Hacker News: archermarks

New comment by archermarks in "Jerry's Map"

archermarks — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:17:12 +0000

There's a good People Make Games video about this from a few days ago

New comment by archermarks in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

archermarks — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:03:47 +0000

I made a nice little CLI tool for testing the subjunctive in Italian. Claude code spun off a bunch of Claude API calls to generate example sentences with fill-in-the-blank spots for the correctly conjugated verb. Having an AI generate a prompt for and call out to other AIs was a bit surreal!

New comment by archermarks in "Playing with Vision Embeddings"

archermarks — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:15:24 +0000

Nice article! The generated images make me so nostalgic for the early days of AI image generation. DeepDream and others had such uncanny, interesting generations.

New comment by archermarks in "What Happened to the Locusts?"

archermarks — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:57:00 +0000

Really interesting article! I knew about the phase polyphenism but the forced cannibalistic march theory was new to me.

New comment by archermarks in "The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] (1978)"

archermarks — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:53:44 +0000

This paper is hilarious

New comment by archermarks in "I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America"

archermarks — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:31:07 +0000

I loved this article, would recommend y'all read it instead of skimming to the end to find the bread

New comment by archermarks in "CERN uses tiny AI models burned into silicon for real-time LHC data filtering"

archermarks — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:26:22 +0000

Thank you, I'll give them a read.

New comment by archermarks in "CERN uses ultra-compact AI models on FPGAs for real-time LHC data filtering"

archermarks — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:19:31 +0000

I didn't know that! Do you have any references that go into more depth here? I'd be curious how the architect and train it.

New comment by archermarks in "The Bitter Lesson Has No Utility Function"

archermarks — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:40:11 +0000

> Several commenters suggested the original essay was written by an LLM. They were half right. Both that essay and this one were written with Claude as a drafting partner. I directed the argument; the LLM helped with prose. I mention this not as confession but as demonstration: the human brought the utility function, the machine brought the compute. If that division of labour bothers you, I’d suggest the discomfort says more about the Bitter Lesson than about my writing process.

This hits like 100% of the AI prose bingo card.

New comment by archermarks in "NanoGPT Slowrun: Language Modeling with Limited Data, Infinite Compute"

archermarks — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:23:44 +0000

Very cool idea. Interested to see how this progresses. One question: how worried are you about over-training on this particular dataset? i.e. instead of generalizing you lean more toward memorization? Obviously you leave out a validation set but since you're meta-optimizing the model itself by its performance on the validation dataset you're still at risk of over-fitting.

New comment by archermarks in "WiFi DensePose: WiFi-based dense human pose estimation system through walls"

archermarks — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 04:09:30 +0000

Putting "privacy first" as the first bullet point on something like this sure is rich.

New comment by archermarks in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

archermarks — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:02:34 +0000

I got a cheap Chinese one (no camera, wifi) in 2024 and it's been a game changer. Yeah it's kind of dumb but it runs every day and picks up an unholy amount of dust, cat hair, and the like. Maybe if you were already vacuuming every day they're pretty useless but for me it's been night and day. As another commenter said, they're also surprisingly repairable, and I bought a ton of spare parts before the tariffs went in.

New comment by archermarks in "California revokes 17,000 expired commercial driver's licenses for immigrants"

archermarks — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:50:11 +0000

AI slop, check the profile

New comment by archermarks in "A Challenge to Roboticists: My Humanoid Olympics"

archermarks — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:46:13 +0000

AI slop

New comment by archermarks in "Show HN: I made an esoteric programming language that's read like a spellbook"

archermarks — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:53:41 +0000

I love this idea

New comment by archermarks in "How to Build a Medieval Castle"

archermarks — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 16:15:47 +0000

They're on youtube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc9JhVp9B6Crpfu7asBwJZAY8...

New comment by archermarks in "Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025"

archermarks — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 13:28:41 +0000

I'd recommend The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. It's sort of a response to Starship Troopers

New comment by archermarks in "Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025"

archermarks — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:41:28 +0000

While I don't think you're wrong about the orientalist elements in Western cyberpunk, consider that Japan also produced two of the seminal and genre-defining works of cyberpunk (Akira and Ghost in the Shell).

New comment by archermarks in "Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025"

archermarks — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:36:39 +0000

Ursula K Leguin, 100%. The Dispossessed is about an anarchist society. Might also check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Kameron Hurley.

New comment by archermarks in "Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience"

archermarks — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 18:07:49 +0000

Only true if the dust grain is stopped by the craft. For a thin lightsail the grain will probably pass right through without depositing much energy