jerf

6 ms·

31.
by jerf 21d ago
A frontier-level AI right now needs multiple bits of high-powered, dedicated hardware cards that cost thousands of dollars apiece. I don't think anything that could physically run in my house could be a threat to humanity. All my graph
32.
by jerf 21d ago
There's a wide array of possibilities that are difficult to characterize in a single HN comment, which is part of the problem you're probably trying to put a finger on. One threat can be completely plausible and the next completel
33.
by jerf 22d ago
It already exists, you're describing the open weights AI. The only reason they aren't "dark" at the moment is that it has no reason to be dark. In the fullness of time, though, we'll also see previous-gen frontier m
34.
by jerf 22d ago
Trying to jam in the extra characters for "efficiency" also doesn't really do much. Base84 is 6.4 bits per character, base64 is a flat 6 bits per character, base58 is 5.86 bits per character. It may intuitively feel like havi
35.
by jerf 23d ago
You get a few dimensions. Some of the dimensions listed in the article for async/await become user library decisions rather than being baked into the threading. But you could still get things like, is each thread memory-isolated (Erlan
36.
by jerf 23d ago
More people think they need a web framework that serves a million requests per second than actually do. More people think they need the latest and hottest in manual memory management than actually do. More people think they need a hundred t
37.
by jerf 23d ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation , which is a closer match to both your experience and the "door" description above.
38.
by jerf 23d ago
In the 1990s, threads were programmed with extensive use of semaphores and threads arbitrarily running around shared data structures. This is a disastrous approach to threading, and I agree with pretty much every scathing condemnation writt
39.
by jerf 24d ago
Took a bit of poking, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgDQ5z7bNPs
40.
by jerf 24d ago
My favorites are: "Power a light with a lifted rock": Actually does work and you can buy this product, but it's a dimmer light for less time than the inevitable marketing diagrams indicate. Not useless but the fawning news st
41.
by jerf 24d ago
It is easy to come away with that idea if you just watch one of his videos. He is very good at clear explanations that get to the essence of an idea and makes it seem simple. Sure, it's at an educational level of detail, but it is accu
42.
by jerf 24d ago
Context: I played piano for about 15 years. I think the discussion around changing the piano keyboard is somewhat more obvious and less subtle. It's pretty obvious that the main thing keeping the current piano keyboard alive is the sam
43.
by jerf 24d ago
It kind of reminds me of the periodic declaration someone makes on HN that textual programming sucks and we all need to switch to something else, usually visual programming in this case. If someone takes time to deeply understand the advant
44.
by jerf 24d ago
Mmmm, even ignoring the age issue, I don't think we can call this "murder". At most it was negligent formicacide. I have to admit I posted this just so I could use the word(?) "formicacide". It seems an opportunity
45.
by jerf 24d ago
"You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own." And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" mus
46.
by jerf 24d ago
So, while it's tempting to be cynical and sarcastic, my honest answer is that I expect them to try it, and it would actually be a value judgment as to whether that constitutes ignoring the law. Common Law-based systems prioritize the
47.
by jerf 24d ago
I accidentally brewed up an effective one myself. Round when I must have been 8 or 9 or so, some neighborhood kids and I played at creating a brew in a trick-or-treat bucket by putting everything we could find in it, like grass clippings, s
48.
by jerf 25d ago
When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the idea of having to serve some ad. Until they fix that hole. I hate that the progression is so pred
49.
by jerf 25d ago
My cynicism fails me on this matter... do I cynically believe that these companies keep deliberately and routinely re- or un-checking these checkboxes because of the obvious benefits of "whoopsie guess you allowed these after all"
50.
by jerf 25d ago
My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the
51.
by jerf 25d ago
So, just in general, I've been seeing more and more foldable phones like this. How well are they holding up now? Having Apple use one seems to be at least somewhat of a vote of confidence that the tech has reached some level of accepta
52.
by jerf 26d ago
You know, everyone's focused on the math and the human drama aspects, but to me the real story should be about this accusation that they somehow read the stream of data these guys were generating and then reacted to it at all on a hu
53.
by jerf 26d ago
There's also the fact that you are in control. You are not obligated to take the AI's commits. I don't even let it commit much of the time because commit time is review time for me. If it changes the button blue and does four
54.
by jerf 26d ago
This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, wi
55.
by jerf 26d ago
As I said to another comment, this isn't a place for architecture astronautics or squinting until one thing looks like another. It's all assembler under the hood in the end and that language not only doesn't have color, it do
56.
by jerf 26d ago
I cited the case of an argument color already in the text for Zig... in fact, that's conditionally a color depending on what is passed, which is even more sophisticated then an argument merely being unconditionally a color. What some
57.
by jerf 26d ago
Your configuration structs are not "everything". You probably have dozens of things in them. You have hundreds to thousands of different parameters to different functions. By the time your configuration structs have hundreds of th
58.
by jerf 26d ago
That has no propagation up the stack at all. Whether a child function does or does not use channels has no effect on the parent.
59.
by jerf 26d ago
I think this is a case where you want to avoid architecture astronautics and deal with languages as they are presented. Yes, in the end it's all continuation passing, or depending on the cut of your jib, it's all just assembler in
60.
by jerf 26d ago
I don't think there's a way to color functions in Go. That's not terribly special, several languages have no colors in them.

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