Hacker News: achierius

New comment by achierius in "We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447"

achierius — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:44:50 +0000

But we still try to stop people from doing so, and we punish people who do. Many good honest people, when confronted with the end of their business, accept it and file for bankruptcy. Those that choose to instead commit fraud don't get a pass because they were "under pressure", they get jail time.

How I would implement an SSA-based compiler

achierius — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:12:56 +0000

Article URL: https://gist.github.com/pizlonator/cf1e72b8600b1437dda8153ea3fdb963

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087776

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The Sticky Mark-Bit Algorithm for GCs

achierius — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:08:46 +0000

Article URL: https://wingolog.org/archives/2022/10/22/the-sticky-mark-bit-algorithm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086025

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Claude Disagrees with Human Philosophers

achierius — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:43:46 +0000

Article URL: https://marcusplutowski.com/blog/philsurvey-1-why-claude-disagrees-with-human-philosophers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083783

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by achierius in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

achierius — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:53:13 +0000

For if someone steals the phone?

New comment by achierius in "What if LLMs escape through inferences itself? This is fiction. For now"

achierius — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:53:22 +0000

They're engaging with the writing. Talking about it as if it's just an "argument" is reductive; this isn't highschool debate club

New comment by achierius in "What if LLMs escape through inferences itself? This is fiction. For now"

achierius — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:52:33 +0000

Man, it's not an argument. Nobody is paying us to read this. If your argument sucks to read, people aren't going to read it - this has always been true, it's nothing new.

New comment by achierius in "Python 3.15’s Ultra-Low Overhead Interpreter Profiling Mode"

achierius — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:48:55 +0000

Reading through this accounts other comments, it feels rather Claude-like. I wouldn't mention this if it weren't a consistent pattern

New comment by achierius in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

achierius — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:29:45 +0000

Sorry, but most of us need to work to eat. This idea that our "value" is has nothing to do with the economy is an idea rooted in deep privilege, in the ability to say -- if I don't like my job, if I'm not employable, I can just retire, and the only problem will be figuring out how to live life afterwards.

New comment by achierius in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

achierius — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:40:49 +0000

Many devices are indeed locked down. But given that it's an OS company and hardware vendor, many employees have access to hardware with e.g. SoC fusing that allows them to install custom-signed firmware. It's very difficult to make an OS lock out the people whose job it is to build the platform that OS depends on.

New comment by achierius in "Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees"

achierius — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:18:03 +0000

> We would still sometimes treat for varroa, but making it easier for the bees to handle varroa how they had evolved to was the first line of defence

I thought this was very dependent on the species -- European honeybees did not evolve to deal with varroa mites, because the mites originated in Asia. Asian honeybees, and honeybees bred with them, do have better ways of dealing with the mite; you said regular Italian bees, were they really not hybridized?

I don't have any actual field experience here, just curious!

New comment by achierius in "SWE-1.7 Reach Near GPT 5.5 and Opus Intelligence"

achierius — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:43:37 +0000

I've always had mixed feelings about Cognition. Obviously they have some very, very smart people working there (I even know a few), and they do make real products. But at the same time, they've made suspicious marketing claims more than once and even been caught making outright fabricated ones; and while they certainly seem to have shaped up from that, I still find their claims to be in a sort of grey area where they seem to avoid unfavorable comparisons and lean on their own benchmarks. Certainly when I've tried their models they have not been nearly as useful as comparable versions of Claude, GLM, etc. -- though I haven't had a chance to try SWE-1.7 yet.

New comment by achierius in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

achierius — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:33:16 +0000

Post offices aren't meant to operate in the free market. More things should be like them.

New comment by achierius in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

achierius — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:31:24 +0000

If you keep studying econ you will learn that these failures are actually the norm, and thus why the only "capitalist" states to really succeed have been the ones where the state was strong enough to reign in the market.

Of course, such a state of affairs is temporary at best -- since the alternative is so lucrative!

New comment by achierius in "The Coming Loop"

achierius — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 06:04:01 +0000

> they catch every security issue

No they don't! They catch a lot but certainly not all of them. I can't explain why but it 100% happens.

New comment by achierius in "From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone"

achierius — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:39:18 +0000

I'm not saying anything good or bad about the fact that they can do what they do. But they can do what they do, it's not hype.

New comment by achierius in "Memory Safe Inline Assembly"

achierius — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:16:21 +0000

> while the large slowdown is justified because it allows people to use existing C applications unchanged instead of rewriting in a safe language (never mind that these two claims contradict each other)

Those two claims don't contradict eachother. Many, many people use C code not because their application needs to be blazing fast, but simply because the programs are already written in C. Rewriting a program from C into another language is likely to introduce a lot of bugs, even if the rewrite does manage to achieve 'full memory safety' (which most don't, instead liberally utilizing unsafe blocks or the equivalent). So what are such users to do, simply accept that there are going to be bugs? Fil-C seems to address a reasonable need.

New comment by achierius in "From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone"

achierius — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:23:51 +0000

I want to put this charitably, but you come out swinging by saying this is "over hyped"... You clearly don't work in a role dealing with attacks from these models. They've changed the game, and for the worse. Capabilities that used to be available only to nation-state attackers are legitimately commodified, or nearly so.

New comment by achierius in "My LSM tree was slower than a B-tree. Then I profiled it"

achierius — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:03:27 +0000

No, that's not the point. This isn't a situation where you need to "guess"; bloom filters should be sized according to their capacity. This is akin to having a fixed 10-arg buffer for your program, getting a crash when someone passes 11, and saying "this is the kind of bug you only find by building the thing and measuring it". Yeah it happens and we all make silly mistakes, but it's just not true that this couldn't have been foreseen.

New comment by achierius in "CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)"

achierius — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:02:53 +0000

ML compilers in particular go beyond even the level of stability you would expect from numerical programs. Due to how the SIMT model of thread/warp divergence works, the hardware heavily punishes unstable branches. E.g. if you have 32 threads taking a branch then recoalescing on a barrier -- if they all go the same direction then they can go down the execution pipe as a single bundle, but if 1 takes it while 31 don't, then that's 2x the ex-pipe usage by default (and if you have e.g. a computed-branch, performance goes out the window). Consequently, the whole stack is built around the expectation of stable control flow, even to the detriment of performance (from a local perspective).

ML frameworks even take advantage of this to compute, ahead-of-time, how much memory will be used at different points in the program graph, and thereafter schedule memcpy's to make space as necessary. Of course this only works for well-behaved program classes, but e.g. most LLM architectures fit into that category. Interestingly MoE models don't, since they require data-dependent control flow, thus the recent push towards accommodating dynamism in frameworks (like JAX, which until ~recently couldn't handle it at all).