Slavoj Zizek would like this joke I feel because of the lack negativity: a person in the crowd effectively declares their individuality by claiming (in Zizek's way) "I would prefer not to be an individual."

However a Lacanian critique would be that the crowd lacks knowing what their higher desires should be, so they create a sudo desire of freedom without the self exploration of what they desire to be "free for". Zizek touches on this point too that freedom requires self understanding on what you want to be responsible for: to be free is to know what is your calling beyond yourself. Without knowing your calling, freedom is either just boredom or blindly following the desires of others.

sudo is pseudo for the readers. A fake desire of freedom.

For some content, it isn’t just freedom the requires self-awareness, any sort of sustained action requires self-awareness to have any sort of coherence. I mean some things don’t need coherence, you could just instinctively take care of others without much deep semantics.

You can respond in a way you find fulfilling to each moment without knowing some grand unified sense of calling, or with only a vague description, “enjoying existence and helping others as you can to enjoy existence.”

> sudo desire of freedom

i think there's a chron job that runs that when you hit puberty.

"Who was Harry Brownstone?"

I don't think this model supports video yet btw. At least it doesnt work with the API yet.

That's really interesting I think- literally putting the layout into ascii language to reason about.

What's wrong with NodeJS or Bun?

NodeJS has just a long history of mistakes and stubbornes. CommonJS, node_modules mess, hostility against standards, low attention to performance just to name a few. Only recently they finally decided that TypeScript is fundamental, they are what is wrong in the JS ecosystem. I don't hate Bun, but it could've been just a slightly better NodeJS they don't solve fundamental issues like Deno has, so I don't like it. I'll just try as much as I can to wrap/hide NodeJS in my toolchain.

Why use Polars over just postgresql or sqlite?

It is optimized for analytic workloads (default in-mem columnar layout), whereas PG and sqlite are OLTP DBs. It's going to be insanely faster for those use cases.

And with DuckDB?

DuckDB is an in process OLAP, I’ve been using it a lot, and I am keen to use Polars but DuckDB seemings to be flying for me.

I like Polars’ syntax, a lot of times its dataframes API is much nicer than SQL.

It’s much more similar to cleaned up Spark syntax vs Pandas’ strange API.

I’m quite happy with things taking 3 minutes instead of an hour or so.

Actual databases pay up to two orders of magnitude of speed for durability. If you can regenerate your dataset in case the DB drops it (or there is a power outage, or whatever), being able to complete a complex, write-heavy query in 10s instead of 15 minutes is actually very useful when doing analysis.

Because those are databases? Polars is a data processing engine, not a database. They have different uses.

If you want to use a database instead of Polars, for similar use cases, duckdb is a much better bet than postgressql or sqlite.

Lee Smolin a few years ago wrote a paper on quantum neuron plausibility: https://arxiv.org/html/2001.08522v1

Gemini 3.8 Flash looks like its better than v7 Luna/Sol on DeepSWE v1.1 while at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. Luna is much cheaper, but Flash has nearly Astra's performance for under the price of Sol ($2/$10).

Flash thinks much more so it’s pretty much line with Sol for performance. That said I like flash coding style much more than OpenAi models.

out of curiosity, what type of code/language do you usually use flash to write?

I use it for golang, and it is fantastic. Incredibly fast. It seems the llm and I “understand” each other. I have to be less careful in my exact phrasing. It kind of just does what I want and expect.

When I ask for an explanation it adds the right amount of detail. Of course, some of the material is new to me so subtle errors are hard to spot. But at least I’ve caught Terra and Sol on inconsistent messaging.

Also I’ve found 3.8 flash to circle back to root issues even at the conceptual level like problem fit and conceptual solution direction or architecture when I wasn’t achieving my goals. It flat out said I was attempting to use the wrong tool. Whereas Sol and Astra kept rabbit holing and looking for tiny implementation errors. Even after prompting them specifically to look at it broader.

what harness or plan are you using 3.8 flash with?

I’m using antigravity. I’m still on the AI Pro plan for the promotional $5/month.

where is this promotion?

If you don’t have a plan yet, log in to antigravity. There will be a button “upgrade plan” somewhere. Sometimes it pops up and otherwise lookup in settings > account. There should be some button that says upgrade. Clicking that brought me to the google studio ai page which offered the 20-something plan for €5/month.

anti-gravity with gemini 3.8 or gtfo

Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.1 Pro are pure rubbish. Very little thinking, mediocre and usually incorrect results. They cannot be compared to frontier models.

This is my experience as well. I am surprised that lot of people find it much better than Luna.

I suspect that the people saying this haven't used Luna.

It's also weird that anyone uses it outside of an enterprise. They force you to use Googles inferior harness on the plans and I doubt any mere mortal is paying that much, for so little usage, with the worst harness on the market.

I prefer 5.6 Luna while a coworker prefers 3.8 Flash. The difference seems to be that they chat with Flash (with code context) while I just ask Luna to directly modify the code. I was already very impressed with 5.6 Luna so I am looking forward to running 6.0 Luna all day tomorrow to see how it compares.

TBH: I really like how fast 3.8 Flash is... Once I have clear plan, I feel quite confident in delegating large parts of implementation to Flash and Luna

Maddening for a bit - I've got problems that Flash is better on, and some Luna is better on, but I generally don't know until one has wasted time/tokens. Then I switch to the other one and... it's often just... bam - done. Correctly. I can't find the patterns ahead of time to determine what model I should be using first. :/ That said, I've been alternating between both the last month or so and they've both been pretty good compared to earlier models.

codex seems pretty solid on review, flash is fast on basics but makes more mistakes/errors, Claude is just to picky for me

look at token use, 3.8 flash is a huge token hog compared to openai models

I do like Typst, but Typst isn't really ideal for diagrams... you could use it that way but I don't think it's ideal. Mermaid or PlantUML are better/cleaner options.

Agreed. My resume and slides are all templated with Typst, but I can't be bothered trying UML languages to make diagrams that'll probably be referenced once or twice a year, if ever.

This is the coolest thing on HN that I've seen in a minute. The whole thing is a perfect blend of ideas with the end result of something that feels... magical. Honestly this is the highest inspiration to me as a builder as I just want to create magical experiences, even if they are just small oddities.

Really cool, except the price. Around 500 Euro for the full thing... I miss the times you could make amazing things with a Pi under 100 Euro.

That's the e-ink monopoly for you. Though you could probably use a slightly smaller b&w eink display with a second hand raspberry 4 to shave a lot from that number.

To be fair even if they could build a 10x larger e-ink panel factory it’s uncertain if they could shave costs by more than maybe 40% to 50% per panel.

And it’s very questionable whether there is genuinely 10x more latent annual demand for e-ink panels at that still not cheap price point.

If you have a Kobo (~ US$ 120 or even less used) you can run this using Cobalt https://github.com/BandarLabs/Cobalt/tree/beta/apps/birds

It seems like Kobo eReaders don't come with a mic.

You could probably use an ESP32-S3-PhotoPainter (which comes with a mic) to do this for even cheaper: https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-photopainter.htm

Yes absolutely, the current Kobo one uses the Mac's mic. I work near a window on my Mac so this is handy without any hardware setup.

Agree, this was really a beautiful thing to see!

EDIT: no Ai for pictures - cool!

Also: please use a credit union and use mutually-owned insurance agencies. As a general statement, you'll be in way better hands.