Hacker News: IsTom

New comment by IsTom in "Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576"

IsTom — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:32:57 +0000

And still that requires X to not be particularly large. It could conceivably be in ballpark of BB(40).

New comment by IsTom in "The AI Aesthetic"

IsTom — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:58:53 +0000

I might be an old man yelling at cloud, but for things coming after win98 era this feels demonstrably false in many cases.

New comment by IsTom in "Are We Stuck with Lean?"

IsTom — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:22:25 +0000

Intuitionistic logic can prove less than classical logic, but what you gain is that proofs are constructive. Also you can use it to reason about things for which law of excluded middle doesn't hold (typically types).

New comment by IsTom in "Are We Stuck with Lean?"

IsTom — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:42:10 +0000

So that link(https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943) buried in the comments of comments sounds pretty damning.

New comment by IsTom in "Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results"

IsTom — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:14:00 +0000

I think it's just that we have hard time pinning down what is it that intelligence factor that isn't well-covered by LLMs. Just like we've had trouble with discerning human intelligence in the past.

It turns out that a savant with all the knowledge isn't "it".

New comment by IsTom in "Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac"

IsTom — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:20:35 +0000

That kind of sounds like a branch predictor in a CPU.

New comment by IsTom in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

IsTom — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:48:39 +0000

Have they factored 21 yet? That metric hasn't changed for some time.

New comment by IsTom in "Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)"

IsTom — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:42:06 +0000

You could read it through internet archive if it's this important.

New comment by IsTom in "DIY Home Solar System for under $5000 (2025)"

IsTom — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:45:22 +0000

Especially as browser History API allows you to change the hash without making new history entries.

New comment by IsTom in "How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?"

IsTom — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:50:53 +0000

If what they're claiming is true then what were they supposed to do? Go "Hey guys, it's the biggest project in Zig and it sucks, don't look at it"? Not exactly a good PR move.

New comment by IsTom in "Why care about programming languages"

IsTom — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:29:08 +0000

That sounds like Haskell's ST monad and yeah, that could work. These are very specific "escape hatches" though and typically people want more.

New comment by IsTom in "Why care about programming languages"

IsTom — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:43:07 +0000

> escape hatches for performance

These allow the model to cheat in ways that are harder to detect. In actually pure FP you can be sure that it's not counting function invocations to bypass tests.

New comment by IsTom in "It's not empowering to hand off the details"

IsTom — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:18:04 +0000

I feel that this is because people have been reinventing the wheel a lot in IT.

A lot of innovation that finally lands in programming languages has been done decades earlier, but now it's mostly awkwardly bolted on existing languages and frameworks.

New comment by IsTom in "Kill The Cookie Banner"

IsTom — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:55:58 +0000

EULAs are restricted in power in EU and at least to me these cookie banners are similar in spirit.

New comment by IsTom in "PartialString – A finite-difference time-domain physical modelling synthesiser"

IsTom — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:19:37 +0000

Physical strings have some stiffness and it causes overtones to not have perfect integer ratios of frequency. It's one of many things to consider that makes it sound a bit more natural.

New comment by IsTom in "PartialString – A finite-difference time-domain physical modelling synthesiser"

IsTom — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:36:16 +0000

Considering that there's a pickup in the model, air doesn't matter. And in typical string instruments the loud part you mostly hear is coming from sound box through bridge, not from strings themselves.

New comment by IsTom in "PartialString – A finite-difference time-domain physical modelling synthesiser"

IsTom — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:33:26 +0000

Does it take nonlinearity of strings into account? In the demo I can't really hear it and to me it ends up sounding like the comb filter synths you get without it.

New comment by IsTom in "DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16"

IsTom — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:01:10 +0000

Are dogfights still relevant? Isn't it mostly shooting missiles outside of visual range these days?

New comment by IsTom in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

IsTom — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:11:20 +0000

I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.

New comment by IsTom in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

IsTom — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:11:21 +0000

Yeah, this happens broadly in shell with globbing. It's a bit ridiculous.