alain94040

6 ms·

1.
by alain94040 10d ago
No. Silicon is on another level. Which is why the EDA verification is an industry on its own. Sure, there are some software that have similar "can't have bugs" requirements. I imagine the computers on Moon missions also had t
2.
by alain94040 10d ago
Not convinced by those points. In particular, I found this very misleading or irrelevant: a typical CPU project anecdotally has about three times as many specification and validation engineers as design engineers and a 5:1 ratio is not unh
3.
by alain94040 10d ago
Happy birthday “Tonton Serre”
4.
by alain94040 11d ago
I wonder what kind of new AI law would be useful right now. Maybe this one: if an AI agent does something, you (the prompter) are responsible by default, unless you can show that your the agent itself behaved in an unexpected way and th
5.
by alain94040 14d ago
Why is it a threat and not an opportunity? Imagine if in ancient times there was their Oracle that could produce mathematical proofs of any question you asked it, would you burn it or try to understand how it works and use it to ask questio
6.
by alain94040 15d ago
Currently a state of the art AI has nowhere to hide: the amount of GPU compute it requires to stay on is huge. And therefore easy to terminate. Unlike biological viruses, AI can't replicate GPUs for free and grow.
7.
by alain94040 1mo ago
Apple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.
8.
by alain94040 1mo ago
I'm surprised by this comment. It's probably mostly AI generated, but I have no problem reading the first 10 pages, and I found them clear and correct. Might be that we come at this page with different experience and knowledge. I&
9.
by alain94040 1mo ago
It will be interesting to find out the details. From the block diagram, the core only issues 10 instructions per cycle, so not especially wide. Maybe the performance will be worse once in a real phone in real thermal conditions, but if that
10.
by alain94040 1mo ago
Agreed. One of the least efficient things to do with digital logic is floating point multiplication. The second least efficient is probably integer multiply (I'm just kidding a bit here). Multiplication may make sense for the math, but
11.
by alain94040 1mo ago
Agreed, what I call "have your AI talk to my AI" [1] I think that's where the future is going. It presents interesting challenges, but also some opportunities to make life better for everyone. [1*] https://foundrs.
12.
by alain94040 2mo ago
Interesting story. I don't know anything about the Linux scheduler, but if one core out of 96 is busy chasing after those ghost allocations, why would a network thread not use one of the other 95 cores, and instead be stuck for seconds
13.
by alain94040 2mo ago
> Yes. Its "simplicity" is exactly why we pick and assemble piece by hand - we imagine the leanest way Professionally, assembly is the last thing I would let an LLM generate for me. That's because if you need to write some
14.
by alain94040 2mo ago
Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI. But the
15.
by alain94040 2mo ago
Use price per page (standard English text)? That would also help make the metric easier to visualize. If you think a page is too vague, use a famous known writer's work as a reference.
16.
U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6(washingtonpost.com)
1184 points by alain94040 3mo ago|1240 comments
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by alain94040 3mo ago
The European Union passed The Artificial Intelligence Act, which classifies: High-risk – AI applications that are expected to pose significant threats to health, safety, or the fundamental rights of persons. Notably, AI systems used in hea
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by alain94040 4mo ago
Neither coding nor internal prototypes were the slow part That is not my experience mentoring 100+ startup founders. Building a prototype, the gateway to serious customer engagement, used to take months and many startups would die before
19.
by alain94040 4mo ago
Not my experience at all. One slow part was coding. AI takes care of that. But more importantly, the slow part was iterating through concepts, ideas, and prototypes. I thought people on this site embraced lean startups and agile development
20.
by alain94040 4mo ago
That discussion triggered a memory from a comment I made a long time ago here (2020, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24841235 ). There is a way to make the campfire approach a little bit less utopian: Californ
21.
by alain94040 4mo ago
the labour cost of having an intern/entry level engineer spend ~30-60s looking through these is likely close to $0.20 Did you do the math? Your estimate feels way off. First, I doubt an intern would process one PR in 30s. Maybe 2-3 m
22.
by alain94040 4mo ago
We all have had the client from hell: they don't know what they want, they change their requirements all the time. Whenever they have a new half-baked idea, I need to scramble and re-design the architecture. They have no clue that a sm
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by alain94040 4mo ago
That matches my experience. At least on the solo front, there were so many topics I wasn't an expert on, that limited what I could build. Now with AI assistance, the sky is the limit. I don't need to be an expert in frontend, back
24.
by alain94040 5mo ago
This paragraph from September 2025 didn't age well: Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-gr
25.
by alain94040 6mo ago
Correct (well, maybe not half a century, maybe 30 years or so). I was just about to reply that I'd love a version of this that shows instructions going in and out of a re-order buffer. That would be enlightening.
26.
by alain94040 6mo ago
You're not wrong, but blocking assignments (and their equivalent in VHDL, variables), are useful as local variables to a process/always block. For instance to factor common sub-expressions and not repeat them. So using only non-
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by alain94040 6mo ago
Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.
28.
by alain94040 6mo ago
It's not misleading for people in the industry. ARM so far was selling IP (Verilog source code) that other chip makers would include in a full chip design. Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], whic
29.
by alain94040 6mo ago
Agreed, in my experience, rule 5 should be rule 1. I think I also heard it said (paraphrased) as "show we your code and I'll be forever confused, show me your database schema and everything will become obvious". Having implem
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by alain94040 7mo ago
In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.

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