gobdovan

11 ms·

151.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
Fun fact: in parts of East Africa, a $50 bill may be worth about 60-70 $1 dollar bills, due to the $1 bill being easier to counterfeit (and also more likely worn down).
152.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I had a similar surprise about how approachable PL is, but from going from 'the bottom up' instead from a normal language. I wrote a compiler toolchain and debugger that takes a Turing machine description plus input string and emi
153.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I could have linked Github repo which has been abandoned for 11 years and ranks higher on Google than the sourceforge page, but that would have maybe been disingenuous. ( https://github.com/ngspice/ngspice )
154.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
As an amateur in the space: I download on Mac, run `ngspice`, "Error: Can't open display: :0". I look in the code - hardcoded X11-era assumptions. Not exactly modern affordances... Then I try to understand and extract the act
155.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
If this experiment ends up resulting in a real migration path, I think that would be completely awesome. Maybe it means we have a chance to revive older projects such as ngspice [0], but with modern affordances and better safety properties.
156.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
It can happen like this: - write sleek operator-overloading-based code for simple mathematical operations on your custom pet algebra - decide that you want to turn it into an autograd library [0] - realise that you now need either `RefCell`
157.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
>He argues that conceptual integrity comes from both simplicity and straightforwardness If you want to follow this advice, I think Leslie Lamport's formulation is the most concrete. His version is: - Write down a small model of what
158.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I would. Even if someone found a prompt or even automated the conversation and just searched all open math problems I still would. If they produced a useful result without harm to anyone, that's a valuable human activity that should be
159.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
"Bad" is a cool label, it marks you as dangerous. But the comment proposes "immature", "behind". So give then a neat, pink shirt, not a black one with a skull on it (not saying that this works either, just clar
160.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
Part of it is security/privacy and providers avoiding liability. People constantly copy passwords, tokens, personal data, etc., so clipboard history is risky by default. Apple probably does not want to expose a rich API here and then b
161.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I think the problem is the mismatch between the intended evocative tone of tricolon crescens and the triviality of a 'computer quirk' in the grand scheme of things. "Use figures of speech, but don't sling them around lik
162.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
Thanks, this puts into perspective why copy-paste from PDFs is so bad. I months into building a pasteboard transform library that normalises VS Code, Google Docs, PDFs and a bunch of Chromium apps provider-specific data so I can start pasti
163.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
As a Romanian child, I saw both Pinocchio and Burattino plays, but somehow never made the connection! This is quite interesting. Burattino was akin to a comedy to me, Pinocchio was like a drama.
164.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I love exactly what you hate about it. I would not read it to a small child, but I would dearly recommend it to a 10- to 15-year-old. I reread it as an adult and loved it. Pinocchio is mean, undisciplined, hedonistic, disrespectful, naive,
165.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I distilled the Meta-Harness workflow in a skill [0]. Unlike the original Islo POC, which demonstrates an automated runtime loop converging from trace-rich evaluations [1], my test only evaluates whether the distilled skill improves a lead
166.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
Are you being ironic or serious? I can see both pros (encourage people to see themselves as customers) and cons (less initial adoption) to the licensing, although I'd maybe leave bug issues open for everybody. What aspect do you think
167.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I think the underlying explanation is that both fields deal with very large state spaces, so the forms converge somewhat. I think the contrast is more interesting: exact discrete trajectories in cryptography versus approximate continuous fu
168.
by gobdovan 5mo ago
Interestingly enough, you're #1, but your model ran on: - Title: Show HN: I built a tool that helps predict HN front page success - URL: https://wannalaunch.com/ Only gave you a 49 out of 100. And gave this advice: `Co
169.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
If someone with no such beliefs would have written the exact same article, would you have taken it more seriously?
170.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
> AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem. > Does that say more about the state of intelligence today or about the nature of consciousness in general?
171.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
Technically, that's a skill test, not an intelligence test. Intelligence measures rate of learning (kinda), so a good test would be something like: a Xonet is a poem of this form I just invented (Iambic rhythm, 15-9-6-15 verses), Xengl
172.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
Before harnesses, I'd fix the methodology/claims. A saner methodology would be to see comments that compare two models, say 'gpt5.5>opus4.7' and infer context ('ctx:frontend', for example). For your current
173.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
> But 50 percentage points of your "more than 50%" of games played are games where you exclusively use binary search Although I think I get your point, saying 'You can't beat binary search in Guess Who' is mislea
174.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
You're mixing two different objectives the paper presents. You can't beat binary search when the objective is to minimise the expected number of turns in a single player setting . However, in a two player setting, using the strat
175.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
I remember I had a pedagogy class in Uni taught by psychology faculty, and was messing with them by proposing a mock syllabus where we'd teach students binary search, then the advanced advanced ones ternary search, and the very advance
176.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
I thought this would be about how you can beat binary search in the 'Guess Who?' game. There's a cool math paper about it [0] and an approachable video by the author. [1] [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03
177.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
You've got the blues.
178.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
Very interesting, especially the harness point, how much of performance is in the wrapper tools (when I almost run out of credits, I change my model to a smaller one and try to give it more structured prompts; very often gpt-5.4-mini with s
179.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
> asking a coding agent “why did you do that” to be illustrating a misunderstanding in the users mind about how the agent works I think the same thing, but about agents in general. I am not saying that we humans are automata, but most of
180.
by gobdovan 6mo ago
> Agents also often respond well to user frustration signs, like threatening to not continue your subscription. From the phrasing, I can't but imagine you as a very calm, completely unemotional person that only emulates user frustra

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