Hacker News: Perenti

New comment by Perenti in "New drug 'functionally cures' many hepatitis B virus infections"

Perenti — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:19:23 +0000

I'm pretty sure that if the virus and its DNA are undetectable then you can't spread it. I believe that's how it works with HIV anyway.

New comment by Perenti in "VibeOS: First ever AI-native operating system"

Perenti — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:04:38 +0000

If it can't run on the metal, is it really an OS that's "native"? Surely an "AI-native" OS runs the AI in ring zero? Is a dockerfile the same as an OS? Always?

These are serious questions, about what is surely not a serious project.

New comment by Perenti in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

Perenti — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:52:58 +0000

I got six a few times at High School. Compared to the beatings at home they were kinda weak. But I guess it'd freak out kids who had never been beaten.

I can't see the threat of three strikes with a cane on the bum over clothes, or on the hand being any kind of disincentive to a determined trouble-maker. I do think the _threat_ of corporal punishment does help keep some kids on the straight and narrow, but I don't think it'll deter people like I was - terribly angry teens.

New comment by Perenti in "US will start revoking passports for parents who owe child support"

Perenti — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:20:12 +0000

I've been told that American's have a very low rate of passport issuance. I don't know if that's true, but the figure quoted was only 10% of adults hold passports. Is this a really effective way to get people to pay for their kids, or just the appearance of doing something to quiet the voters?

New comment by Perenti in "Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything"

Perenti — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:55:49 +0000

I just wish it did what it said on the tin. Seriously, separating the hype from the reality is so time consuming.

New comment by Perenti in "Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD"

Perenti — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:18:11 +0000

I've always been suspicious of the claims THC helps anxiety. CBD may, but my experience is that high doses of THC without corresponding CBD tends to induce anxiety in many people. I also found the brief notes in the article about MMJ and autism intriguing. I'm diagnosed ASD. I would think the use of THC to manage overstimulation could be problematic, as it tends to make colors and sounds and flavours _more_ intense. Conversely, indica strains tend to slow you down.

DISCLOSURE: I use large amounts of high potency cannabis flower with CBD/CBG edibles for intractable neuropathic pain. I also smoked a hell of a lot of weed in my 20s and 30s. I've more experience of Pot than most. MMJ lowers my pain a bit, and reduces suffering a lot. Its the suffering that makes life difficult.

New comment by Perenti in "Launch HN: Captain (YC W26) – Automated RAG for Files"

Perenti — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:23:19 +0000

You're welcome. By the way, as an AIdiot, anything that makes RAG less brittle is good.

New comment by Perenti in "Launch HN: Captain (YC W26) – Automated RAG for Files"

Perenti — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:33:45 +0000

Just a note on the website, I thought at first my browser had been hijacked by a shipping or travel agent. The first impression is how AI has improved ship tracking, so you can now track ships with 98% accuracy, with little to no hint this is AI infrastructure until you scroll down.

If you know what Captain is, this is not an issue. I closed the browser tab at first, thinking "what the hell is this, I don't give a damn about shipping forecasts"

New comment by Perenti in "Shall I implement it? No"

Perenti — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:07:29 +0000

This relates to my favorite hatred of LLMs:

"Let me refactor the foobar"

and then proceeds to do it, without waiting to see if I will actually let it. I minimise this by insisting on an engineering approach suitable for infrastructure, which seem to reduce the flights of distraction and madly implementing for its own sake.

New comment by Perenti in "Aura-State: Formally Verified LLM State Machine Compiler"

Perenti — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:12:58 +0000

Interesting. Seems you are automating my qwen workflow. Every output stage is verified through mathematical proof whenever possible, before being fed to the next step in transforming ideas into code. Except for when qwen decides to go in a very unusual direction, its working reasonably well at producing provably correct code. It's slowish though, with lots of nested iterations, and when qwen goes strange it takes a lot of effort to get it back on task.

New comment by Perenti in "Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough"

Perenti — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:05:05 +0000

You can run any smalltalk code from workspace-style frames in the Inspector, Workspace, Explorer, Finder and Debugger. You can edit classes and methods in these windows, as well as spawn Browsers as desired. I'm not sure what the integration points are that are lacking. That's not to say there can't be a better way, but I cannot see the point he is making.

New comment by Perenti in "Why does C have the best file API"

Perenti — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:51:21 +0000

It may have a tidy mmap api, but Smalltalk has a much better file api through its Streams hierarchy IMHO. You can create a stream on a diskfile, you can create a stream on a byteArray, you can create a stream on standard Unix streams, you can create a stream on anything where "next" makes sense.

New comment by Perenti in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

Perenti — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:02:00 +0000

Will this only apply to an OS with human user accounts? I wonder how autonomous agents that are operating systems running on bare hardware are defined under this strange law. Not all OS are for humans. Consider many uni-kernel applications.

New comment by Perenti in "A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives"

Perenti — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:43:36 +0000

Could you claim any book with boys being different to girls breaches the sex talk rules? I'm just wondering how you could use this law to show how ridiculous it is.

New comment by Perenti in "Minimal x86 Kernel Zig"

Perenti — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:41:14 +0000

So use Zig to implement Smalltalk. All problems solved.

New comment by Perenti in "Show HN: AI Timeline – 171 LLMs from Transformer (2017) to GPT-5.3 (2026)"

Perenti — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:05:08 +0000

It would be nice if clicking on a list entry (say llama3 ) opened a window/tab on the home page of that model.

New comment by Perenti in "Lil' Fun Langs"

Perenti — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:08:17 +0000

I've been playing with my own Smalltalk implementation. I guess it qualifies as a tiny _language_, but the class library is huge!

Yes, I know that all who do not understand Smalltalk are doomed to re-implement it, poorly. I'm just cutting out the middleman - and this allows it to do things Smalltalk normally doesn't. It allows me to think so far outside the box it's not even visible anymore.

New comment by Perenti in "Apple I Advertisement (1976)"

Perenti — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:23:22 +0000

I first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape.

Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way.

The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.

New comment by Perenti in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse"

Perenti — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 23:42:51 +0000

Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.

New comment by Perenti in "The decline of deviance"

Perenti — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:57:15 +0000

Not all of this is as straightforward as the author seems to suggest. In particular, I believe the massive increase in mass shootings is only in one country. Part of it is, I believe, the fear-mongering our glorious leaders and the media love so much.