jerf

23 ms·

331.
by jerf 4mo ago
32-bit is so little overhead that we don't blink at adding 64 to our strings nowadays, because of the benefits we get from alignment. But remember the first Macintosh shipped with 128KB of RAM, 131,072 bytes. Three more bytes per strin
332.
by jerf 4mo ago
AIUI it's fairly well established that the models can be saying one thing and "really" thinking another anyhow. The ones I recall seeing traced how simple one-digit arithmetic was done in the chat versus the actual activation
333.
by jerf 4mo ago
Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizatio
334.
by jerf 4mo ago
It's hard to bring much rigor to it. I'm not saying impossible , but it's not like it's completely obvious how to do it and people are just too lazy. Intrinsically, if I'm going to test a back-and-forth with a mode
335.
by jerf 4mo ago
I wasn't a programmer in these days, so I don't know if there's some other major concern that would kill this, but I sometimes wonder about whether we could have / should have used variable-length integers. That is, some
336.
by jerf 4mo ago
"I genuinely think you could write a competitively-performant multi-threaded DB in Bun + TS if you had shared-heap threads and fast atomics/locking primitives." Not likely. Databases that attain any significant use in the fie
337.
by jerf 4mo ago
Who are these people who keep complaining about this supposed isolation and such? It's a complaint that periodically makes it on to Hacker News, but the more I think about it the more I feel like we're listening to a complaint mad
338.
by jerf 4mo ago
It's self discovering... once you figure out how to use its very eclectic by modern standards mechanisms for discovery. No sarcasm. Learning how to use it is a skill you have to actively acquire. This is more a criticism of emacs than
339.
by jerf 4mo ago
Some years ago, Microsoft got the security religion internally. While it doesn't mean that they've been issue-free since then, it largely worked. They were dangerously close to acquiring a reputation as being too insecure to do re
340.
by jerf 4mo ago
I use claude-code. I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I
341.
by jerf 4mo ago
I never liked the word "start" itself, but if you're going to have a GUI, a single central clean place to say "every interaction you may want to do can be found from here" is a good idea. In principle having search
342.
by jerf 4mo ago
"Is anyone still using emacs?" Yes. I had to briefly visit the world of VSCode during a period of time when it had better AI integration than emacs did, but since I got Claude working well inside of emacs I've returned to 100
343.
by jerf 4mo ago
In addition to the observations in the sibling comments, note that "one half of the camels should go to the eldest heir, one third of the camels should go to the second heir, and one ninth of the camels should go to the youngest heir.&
344.
by jerf 4mo ago
I think you'll find most of the people creating the HTTP proxy servers and brand new AI harnesses and git or ssh config managers and all of the other things that we already have way too many versions of are not our best software engine
345.
by jerf 4mo ago
If we're going to play the "should" game, whatever originated the body "shouldn't" have because the spec says that's illegal. Although we could also go with, a proxy shouldn't delete the body, it &quo
346.
by jerf 4mo ago
I would also observe that it is a completely reasonable hypothesis that even if you can construct a problem in some higher complexity class that a quantum computer "should" be able to solve, it is possible that it would turn out t
347.
by jerf 4mo ago
"I can also write lines of code for free. I have the same superpowers you do..." Boy oh boy can I tell that people have still not internalized this. Yes, your HTTP proxy with a list of features as long as my arm would have been im
348.
by jerf 4mo ago
I cited my sources. You're welcome to seek out studies on the question of how it varies between societies, they probably exist somewhere. However as part of the "adaptation" you cite is precisely scammers getting better at sc
349.
by jerf 4mo ago
Sexual arousal also tends to inhibit rational thought. I don't mean that in a snarky or sarcastic way, I mean that it is a biological process that has been well-studied and well-established [1]. This has obvious uses for scamming peopl
350.
by jerf 4mo ago
I often use the rough approximation that Python is 40-50x slower than C. This is what you'll see in the benchmarks. The truly rough thing about Python though is that that is the speed when the code is being written to a benchmark. It i
351.
by jerf 4mo ago
The problem is that a patch to fix a security issue quite often also shines a spotlight on the issue being fixed. Fixing a part of something like this super complicated Project Zero post might not give much of a clue as to what the issue wa
352.
by jerf 4mo ago
"Death" is hard to define for a programming language. It's tempting to say "the last time anyone writes it", or maybe "runs it", but to put that in biological terms that seems like defining "death&quo
353.
by jerf 4mo ago
It's all assembly code in the end. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with compiling down to Javascript, a high-level language can still implement many things that direct Javascript does not. Just about every language guarantee y
354.
by jerf 4mo ago
A Dune-style stillsuit is thermodynamically impossible. You can't both capture water and use that water to cool you via sweat evaporation. If you let it evaporate, it has to leave ; if you capture evaporated sweat you also recover all
355.
by jerf 4mo ago
You need a limiting principle or there is no limit to the "better funding" you're asking for until you have a Library of Congress in every small town in America, to no positive effect. What's the limiting principle you p
356.
by jerf 4mo ago
I've seen some other suggestions of that idea in the full HN conversation, which I'm reacting to. On the one hand I find it a bizarre approach to running a scam. On the other hand I'm having a hard time coming up with any the
357.
by jerf 4mo ago
My point is more-or-less orthogonal to why it happens. The military, and honestly, a lot of people, want AI to just give the answer. If it is highly dependent on a prompt, or the follow-on training, and the AI could be passive or friendly o
358.
by jerf 4mo ago
"The extremely surprising and concerning part of this whole story is that the agent reported that they proactively spun up 5 AWS instances with a combined 100Gps of network egress capacity." Although given the agent was clearly in
359.
by jerf 4mo ago
"Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically." Sort of. People are being less irrational than it sounds if you account for transaction costs. There's a lot of stuff I might "sell" if I could point a vi
360.
by jerf 4mo ago
The most interesting takeaway for me is the three very distinct personalities. Three models all based on the same tech, trained in the same manner, trained by three groups of people with similar ideological outlooks, and the result is three

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