MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kjksf | 2025-06-16 09:37:03+00:00
I didn't write that article to convince anybody.

I wrote it to share my implementation and my experience with it.

SumatraPDF compiles fast (relative to other C++ software) and is smaller, faster and uses less resources that other software.

Is it because I wrote Func0 and Func1 to replace std::function? No.

Is it because I made hundreds decisions like that? Yes.

You're not wrong that performance wins are miniscule.

What you don't understand is that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And small, fast software.
by rhabarba | 2025-06-16 09:37:12+00:00
> Today, one of the remaining appeals of Lisps (e.g., CL, Scheme) is that (aside perhaps from Clojure) they're not very employable, and so the communities and ecosystems are more old-school hardcore in sensibility.

One of the reasons why I wrote 42links in Lisp is that it’s less likely to end up in a ChatGPT reply without any license hints.
by sky2224 | 2025-06-16 09:38:07+00:00
So far it's been sesame AI. The idea isn't novel as it's just AI voice generation that can be used in a conversational context (i.e., you speak it to it, it speaks back). But the way it convincingly sounded and communicated with me was incredible.

Chatgpt was really neat when it came out, but Sesame was the first one that actually made me scared.

https://www.sesame.com/
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-16 09:40:55+00:00
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.

I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.

Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/

Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
by supermatt | 2025-06-16 09:41:00+00:00
Because none of the rest was relevant.

Here, i will isolate the specific piece:

> start from scratch

Europe isn’t “starting from scratch.” It already has 12nm-class fabs (just like the US did until very recently), designs its own chips, and developed the very architecture — ARM — that many other countries now use as the foundation for their processors.
by lbschenkel | 2025-06-16 09:41:25+00:00
As a data point/anecdote, I had a parallel-port Zip drive with a 386 and Windows 3.1. I remember quite clearly that I had to load a SCSI driver in CONFIG.SYS. I didn't understand back then why I had to load a SCSI driver for a parallel port device, years later I found out that the parallel port version was actually the SCSI version but it tunnelled the SCSI protocol via the parallel interface...
by bananapub | 2025-06-16 09:41:32+00:00
> Mediocre people produce mediocre work. Using AI might make those mediocre people produce even worse work, but I don't think it'll affect competent people who have standards regardless of the available tooling.

this is clearly not the case, given:

- mass layoffs in the tech industry to force more use of such things - extremely strong pressure from management to use it, rarely framed as "please use this tooling as you see fit" - extremely low quality bars in all sorts of things, e.g. getting your dumb "We wrote a 200 word prompt then stuck that and some web scraped data in to an LLM run by Google/OpenAI/Anthropic" site to the top of hacker news, or most of VC funding in the tech world - extremely large swathes of (at least) the western power structures not giving a shit about doing anything well, e.g. the entire US Federal government leadership now, or the UK government's endless idiocy about "AI Policy development", lawyers getting caught in court having just not even read the documents they put their name on, etc - actual strong desire from many people to outsource their toxic plans to "AI", e.g. the US's machine learning probation or sentencing stuff

I don't think any of us are ready for the tsunami of garbage that's going to be thrown in to every facet of our lives, from government policy to sending people to jail to murdering people with robots to spamming open source projects with useless code and bug reports etc etc etc
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-06-16 09:42:21+00:00
> And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when operating under emergency situations, which is the context on this case.

In portugal? Yes, you need one. Probably in every other EU country too

In USA too.

I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the actual rules.

Also, you cannot use the same device for PMR and ham radio bands, the PMR device needs to be certified for PMR use, that means that it can only transmit on pmr frequencies and nowhere else. Other devices (eg. ham radio) cannot be used on PMR frequencies.

It's not FUD, it's regulation which exists for good reason, because in cases of actual emergencies, trained ham operators can assist actual emergency services with communication, and that's impossible if every idiot with a baofeng jams the channels.
by tguvot | 2025-06-16 09:42:46+00:00
i'll add this quote from article:

Perhaps one of the more concerning findings is that participants in the LLM-to-Brain group repeatedly focused on a narrower set of ideas, as evidenced by n-gram analysis (see topics COURAGE, FORETHOUGHT, and PERFECT in Figures 82, 83, and 85, respectively) and supported by interview responses. This repetition suggests that many participants may not have engaged deeply with the topics or critically examined the material provided by the LLM.

When individuals fail to critically engage with a subject, their writing might become biased and superficial. This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.

Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term but results in long-term costs, such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity. When participants reproduce suggestions without evaluating their accuracy or relevance, they not only forfeit ownership of the ideas but also risk internalizing shallow or biased perspectives.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-06-16 09:44:49+00:00
>Not to be snarky but “as far as I can tell” is the rub isn’t it?

From skimming the paper, I don't believe they're doing in-context learning, which would be the obvious interpretation of "pattern matching". That's what I meant to communicate.

>No, one could not unless they were being disingenuous.

I think it is just about as disingenuous as labeling LLMs as pattern-matchers. I don't see why you would consider the one claim to be disingenuous, but not the other.
by codedokode | 2025-06-16 09:44:54+00:00
In practice, you need to do more than use existing file descriptors. You want a sandboxed program to be able to display windows, use graphic acceleration, play and record audio, have limited access to dbus, integrate with other sanboxed programs. This is where you cannot get away with 112 lines of code.

For example, to play audio, one has to use pulseaudio protocol and create a fake ALSA device in the sandbox because pipewire doesn't have simpler way to share the access between different users. Also this does not prevent the untrusted program from reading audio card vendor and name.

Some applications like Chromium use privileged SUID helper so I am not sure if it is possible to sandbox them at all. Electron-based apps are also a pain to make work in a sandbox, for example, without /proc and graphic acceleration.

The state of sandboxing on Linux is pretty sad at present moment, and almost everything runs without any restrictions. Compare to Android or iOS where sandboxing was implemented from the start. It is easier and more reliable just to use a virtual machine with a full OS for sandboxing.

There is flatpak, but as I understand, it doesn't prevent the application from reading OS and hardware identifiers via /proc and /sys for example. Also some flatpak apps use "classic" confinement which contrary to the name means no confinement at all.
by XorNot | 2025-06-16 09:46:16+00:00
This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.

Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-06-16 09:46:17+00:00
Don't know if you're still reading this thread but just in case I finally got around to watching the meta-interpreter video. I can definitely see why Prolog shines for this.

Though even in that video we see a display of "jank", e.g., needing to ensure that rules don't overlap, being careful with introducing redundant choicepoints, permission errors, the trick with +, etc. in the vanilla meta-interpreter and the workarounds to get efficient tail recursion in the list-based meta-interpreter.

However, I don't think there's any way to avoid such "jank" when implementing something this powerful. The "jank" is the price to be able to do this. So fair point that this is something Prolog, and only Prolog, can do.
by sky2224 | 2025-06-16 09:47:36+00:00
Quit worrying about helping those that helped you in particular. If you have the opportunity and means to express gratitude, then go for it, but otherwise just pay it forward to the next person that comes along that you can help.

I've helped a number of people in what I think are pretty significant ways, and I've thought about what I'd say in response to them asking how they could repay me. All I'd say is, "pay it forward".

I've had plenty of incredible mentors help me without expecting anything in return. And thus, I shall do the same for those that I cross paths with for whom I can help. I suggest you do the same.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-06-16 09:48:25+00:00
Also copyright should never trump privacy. That the New York Times with their lawsuit can force OpenAI to store all user prompts is a severe problem. I dislike OpenAI, but the lawsuits around copyrights are ridiculous.

Most non-primitive art has had an inspiration somewhere. I don't see this as too different in how AIs learn.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-16 09:50:08+00:00
If you train a meat-based intelligence by having it borrow a book from a library without any sort of permission, license, or needing a lawyer specialised in intellectual property, we call that good parenting and applaud it.

If you train a silicon-based intelligence by having it read the same books with the same lack of permission and license, it's a blatant violation of intellectual property law and apparently needs to be punished with armies of lawyers doing battle in the courts.

Picture one of Asimov's robots. Would a robot be banned from picking up a book, flipping it open with its dexterous metal hands, and reading it?

What about a cyborg intelligence, the type Elon is trying to build with Neuralink? Would humans with AI implants need licenses to read books, even if physically standing in a library and holding the book in their mostly meat hands?

Okay, maybe you agree that robots and cyborgs are allowed to visit a library!

Why the prejudice against disembodied AIs?

Why must they have a blank spot in the vast matrices of their minds?
by geeunits | 2025-06-16 09:50:57+00:00
I've been implementing a bare metal APL Assembly kernel on mac arm and have been surprised at the resurgence of interest in languages like it. I think people are in general thinking about symbol representation/compression to a fundamental level for these performance gains. It's been fun to try and hack AMX implementation and couldn't do any of it without the shoulders of giants / Asahi linux project
by nunobrito | 2025-06-16 09:51:40+00:00
Again with FUD.

In Portugal you are legally permitted to use channel 9 (27.065 MHz) in addition to the PMR channels. The hard line has always been on public safety bands. From a long time cooperation with the authorities (especially around the Azores) there was always an informal permission for that kind of usage across boats and islands because communication is difficult there.

Last but not least: taking the radio license exam is NOT a drama. Anyone can apply and get the radio license when they are serious into this topic.
by perlgeek | 2025-06-16 09:51:50+00:00
Our models use single atoms (or single molecules), and for those we have pretty good models that we can solve numerically, at least.

In a gas, the atoms or molecules only interact weakly, so you just get some known effects like a line broadening due to thermal motion of the particles

But you really still want experimental validation before you declare any of these as a new standard, for a whole variety of reasons:

* it's often complicated to calculate multiple excitations

* you might forget something in the models, like isotope ratios

* the models don't really give you a good sense of how impurities in your materials will affect the clocks

* there might be some practical issues, like glass (used in the optical fibers) not being a very good medium for some frequencies of light that would otherwise look promising as a time standard

... and so on.
by leotsem | 2025-06-16 09:53:21+00:00
Apple’s recent paper on the limits of AI reasoning is an uncomfortable but important read.

Instead of relying on standard benchmarks, the authors designed controlled environments—like Tower of Hanoi and River Crossing puzzles—to test how models handle increasing compositional complexity. The results: performance doesn’t taper off, it collapses. And even when the models fail, they continue to produce fluent, structured reasoning traces that sound convincing but fall apart logically.

If you’re building on top of LLMs or reasoning-augmented models, it’s well worth a look.
by rikafurude21 | 2025-06-16 09:53:58+00:00
GCP went down over a null pointer exception recently, taking down a good chunk of sites, and people claimed that it was the start of WW3, since obviously it would begin with an internet blackout - Meanwhile everyone is refreshing their feeds constantly to see the latest hypersonic missiles hit civilian houses in HD quality."war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria. People just write buggy software
by meindnoch | 2025-06-16 09:54:01+00:00
>Simple example: why ice melts in a warm room.

Ice melting is simply the water molecules gaining enough kinetic energy (from collisions with the surrounding air molecules) that they break the bonds that held them in the ice crystal lattice. But at the microscopic level it's still just water molecules acting according to Newton's laws of motion (forgetting about quantum effects of course).

Now, back on the topic of the article: consider a system of 2 particles separated by some distance. Do they experience gravity? Of course they do. They start falling towards the midpoint between them. But where is entropy in this picture? How do you even define entropy for a system of 2 particles?
by this_steve_j | 2025-06-16 09:54:48+00:00
The terms “Cognitive decline” or “brain rot” may have sounded too sensational, and to be fair the authors note the limitations of the small sample size.

Indeed the paper doesn’t provide a reference or citation for the term “cognitive debt” so it is a strange title. Maybe a last minute swap.

Fascinating research out of MIT. Like all psychology studies it deserves healthy scrutiny and independent verification. Bit of a kitchen sink with the imaging and psychometric assessments, but who doesn’t love a picture of “this is your brain on LLMs” amirite?
by alganet | 2025-06-16 09:57:41+00:00
That's why you can't rely on it.

If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.

The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building long-term resilience is much harder.

IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-16 09:57:57+00:00
Very relevant. None of the recent techniques are truly revolutionary. It's all based on these same foundations. I'd say it would do good to read even older ones. There are lots of real, profitable computer vision applications built on classic methods like Hough transforms, canny edges, sift, Harris corners, etc. You should be familiar with these if you want to come across as a serious professional as opposed to a hype boy vibe coder who can just rattle off buzzwords and glue apis without fundamental understanding.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-06-16 09:58:10+00:00
What fud?

Channel 9 is a CB channel, and neither quanshengs nor baofengs work on those frequencies at all, but you need a certified/type-accepted CB radio to use on that frequency.

Same with PMR, you need a PMR radio to use on pmr frequencies.

It's not FUD, it's just hardware limits and regulation.

Yes, 12yo kids can get an amateur radio licence, it's easy, but you still need a licence to transmit on ham bands, and you still cannot legally use a baofeng (except the few pmr models) or a quansheng on PMR frequencies, those radios don't transmit on cb freqencies at all, and there are no legal "you don't need a licence in an emergency" exceptions.
by paxys | 2025-06-16 09:59:31+00:00
If you really haven't read a single argument about it then you're deliberately blocking them out, because it just takes a couple minutes of searching.

https://www.arl.org/blog/training-generative-ai-models-on-co...

https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-...

https://www.bakerdonelson.com/artificial-intelligence-and-co...

https://www.techpolicy.press/to-support-ai-defend-the-open-i...
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-16 09:59:46+00:00
I have a WAP on my shed roof and batteries that can power my gear for a few hours without the grid. In the absence of other WiFi networks the one atop my shed would stand out as a rallying point.

(It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we didn't have power outages).
by Tainnor | 2025-06-16 10:00:08+00:00
There's a subset of people in the Japanese learning community that claim to have found the "one true way" of understanding Japanese and sometimes this amounts to making very grandiose claims about how to think like a Japanese person (in an almost Neo-Whorfian way). You can tell these people likely never had any sort of formal linguistic training.

Which is whatever - if you want to use some analogies that make sense to you, go for it - just don't pretend that this is what Japanese really is like.

(There is an element of truth to it, namely that Japanese works rather differently in most respects that European languages including English. But also, there are 6-7000 languages in the world and many things that happen in Japanese have analogues in other languages, even if the specifics play out somewhat differently.)

In the case of だ the much more mundane understanding is that it's the (nonpast, plain form) copula. Yes, there are some rules about when you can/should leave it off and when not, but those IMO belong to the realm of pragmatics not semantics.
by dazzawazza | 2025-06-16 10:00:14+00:00
Where as in London, where there is at least one house every 8 meters, they were in and out of my street in two days and now we have constant door to door sales people offering deals.

Smells like they "installed" fibre in York to meet a contract/regulation but they really focus on Urban density. Makes sense for them but not for the rest of us.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-16 10:01:11+00:00
だ is what linguists call the copula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics)

In English, it's words like "is", "was", "are" or the verb "be". It follows the rules of linguistics, not mathematics, so there shouldn't be pressing need to stress its non-commutativity.
by victorbjorklund | 2025-06-16 10:01:22+00:00
I think their basic idea is to have a more advanced (and therefore scaleable mesh) where you can have more control over the path your packets take. I dont get the impression they are very commercial. Seems to been started by people first approaching meshtastic with proposed changes to the algo and getting rejected and therefore "forking" (forking in quotes because I dont think they share any code)
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-16 10:01:48+00:00
Let's set Linus' personal opinion aside [1] - the fact is, the Linux kernel team hasn't had much of a say in that matter. Both the European Union and the US have sanctioned a lot of things related to Russia ever since the invasion of Ukraine, and if there is one thing where "better ask for forgiveness than for approval" is a very, very bad idea it is straying too close to the edge of sanctions laws.

These things don't just have teeth, they have fangs - existentially threatening fangs, to add. If you are not a nation-state entity or backed by one with a sufficiently powerful military or economy (such as India and Turkey, who openly deal in Russian oil), it is not a good idea to cross any line.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEg...
by ofalkaed | 2025-06-16 10:01:54+00:00
>Opting for Lisp is like trying to use a swiss knife to cut a tree just because you love your swiss knife.

First thing I did when I got my Swiss Army pocket knife was go to the woods by my house and cut down a tree with its little saw. It was a small, aspen or poplar maybe 3" thick and it took some doing but it came down. That was my first pocket knife and the first tree I cut down, believe I was in third grade. Still remember the smell of the freshly cut wood and the damp humus, the feeling of the sap running over my hand; it was one of those shadowless overcast days, early fall before leaves started turning. I avoided washing my hands all day just to keep the smell of the sap with me. I did love my Swiss knife, took it with me everywhere I went for years. Thanks for the memories.