Hacker News: CyLith

New comment by CyLith in "Position: LLMs Can't Jump"

CyLith — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:04:32 +0000

That’s funny, when I first learned about the equivalence principle, my first thought was “of course!” I have always found it to be very intuitive. The great leap is being able to frame it that way.

New comment by CyLith in "Show HN: Run an 80B Qwen in 4.3 GB of RAM on a Mac, and a 35B on an iPhone"

CyLith — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:47:07 +0000

I know relatively little about the workings of LLMs, but I keep seeing projects like this that run massive MoE models using very modest amounts of RAM, perhaps excessively so. I wonder, is there a way to make the RAM usage tunable? I have a Macbook with 32 GB of RAM, and it'd be great if I could run the same model but take advantage of the additional RAM to make it run faster.

New comment by CyLith in "Show HN: Formally verified 3D CSG: Trust 93 lines spec, not 1000 lines AI code"

CyLith — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:49:50 +0000

The issue I have with all these formally verified numerical algorithms is that, at the end of the day, I need this implemented using actual floating point. It's great that it's verified, but not for the case that is practically meaningful. Unless it's implemented using hardware accelerated floating point, most of these algorithms are not sufficiently performant to be practically useful.

New comment by CyLith in "You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand"

CyLith — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:14:49 +0000

I feel like if the logic in git were just a bit more sophisticated, many of these issues wouldn't even arise. Most of these are because someone foolishly (usually me) merged in the wrong direction for convenience's sake, and now I have a duplicated set of commits. It's not like Claude is doing anything very sophisticated; it's just looking at commit hashes and seeing what the unique changes are.

New comment by CyLith in "You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand"

CyLith — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:43:14 +0000

These days, I am leaning heavily on Claude to deal with all the git issues that I never wanted to be bothered with. A rebase that can't just fast-forward? That's a job for Claude. A merge conflict that really shouldn't be a problem? Claude deals with it. These are things I never wanted to have to learn in the first place, and I don't feel like reserving a part of my brain to remember how to deal with these things is worthwhile. In almost all cases, there is no actual decision that needs to be made, it's purely a mechanical process.

New comment by CyLith in "Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI"

CyLith — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:24:20 +0000

Former Google employee here. This is exactly the kind of shit-for-brains action I'd expect from Google executives. Bravo on further dragging your image through the mud.

New comment by CyLith in "The case against geometric algebra (2024)"

CyLith — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:51:42 +0000

This article captures so much of what I have felt but been unable to put into words about GA. I come from a computational physics background, and when translating theory into numerical algorithms, the dimensional analysis and units are very important (you have to be able to relate the simulation to something in the real world!). GA dispenses entirely with any notion of meaningful units, making the dimensional analysis and error checking extremely difficult. The geometric product has always seemed like some strange mathematical trick or coincidence that happens to maybe have some useful properties. Almost like how "new math" is perhaps easier to learn or understand at first, but you really just need to sit down and understand algorithmically what is going on with the basic arithmetic operations.

New comment by CyLith in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

CyLith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:50:33 +0000

I wouldn't trust any engineers I know of with their "taste". At best it's a highly skewed view of the world. At worst, it's outright opposite to genpop.

New comment by CyLith in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

CyLith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:19:44 +0000

You missed the best part: analyzing what to do around knots. There's a skill and artistry to it. Those who are good at it make it look absolutely effortless: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsIFvStf9Oz99GMitW4vD_g

New comment by CyLith in "An introduction to functional analysis for science and engineering"

CyLith — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:24:10 +0000

DABM writes everything in MS Word.

New comment by CyLith in "Aging and Eye Problems"

CyLith — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:00:50 +0000

Optical engineer here. This is what they don't tell you about continuous/transition/progressive bifocals: optically they don't work. The lens design is an overconstrained optimization problem and the solutions they come up with end up compromising a lot on everything, to the point that it is practically useless.

New comment by CyLith in "Show HN: Formally verified polygon intersection – Opus 4.8 oneshots, prev failed"

CyLith — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:17:47 +0000

Does this use integer coordinates or floating point coordinates?

New comment by CyLith in "Ask HN: Why would people in town be upset about a datacenter being installed?"

CyLith — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:45:50 +0000

Add to that that they are (at least perceived to be) supporting AI, which the majority of people do not want, and data centers are physical faceless embodiments of big tech corporations, which people are increasingly against.

New comment by CyLith in "Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure"

CyLith — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:30:19 +0000

Yes. I see the 6 and I think: pretty tall, just a bit taller than me as a baseline. Then the 3 indicates another bit more. At no point am I adding the quantities to achieve a total. It’s two pieces of information in something akin to a binary search.

I do woodworking and framing and approach is similar. Measure out to 6 feet first, then move out 3 inches more. It’s iterative refinement. To measure lengths I always do a few bisections like 3 feet, 2 inches, and 3/4 plus a sixteenth. I can remember a sequence of 3 or 4 integers for about a minute, long enough to transfer the measurement. Give me something like 135mm, and I’ll forget in a few seconds.

New comment by CyLith in "We've made the world too complicated"

CyLith — Sun, 17 May 2026 04:19:34 +0000

I strive for a “simple” lifestyle not because I believe it will be enjoyable. Quite the opposite. A simple lifestyle is much more laborious, arduous, and mentally taxing in terms of all the minutiae I need to worry about to achieve even modest levels of comfort. E.g. Do I have enough wood stored for the winter?

I strive for a simple life because it gives meaning to life, and a connection to the earth and other living things. It keeps me resilient in the face of hardship and less reliant on other people. It also provides a connection to the past and our heritage.

New comment by CyLith in "Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure"

CyLith — Sun, 17 May 2026 03:25:19 +0000

Because I don't want to deal with a hundred of anything, and I don't want to deal with decimal points. I want everything I measure to be near single digit numbers. Hence, inches for common dimensions like a "2x4". I can handle something being 5 1/4 inches. How the hell large is 133 mm? Humans are not good at intuiting numbers far from unity.

Miles are great. The typical highway speed limit is about a mile a minute. You can easily lower bound how long it will take to get somewhere if you know how far it is in miles.

In cooking, I often need to halve quantities in recipes, hence pounds and ounces. Watching cooking channels give metric quantities is absolutely baffling to me. You see things like 175 mL. That is 2 sigfigs too many.

New comment by CyLith in "Show HN: Full Python GUI apps in the browser – no JavaScript, no server"

CyLith — Fri, 08 May 2026 03:47:12 +0000

This is really neat, and I think I can use it in some of my projects as a simple front end to physical simulation tools. One question I have: do you have true 3D bindings? I see there is ImPlot3D, but right now I need to render meshes in OpenGL (or WebGL as the case will be). Is there a way for me to define shaders and feed it triangle soup?

New comment by CyLith in "Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser"

CyLith — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:25:41 +0000

This is the single reason I have not upgraded from OS 12.x. Postscript is key to many of my workflows.

New comment by CyLith in "Ask HN: Are We Destroying Earth?"

CyLith — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:57:18 +0000

Yes

New comment by CyLith in "Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode"

CyLith — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:54:29 +0000

And anyone implementing numerical algorithms is thankful for the tremendous amount of thought put into the fp spec. The complexity is worth it and makes the code much safer.