MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eadwu | 2025-10-26 20:10:32+00:00
There are bleeding edge issues, everyone dials into transformers so that's generally pain proof.

I haven't exactly bisected the issue but I'm pretty sure convolutions are broken on sm_121 after a certain size, getting 20x memory blowup from a convolution from a 2x batch size increase _only_ on the DGX Spark.

I haven't had any problems with inference, but I also don't use the transformers library that much.

llama.cpp was working for openai-oss last time I checked and on release, not sure if something broke along the way.

I don't exactly know if memory fragmentation is something fixable on the driver side - this might just be the problem with kernel's policy and GPL, it prevents them from automatically interfering with the memory subsystem to the granularity they'd like - see zfs and their page table antics - or so my thoughts on it is.

If you've done stuff on WSL, you have similar issues and you can fix it by running a service that normally compacts and clean memory, I have it run every hour. Note that this does impact at the very least CPU performance and memory allocation speeds, but I have not have any issue with long training runs with it (24hr+, assuming that is the issue, I have never tried without it and put that service in place since getting it due to my experience on WSL).
by palata | 2025-10-26 20:11:03+00:00
> I mean surely theyve seen a cat before to know that two legged cats don't dance with babies.

They've lived in a world where it was hard to make convincing fake videos, and where it would only be worth doing in contexts like movies or maybe propaganda. Suddenly, photorealistic videos pop up everywhere.

Also I don't know if you've seen a circus before, but animals can do very impressive stuff.

> But I do think they've been convinced, and manipulated, very hard, to just turn off their brain and power of discernment.

Again that's harsch. If we're talking about believing in a video that shows cats doing something that could happen in a circus (I haven't seen the video, but why not), then they are believing in something that does not matter much; it's just fun. There are young people that truly believe that the Earth is flat, I don't know what's worse.
by runarberg | 2025-10-26 20:11:27+00:00
There is exactly one good reason, at least for consciousness and sentience. And the reason is that those are such a vaguely defined (or rather defined by prototypes; ala Wittgenstein [or JavaScript before classes]). And that reason is anthropism.

We only have one good example of consciousness and sentience, and that is our own. We have good reason to suspect other entities (particularly other human individuals, but also other animals) have that as well, but we cannot access it, and not even confirm its existence. As a result using these terms of non-human beings becomes confusing at best, but it will never be actually helpful.

Emotions are another thing, we can define that outside of our experience, using behavior states and its connection with patterns of stimuli. For that we can certainly observe and describe behavior of a non biological entity as emotional. But given that emotion is something which regulates behavior which has evolved over millions of years, whether such a description would be useful is a whole another matter. I would be inclined to use a more general description of behavior patterns which includes emotion but also other means of behavior regulators.
by nativeit | 2025-10-26 20:11:33+00:00
I’m gonna start referring to my own lies as “hallucinations”. I like the implication that I’m not lying, but rather speaking truthfully, sincerely, and confidently about things that never happened and/or don’t exist. Seems paradoxical, but this is what we’re effectively suggesting with “hallucinations”. LLMs necessarily lack things like imagination, or an ego that’s concerned with the appearance of being informed and factually correct, or awareness for how a lack of truth and honesty may affect users and society. In my (not-terribly-informed) opinion, I’d assert that precludes LLMs from even approximate levels of intelligence. They’re either quasi-intelligent entities who routinely lie to us, or they are complex machines that identify patterns and reconstruct plausible-sounding blocks of text without any awareness of abstract concepts like “truth”.

Edit: toned down the preachiness.
by eddealmeida | 2025-10-26 20:11:54+00:00
I've been thinking about the ethical frameworks we unknowingly embed in our systems. Recently, while working on a recommendation engine, I realized our technical decisions often directly contradict our stated Codes of Conduct.

For example: training data choices that perpetuate societal biases, engagement metrics that reward controversy, and optimization goals that prioritize growth over truth. We're writing moral judgments into systems that then scale our blind spots.

Some concerning patterns:

Algorithms that claim neutrality while making value judgments

Codes of Conduct that address individual behavior but ignore systemic algorithmic harm

The disconnect between PR ethics and engineering priorities

I explored how this creates what I'm calling "algorithmic hypocrisy" - where our systems behave in ways that would get individuals disciplined under the same companies' Codes of Conduct.

Would be curious to hear from other developers who've faced similar ethical tensions between what we build and what we promise.

https://blog.thecodejedi.online/2025/10/code-of-conduct-hidd...
by globular-toast | 2025-10-26 20:12:43+00:00
This is classic git usage. A "pull request" was literally just asking someone to pull from your branch. GitHub co-opted the term for their own thing.

The thing that people really don't seem to get these days is how your master branch is a different branch from someone else's master branch. So pulling from one master to another was a normal thing. When you clone you get a copy of all the branches. You can commit to your master branch all you want, it's yours to use however you want to.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-26 20:13:04+00:00
You may find yourself quite surprised, as an adult, by what Logo actually is.

I was never taught much of it, but Logo is massively more sophisticated than most primary education ever gets into -— it's really a multi-paradigm language with quite an elegant loose functional programming style hidden in it.

There's a good article about it here with some links:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/modern-logo/

Also don't ignore Scratch: if you can teach familiarity in Scratch you are going to set your daughter up really well for all sorts of stuff. Scratch is really Logo's spiritual successor and it's a thing of beauty, IMO.
by pron | 2025-10-26 20:14:17+00:00
You're talking about formal languages in the context of computer science. Formal languages in the context of logic predate computer science (or could be said to be a direct precursor to computer science). These logic languages are also trivially decidable in the computer-science sense of formal languages, i.e. their set of strings is easily decidable. When we talk of decidability in those languages we ususally mean the decidability of whether a statement is provable or not (using the language's inference rules).

While my explanation of "formal" is meant to be introductory and not entirely precise, that some problem tackled by an algorithm is undecidable does not mean that that problem isn't precisely interpretable by the computer. A Python interpreter doesn't terminate for all inputs (and therefore doesn't decide halting), yet it does interpret all of its inputs precisely.
by derefr | 2025-10-26 20:15:22+00:00
> Turns out CLI interfaces by themselves are (from a usability perspective) incomplete for the kind of collaboration git was designed to facilitate.

git was designed to facilitate the collaboration scheme of the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which is, as you might guess... a mailing list.

Rather than a pull-request (which tries to repurpose git's branching infrastructure to support collaboration), the intended unit of in-the-large contribution / collaboration in git is supposed to be the patch.

The patch contribution workflow is entirely CLI-based... if you use a CLI mail client (like Linus Torvalds did at the time git was designed.)

The core "technology" of this is, on the contributor side:

1. "trailer" fields on commits (for things like `Fixes`, `Link`, `Reported-By`, etc)

2. `git format-patch`, with flags like `--cover-letter` (this is where the thing you'd think of as the "PR description" goes), `--reroll-count`, etc.

3. a codebase-specific script like Linux's `./scripts/get_maintainer.pl`, to parse out (from source-file-embedded headers) the set of people to notify explicitly about the patch — this is analogous to a PR's concept of "Assignees" + "Reviewers"

4. `git send-email`, feeding in the patch-series generated in step 2, and targeting the recipients list from step 3. (This sends out a separate email for each patch in the series, but in such a way that the messages get threaded to appear as a single conversation thread in modern email clients.)

And on the maintainer side:

5. `s ~/patches/patch-foo.mbox` (i.e. a command in a CLI email client like mutt(1), in the context of the patch-series thread, to save the thread to an .mbox file)

6. `git am -3 --scissors ~/patches/patch-foo.mbox` to split the patch-series mbox file back into individual patches, convert them back into an annotated commit-series, and build that into a topic branch for testing and merging.

Subsystem maintainers, meanwhile, didn't use patches to get topic branches "upstream" [= in Linus's git repo]. Linus just had the subsystem maintainers as git-remotes, and then, when nudged, fetched their integration branches, reviewed them, and merged them, with any communication about this occurring informally out-of-band. In other words, the patch flow was for low-trust collaboration, while direct fetch was for high-trust collaboration.

Interestingly, in the LKML context, `git request-pull` is simply a formalization of the high-trust collaboration workflow (specifically, the out-of-band "hey, fetch my branches and review them" nudge email). It's not used for contribution, only integration; and it doesn't really do anything you can't do with an email — its only real advantages are in keeping the history of those requests within the repo itself, and for forcing requests to be specified in terms of exact git refs to prevent any confusion.
by greatgib | 2025-10-26 20:15:32+00:00
For me this is the "business as usual" asshole move of GOG.

If there is no clear owner, and no one claiming right anymore, then it is abandonware that we can all profit of.

But now Gog will actually spend lot of effort to make the intellectual property alive and so killing abandonware that is their competition in the end. When a game is still sold through their platform, it can't claimed to be abandoned as it is still in the market generating revenues.

And in the example they give with the PI it is even worse. You don't do this in the interest of the creator that needs to be rewarded for its game but some distant relative that had nothing to do with it...
by ompogUe | 2025-10-26 20:15:36+00:00
I often init a bare repo on single-use server's I'm working on.

Then, have separate prod and staging clones parallel to that.

Have a post-commit hook set on the bare repo that automatically pushes updates to the staging repo for testing.

When ready, then pull the updates into prod.

Might sound strange, but for certain clients hosting situations, I've found it allows for faster iterations. ymmv
by theaniketgiri | 2025-10-26 20:15:59+00:00
Great question - I should've been clearer.

When I started, I wanted to understand LLMs deeply. But I hit a wall: tutorials were either "hello world" toys or "here's 500 lines of setup before you start."

What I needed was: "give me working code quickly, THEN let me modify and learn."

That's what create-llm does. It scaffolds the boilerplate (like create-next-app), so you can spend time learning the interesting parts: - Why does vocab size matter? (adjust config, see results) - What causes overfitting? (train on small data, see it happen) - How do different architectures perform? (swap templates, compare)

It's "easy to start, deep to master." The abstraction gets you running in 60 seconds, then you dig into the code
by BobaFloutist | 2025-10-26 20:17:03+00:00
If they're going twice your speed, they can go twice as far. Assuming they're personally providing at least half the power over the course of the bike ride, they're expending identical calories to you, possibly more to compensate for their heavier bike.

It's true that the moment-to-moment intensity is lower, but lowering intensity is some of the most common advice given to people struggling to get into a sport without their body rebelling, and the challenge as often as not is that they're bored at the beginner's pace and want to push more.

It's the same concept as assisted pull ups or knee pushups. Sure, you can build up from scratch by just doing a fraction of the duration, but that's boring and frustrating. Being able to actually move your body the full distance with less effort is a much more engaging way to build up the physical capacity you need to do it without the assist.
by pron | 2025-10-26 20:17:05+00:00
Yes, by Godel's time the notion of "calculability" was already at least intuitively grasped, and it was then that "formal" was understood to mean mechanical. Turing made the connection rigorous.

Leibniz spoke of "automatons" and dreamt of some sort of "thoughtless" reasoning, but I don't know if he had the right building blocks to even think of mechanisation as we could since the 19th century. E.g. here's how Leibniz tries to justify the utility of formal reasoning: "Our thoughts are for the most part what I call ‘blind thoughts’. I mean that they are empty of perception and sensibility, and consist in the wholly unaided use of symbols... We often reason in words, with the object itself virtually absent from our mind."

So he definitely had the right concept - which is why formal logic is so old - but not the right language that most people would intuitively understand today.
by jagrsw | 2025-10-26 20:17:50+00:00
That "blank slate" idea doesn't really apply to humans, either.

We are born with inherited "data" - innate behaviors, basic pattern recognition, etc. Some even claim that we're born with basic physics toolkit (things are generally solid, they move). We then build on that by being imitators, amassing new skills and methods simply by observation and performing search.
by tsoukase | 2025-10-26 20:18:45+00:00
Make a successful career plan for the next 10-15 years. By then you should be financially very well, not now. Women, marriage, jobs, money will come some time until then. But NOW you should plan the career.

Note: for a woman except of the above you should keep some breath, time, effort and preparation to create a family. For a man, it will be woke up for you from one of your girlfriends.
by jltsiren | 2025-10-26 20:19:31+00:00
An interested but uninformed layman.

When I was in college ~25 years ago, I took a class on the philosophy of AI. People had come up with a lot of weird ideas about AI, but there was one almost universal conclusion: that the Turing test is not a good test for intelligence.

The least weird objection was that the premise of the Turing test is unscientific. It sees "this system is intelligent" as a logical statement and seeks to prove or disprove it in an abstract model. But if you perform an experiment to determine if a real-world system is intelligent, the right conclusion for the system passing the test is that the system may be intelligent, but a different experiment might show that it's not.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-26 20:20:11+00:00
Sure, but there is a good reason for that. The way they are currently post-trained is the only way to make them actually useful. If you take the raw model, it will actually be much worse at the kinds of tasks you want it to perform. In contrast, a human can both be human, and be good at their job - this is the standard by which we should judge these machines. If their behavior needs to be restricted to actually become good at specific tasks, then they can't also be claimed to pass the Turing test if they can't within those same restrictions.
by wavemode | 2025-10-26 20:20:14+00:00
> Between org structure, roadmap incentives, and limited risk budget, few engineers can take months to pursue ambiguous bets.

> I can.

It's weird to hear a company executive say essentially "this work is important, but our company has too much bureaucracy and risk aversion for a regular IC to spend time working on this, so I just do it myself." Like, maybe that means you should actually be spending your time removing those roadblocks, instead?

It's no wonder why small companies innovate more than large companies. What is a wonder is, why many small companies intentionally make themselves more like large companies and lose their innovative spark as a result.
by whateveracct | 2025-10-26 20:20:28+00:00
As a manager? Coach your report on his soft skills. Software dev is about being a good team member as much as a good individual contributor. If the strongest guy is dominating meetings and dominating the team's direction with his opinion, that's something to work on.

He has to give others space to contribute by not jumping in. And his manager should be coaching this directly. As the EM, you want your whole team to be able to confidently do what he does. Functioning teams have multiple engineers concurrently owning your scope.

If your company isn't toxic, over-working would also be seen as a negative because of the precedent it sets. If this guy wants to be a leader and not a monkey, he has to appreciate that. And senior/staff counts as "leader" here.
by miloverse | 2025-10-26 20:20:45+00:00
Kids spend millions of hours glued to passive content. We built Milo to change that. It’s an AI-powered buddy that helps kids turn doodles and stories into fully animated adventures—real-time, interactive, and guided by their imagination.

Launched our alpha few weeks back, 100+ families, 500+ creations in four days, and reactions like “Wait… that’s MY drawing?!”

Looking for feedback from parents, educators, and anyone interested in creative AI tools for kids.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-26 20:21:03+00:00
There's also [1], containing further bibliography references along with practical applications in discrete planning.

Prolog is quite popular and successful as a target for LLMs. And it's no accident considering Prolog was introduced to represent natural language statements in (predicate) logic.

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/llm-demo/part1.html
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-26 20:23:13+00:00
If you share screen you are in control of what you show, if you give someone SSH access, what would stop them from passing/running a small script to fetch everything you have or doing w/e with your computer? I mean it's a blatant security violation to me. Just no reason to do that.

In large corps you usually have policies to not leave your laptop unattended logged in, in the office, that would be potentially even worse than that.
by palata | 2025-10-26 20:23:29+00:00
> I didn’t grow up with SMS or internet video but

Going through such changes when you are in your twenties or when you are in your sixties is extremely different.

An interesting example I have is working with younger software engineers: those who studied and graduated after clouds existed. It has surprised me more than once, with different people and in different contexts, that they had trouble imagining that one may not always have a fast internet connection or access to a cloud.

I wouldn't call them dumb for that, though.
by andix | 2025-10-26 20:24:46+00:00
I love it, starting mid-december a lot of my free time goes into Christmas preparations and at the same time the puzzles went up in difficulty. I never made it past #18 in real time. Not because of the difficulty, I just had to do other things.

Another option would be to add some breaks, maybe a day off every 2 or 3 days.
by userbinator | 2025-10-26 20:24:47+00:00
It must be mentioned that this is about blue asbestos, or crocidolite, which is the most dangerous form of asbestos, but was relatively rarely used and the first to be banned. White asbestos (chrysotile) has a much lower risk[1], far more widespread use, and there are still active chrysotile mines in Russia and China.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581056/
by enum | 2025-10-26 20:24:49+00:00
+1

I have H100s to myself, and access to more GPUs than I know what to do with in national clusters.

The Spark is much more fun. And I’m more productive. With two of them, you can debug shallow NCCL/MPI problems before hitting a real cluster. I sincerely love Slurm, but nothing like a personal computer.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-26 20:25:02+00:00
I very much wish there were a category of doctors...

"Sports medicine".

<https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/24627-sports-...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_medicine>

You might also look into nutrition and dietetics and exercise physiology. If you're looking at cognitive function, neuropsychology and possibly some psychotherapy specialisations.

"Wellness coaching" is starting to get into the woo / overly-self-interested / conflicted domain, though there are probably a few good apples. I'd proceed with extreme caution however. There are plenty of docs who're more than happy to provide what a patient asks (and is willing to pay top dollar) for.
by flkiwi | 2025-10-26 20:25:28+00:00
> defining AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult

I don't think people really realize how extraordinary accomplishment it would be to have an artificial system matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of an uneducated child, much less a well-educated adult. Hell, AI matching the intelligence of some nonhuman animals would be an epoch-defining accomplishment.
by phforms | 2025-10-26 20:26:09+00:00
It is unfortunate, but I can absolutely understand it. Keeping up such open-ended, time-consuming projects year after year while the person doing it changes inevitably – their personal life, habits, job, interests, etc. – must feel like a burden at some point, even if it is out of love and passion (I know that from personal experience with my voluntary work, from which I had to take a break after 10+ years).

I am truly thankful for all of Eric Wastls work on Advent of Code, no matter how much time he can invest and how much puzzles we get. I already look forward to the challenge at the start of autumn and consider what programming language I will choose (this year it’ll be Uiua :)). I am very slow at these puzzles, so I mostly quit at around puzzle 12 anyway, but I learn so much from them and they are a lot of fun.