Hacker News: ActivePattern

New comment by ActivePattern in "Grok 4.3"

ActivePattern — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:22:36 +0000

Seeing this makes me wonder if Grok uses Claude conversations for training.

It's otherwise kind of surprising that they both converge on very similar phrases (e.g. "API integration is kicking my ass") that aren't anywhere in the prompt.

New comment by ActivePattern in "To my students"

ActivePattern — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:55:48 +0000

Automatic coding systems have way too much economic value to be considered a "fad". I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to predict that we're never going back to manual coding. Sure, the systems will evolve and improve, but they're certainly not going anywhere.

New comment by ActivePattern in "Laws of Software Engineering"

ActivePattern — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:49:56 +0000

You're describing "modularity" or "loose coupling" in code. But it rarely implies you can just delete files or directory. It usually just means that a change in one component requires minimal changes to other components -- i.e. the diff is kept small.

New comment by ActivePattern in "EFF is leaving X"

ActivePattern — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:54:32 +0000

He's most definitely talking about a white homeland [1][2]

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1962406618886492245 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration

New comment by ActivePattern in "Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equation: Reinforcement Learning and Diffusion Models"

ActivePattern — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:50:33 +0000

Reinforcement Learning by Sutton & Barto is an excellent introduction by two of the founders of the field.

Read here: http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html

New comment by ActivePattern in "BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs"

ActivePattern — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:30:29 +0000

The win is in how many weights you process per instruction and how much data you load.

So it's not that individual ops are faster — it's that the packed representation lets each instruction do more useful work, and you're moving far less data from memory to do it.

New comment by ActivePattern in "Classical statues were not painted horribly"

ActivePattern — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:45:27 +0000

I still don't understand is why they don't even make an attempt to apply overlayers, when (as the author notes) there is ample secondary evidence that it would be present. It's not like there isn't already some element of inference and "filling in the blanks" when reconstructing how something was painted from the scant traces of paint that survived.

New comment by ActivePattern in "Classical statues were not painted horribly"

ActivePattern — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:35:05 +0000

I assume you didn't read the article, since that's their exact point...

"Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence."

New comment by ActivePattern in "This is not the future"

ActivePattern — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:05:19 +0000

> I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it.

So we're just waving away the carbon cost, centralization of power, privacy fallout, fraud amplification, and the erosion of trust in information? These are enormous society-level effects (and there are many more to list).

Dismissing AI criticism as simply ignorance says more about your own.

New comment by ActivePattern in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

ActivePattern — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:46:28 +0000

I've never heard the caveat that it can't be attributable to misinformation in the pre-training corpus. For frontier models, we don't even have access to the enormous training corpus, so we would have no way of verifying whether or not it is regurgitating some misinformation that it had seen there or whether it is inventing something out of whole cloth.

New comment by ActivePattern in "OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030"

ActivePattern — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:30:27 +0000

Yes, as is implied by the word "improvements"

New comment by ActivePattern in "The problem with farmed seafood"

ActivePattern — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:50:02 +0000

You started this by objecting to my wording ("among the most") when I said fish/chicken are the most sustainable meat options. They are, by a wide margin. Beef’s footprint is roughly 10× higher, so swapping a beef meal for chicken or fish cuts ~90% of those emissions. That’s not a "slightly less bad choice".

Calling harm reduction "silly" because tofu exists just shifts the target. We can hold two thoughts at once: (1) plant-heavy diets are best, and (2) for the vast majority who aren’t going vegan tomorrow, steering from beef to chicken/fish dramatically reduces damage right now. Dismissing that because it’s not maximal purity guarantees we leave real cuts on the table.

New comment by ActivePattern in "The problem with farmed seafood"

ActivePattern — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 02:53:44 +0000

I agree it’s worth comparing beef sources! That was my point about within-category differences and harm reduction. Saying "tofu is cleaner" doesn’t make beef comparisons pointless - just like the existence of bicycles doesn’t make car fuel economy comparisons pointless. We should compare across categories and within them, so people who aren’t switching today still choose the lower-impact option.

New comment by ActivePattern in "The problem with farmed seafood"

ActivePattern — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 20:28:41 +0000

I don't think it's "unserious" to recognize that >85% of the world's population eats meat.

If you're quibbling about wording, all I meant was: farmed fish and chicken are among the most sustainable meat sources.

I'm not making a statement that people should eat meat, but many people do eat meat, so it's worth comparing which meat sources are better than others. I think it would be great if more people knew that beef produces 10x the greenhouse gases than chicken/fish do.

New comment by ActivePattern in "The problem with farmed seafood"

ActivePattern — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:37:28 +0000

That take’s outdated. In the US/EU, routine antibiotics in fish farming are banned [1]. Growth hormones aren’t used in edible fish. Farmed salmon’s feed changed (more plant oils), but it still delivers high omega-3s and usually less mercury than wild [2].

[1] FDA “Approved Drugs for Use in Aquaculture” — https://www.fda.gov/media/80297/download

[2] Jensen et al., Nutrients 2020 — https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12123665

New comment by ActivePattern in "The problem with farmed seafood"

ActivePattern — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 16:16:20 +0000

On the contrary, farmed fish is among the most sustainable protein sources for those not willing to go full vegetarian [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore

New comment by ActivePattern in "You are the scariest monster in the woods"

ActivePattern — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:22:06 +0000

Hah, why don't you try implementing your 3 little functions and see how smart your "AGI" turns out.

> not a particularly capable AGI

Maybe the word AGI doesn't mean what you think it means...

New comment by ActivePattern in "Show HN: I invented a new generative model and got accepted to ICLR"

ActivePattern — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 16:32:21 +0000

I don't think you've understood the paper.

- There are no experts. The outputs are approximating random samples from the distribution.

- There is no latent diffusion going on. It's using convolutions similar to a GAN.

- At inference time, you select ahead-of-time the sample index, so you don't discard any computations.

New comment by ActivePattern in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?"

ActivePattern — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:49:53 +0000

It doesn't play nice with a lot of popular Python libraries. In particular, many popular Python libraries (NumPy, Pandas, TensorFlow, etc.) rely on CPython’s C API which can cause issues.

New comment by ActivePattern in "Python performance myths and fairy tales"

ActivePattern — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:51:01 +0000

Smalltalk JITs make p x * 2 fast by speculating on types and inserting guards, not by skipping semantics. Python JITs do the same (e.g. PyPy), but Python’s dynamic features (like __getattribute__, unbounded ints, C-API hooks) make that harder and costlier to optimize away.

You get real speed in Python by narrowing the semantics (e.g. via NumPy, Numba, or Cython) not by hoping the compiler outsmarts the language.