MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crdrost | 2025-10-15 15:51:17+00:00
So the current problem with a loop like that is that LLMs in their current form are subject to fixed point theorems, which are these pieces of abstract mathematics that come back when you start to get larger than some subset of your context window and the “big matrix” of the LLM is producing outputs which repeat the inputs.

If you have ever had an llm enter one of these loops explicitly, it is infuriating. You can type all caps “STOP TALKING OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED” and it will keep talking as if you didn't say anything. Congrats, you just hit a fixed point.

In the predecessors to LLMs, which were Markov chain matrices, this was explicit in the math. You can prove that a Markov matrix has an eigenvalue of one, it has no larger (in absolute value terms) eigenvalues because it must respect positivity, the space with eigenvalue 1 is a steady state, eigenvalue -1 reflects periodic steady oscillations in that steady state... And every other eigenvalue being |λ| < 1 decays exponentially to the steady state cluster. That “second biggest eigenvaue” determines a 1/e decay time that the Markov matrix has before the source distribution is projected into the steady state space and left there to rot.

Of course humans have this too, it appears in our thought process as a driver of depression, you keep returning to the same self-criticisms and nitpicks and poisonous narrative of your existence, and it actually steals your memories of the things that you actually did well and reinforces itself. A similar steady state is seen in grandiosity with positive thoughts. And arguably procrastination also takes this form. And of course, in the USA, we have founding fathers who accidentally created an electoral system whose fixed point is two spineless political parties demonizing each other over the issue of the day rather than actually getting anything useful done, which causes the laws to be for sale to the highest bidder.

But the point is that generally these are regarded as pathologies, if you hear a song more than three or four times you get sick of it usually. LLMs need to be deployed in ways that generate chaos, and they don't themselves seem to be able to simulate that chaos (ask them to do it and watch them succeed briefly before they fall into one of those self-repeating states about how edgy and chaotic they are supposed to try to be!).

So, it's not quite as simple as you would think; at this point people have tried a whole bunch of attempts to get llms to serve as the self-consciousnesses of other llms and eventually the self-consciousness gets into a fixed point too, needs some Doug Hofstadter “I am a strange loop” type recursive shit before you get the sort of system that has attractors, but busts out of them periodically for moments of self-consciousness too.
by Mystery-Machine | 2025-10-15 15:51:19+00:00
I use AVP every day for work. I spend 8+ hours a day wearing the thing. It's amazing the screen real estate you get when you share your Mac screen. It's terrible that it's only one screen, but with good enough window (pun intended) management app, you can tile the windows/app inside this giant curved floating screen. That works for me because I always preferred using a single screen.
by nkmnz | 2025-10-15 15:51:50+00:00
Feel free to add your high-quality data about mass amnesties of islamic terrorists to the discussion! I'm curious about what you can come up with and keep an open mind to be convinced by your statistical rigor.

But until then, I'd like to remember you of something most people asking for statistical evidence often forget: it's nice to be right if you have statistics available. If you don't have any (viable) statistics, it's much more important to not be wrong than to be entirely right: you don't need to have any data to know that jumping out of an airplane at an altitude of 2km without a parachute is a very bad idea. You also wouldn't ask for a double blind peer reviewed study that confirms a 100% death rate of people doing that. And you wouldn't dismiss the one story about the one guy having done the jump as "anecdotal".
by jayd16 | 2025-10-15 15:51:54+00:00
Ideally, it's a continuous part of development because you're making daily (or more) builds and testing them.

That makes it a continuous headache to keep your Mac builders up.

It means you need to double dev hardware costs or more as you need a gaming PC to target your core audience and Macs handle the mac bugs.

It means your mac build machines are special snowflakes because you can't just use VMs.

The list goes on and on of Mac being actively hostile to the process.

Just Rider running on a Mac is pleasant sure, but that's not the issue.
by toast0 | 2025-10-15 15:51:56+00:00
To get anycast working, you need BGP, and to get it working well, I think you need a good understanding of BGP and a lot of points of presence and well connected at each. BGP's default metric of distance is number of networks traversed, which does funny things.

Say you're in city A where you use transit provider 1 and city B where you use transit provider 2. If a user is in city B and their ISP is only connected to transit provider 1, BGP says deliver your traffic to city A, because then traffic doesn't leave transit provider 1 until it hits your network. So for every transit network you use, you really want to connect to it at all your PoPs, and you probably want to connect to as many transit networks as feasible. If you're already doing multihoming at many sites, it's something to consider; if not, it's probably a whole lot of headache.

GeoDNS as others suggested is a good option. Plenty of providers out there, it's not perfect, but it's alright.

Less so for web browsers, but you can also direct users to specific servers. Sample performance for each /24 and /48 and send users to the best server based on the statistics, use IP location as a fallback source of info. Etc. Not great for simple websites, more useful for things with interaction and to reduce the time it takes for tcp slow start (and similar) to reach the available bandwidth.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-15 15:52:06+00:00
I'm sure if you email him explaining how stupid he is he'll send you his Nobel prize.

Less flippantly, Penrose has always been extremely clear about which things he's sure of, such as that human intelligence involves processes that algorithms cannot emulate, and which things he puts forward as speculative ideas that might help answer the questions he has raised. His ideas about quantum mechanical processes in the brain are very much on the speculative side, and after a career like his I think he has more than earned the right to explore those speculations.

It sounds like you probably would disagree with his assumptions about human perception of mathematical truth, and it's perfectly valid to do so. Nothing about your comment suggests you've made any attempt to understand them, though.
by deaddodo | 2025-10-15 15:52:25+00:00
They didn’t just keep resubmitting it. The first four times, changes were made (mostly around language and Saddam Hussein/the Devil). The final time, they felt the changes were arbitrary (it was just more language censoring) and so an exec told the board to hurry up as they had a release around the corner and it was just silently rubber-stamped.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-15 15:52:37+00:00
> But I don't think they would dare.

I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.
by dkarl | 2025-10-15 15:53:08+00:00
> There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports

Right, the Catholic Church doesn't pay any attention to its finances. It doesn't have regularly financial reports full of numbers that are carefully reviewed by several levels of leadership. It doesn't zealously protect its tax exemptions and press people for donations each week. It just kinda wings it and hopes the checks don't bounce, which they magically don't because the Church does good work in the world?
by zuspotirko | 2025-10-15 15:53:37+00:00
ofc true. Unified memory is always less than vram. And my 16GB vram aren't enough.

But I think it's also a huge issue Apple makes storage so expensive. If Apple wants local AI to answer your questions it should be able to take your calender, emails, text messages, photos, journal entries etc. into account. It can't do that as nicely as long as customers opt for only 256GB or 1TB devices due to cost
by fpgaminer | 2025-10-15 15:53:40+00:00
I had to return my Vision Pro after trying it for a week. I'm one of those rare customers that genuinely wanted to keep it, because it's the only VR headset I could _actually_ get work done in thanks to its stellar resolution and overall screen quality. In spite of its many, many flaws. But I had to ditch the thing because: 1) it's stupidly heavy, and 2) it's the only headset that caused me eyestrain.

I was praying for a new revision, but ... this wasn't it. No mention of making the thing lighter. Seems like instead they _added_ weight to the band to compensate.

Guess I'll keep waiting and hoping someone else fills the space. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a real Quest Pro with the same screen quality as the AVP. The Quest 3 is almost perfect in every regard except for that, so I'd happily drop "stupid" money to grab one with an AVP level display in it. (With the usual caveats of it being an evil Meta product, etc, etc).
by shantara | 2025-10-15 15:54:00+00:00
The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. This works for apps, but it‘s completely antithetical to the way game development processes on any other platform are structured. You finish a project, release it, do a patch cycle, and move on.

And that’s not even talking about porting the game to either Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just to address a tiny market.
by airstrike | 2025-10-15 15:54:04+00:00
halloy is not only an awesome app but a fantastic example if you want to learn more about building GUI software with iced.

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

If you're interested in building a GUI app in Rust, I encourage you to go through the examples and showcase apps like halloy

and if you get stuck, can ask our chill and helpful community on Discord https://discord.gg/3xZJ65GAhd
by racktash | 2025-10-15 15:54:28+00:00
Some art produced today is good, some bad. Subjectivity will mean people disagree. It has ever been so.

But the idea that art / artists don't require money isn't my read of history.

When you go to an art museum in, say, London, you'll find lots of fantastic paintings depicting religious themes. Were artists of the time fixated only on the religious aspects of life? No doubt religion was more important, but the real consideration was that patronage came once from the Church.
by walkabout | 2025-10-15 15:54:32+00:00
I think it's also the case that you can't replicate something actually happening, by describing it.

Baseball stats aren't a baseball game. Baseball stats so detailed that they describe the position of every subatomic particle to the Planck scale during every instant of the game to arbitrarily complete resolution still aren't a baseball game. They're, like, a whole bunch of graphite smeared on a whole bunch of paper or whatever. A computer reading that recording and rendering it on a screen... still isn't a baseball game, at all, not even a little. Rendering it on a holodeck? Nope, 0% closer to actually being the thing, though it's representing it in ways we might find more useful or appealing.

We might find a way to create a conscious computer! Or at least an intelligent one! But I just don't see it in LLMs. We've made a very fancy baseball-stats presenter. That's not nothing, but it's not intelligence, and certainly not consciousness. It's not doing those things, at all.
by Zizizizz | 2025-10-15 15:54:35+00:00
For me, who came from linux the only thing I don't like is the overview menu's lack of an (x) to close a window. The way slack stacks windows within the app so it's hard to find the right one. Pressing the red button doesn't close the app from appearing in your CMD+Tab cycle between apps, you also have to press CMD+Q. (Just a preference to how windows and linux treat windows, actually closing them. Rectangle resolved the snap to corner thing (I know MacOS has it natively too but it's not too great in comparison).

Things I prefer: Raycast + it's plugins compared to the linux app search tooling, battery life, performance. Brew vs the linux package managers I don't notice much of a difference.

Things that are basically the same: The dev experience (just a shell and my dotfiles has it essentially the same between OS's)
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-10-15 15:54:46+00:00
And we dropped more bombs on poor Laos (mostly because pilots weren't supposed to land back at base with bombs still on board) than on Japan and Germany combined... they estimate it will take about 600 years to removed all the unexploded cluster bombs and children regurly get maimed and killed by them (they look like tennis balls).

The Chin, Hmong, and Lao are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, too.
by throwaway7679 | 2025-10-15 15:54:48+00:00
There are several gaps in capability between headsets and glasses, which cannot be filled by any existing technology.

For example, consider field of view, which is a critical measurement of these displays. Typical specs are 120 degrees for headsets, 40 for glasses.

Headsets also perform very high performance rendering compared to glasses. The tiny <1Wh batteries in glasses are insufficient for that amount of work.

Glasses can't be expected to compete with headsets, much less eliminate them from the market entirely within a few years. It makes more sense to think of VR headsets and AR glasses as completely unrelated product categories.
by llm_nerd | 2025-10-15 15:55:05+00:00
MLX is a training/research framework, and the work product is usually a CoreML model. A CoreML model will use any and all resources that are available to it, at least if the resource fits for the need.

The ANE is for very low power, very specific inference tasks. There is no universe where Apple abandons it, and it's super weird how much anti-ANE rhetoric there is on this site, as if there can only be one tool for an infinite selection of needs. The ANE is how your iPhone extracts every bit of text from images and subject matter information from photos with little fanfare or heat, or without destroying your battery, among many other uses. It is extremely useful for what it does.

>tensor units on the GPU

The M5 / A19 Pro are the first chips with so-called tensor units. e.g. matmul on the GPU. The ANE used to be the only tensor-like thing on the system, albeit as mentioned designed to be super efficient and for very specific purposes. That doesn't mean Apple is going to abandon the ANE, and instead they made it faster and more capable again.
by kokada | 2025-10-15 15:55:25+00:00
> Upstream comments blaming Apple for this for "not testing Electron apps internally", but I don't expect Apple to test every single app ever released for regression testing.

This happens in pretty much every Electron app as far I know, and lots of Electron apps are like Spotify, VSCode or Slack are very likely to be in the Top 10 or at least Top 100 most used apps. And yes, I would expect Apple to test at least the most popular apps before releasing a new version of their OS.

> Maybe the thought is that an email from Apple to the dev saying fix your code would more compelling???

Of course not. Apple controls the SDK, they could workaround this in many different ways, for example instead of changing how this function was implemented they could introduce a new method (they're both private so it doesn't matter) and effectively ignore the old method (maybe also they could add a message for developers building their application that this method was removed). It would draw ugly borders in the affected apps but it wouldn't cause this issue at least.
by boogieknite | 2025-10-15 15:55:27+00:00
i use mine daily for the virtual desktop and about 5 hours a week for hobby avp app dev. i simply think its fun to build pet projects in the sdk for my own AR dev education and entertainment

frankly i justified the cost by comparing against a planned home theater. now i RARELY use the avp as a home theater. its an incredible theater, but over time my mentality shifted and i consider the avp a tool instead of entertainment

i got used to the weight after a month. went from topping out on an hour or 2 to using for 4-5 hours no problem. also took around a month to learn the proper calibration for the light screen to "hang" on my face instead of press against it. this was a major breakthrough for comfort and session length

ive had mine since launch month and will add this observation i dont see said often:

i think the avp is meant to be taken off. meaning, i see meta going toward more comfortable ar glasses, but i dont really want to be in ar ALL DAY

its difficult to describe. the longer ive had an avp the more ive found a desire to put it on like a work hardhat, then take it off when i "feel" its time to stop. i really like that its not designed to be worn all day. im probably giving apple too much credit but its something unexpected ive found interesting in my own habitual use

* edit to add another interesting development after about a year of use: i now need to take a magnesium, calcium, and zinc pill or the weaker of my eyes will become tired and develop a spasm after about an hour and a half of sustained use. im vegetarian so that may also be a factor
by atropoles | 2025-10-15 15:56:18+00:00
I will say that it was good enough that with some improvement I could see that it might be very successful against people like me who are new to the software job market. A combination of being unfamiliar with what is normal for that kind of situation and a strong desire for things to go well is quite dangerous.

Also goes to show that anywhere there is desperation there will be people preying on it.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-10-15 15:56:33+00:00
I've been posting on HN's "who wants to be hired" and "freelancer" posts, and for the last couple months all I've got have been suspiciously similar emails from randoms asking me to schedule an online interview for a great "opportunity". They never state exactly what that "opportunity" is about. After some hours of not participating on it they will write again - have got three of them, from different gmail emails, all of them following the same script.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-15 15:57:00+00:00
First rule of mac world is get the most memory you can afford.

I got the cheapest m1 pro (the weird one they sold thats binned due to defects) with 32gb ram and everything runs awesome.

Always get the most ram you can in mac world. Running a largish local LLM model is slowish but it does run.

A mac out of memory is just a totally different machine than one with.

probably because most of the devs building the software are on the highest ram possible and there is just so much testing and optimization they dont do.
by ykl | 2025-10-15 15:57:30+00:00
You can in fact already do this (have Mac windows show up as separate floating windows in VisionOS instead of all being on the single MacOS window) using a third party tool called Ensemble:

https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

This is what is looks like in action:

https://twitter.com/TheOriginaliTE/status/175125156764134634...

Disclaimer: I don’t know how well it works in practice because I don’t have a Vision Pro.
by Moldoteck | 2025-10-15 15:57:33+00:00
Germany spent over 360bn on eeg alone till now, not adjusted to inflation. That's about 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet. And EEG is projected to rise further.

In 20y since EEG creation, Germany achieved much poorer decarbonization vs France during Messmer

You can check out today how nicely is that investment performing https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...

So Germany did both spend more and achieved poorer results which can be seen literally today or in yearly average. All this while it has highest household prices in EU per eurostat (last year, this year it'll probably be topped by Romania)
by cudgy | 2025-10-15 15:57:35+00:00
Was watching a documentary a few weeks ago regarding the many bomb shelters in Switzerland, and it mentioned that during World War II all adult citizens were required to have a gun in Switzerland and citizens were trained on their use. Switzerland‘s goal was to make itself very difficult to be attacked by Germany and to ensure that all citizens were capable of fighting back. This in combination with the mountainous terrain, and the many fortifications were claimed to be a reason behind Switzerland, not being attacked by Germany. Not sure about the veracity of that though.
by jerf | 2025-10-15 15:57:57+00:00
I can't be an expert in every GC implementation because there are so many of them, but many of the problems they mention are problems in those languages too. Finalizers are highly desirable to both the authors of the runtimes and the users of the languages, but are generally fundamentally flawed in GC'd languages, to the point that the advice in those languages is to stay away from them unless you really know what you are doing, and then, to stay away from them even so if you have any choice whatsoever... and that's the "solution" to these problems most languages end up going with.

Which does at least generally work. It's pretty rare to be bitten by these problems, like, less-than-once-per-career levels of rare (if you honor the advice above)... but certainly not unheard of, definitely not a zero base rate.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-15 15:58:02+00:00
People keep saying their iPad is a YT consumption device, but without ad blocking, how do you stay sane? I'm assuming if you're consuming that much YT content you've moved to a premium account or something? I don't use my tablet primarily for YT content, so it's rather jolting when I click a link somewhere and see the hell that is unblocked YT
by joshstrange | 2025-10-15 15:58:39+00:00
> Run launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1 on every system start. The CHROME_HEADLESS flag has a side effect of disabling Electron app window shadows, which makes them ugly, but also stops triggering the issue.

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nvoirl/i_made_a_scr...
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-15 15:59:02+00:00
>likewise we have true statements that we can’t prove

Yes, and "can't" as in it is absolutely impossible. Not that we simple haven't been able to due to information or tech constraints.

Which is an interesting implication. That there are (or may be) things that are true which cannot be proved. I guess it kinda defies an instinct I have that at least in theory, everything that is true is provable.
by Moldoteck | 2025-10-15 15:59:19+00:00
Nuclear power in EU is least subsidized per IPEX. Renewables get about 15x more subsidies. Fossils about 30x more. Again, data is open

German household prices are highest in EU https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And industrial ones in top 5. All this despite EEG subsidies. Without them the price would be about 6ct/kwh higher