Hacker News: Ericson2314

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Governments are mishandling the affordability crisis"

Ericson2314 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 01:57:19 +0000

Crime has declined for 30 years to an amazing extent, almost uninterrupted but for Covid. Total non-problem.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

Ericson2314 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 23:25:23 +0000

I mean there's been huge strides in electric vehicles at low prices that Americans haven't experienced.

We've just locked out a large part of modernity because the shitty American auto industry is in swing states and also gender.

Same could be said about the slow rollout of Waymo.

Lots of America is just very anti technological change, and this means any technology no matter how "magical" hits a wall.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Unikernels were hard. key word: were"

Ericson2314 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 06:08:35 +0000

This is exactly right.

I saw a post that said roughly "I thought computing was doomed to be 'Linux, Python, and HTTP' for the rest of my life. Now we're free". That's it. Let it sink in. We're free. We can make the computer do whatever we want.

Cast off the yokes back-compat and history

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Transit rewards"

Ericson2314 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:14:34 +0000

That's an artifact of where you live haha

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

Ericson2314 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:56:59 +0000

RL robotics is increasingly something that cannot be avoided, I think.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust"

Ericson2314 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:39:59 +0000

To everyone skeptical of people saying that it's better to separate CPU and GPU code into separate files, riddle me this:

With this system, how do we specify whether dependencies are needed to be compiled for the CPU, GPU, or both?

----

Technically I don't know really care whether it's multiple files or one, I just want to make sure we are not reinventing a shittier version of CFG. What they are providing looks to me like:

1. explicitly annotate some things as `cfg(GPU)` or ungated (both)

2. unlabeled means annotated `cfg(not(GPU))` by definitely

Put this way, this has nothing to do with GPUs, and just has to do with creating some crate-local CFG shorthanded. Great! Let's do that first, get a solid foundation, and then come back to whatever is remaining for CUDA Rust.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

Ericson2314 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:11:07 +0000

The problem is not the sex, the problem is the cult. The sex is merely evidence for the cult.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Ericson2314 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:51:08 +0000

My perspective using Nix is that it's hardly worth standardizing ISAs. Recompiling software is easy and we should have a Cambrian explosion of different designs.

This is especially good if one scopes out a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months"

Ericson2314 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:21:30 +0000

Sure.

Nixpkgs cross support for Windows has been in there a while. Native windows support for Nix is a bit less advertised because it is pre-release/pre-MVP-on-master, but see https://github.com/nix-windows/nix-windows-demo . And expect to hear more on this in the next few weeks :).

New comment by Ericson2314 in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

Ericson2314 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:19:19 +0000

I totally agree with you on the first bit, but I also think that I am way better at deciding on how to refactor code bases than the LLM is.

Right now, I put models in low thinking mode during my refactors and hate waiting. I would much rather have a faster model that that maybe was slightly stupider, and I would wait far less long between prompts where it needs my valuable input.

Models that are dumb, but humble and fast, can be fine.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

Ericson2314 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:50:10 +0000

If your task has incremental rewards/feedback, you can push the "intelligence rate" simply by sampling the reward function faster. That's not fake, even if it not a substitute either.

This is the "dumber but honest person that works harder" phenomenon, vs "lazy genius".

New comment by Ericson2314 in "libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months"

Ericson2314 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:06:06 +0000

> PS: If anyone managed to combine Clang-based MinGW with AddressSanitizer and Wine without crashing at launch, please show me how and drop me an e-mail. Thank you!

It's for problems like these that I have been working at cross and native Windows support in the Nix ecosystem

New comment by Ericson2314 in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

Ericson2314 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:55:22 +0000

No this isn't mindless reinventing --- this is finally having clear empiric evidence for something that we knew the entire time. This is a huge relief!

Next up is demonstrating the AI is more productive with better programming languages.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

Ericson2314 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:29:34 +0000

> While using floating point?

Where is this meme coming from? IEEE floating point is deterministic

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

Ericson2314 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:27:38 +0000

Skill issue

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

Ericson2314 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 03:11:57 +0000

Deterministic seed

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

Ericson2314 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 03:06:35 +0000

Yeah maybe *both" sass and training companies are wiped, imagine that!

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable"

Ericson2314 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 05:32:47 +0000

Good job, but the parent fork already did macOS, so this wasn't too hard.

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water"

Ericson2314 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:59:18 +0000

Well put. That's exactly right. (And I don't even mind mouse studies!)

New comment by Ericson2314 in "Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water"

Ericson2314 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:58:50 +0000

This neural network stuff does give me real divination vibes, not gonna lie.