Hacker News: ptidhomme

New comment by ptidhomme in "Apple: Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation"

ptidhomme — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:59:28 +0000

I used to have the opposite rule in my signal processing field : the more Chinese names, the less innovation was there.

They seemed like they had to be churning out papers and any little adaptation to existing research triggered a new publication.

But it may have changed now.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD"

ptidhomme — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:36:54 +0000

I liked this reply in the thread :

There's another issue surrounding developer skill atrophy or stunting that I find \ particularly concerning on an existential level.

If we allow people to use LLMs to write code for a given project/platform, experience \ in that platform will potentially atrophy or under develop as contributors \ increasingly rely on out sourcing their applicable skills and decisions to "AI".

Even if you believe out sourcing the minutia of coding is a net positive, the \ "enshitification" principal in general should give you pause; as soon as the net \ developer skill for a project has degraded to a point of reliance, even somewhat, I \ think we can be confident those AI tools will NOT get less expensive.

I'd rather be independently less productive, than dependent on some MegaCorp(TM)'s \ good will to rent us back access to our brains at a fair price.

- achaean

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177430829313972&w=2

New comment by ptidhomme in "Semi-retirement, or, changing my relationship with the BSDs"

ptidhomme — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:05:01 +0000

I'm not sure why this would force him to retire as an OpenBSD developer ? Did this research bring him some backlash from other developers ? If not, maybe he can advocate for a better acknowledgment of the issue from the inside ? Just wondering.

New comment by ptidhomme in "GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone without requiring personal information"

ptidhomme — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:29:53 +0000

Plus you can install them in a separate work profile (use app "shelter"), which isolates them more.

Personally I need them for my banking app (which is a shame but here we are), but I disallow network access for Google Play Services + disable Google Play app. The bank app works nice with that.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

ptidhomme — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:46:38 +0000

The theory still emanated from actual observations, didn't it ?

New comment by ptidhomme in "Bag of words, have mercy on us"

ptidhomme — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:40:39 +0000

Now of course, the only input LLMs have is human text (for text only LLMs anyway). So their model is entirely dependent on how we see the world. I wouldn't restrict LLMs to description of human understanding. They can articulate concepts in a rather sensible way, that wouldn't exist as is in the training corpus. Which exactly means that they have a model, however limited or imperfect.

New comment by ptidhomme in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

ptidhomme — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:26:54 +0000

What would a human say about what he/she is or how he/she works ? Even today, there's so much we don't know about biological life. Same applies here I guess, the LLM happens to be there, nothing else to explain if you ask it.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

ptidhomme — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 07:36:46 +0000

Tbf banks are truly driving the coercion. My banks used to have functional apps on bare GrapheneOS, but nowadays they won't launch without Play Services (to wich I can deny network access, pretty neat of GrapheneOS). Plus my main bank now requires the app even for web access. Nightmarish.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Bag of words, have mercy on us"

ptidhomme — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 08:14:39 +0000

"How concepts relate" is called a model. That it uses language to be interacted with is irrelevant to the fact that it's a model of of a worldly concept.

What of multi modal models according to you ? Are they "models of eyesight", "models of sound", or pixels or wavelengths... C'mon.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Bag of words, have mercy on us"

ptidhomme — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:10:17 +0000

When you ask an LLM a question about cars, it needs an inner representation of what a car is (how imperfect it may be) to answer your question. A model of "language" as you want to define it would output a grammatically correct wall of text that goes nowhere.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Bag of words, have mercy on us"

ptidhomme — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:46:59 +0000

A model of language is a model of the world, else it being pure gibberish.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Bag of words, have mercy on us"

ptidhomme — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 07:47:01 +0000

Those billion parameters, they are a model of the world. Autocomplete is such a shortsighted understanding of LLMs.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down"

ptidhomme — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 12:07:59 +0000

Aren't botnet targeting cheap and unsecured consumer devices specifically in the residential IP ranges ?

New comment by ptidhomme in "Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?"

ptidhomme — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 22:22:53 +0000

GrapheneOS, OpenBSD, Wireguard

New comment by ptidhomme in "Moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls"

ptidhomme — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:44:36 +0000

Filesystem is one of the rare areas (albeit crucial) where OpenBSD is flaky, tbf.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls"

ptidhomme — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:41:41 +0000

> "how do I get working"

OpenBSD is very different from FreeBSD in this regard. OpenBSD mostly works out of the box.

New comment by ptidhomme in "A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure"

ptidhomme — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 22:32:21 +0000

Man, I remember when you told this story some years ago, and I still very much like it ! (I have an hnrss.org feed with all comments mentioning OpenBSD, so, I was bound to catch it).

New comment by ptidhomme in "Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer"

ptidhomme — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:57:21 +0000

Have some self awareness. One could say the exact same things about western media.

New comment by ptidhomme in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

ptidhomme — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 08:10:55 +0000

Beware of yours. Working in inhuman conditions cannot be justified by any amount of money.

New comment by ptidhomme in "Show HN: DeepSeek My User Agent"

ptidhomme — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 07:57:14 +0000

Your browser arrived here like a ninja—empty referrer, sneaking in from nowhere after 4 seconds of indecision—yet your "K" phone from Chiapas (but actually Querétaro?) has the mystery of a spy using misspelled Linux armv81 and the multitasking power of 8 cores just to run Chrome in French. You’ve got 5 touchpoints but zero chill, rocking a screen taller than your identity clarity and a network so fast (9.5 downlink!) it almost compensates for your location’s existential crisis. Congrats on being the most cryptically lost polyglot Android user this side of a typo!

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