MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Model-agnostic cognitive architecture for LLMs
by HimTortons | 2025-11-18 00:35:08+00:00
Hi HN,

A couple weeks ago I shared an early version of a side project I’ve been tinkering with called Persistent Mind Model. I built it at home on an i7-10700K / 32GB RAM / RTX 3080 because I was curious whether an AI could keep a stable “mind” over time, that could "think" about it's own identity as an LLM, instead of resetting every session.

After a lot more tinkering, I think the architecture is finally in a solid place.

Basically, it saves everything the AI does, thoughts, decisions, updates as a chain of events in a local SQLite database. Because the “identity” is stored in that ledger (and not inside the model), you can swap between OpenAI, Ollama, or other backends and it just keeps going from where it left off, and reasons about its own history/identity development.

I cleaned up the runtime and added things like: a better control loop, a simple concept system for organizing ideas, graph-based telemetry so you can inspect how it evolves, and a draft whitepaper (for now), and several full sessions you can replay to see how the behavior develops.

It's basically my experiment to develop persistent memories, and self-evolving "identities" for LLMs.

The whole system is only a few MB of code, plus about 1.3 MB for the example ledger I’m sharing.

If you’re interested in AI systems that can grow over time, or you want to experiment with persistent reasoning/memory/ verifiable mechanical cognition, I’d love feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/scottonanski/persistent-mind-model-v1.0

It’s open-source, free to use, and still early. but it’s already producing some surprisingly interesting results.

Would love to see what others do with it.
by HarryHirsch | 2025-11-18 00:35:18+00:00
It's not a surprise that especially at elite college it's classical economics that is taught in the gen. ed. courses. Its models are simple, and plainly visibly wrong.

If behavioural economics or political economics were taught instead, anything with models that have explanatory power it would be viewed as lefty and revolutionary, and that would really upset donors. Consequently we are stuck with homo oeconomicus.
by vladgur | 2025-11-18 00:35:33+00:00
I read through the linked article and an article on smex.org and there was nothing about "remote control backdoor access".

It complains about inability to uninstall from the manufacturers handset which is a manufacturers decision.

Again both articles manufacture controversy simply by nature that the Appcloud is associated with an Israeli company, not by what the app actually does or not by the fact that nobody forced Samsung to install this app on their handsets.

If you have information showing that Samsung is selling phones that are remote controlled by another government or corporate actor, that would be extremely newsworthy. Please share these news when you find them
by fc417fc802 | 2025-11-18 00:35:34+00:00
> how on earth do we keep things safe and secure if everyone can see the code and verify what it does!

That's not always the silver bullet you seem to think it is. Have you ever tried to build something like Chromium, Firefox, or LLVM yourself? It's not realistic to do that on a mid tier let alone low end device.

Even when you go to the trouble of getting a local build set up, more often than not the build system immediately attempts to download opaque binary blobs of uncertain provenance. Try building some common pieces of software in a network isolated environment and you will likely be surprised at how poorly it goes.

If projects actually took this stuff seriously then you'd be able to bootstrap from a sectorlisp and pure human readable source code without any binary blobs or network access involved. Instead we have the abomination that is npm.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-18 00:35:55+00:00
>obsessive seeking of external validation which I have never felt myself

if you've never felt it, why are you mentioning it? why are you so focused on it?

A useful psychoanalytic rubric is "there is no negation in the unconscious mind". Negation is a conscious mind idea, the unconscious mind just thinks of things, it doesn't think of something and claim it's not thinking of it.

so, rephrasing what you wrote in the unconscious sense, "obsessive seeking of external validation which I have felt myself": yes, you have identified something, identified with something, interesting, about other people and about yourself. If you are aware that you are not seeking external validation, but also aware when other people do, you have to ask yourself...

if your complaint about this argument is along the line of "no fair, i can't escape from this!", you're getting the point.
by jungypoo | 2025-11-18 00:36:11+00:00
I interviewed the founders of The Game Club, which sends users a free game every month along with discussion prompts for folks to meet up and talk about.

The games will be lesser known indie gems on Steam, which the curators believe didn't get proper time in the limelight and deserved more attention. They're aiming for 8-10 hour experiences but will play with the format, including some multiplayer occasionally, and leaning towards games that foster good discussion for the meet-ups.

What it's really about, though, is making friends. Blomberg and Leighton hope to use shared passions and experiences to build friendships and go some small way towards slowing the rise of loneliness in modern society.

It's clear Shay P Leighton has done his research on combating the "friendship recession," and his last book club project, the Tough Guy Book Club, is already a success. He makes some great points in the episode about the removal of civic life, and how we've replaced our missing institutions with... nothing.
by Frannky | 2025-11-18 00:36:20+00:00
For sure, something happened. Grok 3 was awesome to work with. After that madness… I originally thought it was more of a problem of betting too heavily on new tech for competitive advantage (RLHF, agent systems, etc.) and accepting worse results in the process. But in the meantime, the usefulness of the LLM has gone downhill. Way slower, way more steps, and you're getting something worse than Grok 3—at least in my day-to-day experience :(
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-18 00:36:23+00:00
You can absolutely be charming towards people and play the "game" of social interaction while being quite aware that this is what you're doing. The point is that this need not involve outright lying or BS at all and that the latter is what such terms as "manipulation" actually imply in a very practical sense; not that it somehow counts against you if you're aware of what's happening at a pure level of social interaction. (In fact, the opposite is generally the case; active social awareness and mindfulness is a big part of what people variously call "EQ", "empathy", "cross-cultural competence", etc.)
by there4 | 2025-11-18 00:36:24+00:00
> Feels like a lazy justification

I try to give people kindness and grace, even for small things. Maybe we can sometimes reframe a "lost cart" as something other than an act of laziness or aggression against society. Maybe it’s a sign someone was just having a hard moment.

When I take a stray cart back, sure, it could’ve been left by someone careless. But it also could’ve been left by someone overwhelmed. Maybe a parent, an exhausted worker, someone barely holding it together because of some struggle we'll never know.

Returning that cart might be a tiny act of kindness toward someone who needed it that day.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-11-18 00:36:42+00:00
> dances around it

Aren't you just confirming the author's point. You can dance around only certain ways with words. Either he could have said they don't liked the lifestyle and he likes to fight. Or he could have at least given some reason or argument against the question. Incapable in dealing with things inside him doesn't mean incapable of answering a simple question.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-18 00:36:58+00:00
All the rural towns I've been to in Texas are just farm roads that you'd never want to walk down and towns with no real centers/plazas to hang out at (and you'd have to drive there anyways).

Then I moved to Mexico and they were on to something there: small towns have central plazas that are heavily used for social activities, young men and women can walk around meeting each other, and they build densely enough to where you can walk around the town.

So I envy anyone whose rural US upbringing is like your wife's. I didn't think we had that as an option anywhere in the US except for movies.
by RGamma | 2025-11-18 00:37:21+00:00
I realize this doesn't really say anything about grid-level/national requirements, but at least in my situation 100% electric heating seems feasible.

Last year we used 7000kWh of natural gas (at 0.14€/kWh). Assuming 90% efficiency of our condensing boiler that's 6300kWh for heating water and air. We heat from ~November to ~February and use hot water all year round (though the cold water will vary by ~6 degC).

We have PV: 7.5kWp, 6kWh storage, electricity 2024: 6.3MWh generation, 2.1MWh usage at 80% autarky (100% from April to August, 90% March, Oktober, avg 50% November to February). 435kWh drawn from grid at 0.36€/kWh, 4.2MWh sent to grid at 0.075€/kWh

We can replace the boiler with a hot water heatpump that would be ~fully powered by our PV from ~March to ~Oktober. And for space heating we can use an air-air heatpump(s). We also have decent insulation and decentral ventilation with enthalpy exchanger.

Now the mystery is how much gas we waste in the non-heating period for hot water, and how little space heating we can get by with (small 60m^2 flat, kitchen, bedroom don't need heating) as well as the actual COP. My guess would be 3-4kWh of heating would be quite adequate plus whatever hot water will use.

We're currently looking for offers for getting rid of gas (and maybe central heating) completely. Wonder what calculation they'll come up with. Note that it doesn't need to be profitable at current prices as gas prices will rise, renewables will get cheaper, and you can still get 30-55% of subsidy.

I also consider getting rid of fossils completely a worthy struggle in itself as it reduces geopolitical dependence and increases resilience. But yeah, it's a multigenerational problem at this scale and scope, esp. considering all the other areas of overuse that need fixing.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-11-18 00:38:06+00:00
What's definitely not popular is the prospect of retired old ladies getting 50%+ rent increases. That's absolutely what happened over the pandemic in the Maritime provinces where there was no rent control at all when they suddenly became popular places to move to.

People like stability. They can adapt to higher prices, but they need time to adapt to higher prices. That is the point of rent control. It is a system to smooth out volatility. It trains landlords to consistently increase prices and trains tenants to prepare for (small) increased prices.
by apparent | 2025-11-18 00:38:10+00:00
Even if people thought that all "pre-owned" vehicles come with "higher warranty protection", then they would be correct. Per TFA:

> all the vehicles sold on Amazon will be backed by Ford’s warranties and roadside assistance guarantees. According to Ford, every vehicle that appears on Amazon has been “inspected, reconditioned, and comes with a Ford warranty, Ford Rewards points, and in some cases, a money-back guarantee.”
by malfist | 2025-11-18 00:38:57+00:00
I disagree that the headline is clickbaity. It's true. The agents run in the background and have access to your personal data.

I don't care how "auditable" an agent is, I don't want my personal information slurped up by AI and shipped out to microsoft's servers. Full stop.

This is just another spying data exfiltration but with a hype con built into it.

Just because I can see what it read and shipped off, doesn't mean I can undo that or claw it back.
by parliament32 | 2025-11-18 00:39:16+00:00
There is good options if you're willing to pay for them, but they have nothing to do with DNS. You will never get DNS TTLs low enough (and respected) to prevent a multi-minute service interruption in cases like these.

Proper HA is owning your own IP space and anycast advertising it from multiple IXes/colos/clouds to multiple upstreams / backbone networks. BGP hold times are like a dead-mans-switch and will ensure traffic stops being routed in that direction within a few seconds in case of a total outage, plus your own health-automation should disable those advertisements when certain things happen. Of course, you need to deal with the engineering complexity of your traffic coming in to multiple POPs at once, and it won't be cheap at all (to start, you're looking at ~10kUSD capex for a /24 of IP space, plus whatever the upstreams charge you monthly), but it will be very resilient to pretty much any single point of failure, including AWS disappearing entirely.
by iLemming | 2025-11-18 00:39:36+00:00
Yup, just the other day I was talking about it on subreddit, will repeat here verbatim:

My comment is an honest reflection of long-time Emacs usage. When I started, years ago, I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there were no tabs for every file anymore - the concept that was seemingly ingrained into my programmer's brain - almost in every IDE/editor I used before Emacs, I had tabs and a navigational panel on the side. I complained and demanded my tabs, asked on forums and called it "bullshit", when people calmly told me that I truly don't need them. Later I realized - they were right.

Slowly I learned that the wise choice is to remove any distractions - you don't need a minimap, side-panels, complicated modelines, and even line-numbers shown all the time. All that can be activated purposefully, on demand and then toggled off again. These "visual clues" are in fact not so much even distractions but micro-bombardments of your brain neurons - you think they are helping, while in fact they are slowly eating up your neural capacity, to the point that the brain just stops even paying attention to them and they become almost useless waste of your screen estate.

I'm not saying that this all generally true for every case and every user - some prefer certain ways, and it's great that we have a system that is able to satisfy any whim, but it's worth sometimes questioning yourself - am I enslaved by my own mental habits?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-18 00:40:41+00:00
The disappointing thing is that the companies don't just ship the open source firmware on their devices from the factory. They rarely if ever have any marketable features the open source firmware doesn't -- it's more often the other way around -- and then you don't have a zillion unpatched devices when they decide to stop caring because the community continues to maintain the code.
by m463 | 2025-11-18 00:40:44+00:00
I hate that.

I had an old suv that would throw errors about the suspension.

Turns out there are lots of systems on a car that you can't diagnose with standard OBD2 readers. Same with transmission, etc.

As a matter of fact, don't know why all of this isn't easily available to the owner, not just a code, but a full message.
by pron | 2025-11-18 00:40:46+00:00
> leads to library code that needs to be actively tested for potential client use since the instantiation might fail

True, like templates in C++ or macros in C or Rust. Although the code is "tested" at compile time, so at worst your compilation will fail.

> I don’t want that in any “the new X” language

Okay, and I don't want any problem of any kind in my language, but unfortunately, there are tradeoffs in programming language design. So the question is what you're getting in exchange for this problem. The answer is that you're getting a language that's both small and easy to inspect and understand. So you can pick having other problems in exchange for not having this one, but you can't pick no problems at all. In fact, you'll often get some variant of this very problem.

In Java, you can get by with high-level abstractions because we have a JIT, but performance in languages that are compiled AOT is more complicated. So, in addition to generics, low-level languages have other features that are not needed in Java. C++ has templates, which are a little more general than generics, but they can fail to instantiate, too. It also has preprocessor macros that can fail to compile in a client program. Rust has ordinary generics, which are checked once, but since that's not enough for a low-level language, it also has macros, and those can also fail to expand correctly.

So in practice, you either have one feature that can fail to compile in the client, or you can have the functionality split among multiple features, resulting in a more complicated language, and still have some of those features exhibit the same problem.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-18 00:40:48+00:00
It's the lawyers. They ran out of actual lawsuits, so they're inventing them. They either find a wheelchair-bound person to sue you because your shop is in a historic building and you never bothered to spend tens of thousands on making it ADA compliant, or they sue you because your website doesn't pass ADA compliance[1] (hey, does HN pass ADA compliance? I have an idea...), or they find[2] a couple guys selling illegal truck parts and try to sue them for tens of millions.

https://www.accessibility.works/blog/ada-lawsuit-trends-stat... [1]

https://www.uphe.org/priority-issues/diesel/ [2]
by sbinnee | 2025-11-18 00:43:23+00:00
As a native Korean, every time I see something related to Korea, I am just amazed how much passion these people have. I briefly remember seeing a detailed map of the whole Korean peninsula from the elementary school, I think. I appreciate this finding!

North Korea is kind of invisible if you live in South Korea. You may see some news that they launched some rockets and did some military actions. People are so used to these news that they don't pay attention anymore. You forget about the North one and just live your life.
by ggm | 2025-11-18 00:43:26+00:00
Given 6 degrees is rooted in reality, this means we can draw causal graphs from anyone (bad) to anyone (we don't like) and then invent specious reasons why it means "it's all connected, man"

That said, some networks of shorter paths than 6 are interesting. Right now, there's a 1:1 direct path from these documents to a bunch of people with an interest in confounding what evidentiary value they have in justice processes. That's more interesting to me, than what the documents say right now.
by apparent | 2025-11-18 00:43:30+00:00
In some cases, the new term is just a euphemism, and it means exactly the same thing. Like how "homeless" turned into "unhoused". There's no difference in meaning. It's just meant to sound nicer.

In my book, it's the same for "used" and "pre-owned". It never occurred to me that anyone would think a "pre-owned" vehicle automatically came with a warranty. It was just a nicer way of saying that you weren't the first owner, without using the word "used" (which evokes "used up"). Also, I think sketchy used car lots sell what they call "pre-owned" vehicles, even though they don't provide certification and warranties (at least not ones you can count on, since they could just disappear overnight).
by DaveZale | 2025-11-18 00:44:07+00:00
We get serious grasshopper damage around here, esp the last two years. It's cyclical, but not all crops are seriously affected. Root crops are usually very robust.

I tried neem and diatomaceous earth against the hoppers. Different mechanisms of action, not total control but good enough for root crops like potatoes. The pumpkins and other squashes also hold up well.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-18 00:44:49+00:00
20 years ago In my area, a an owner of a mobile home part wanted to kick everyone out, sell the land do developers. The land is worth a lot due to its location very near a "tier 1 city".

The residents contacted the AG and the AG and State forced the owner to sell to the residents. Which happened. When I drive by that park now, even now it looks 100x better then it did before they bought it.

Hopefully the same happens to these parks.
by bccdee | 2025-11-18 00:45:46+00:00
I think the important thing is that the code look pure from a testing perspective.

Say you've got a function that accesses a key-value store. Ideally, you can factor out the i/o so that you do all your reads up front and all your writes at the end, leaving a pure function in the middle. But if the code is too tangled up in its side effects for that, the next best thing is to create a fake KV store and then wrap the function like this:

def doTest(input, initialState): kv = makeFake(initialState) result = doThing(kv, input) return result, kv.dumpContents()

doThing isn't a pure function, but doTest is. Now you can write tests like this:

result, outputState = doTest(input, initialState) assert (result, outputState) == expected

I guess you could call that "imperative core, functional shell," lol.
by kuschku | 2025-11-18 00:45:51+00:00
How's the support for the first option? If that reliably works, I'm gonna stop being angry, as it solved all my needs (and would allow polyfilling xslt anyway)

On second thought, that wouldn't allow me to modify the DOM before it's being parsed, I'd have to wipe the DOM and polyfill the entire page load, right?
by docmars | 2025-11-18 00:46:18+00:00
If you ask a mainstream LLM to repeat a slur back to you, it will refuse to. This was determined by the AI company, not the content it was trained on. This should be incredibly obvious — and this extends to many other issues.

In fact, OpenAI has made deliberate changes to ChatGPT more recently that helps prevent people from finding themselves in negative spirals over mental health concerns, which many would agree is a good thing. [1]

Companies typically have community guidelines that often align politically in many ways, so it stands to reason AI companies are spending a fair bit of time tailoring AI responses according to their biases as well.

1. https://openai.com/index/strengthening-chatgpt-responses-in-...
by kondro | 2025-11-18 00:46:34+00:00
While there appears to be some us-east-1 SPoF for Route 53 updates (as shown recently), the actual health checks themselves occur in up to 8 different regions [1] with an 18%[2] agreement of failure required to initiate a failover.

AWS has very good isolation between regions and, while it relies on us-east-1 for control plane updates to Route 53, health checks and failovers are data plane operations[3] and aren't affected by a us-east-1 outage.

Relying on a single provider always seems like a risk, but the increased complexity of designing systems for multi-cloud will usually result in an increased risk of failure, not a decrease.

1. us-east-1, us-west-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, ap-southeast-1, ap-southeast-2, ap-northeast-1 and sa-east-1 which defaults to all of them.

2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dn...

3. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...
by Bjartr | 2025-11-18 00:47:45+00:00
IIRC, the value of randomness went even further than that. I think it was in the allocation of land for rice paddies. I-ching was used to decide if any given farmer's land was to be used that year or something like that. The benefit wasn't divination selecting better land, but by way of random selection, gave an impersonal excuse to leave fields unplanted some years, which is beneficial in the long term to overall yield.
by b112 | 2025-11-18 00:48:23+00:00
Someone once tried to hire me, on one of the islands up the Northern coast of BC.

Took 3 hours to get to by ferry, and one of the enticements was that "we have these dwarf deer, and they have no fear of man. You just walk up to them and hit them on the head with a stick".

I presume there was nothing larger than a fox on that island, for a deer to have no fear.