Hacker News: pjs_

New comment by pjs_ in "Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata"

pjs_ — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:04:54 +0000

BEAUTIFUL WORK!!!!!

New comment by pjs_ in "Alan Greenspan has died"

pjs_ — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:55:31 +0000

Highly recommend the extremely good multipart documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis for a fun and wide ranging if slightly silly look at the nexus of Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Silicon Valley, computer technology etc

New comment by pjs_ in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

pjs_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:55:51 +0000

looks really beautiful, amazing job

New comment by pjs_ in "A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft"

pjs_ — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:20:00 +0000

Finally

New comment by pjs_ in "A scoping review of bicycling interventions’ impacts on well-being"

pjs_ — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:39:18 +0000

Being able to cycle to and from work across a nice university campus, through fields and trees and in good weather, makes me feel as rich as any human who has ever lived

New comment by pjs_ in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

pjs_ — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:35:26 +0000

by what metric has it not improved in the last 3 years?

New comment by pjs_ in "Google changes its search box"

pjs_ — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:39:49 +0000

The training process literally ingests the majority of text on the internet, including a huge volume of SEO garbage, and seeks to create a self-consistent compressed model of that. This is totally imperfect of course but is also likely more truthful than the median Google result, because of the incentive for self-consistency and coherence that is created by the reward function as well as during RL.

Imagine that you had 1,000 years to read every Google result on a particular topic, and literally infinite patience. You would read a lot of rubbish but ultimately you are a smart person, you would figure out the underlying truth and likely produce something that is more valuable than the average or even the sum of the parts.

New comment by pjs_ in "I'm scared about biological computing"

pjs_ — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:12:07 +0000

Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE

But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo:

https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron

So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the mysterious little blob of neurons -- they aren't just wired straight into WASD. There is a conventional convnet-based encoder, running on a GPU, in the critical path. The README tries to argue that the "neurons are doing the learning" but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also.

Are the neurons learning to play doom, or are they learning to inject ever so slightly more effective noise into the critical path? Would this work just as well if we replaced the neurons with some other non-markovian sludge? The authors do ablation experiments to try to get to the bottom of this but I can't really tell how compelling the results are (due to my own ignorance/stupidity of course)

New comment by pjs_ in "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust"

pjs_ — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:22:40 +0000

So far the wonders of claude/codex have been mostly constrained to applications that are built within the boundary conditions of existing libraries -- the models make direct use of the good work that humans have done to date to build Python, `requests`, `ffmpeg`, you name it.

But I'm excited for the (I think inevitable) stage where the shoggoth starts to reach outside those constraints -- rewriting, patching, renaming, rebuilding libraries, DLLs, binaries -- and we move into a regime where the libraries dissolve, the application floats on top of the shifting sands of an ever more efficient, secure, unified and totally inhuman technology stack.

Obviously this is a horrifying idea in some ways (interpretability, security etc), but it's also not obvious to me that it can't work, especially if there are dedicated, centralized efforts to do this. it's also not clear that interpretability is necessarily mutually exclusive with full slopification/machine rewrite of decades of foundational, incremental development

New comment by pjs_ in "[dead]"

pjs_ — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:54:47 +0000

Journalists are so funny man. "Last week we told you that AI is fake and fraud. But we just learned something fascinating. A few months after everyone else was talking about it, we uncovered an amazing scoop: the companies which raised a lot of capital, are also doing tens of billions of dollars of revenue. So now we're starting to thing it might not all be a scam! Tune in next week for when we say it's all 100% fraudulent again."

New comment by pjs_ in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"

pjs_ — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:59:00 +0000

I think that was true when you could rely on good old Moore’s law to make the heavy iron quickly obsolete but I also think those days are coming to an end

New comment by pjs_ in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"

pjs_ — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:21:55 +0000

Continue to believe that Cerebras is one of the most underrated companies of our time. It's a dinner-plate sized chip. It actually works. It's actually much faster than anything else for real workloads. Amazing

New comment by pjs_ in "Everything – Locate files and folders by name instantly"

pjs_ — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:56:18 +0000

Literally the only good piece of software left on windows. Masterpiece

New comment by pjs_ in "People who know the formula for WD-40"

pjs_ — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 02:41:25 +0000

GOAT lubricant

New comment by pjs_ in "The challenges of soft delete"

pjs_ — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:52:40 +0000

Tried implementing this crap once. Never again

New comment by pjs_ in "STFU"

pjs_ — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:21:09 +0000

I love this… have been thinking about exactly this technology for years but combined with phased array directional loudspeaker and shotgun mic. Deploy during major political speech, instantly shut down brain of speaker, would appear to be an internal malfunction

New comment by pjs_ in "If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app"

pjs_ — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:24:01 +0000

Anyone else find that the iPhone camera app crashes about half the time these days? It's killing me...

New comment by pjs_ in "How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants"

pjs_ — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:00:09 +0000

Google Maps is the mind killer. We all worry about social media controlling the way we think, feel, vote etc. but Google Maps literally manipulates where people physically go in real life, what they do on holiday, where they hang out, what they eat etc. I got so sick of feeling like a four point five star Google Maps automaton I had to mostly stop with it. In addition to OSM, personal recommendations etc. the best substitute for me for a 4.5 star review is my nose, eyes and ears

New comment by pjs_ in "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be"

pjs_ — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:18:06 +0000

And? Writing software at scale is incredibly hard. Where is the empathy for MS devs who are sprinting every day to give us an awesome product

New comment by pjs_ in "You can see a working Quantum Computer in IBM's London office"

pjs_ — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:25:10 +0000

Dil fridge will get a bit hot with its clothes off like that