Hacker News: m_mueller

New comment by m_mueller in "Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5"

m_mueller — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:23:09 +0000

It's a bit confusing to me why they'd make this 'fast' version the default, as it appears to be much more expensive than Composer 2. Wasn't it supposed to be a very cheap alternative to SOTA models?

Why $207M in AI Spend Hasn't Fixed Corporate Slide Decks

m_mueller — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:38:32 +0000

Article URL: https://octigen.com/blog/posts/2026-05-11-ai-presentation-gap/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147346

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by m_mueller in "Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints"

m_mueller — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:24:19 +0000

Tangential, but in our opinion corporate PPTX automation is an unsolved problem, even with Claude for PowerPoint (and it's worse with everything else common out there). Its harness (a) is not tuned very well for corporate use and (b) even if it were, fails to manage the specific business knowledge within each org needed to create effective (i.e. audience tailored) presentations.

I've just written a blog post about this topic this week: https://octigen.com/blog/posts/2026-05-11-ai-presentation-ga...

New comment by m_mueller in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

m_mueller — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:21:32 +0000

Also, Airbus is doing very well last I checked.

New comment by m_mueller in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

m_mueller — Sat, 09 May 2026 07:20:47 +0000

here I think it's less about "poverty" (non-US acedemic budgets are still high, though not in the same sphere), but it's about having red tape when it comes to software. My experience doing a PhD in Japan was: Everything you can touch was basically a free for all - including $500 keyboards and $10k Mac Pros, especially if you are a valued researcher. But software, oh man, how can we prove receipt of goods to accounting...

New comment by m_mueller in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

m_mueller — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:35:29 +0000

To me it just boils down to using the right tool for each job. I definitely wouldn’t use Fortran for anything heavily using strings. One weakness is also the lack of meta programming support. But for numerical code to be run on a specific hardware, including GPU, it’s pretty close to perfect, especially also since NVIDIA invested into it.

New comment by m_mueller in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

m_mueller — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 23:46:10 +0000

So that's where the intent system comes in (an argument can be in/out/inout) as well as the built-in array sizes, because it allows you to express what you want and then the compiler will enforce it. In Fortran you kinda have to work hard to invade the memory of one array from another, as they are allocated as distinct memory regions with their own space from the beginning. Pointer math is almost never necessary. Because there is built-in support for multidim arrays and array lengths, arrays are internally anyways built as flat memory regions, the same way you'd do it in C-arrays for good performance (i.e. cache locality), but with simple indices to address them. This then makes it unnecessary to treat memory as aliased by default.

Honestly, I still don't get why people have built up all these complex numerics frameworks in C and C++. Just use Fortran - it's built for exactly this usecase, and scientists will still be able to read your code without a CS degree. In fact, they'll probably be the ones writing it in the first place.

New comment by m_mueller in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

m_mueller — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:52:55 +0000

e.g. the climate models that could be run on some of these systems would dwarve anything we’ve been able to do so far.

New comment by m_mueller in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

m_mueller — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:18:57 +0000

btw. Fortran is implicitly behaving as "restrict" by default, which makes sense together with its intuitive "intent" system for function/subroutine arguments. This is one of the biggest reasons why it's still so popular in HPC - scientists can pretty much just write down their equations, follow a few simple rules (e.g. on storage order) and out comes fairly performant machine code. Doing the same (a 'naive' first implementation) in C or C++ usually leads to something severely degraded compared to the theoretical limits of a given algorithm on given hardware.

New comment by m_mueller in "France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk"

m_mueller — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:35:50 +0000

I think it depends on how strong the compression advancements are going to be, such that much can be done locally in the future. I'd be interested in experiences of others here in using Gemma4, which is at the forefront of "intelligence per gigabyte" atm. (according to benches).

Are You Managing Your AI, or Is Your AI Managing You?

m_mueller — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:35:02 +0000

Article URL: https://octigen.com/blog/posts/2026-04-07-whos-boss/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714362

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Are You Managing Your AI, or Is Your AI Managing You?

m_mueller — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:16:23 +0000

Article URL: https://octigen.com/blog/posts/2026-04-07-whos-boss/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675768

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by m_mueller in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

m_mueller — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:55:56 +0000

"this so called planet killer doesn't matter to us, and we live in a free speech country! checkmate scientists"

like that?

New comment by m_mueller in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

m_mueller — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:50:20 +0000

so you want us to reed furst? wat ar u dumb?

New comment by m_mueller in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

m_mueller — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:36:31 +0000

imagine how it would hit today. I'd guess a vast majority would feel insulted by it...

New comment by m_mueller in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

m_mueller — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:40:41 +0000

~100 million consumers (assuming average sized states are impacted) being essentially defrauded by a cartel of telcos - doesn't really matter what you wanna call it but I'd say it's a pretty major deal.

New comment by m_mueller in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

m_mueller — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:36:49 +0000

I'd say first of all you need to put a lid on it, call this kind of thing again what it is (bribery), and make it illegal. Secondly, if someone wants a public office: pay them well (they'll still have the revolving door afterwards anyways), but all their finances will need to be published on a quarterly basis. It's not exactly rocket science, this kind of thing is implemented in many jurisdictions.

New comment by m_mueller in "LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua"

m_mueller — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:02:01 +0000

that's great, could read the source code on how to unify gravity and quantum mechanics for all energy levels? vibeing to a nobel price will be cool...

New comment by m_mueller in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

m_mueller — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:49:18 +0000

this is insane. I guess it's that easy for telcos to lobby the legislators for keeping up their rents?

New comment by m_mueller in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

m_mueller — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:46:05 +0000

at least in the Netherlands you got these nice street bricks, so it's not always a waste of concrete and patched streets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq1kV6V_jvI