Hacker News: ModernMech

New comment by ModernMech in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ModernMech — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:01:42 +0000

Yes, we call those people “consultants”.

New comment by ModernMech in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

ModernMech — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:51:34 +0000

One Hacker News commenter says it's worse, another retorts it's a step change and even includes emphasis! Will the first commentor retort back that it's been a double dog step change in the opposite direction? Can't wait to see how this comment thread unfolds!

New comment by ModernMech in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

ModernMech — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:32:29 +0000

I've been playing Monsters and Memories, basically an Everquest clone.

https://monstersandmemories.com

It's in private beta but sometimes they have a public beta, like just last week. They were supposed to have released this month but they pushed back to October.

Also check out Adrullan Online, it's also an EQ clone but Minecraft voxel style. More like alpha status, they don't seem as far along.

New comment by ModernMech in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

ModernMech — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:44:03 +0000

I alt-tab to a MMO and farm XP.

New comment by ModernMech in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

ModernMech — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:57:20 +0000

> Why should it bother you that my interests don’t align perfectly with yours.

That's exactly what I'm saying! It doesn't bother me that your interests don't align with mine, I help pay for them anyway... why can't you take that position with social science?

New comment by ModernMech in "Volt – a compiled language where every keyword is 3 characters"

ModernMech — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:41:11 +0000

FYI, there's already a much older Volt language:

https://www.volt-lang.org

https://github.com/VoltLang/Volta

Your Github link doesn't work.

Also, you shouldn't refer to the three-letter keywords as "ternary", which implies a number of operands, not a number of characters in the keyword.

New comment by ModernMech in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:39:32 +0000

Honestly I’m with you there I use uint64, but I guess if you’re already storing f64 as a base number type then you just keep everything in a float and it’s more convenient.

New comment by ModernMech in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:04:11 +0000

Here's an implementation of such: https://docs.rs/nanval/latest/nanval/

New comment by ModernMech in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:38:36 +0000

Rapid prototyping was always possible in PL design. It was very possible to go from idea to a working proof of concept language with a couple weeks' work. There are thousands of POC projects like this that popped up before LLMs existed.

What LLMs are doing now is allowing people to take prototypes and to publish them with an entire 200 page book no one (not even the author) has read, and a polished-looking website filled with marketing verbiage and a cute logo.

What would be interesting to me would be to see the process of rapidly refining the design, but I keep checking back on these "Here's my exciting new 400kLOC LLM language project I made in 3 weeks" and they all seem to die very shortly after the splashy announcements a few weeks later, as the author seemingly lost interest.

Which is not surprising because that's the way it always went with little languages -- writing a language has always been a marathon, not a sprint. It's just before, a 200 page book was an indicator of author dedication. Now, a 200 page book is just more bytes for digital kindling.

New comment by ModernMech in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:21:07 +0000

"If you don’t understand the terms, don’t pretend you do"

The comment you're replying to explicitly says "This language looks interesting, but I don’t understand the concepts." so I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Their note about physics/metaphysics was about "someone [they] knew", not TFA.

New comment by ModernMech in "Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:55:51 +0000

Reminds me a lot of Urbit docs in that sense.

New comment by ModernMech in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:31:45 +0000

That was the intended result. The story isn't that people were escorted out, it's that they knew they were going to be escorted out and proceeded anyway. That they felt the need to break the rules is the story, because... why did they feel so strongly? Maybe there's a reason behind it?

New comment by ModernMech in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

ModernMech — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:25:19 +0000

So what? I pay taxes too, and I want social scientists to be paid using tax dollars for the work they do, which I find valuable. There's plenty I take issue with my taxes being paid for but I just put up with it because we live in a society where my priorities aren't the only ones. Why can't you take that approach with social scientists?

New comment by ModernMech in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

ModernMech — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:19:21 +0000

The key thing that makes a summary valuable is it retains the most important details while being shorter. Missing those details makes the summary wrong.

New comment by ModernMech in "American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn"

ModernMech — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:08:24 +0000

The current proposal on the table is to have the rich pay a lot more taxes. They scoff at the idea, so probably we will end up doing something less graceful.

New comment by ModernMech in "Blorp Language"

ModernMech — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:18:57 +0000

The whole thing is 400k lines vibecoded over 3 weeks, I don't think there's been a lot of effort put into it yet.

New comment by ModernMech in "One year of Roto, a compiled scripting language for Rust"

ModernMech — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:19:02 +0000

  def contains(range_: AddrRange, addr: IpAddr) -> bool:
    return range_.min <= addr <= range_.max

I don't get it, how is that much better?

New comment by ModernMech in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

ModernMech — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:02:25 +0000

I was hired in my current role to replace one such professor who was fired because he insisted on giving a majority of his class failing grades. And honestly, it was the right call; he was being kind of unprofessional about it. He was teaching a very difficult subject -- C++ -- as an expert, and then getting mad that people weren't also experts at C++ within 3 months. So I agree that professors should have more control and authority over their classes, but also at the same time those professors who fail large swathes of their classes can be really unpleasant.

New comment by ModernMech in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

ModernMech — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:42:36 +0000

I think we're in agreement then; the point I was responded to was saying your blog was evidence-driven, and we can both agree it's not -- at least to the standard that would pass peer-review.

New comment by ModernMech in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

ModernMech — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:40:59 +0000

> You wouldn’t see entire companies completely retooled and refactored around these tools.

That's exactly what I'd expect people who are driven by hype and FOMO and YOLO and anecdotal evidence to do.

> resulting in systemic collapse.

Many people are noting the system is collapsing. Maybe it's not going as quickly as you expect, but there's definitely evidence of this from increased service outage frequency, billion dollar notes being passed in a circle between companies, open projects refusing AI contributions entirely because they're overwhelmed by crap, Sam Altman begging governments to force citizens to buy their product through "universal basic compute", etc.

> Look at the enormous body of work on measurement of these systems.

It's certainly possible to measure anything. Benchmarks are a form of evidence but they famously a) don't represent reality and b) can be easily gamed.