Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?
Show HN tool 'Sunk Cost' calculates when a local LLM rig breaks even versus falling API prices, factoring electricity cost and inference speed.
A Hacker News Show HN project called Sunk Cost models the payback period of buying local LLM hardware instead of paying API prices. Users can adjust assumptions like electricity cost ($/kWh) and API speed (tokens/second), and the model assumes API prices keep falling. Where local speed is unmeasured, it is estimated from memory bandwidth divided by bytes read per token, and labelled as an estimate.
UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons
UniMate is a topology-aware diffusion transformer generating articulated motion for arbitrary rigged skeletons from text, trained on 13,006 motion sequences.
UniMate is a unified foundation model that animates arbitrary rigged 3D skeletons from an asset and text prompt with no test-time optimization or per-skeleton retraining. It uses a topology-aware diffusion transformer combining graph-aware attention bias from joint relations and geodesic distances, a spectral rotary position embedding generalizing RoPE to kinematic trees via the graph Laplacian, and a global topological conditioner. The accompanying UniML3D dataset spans 13,006 motion sequences across bipedal, quadrupedal, avian, marine, insectoid, serpentine, and articulated rigid-object skeletons; the model outperforms baselines and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, expansion, and text-guided editing.
UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons
Researchers introduce UniMate, a topology-aware diffusion transformer generating text-driven motion for arbitrary 3D skeletons without per-skeleton retraining.
UniMate is a unified foundation model that synthesizes articulated motion for arbitrary skeletons from a rigged 3D asset and a text prompt, with no test-time optimization or per-skeleton fine-tuning. It uses a topology-aware diffusion transformer combining graph-aware attention bias, a spectral rotary position embedding generalizing RoPE via the graph Laplacian, and a rest-pose topological conditioner. Trained on UniML3D, a curated set of 13,006 motion sequences spanning bipedal to serpentine skeletons, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, and text-guided editing.
Kaininja: Extending Native 3D Generators to the Part Level
KaiNinja extends TRELLIS.2 native 3D generation to part-level assets via a dual-volume O-Voxel representation, cutting whole-object Chamfer distance by 40%.
KaiNinja extends the TRELLIS.2 native 3D generator to produce part-level assets instead of one fused mesh, enabling downstream editing, rigging, and simulation. A dual-volume form of the O-Voxel representation solves the problem that a single volume cannot represent interfaces where two parts touch. The model needs no segmentation network, is partly trained on LLM-agent-authored part data, lowers whole-object Chamfer distance by 40%, and raises strict part F-score by 16% versus other part-generation pipelines.
NVIDIA Brings Real-Time AI to Broadcast, Sports and Global Streaming at IBC
NVIDIA expanded its AI for Media suite at IBC 2026, adding NIM microservices for synthetic video detection, body pose, frame generation, upscaling and HDR.
At IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, NVIDIA announced a major expansion of NVIDIA AI for Media, a collection of GPU-accelerated SDKs, NIM microservices and blueprints for broadcast and streaming workflows. The Synthetic Video Detector (SVD) NIM microservice reaches 99.3% accuracy on text-to-video and 97.7% on image-to-video content, while Video Frame Generation boosts frame rates 2x-4x and Video Super Resolution adds 10-bit support; TrueHDR converts SDR to HDR at up to roughly 2,000 nits. Partners including Dalet, TwelveLabs, Wowza, Vizrt and Ross Video are integrating the new services into verification, compliance and live-production workflows.