Hacker News: nuc1e0n

New comment by nuc1e0n in "OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:51:56 +0000

> but it's much closer to an "interesting lab demo" than an "obituary for human programmers."

Was it being sold as the latter? I thought it was strange that a fuss was being made over this tech demo, and that explains why.

Parsing regular languages into other regular languages is exactly what transformer based LLMs should be good at.

A while ago there was an AI system publisized that was trained to generate animations from the game doom that was sold as AI created computer games. But the output made no sense if you watched for more than a few seconds. Isn't this the same kind of scare tactics dressed up as innovation?

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:00:34 +0000

Interesting. I'll look into that. The Hippocratic oath says that a physician should do no harm (ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν). It's a personal value judgement as to whether some intervention is providing medical care or causing harm. I consider reckless genetic modification to be causing harm.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:36:51 +0000

I can't see how genetic modification would be the correct way to treat such injuries.

Maybe substances that can trigger epigenetic effects would be more relevant to such things. I understand a Japanese team is working on a means of triggering tooth regrowth by means of an injection. I've got no problem with that. Or something like Skele-Gro from Harry Potter either.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:37:33 +0000

If you think so, what sources would you recommend? According to Wikipedia on medical ethics, "These values include the respect for autonomy". Not expecting any level of self control doesn't show respect for autonomy IMHO.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:10:48 +0000

Medical ethics boards already do such things don't they?

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:03:33 +0000

Some issues could only become evident over a period of hundreds of years with gene editing. That's longer than any medical trial I'm aware of. And mistakes made would be difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

If medications can already do what's required for cholesterol issues, why wouldn't we continue to use them rather than making some change to affect a complex balance that could cause problems over very long timescales?

If we were to be editing a specific gene to match what the wider population has, then I'd be more ok with that.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:52:48 +0000

Genetic treatments have the scope to not only have unintended consequences, but unintended consequences that can last over generations of people. I am in favour of them for some things, but we need to tread very carefully with the technology.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:49:22 +0000

Maybe such a mutation would be a suitable target for a gene editing treatment. I'm not aware of all the issues involved there. I think the linked article doesn't have enough detail to form a fair opinion with.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:36:30 +0000

I wouldn't go that far. Other, less invasive treatments should still be available IMHO, but there should remain an element of personal accountability. Gene editing is a very powerful tool, and messing with complex systems in powerful ways that we don't fully understand could be a recipe for many troubles down the line. I think the use of gene editing should be very surgically applied to obviously detrimental mutations, not for some scatter gun like approach.

What if the body raising cholesterol levels serves some purpose we aren't yet aware of? I've heard there's some evidence that medication to reduce blood pressure has a potential link to the onset of Parkinson's disease. Maybe messing with blood pressure in that way without addressing underlying causes has been a mistake, and messing with cholesterol levels without addressing underlying causes could also be.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Cholesterol levels cut in half with one-time gene editing drug in trial"

nuc1e0n — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:12:45 +0000

This is not an acceptable use of gene editing IMHO. Cholesterol can be managed by diet. High levels of Cholesterol are down to choices made, not some inherited disease that patients couldn't avoid from when they were born.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Ask HN: How do you find the "why" behind old code decisions?"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 22:48:30 +0000

By whose judgement is the css you speak of 'broken'? Just making random code changes without a corresponding ticket is a recipe for troubles down the line. If you must do unprioritised work at the bare minimum create a issue tracker ticket to provide more information than can fit in a commit message. Something like selenium is good to automate acceptance testing (with screenshotting) cross browser as well.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Ask HN: How do you find the "why" behind old code decisions?"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:44:27 +0000

In the corporate environments I've worked in it is often company policy that all commits to source code control should have messages that start with reference codes to the coresponding ticket in the issue tracker (often jira). This how I look up the whys and wherefores of code changes.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:09:19 +0000

I gather decompiling mario 64 wasn't easy either. Just having C++ that can be recompiled to other architectures would seem to be useful. The original Eliza chatbot was converted to modern C++ in a similar way recently, and that used a compact representation for its logic as well.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:06:32 +0000

Has anyone considered decompiling eloquence? With something like ghidra or ida pro? Mario 64 was turned back into high level language source code this way.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "ONNX Runtime and CoreML May Silently Convert Your Model to FP16"

nuc1e0n — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 14:23:37 +0000

My experiences with ONNX have not been pleasant. Conversions from models written with Tensorflow and Pytorch often fail. I recommend using TFLite or Executorch for deployment to edge devices instead.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits"

nuc1e0n — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 10:05:10 +0000

The results of a poll commissioned by ofcom are worthless.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

nuc1e0n — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:36:37 +0000

Such lingistic differences of phrasing are the source of much conflict in my opinion.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters?"

nuc1e0n — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:05:29 +0000

>once you bulldoze all that concrete and steel

You're not quite thinking things through there man. Once the elites who built these follies have gone, the mob will go shopping for building materials. I wouldn't be surprised even if people end up living in these datacentres once they become derelict. They have AC after all.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters?"

nuc1e0n — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:28:59 +0000

Why even bother with the text generation then? You could just make a phone call to an LLM with a TTS frontend. Like with directory enquiries back in the day. Which can be set up as easily as a BBS if you have a home server rack like Jeff Geerling makes youtube videos about.

New comment by nuc1e0n in "Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters?"

nuc1e0n — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:50:20 +0000

How big does an LLM need to be to support natural language queries with RAG?