Hacker News: pjs_

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

New comment by pjs_ in "Why Nextcloud feels slow to use"

pjs_ — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 15:11:34 +0000

I’ve tried every scheme under the sun and Immich is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually works for this use case

New comment by pjs_ in "Facts about throwing good parties"

pjs_ — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:32:16 +0000

This is great advice, parties are a lost technology in some parts of society, like the pyramids. We should throw more parties

For a dinner party specifically I like to force everyone to go for a walk before dessert. By that point they’re all hot and drunk, sending them outside for a quick lap cools everybody off, gets them talking, and is good for the digestion. Then you can come home and crack into that bottle of wine someone brought

New comment by pjs_ in "Signs of introspection in large language models"

pjs_ — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 09:58:17 +0000

This is a real concern but academic groups also need funding/papers/hype, universities are not fundamentally immune either

New comment by pjs_ in "The Piper Alpha oil rig exploded – I made a desperate 175ft jump into the sea"

pjs_ — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:36:40 +0000

Certified bad boy

New comment by pjs_ in "42,600 ton ship to break the world record for the deepest drill at 7 miles"

pjs_ — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 18:46:23 +0000

We getting to agartha soon with this tech

New comment by pjs_ in "Dark Academia Grows Up"

pjs_ — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:29:17 +0000

No mention of Gormenghast? Bumbaclart…

New comment by pjs_ in "Nvidia DGX Spark"

pjs_ — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:47:49 +0000

So if I buy 1000 of these I have an exascale supercomputer? I remember when exascale was disparaged as science fiction :)