nemo1618 · HackerLangs

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

After Christmas this year, I removed the tree from our living room, and in the process of being moved, it shed of needles everywhere. I swept them up, but I missed a few areas on my first pass. So I did a second pass, but when I looked again, I saw there were still a handful left. It struck me how removing >99% of the needles was nowhere near acceptable! Lots of cleaning jobs are like this, I suppose, because even a tiny mess can be visually distinct. In fact, as you approach 100%, the remaining mess stands out more.

nemo1618

26 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I would love a crank-powered router. Would be a good way to curb internet addiction!

nemo1618

26 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I think the key is that, while you may think you have a full formal spec of f(), you actually do not. You have a program written in some language, and that language has its own spec, and the language is compiled to asm which has its own spec, and the asm executes on an architecture that has its own spec, and so on.

So when you write a function like:

  func hypot(x, y):
    return sqrt(x*x + y*y)

You might think you have "fully specified" hypot, but this is far from true! You have said nothing about what registers will be used, for example. This is not a problem; quite the opposite. It's the whole point of using high-level languages: they let you focus on what you care about. A spec is just a program in a very-high-level language.

nemo1618

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

The first moment I specifically remember was writing a test of a new RPC protocol back in 2021. There were no agents yet, only "AI autocomplete" in the form of GitHub Copilot. I wrote the "server" half of the test, which received a name and responded with "Hello, <name>". Then I wrote the client code to send "world", and Codex suggested `if response == "Hello, world"`.

I was floored by this. How could it have known?!

We have come so far in such a short time.

nemo1618

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

It really is crazy. I have been contributing the Melee decompilation project for the past year-ish, and things have really accelerated in 2026. Just today I decided it would be nice to have a better "permuter" (program that randomly modifies C in the hopes of finding a better asm match) so I...just asked Claude to make one, custom-tailored to my needs. It almost feels pointless to publish it to GitHub when I can just tell the other contributors "hey fyi you can ask Claude to make you a better permuter"

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

You should not swear at LLMs, for the same reason you should not shout a slur even if no one is around to witness it: You witness it, and witnessing yourself being toxic updates you in the direction of "I am capable of toxicity" and eventually "I am toxic." In other words, it stains your soul.

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Good git hygiene is also less important post-LLMs, as the LLM can make sense of even a messy history.

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Agreed. In fact, one of the things I now watch for is my mind starting to "slide off" the text, or finding myself re-reading a section multiple times. It's like the brain subconsciously recognizes a lack of substance even if we can't point to a specific tell.

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

LLM writing tells are getting more subtle, but they still jump off the page for me, in particular the word "genuine:"

   "This is the area where Go genuinely shines, and it’s worth being precise about why"
   "the lack of GC pauses is a genuine selling point"
   "Humans are genuinely bad at reasoning about memory"
   "There are cases where the borrow checker is genuinely too strict"

tbc I don't think the article was fully AI-generated, just AI-assisted. If so, the author did a genuinely good job of it! No one else is commenting on it, so clearly it didn't detract much from the substance. It's just weird that this is becoming increasingly common, and increasingly hard to detect.

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Evidence for 1992:

> After a disorienting visit from the FBI in May of 1990, I wrote a rant called Crime and Puzzlement, which led to my establishing with Mitch Kapor (who had previously founded Lotus Development Company) an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

> Now, after almost two years of operation...

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

It's interesting to revisit Brooks' "surgical team" in light of AI. For example, I frequently have Claude act as a "toolsmith", creating bespoke project-specific tools on the fly, which are then documented in Skills that Claude can use going forward. What has changed is that a) One person (or rather, one person-AI hybrid) plays all the roles within the surgical team, and b) Internal frictions such as cost, development time, and communication overhead have all been dramatically slashed.

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Huh? I'm not aware of anyone else who defines "deterministic" that way. "Deterministic" comes from "determinism," as in "the effects are fully determined by the causes" -- not "determine" as in "deduce."

nemo1618

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

LLMs are not inherently non-deterministic. This is a common misconception. You used to be able to set temp=0 and a fixed seed and get the same output every time. This broke when labs started implementing batching, and no one bothered fixing it because the benefits of batching vastly outweighed the demand for deterministic output.

I am hopeful deterministic output will return, though; DeepSeek v4 claims to have implemented "bitwise batch-invariant and deterministic kernels," though I haven't tested it myself.

nemo1618

3 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Sufficiently-developed concentration gives you access to the jhanas, which are extremely blissful states of consciousness. Having reliable access to high valence reduces your need to seek pleasure in less wholesome things (drugs, food, twitter, etc.)

Sufficiently-developed attention gives you insight into how your brain is constructing what you perceive as reality, leading to a reduction in ego, permanent reduction in baseline suffering, and a pervading sense of unity with the rest of the universe.

nemo1618

3 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...?

At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.

nemo1618

4 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

yep, I do a simple version of this in Google Sheets. Very useful to be able to "Ctrl-F" your life, especially when combined with Google Maps location history.

nemo1618

4 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

If this was a joke, it certainly flew over most people's heads...

nemo1618

4 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

This will happen with GUIs as well, once computer-use agents start getting good. Why bother providing an API, when people can just direct their agent to click around inside the app? Trillions of matmuls to accomplish the same result as one HTTP request. It will be glorious. (I am only half joking...)

nemo1618

4 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

> But like humans — and unlike computer programs — they do not produce the exact same results every time they are used. This is fundamental to the way that LLMs operate: based on the "weights" derived from their training data, they calculate the likelihood of possible next words to output, then randomly select one (in proportion to its likelihood).

This is emphatically not fundamental to LLMs! Yes, the next token is selected randomly; but "randomly" could mean "chosen using an RNG with a fixed seed." Indeed, many APIs used to support a "temperature" parameter that, when set to 0, would result in fully deterministic output. These parameters were slowly removed or made non-functional, though, and the reason has never been entirely clear to me. My current guess is that it is some combination of A) 99% of users don't care, B) perfect determinism would require not just a seeded RNG, but also fixing a bunch of data races that are currently benign, and C) deterministic output might be exploitable in undesirable ways, or lead to bad PR somehow.

nemo1618

5 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

IMO this is one of the best use cases for AI today. Each function is like a separate mini problem with an explicit, easy-to-verify solution, and the goal is (essentially) to output text that resembles what humans write -- specifically, C code, which the models have obviously seen a lot of. And no one is harmed by this use of AI; no one's job is being taken. It's just automating an enormous amount of grunt work that was previously impossible to automate.

I'm part of the effort to decompile Super Smash Bros. Melee, and a fellow contributor recently wrote about how we're doing agent-based decompilation: https://stephenjayakar.com/posts/magic-decomp/

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