Hacker News: duskwuff

New comment by duskwuff in "Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure""

duskwuff — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:53:51 +0000

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that a lot of the outputs were characteristic of an online tool called SpinBot. (The tool no longer seems to work the same way that it did at the time.)

New comment by duskwuff in "Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users"

duskwuff — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:45:56 +0000

> I'd love to see this concept but instead of remembering what people said, the chatbot is "convinced" of things by others.

I'm not sure this is feasible, given how LLMs work. Context is finite, and it doesn't replace training data.

New comment by duskwuff in "Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure""

duskwuff — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:41:01 +0000

The phenomenon of tortured phrases in published papers has been going on since at least 2020 - long before LLMs were a significant factor, and certainly before watermarking their output was a consideration.

The general working theory is that these phrases are the result of a "text spinner" tool being applied to a manuscript and blindly replacing random words or phrases using a preset list of synonyms (which are often imprecise and/or inappropriate). https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that many of the commonly observed phrases were characteristic of an online text-spinning tool.

New comment by duskwuff in "Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure""

duskwuff — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:37:36 +0000

Some more examples of these tortured phrases: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751

A few of my favorites are "counterfeit consciousness" (artificial intelligence), "discourse acknowledgement" (voice recognition), and "arbitrary get right of passage to memory" (random access memory).

New comment by duskwuff in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

duskwuff — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:01:58 +0000

The ARM ISAs are not free to implement. ARM holds patents relevant to the ISA.

New comment by duskwuff in "Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game"

duskwuff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:56:26 +0000

Given that they're on the audio board, they're almost certainly volume controls.

New comment by duskwuff in "Compression is prediction"

duskwuff — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:46:29 +0000

A common design in compressors is to use LZ as a first step, but to then represent the constant data and/or offset-length pairs from LZ using an entropy coder.

Deflate (as used in gzip) uses a Huffman coder. LZMA (as used by xz) uses a predictive range coder. Zstandard can use either Huffman or FSE. Some high-speed compressors like LZ4 skip the entropy coding stage entirely at the expense of compression ratio.

Bzip2 is an interesting aversion of this pattern - it uses the Burrows-Wheeler transform as a first pass instead of LZ. Unfortunately, this is one of the major reasons why it's so slow.

New comment by duskwuff in "Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]"

duskwuff — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:23:05 +0000

I have to agree. Even if it hadn't been designated as Fermat's Last Theorem, the problem would likely have ended up in some comparable list of interesting conjectures (e.g. Hilbert's problems, the Erdős problems, the Millennium Prize problems, etc).

New comment by duskwuff in "I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union"

duskwuff — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:32:13 +0000

A news story from a couple of years ago comes to mind - "Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline’s chatbot". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-cha...

New comment by duskwuff in "When Compilers Disagree About UTF‑8"

duskwuff — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:54:30 +0000

> So if you detect usage of 3-byte encodings, chances are you'll continue encountering only 3-byte encodings, with the odd ASCII or emoji codepoints.

Depends on what kind of text you're processing. Many languages use the ASCII range for spaces/newlines, digits, and punctuation.

New comment by duskwuff in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

duskwuff — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:55:36 +0000

Technically true, but the list is mostly nonfunctional - cryptominers are basically extinct in the wild, and most of the domains on the list have expired or no longer serve mining scripts.

New comment by duskwuff in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

duskwuff — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:52:26 +0000

Per personal communication, this is precisely why the developer did that.

New comment by duskwuff in "Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?"

duskwuff — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:38:00 +0000

> Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer.

You may not even need anything as fancy as that - many microchips can be delayered by a skilled operator using mechanical polishing processes.

New comment by duskwuff in "Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?"

duskwuff — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:30:59 +0000

The original NMOS 6502 also used a lot of rather weird dynamic logic which can't easily be represented as standard digital logic elements. Some details here:

http://www.aholme.co.uk/6502/Main.htm

New comment by duskwuff in "Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks"

duskwuff — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:01:18 +0000

No, that's misleading. "Immediately available" means parts you already have in stock and can start populating without waiting for another supplier - it doesn't mean things that you could order.

New comment by duskwuff in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

duskwuff — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:35:07 +0000

> But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.

This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.

As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.

New comment by duskwuff in "Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years"

duskwuff — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:05:40 +0000

The site is a personal blog. There's no expectation, explicit or implicit, that it be "professional".

New comment by duskwuff in "How the words we teach English language learners changed"

duskwuff — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:34:14 +0000

It's still used in a couple of specific senses - it's used in the nearly fixed phrases "keen edge" or "keen mind" as a synonym for "sharp", and as "to be keen to -" to mean "eager". But, in my experience, it's rarely used to mean grieving ("to keen over -"), and almost never as a generic term of approval ("that's real keen").

New comment by duskwuff in "Cyberscript"

duskwuff — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:00:31 +0000

And cryptosporidium (a type of bacteria which causes diarrhea) is also often abbreviated as "crypto". Not that there's much risk of confusion in CVs, but it does lead to some amusing lines like "preventing and controlling crypto", "symptoms of crypto", etc (e.g. at https://www.cdc.gov/cryptosporidium/prevention/preventing-an...).

New comment by duskwuff in "RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB"

duskwuff — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:19:36 +0000

Definitely not. DOS had disk compression utilities, but not RAM - there was no reasonable way to accomplish that at the time.

You may be thinking of "memory manager" utilities like QEMM and EMM386 which tried to maximize the amount of conventional memory available to programs (i.e. below the 640KB boundary). These programs worked primarily by causing drivers and TSRs to run in upper memory - they didn't actually provide more memory.