Hacker News: JPLeRouzic

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "PSSA: A non-transformer language model written from scratch in Rust"

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:49:44 +0000

I have read somewhere that Transformer architecture has a quadratic cost [0] (which explains the high costs associated with LLMs and the difficulty for constant improvement without state size pockets).

For what I understand PSSA belongs to a line of research for LLMs with scalable architecture because you don't need to load the full KV in memory to generate a single token:

[0] https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.936/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00392

https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/hash/6ceefa7b1...

Star.vision Unveils 'Space.IDC' Computing Constellation with Partners

JPLeRouzic — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:20:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.china-in-space.com/p/starvision-unveils-spaceidc-computing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894872

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX"

JPLeRouzic — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:05:30 +0000

Thank you @squantor

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX"

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:51:55 +0000

Thanks @FrankPetrilli.

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX"

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:41:15 +0000

Please can you provide some links to intro level articles?

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX"

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:39:38 +0000

That looks interesting, what technology "lifts signals out of thermal noise"?

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX"

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:48:32 +0000

The author says:

"It used Voronoi Cells and reduced most math to 8- and 16-bit integer calculations with one or two single-precision floating-point calculations."

I wonder if it can be used to speed up LLM inference.

A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:43:44 +0000

Article URL: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/a-software-thing-i-built-gps-on-a-25mhz-486-sx.1258966/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49722521

Points: 75

# Comments: 24

Teaching an M4 CPU to Tell Stories with XOR, Popcount and SDOT

JPLeRouzic — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 06:39:30 +0000

Article URL: https://dnhkng.substack.com/p/teaching-an-m4-cpu-to-tell-stories

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669539

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return Mission Progresses Towards 2028 Launch

JPLeRouzic — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:52:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.china-in-space.com/p/tianwen-3-mars-sample-return-mission

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610366

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "Europe would not be able to sustain war of attrition with Russia"

JPLeRouzic — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:42:37 +0000

I don't think so; prior to 2026, the Russian economy was flourishing, partly due to very high crude oil prices and the existence of a "shadow fleet" of oil tankers.

Since 2026, that shadow fleet has been significantly hampered by Ukrainian actions in the Black Sea and elsewhere (notably, Norway and France have boarded vessels); China has faced pressure to stop buying Russian oil, and Russia is now selling its oil at half price because nearly nobody wants it (only India still buy it).

In an economy that was only driven by oil export (their Western gas pipeline had unfortunately exploded a few years ago), this is a terrible situation,

I have read posts online from (well-off) Russians who say they are somewhat despairing about the economic situation.

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "Is your favorite plant-based milk good for the planet"

JPLeRouzic — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:01:40 +0000

I have been consuming dairy products for nearly 70 years and have experienced abdominal cramps after meals, but I hadn't made the connection until recently.

In the Western world, 20% of people are lactose intolerant, whereas this figure can reach 65% elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "Europe would not be able to sustain war of attrition with Russia"

JPLeRouzic — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:53:52 +0000

Apparently, the Russian economy is near collapsing; it therefore seems unlikely to me that Russia would be in a position to sustain a war against the EU.

On the same issue of the Guardian there is this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/06/zelenskyy-advi...

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "French CII's Mitra-15 in SIMH. Work in Progress"

JPLeRouzic — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:38:16 +0000

Ah, another "télécommunicant"!

I briefly worked on 11F centers back in the 70s and 80s, not E10 family, but in 1999, I salvaged some AM2901 chips from Mitra CPU boards that were headed for the scrap heap. They came from either the Yellow Pages or Transpac in Rennes facilities—it was a hectic time!

As for information sources, I found doctoral theses from CEA, a scientist from INRIA kindly pointed to INRIA historical resources and current work [0]. There are as well SNCF, EDF or BULL historical resources, a museum in Denmark, ex USSR documents but for creating a Mitra simulator nothing beats Pascal Chour's website.

What is missing for a SIMH simulator is original software to make sure the simulator is accurate (currently it is not).

[0] https://tiers-lieux.univ-rennes.fr/projets/mitra-miniature

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "French CII's Mitra-15 in SIMH. Work in Progress"

JPLeRouzic — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:00:08 +0000

Thank you!

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "Alzheimer's Damage in Mice Reversed with Just Two Injections"

JPLeRouzic — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:51:52 +0000

In 2020 an interesting article was published:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2388-4

It was titled: Reversing a model of Parkinson’s disease with in situ converted nigral neurons

There were some controversies and in 2023 another publication told: Ptbp1 deletion does not induce astrocyte-to-neuron conversion

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06066-9

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "French CII's Mitra-15 in SIMH. Work in Progress"

JPLeRouzic — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:27:57 +0000

This is still a pre-Alpha version.

If you have memories or documents about the Mitra-15 computer, please can you share them?

French CII's Mitra-15 in SIMH. Work in Progress

JPLeRouzic — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:27:57 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/JPLeRouzic/Mitra-15-for-SIMH

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49465464

Points: 28

# Comments: 6

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)"

JPLeRouzic — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 06:16:04 +0000

Morrow systems ran on a Unix flavor, could address 16MB all on Z80, had memory protection and could have up to 6 simultaneous users. Micronix was the only Unix-like multiuser system ever to run on an 8 bit processor.

https://ia902902.us.archive.org/20/items/mame0.211manualsful...

New comment by JPLeRouzic in "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time"

JPLeRouzic — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:36:58 +0000

A long time ago, while I am not a scientist nor a MD, I implemented the kind of PSSM* peptide vaccine in PHP and I put the code on Github, then a few years later I removed it. Indeed for the reasons explained in this excellent article it is considerably obsolete now.

The implementation is still online:

https://padiracinnovation.org/en/peptide_PoC/

* position-specific scoring matrix

PSSM itself is fascinating, it has some similarity to Transformers. In another timeline and with much evolution it could have lead to LLMs.