Hacker News: rjinman

New comment by rjinman in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

rjinman — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:14:37 +0000

It’s amazing how everyone thinks this sculpture’s message doesn’t apply to them. “My side’s flags are different, it’s the other side’s flags that are bad”. So many people here making this argument. It’s beyond parody, yet really so predictable. Amazing lack of self awareness. I thought this place was more rational than Reddit, but apparently not!

New comment by rjinman in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

rjinman — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:29:54 +0000

No, you don’t understand, it’s only British national flags that are bad!

New comment by rjinman in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

rjinman — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:00:38 +0000

Is it? Most people I know who have flags proudly displayed are left wing and their flags are usually one of: the Palestinian flag, the ukrainian flag, the LGBT rainbow flag, or the trans flag.

Write "Freehold" Software

rjinman — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 11:15:09 +0000

Article URL: https://deadbeef.io/freehold_software?resubmit=hn

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766638

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by rjinman in "Write "Freehold" Software"

rjinman — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:49:55 +0000

I wasn't asking it to define it. I came up with the list of principles first, then spent ages trying to think of a suitable name for them. It was quite gratifying when ChatGPT, without any context, when asked to guess what the term "freehold" might mean with respect to software, came up with almost the exact same set of principles. That told me that the "freehold" term is a pretty good fit. It would be an incredible coincidence otherwise.

Write "Freehold" Software

rjinman — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:54:53 +0000

Article URL: https://deadbeef.io/freehold_software

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695015

Points: 75

# Comments: 32

New comment by rjinman in "Astronomers discover 3I/ATLAS – Third interstellar object to visit Solar System"

rjinman — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:43:36 +0000

The more interstellar objects we find that resemble comets, the weirder Oumuamua is.

New comment by rjinman in "A CNN from scratch in C++/Vulkan (no ML/math libs) – A detailed guide"

rjinman — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:40:01 +0000

When I posted about this project here and on reddit a few months ago I got a lot of people asking for advice and learning resources. I promised I'd one day provide a detailed write-up explaining everything, so here it is :)

A CNN from scratch in C++/Vulkan (no ML/math libs) – A detailed guide

rjinman — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:40:01 +0000

Article URL: https://deadbeef.io/cnn_from_scratch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44355716

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

A CNN from scratch in C++/Vulkan (no ML/math libs) – write-up and tutorial

rjinman — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 11:30:30 +0000

Article URL: https://deadbeef.io/cnn_from_scratch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44326738

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

Building a convolutional neural network from scratch with no libraries

rjinman — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:16:41 +0000

I posted this project here many months ago, but only just got around to writing about it :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317157

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by rjinman in "Modern C++ – RAII"

rjinman — Fri, 30 May 2025 11:29:05 +0000

unique_ptr is much better because then each object has a sole owner, which makes object lifetimes much easier to reason about and you can't end up with cyclic references causing memory leaks.

New comment by rjinman in "Nice things with SVG"

rjinman — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:33:05 +0000

I wrote a game of Tetris in JavaScript with SVG many years ago. It had nice graphics and was smoothly animated. I hadn’t heard of anyone else using SVG like that at the time.

I also made a game called Pro Office Calculator (available on Steam), which includes a Doom-style 3D engine for which I used Inkscape as my map editor. Here’s an example of a map: https://github.com/robjinman/pro_office_calc/blob/develop/da...

New comment by rjinman in "GPT-4.5"

rjinman — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 06:45:48 +0000

That’s not what I was saying at all. I was using Go as an example of what the experience of being helplessly outclassed by a superior intelligence is like: you are losing and you don’t know why and there’s nothing you can do.

New comment by rjinman in "GPT-4.5"

rjinman — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:03:57 +0000

> What's the difference between your "agentic AIs" and, say, "script kiddies" or "expert anarchist/black-hat hackers"?

Intelligence. I'm talking about super-intelligence. If you want to know what it feels like to be intellectually outclassed by a machine, download the latest Go engine and have fun losing again and again while not understanding why. Now imagine an ASI that isn't confined to the Go board, but operating out in the world. It's doing things you don't like at speeds you can scarcely comprehend and there's not a thing you can do about it.

New comment by rjinman in "GPT-4.5"

rjinman — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:55:06 +0000

I agree unfortunately. I might be a bit of an extremist on this issue. I genuinely think that building agentic ASI is suicidally stupid and we just shouldn’t do it. All the utopian visions we hear from the optimists describe unstable outcomes. A world populated by super-intelligent agents will be incredibly dangerous even if it appears initially to have gone well. We’ll have built a paradise in which we can never relax.

New comment by rjinman in "GPT-4.5"

rjinman — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:59:55 +0000

As someone who is terrified of agentic ASI, I desperately hope this is true. We need more time to figure out alignment.

New comment by rjinman in "DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures"

rjinman — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 14:08:15 +0000

What the frell! This is cool.

New comment by rjinman in "Why Clojure?"

rjinman — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:31:55 +0000

Couldn't agree more with the necessity for fast feedback loops. I've experienced the opposite, and it's not fun.

I worked with Clojure/ClojureScript (mostly ClojureScript) for a couple of years many years ago. It was the first time I'd worked professionally with a functional language, so I made a game of minesweeper in my free time to help get to grips with it: https://github.com/robjinman/cljsmines

Back then, I fully bought into the idea that functional language like Clojure were the future, especially on the web. The way application state is managed is perhaps the key virtue of functional programming - if you get it right, you can design your program to consist mostly of completely pure functions. I remember how enlightening that was once I understood it.

New comment by rjinman in "A C++ Developer Learns Assembly"

rjinman — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 19:02:07 +0000

Thanks, I've made a new branch called display_fixes. Let me know if it works