jerf

39 ms·

601.
by jerf 7mo ago
Larry Niven isn't referring to merely an "unusual" setting in his quote (which I've never managed to find referenced online, unfortunately), but to the way in science fiction you are creating the setting from scratch .
602.
by jerf 7mo ago
I know that's been dropping my level of interest for hacking consoles farther and farther. Why hack a console when it has almost no exclusives, even fewer of which I personally care about, and having a real computer hooked to a TV is n
603.
by jerf 7mo ago
The approval tree grows logarithmically as the size of the company grows. A startup can win initially because they may have zero or one level to get to production. That's part of how they manage to get inside the OODA loop of much bigg
604.
by jerf 7mo ago
"The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels like monster of the week rather than a true full book that holds onto a core sharply executed identity." This is one of the structural weaknesses in the entire SCP... mot
605.
by jerf 7mo ago
We don't have to theorize about this. We've had cloud gaming for years, and the companies have immense motivations to turn us all into renters in the cloud so they've poured a lot of effort into it and we can see half-a-dozen
606.
by jerf 7mo ago
Part of the problem with [1] is that you still end up needing [3] anyhow, because even if you've got a fiber-to-fiber connection, while the transfer was occurring the game world has moved on and you'll need to replay that anyhow.
607.
by jerf 7mo ago
"So your statement incorrectly implied that this strict syntax distinction between directives and comments has always existed," There was no such statement. "In practice" clearly indicates the contrary about it being &
608.
by jerf 7mo ago
Actually, in practice the rule is "The delimiter for a comment is '// '", which to be clear, is slash-slash-space. Slash-slash-(not a space) is in practice a directive. There are several basic tools in the comm
609.
by jerf 7mo ago
Back around 2000 or 2001, I got the idea for a collaborative editor that also would have had some UI fanciness in it. I abandoned it when I couldn't find a GUI toolkit that had an acceptable level of quality for that UI fanciness, with
610.
by jerf 7mo ago
Money. The general public thinks phones and computers are fundamentally different. Heck, I remember arguing this point even on HN back when smart phones were first coming out and being generally on the losing side as people got very excited
611.
by jerf 7mo ago
"There are several writeups of large backends ported from node/python/ruby to Go which resulted in dramatic speedups, including drop in P99 and P99.9 latencies by 10x" But that's not comparing apples to apples. When
612.
by jerf 7mo ago
Dueling physical analogies is never a productive way to resolve a conversation like this. It just diverts all useful energy into arguing about which analogy is more accurate but it doesn't matter because the people pushing this law don
613.
by jerf 7mo ago
I wrote about that recently: [1] One of the ways that code will be valued in the AI era is the extent to which it has contact with the real world. It doesn't matter how smart the AI is, the real world is always more perverse and compli
614.
by jerf 7mo ago
An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or pe
615.
by jerf 7mo ago
Even a retrodiction can be impressive and/or interesting if it is a sufficiently "nothing up my sleeve" [1] type of prediction. I don't know enough about this field and the article isn't informative enough for me to
616.
by jerf 7mo ago
The only things I'm aware of that I consider actual problems it solves are "it breaks classical encryption" and "you may be able to use it to directly model other quantum systems like for protein folding and such".
617.
by jerf 7mo ago
From a 2026 perspective I couldn't possibly have had as a teenager in the 1990s, it kind of feels like a well-polished, extended SCP story. As I can in 2026 gorge myself on "mysterious things doing mysterious tasks mysteriously&qu
618.
by jerf 7mo ago
That would be a hypothesis, not a fact. I'm not closed to it. You can check my comment history for frequent references to next-generation AIs that aren't architected like LLMs. But they're going to have to produce an AI of
619.
by jerf 7mo ago
I classify your latter points under "AIs are Finite": https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
620.
by jerf 7mo ago
We need to develop some ethics, or at least, "community standards" (as they may vary significantly between different use cases) around the some of the things this essay talks about. I know I've really been pondering the misma
621.
by jerf 7mo ago
One out of ten to the power of "forget about it" is not improbable, it's impossible. I know it's a popular misconception that "impossible" = a strict, statistical, mathematical 0, but if you try to use that in
622.
by jerf 7mo ago
As sibling says, the Court very definitely did not order them to refund anything. They could have, and they didn't. The Court knew from the beginning that this was coming back to them. You may see other judges rule that the refunds don
623.
by jerf 7mo ago
None of this matters; this is guaranteed to go to the Supreme Court. Too much money, too much precedent. The only thing being established now is the battleground as the procedure of getting up to the Supreme Court. The actual rulings on the
624.
by jerf 7mo ago
"Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft" True, but too weak. It ends copyright entirely. If I can do this to a code base, I can do it to a movie, to an album, to a novel, to anything. As such, we can
625.
by jerf 7mo ago
It is true that if two people happen to independently create the same thing, they each have their own copyright. It is also true that in all the cases that I know about where that has occurred the courts have taken a very, very, very clos
626.
by jerf 7mo ago
You could imagine what MFM drives were like, or you could read about it, in the link I gave.
627.
by jerf 7mo ago
Yeah, it's hard to even get started until we can go three months without a significant improvement in the AIs. Today's characteristic failures may not be 2027's characteristic failures. Example: Today I'm complaining tha
628.
by jerf 7mo ago
Worse yet, the problems are going to be real. There's a lifecycle to these hype runs, even when the thing behind the hype is plenty real. We're still in the phase where if you criticize AI you get told you don't "get it&
629.
by jerf 7mo ago
Amusingly, that's unnecessary, but possibly not for the reason most people think. It's not because the hard drive hardware is oblivious to runs of 0s and 1s exactly... it's because it's actually so sensitive that it alr
630.
by jerf 7mo ago
But... why? How do you win moving your central controller from a 4GHz CPU to a multi-hundred-MHz single GPU core? If we tried this, all we'd do is isolate a couple of cores in the GPU, let them run at some gigahertz, and then equip the

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