Hacker News: tux3

New comment by tux3 in "C++26: The New Debugging Header"

tux3 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:52:16 +0000

I don't see how this happens in a C++ function, since breakpoint() is not noreturn you'd have to be doing something very strange for the next instruction to be outside the function. It's possible some debuggers will show the next line, and even then that seems like a debugger QoL issue that's fixable pretty mechanically. A soft breakpoint can come from CD 3 or CC, even if you don't get the instruction length from the CPU there aren't that many possibilities. I'm sure we don't need everyone to start inserting extra NOPs to get the desired behavior.

New comment by tux3 in "Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have"

tux3 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 11:42:59 +0000

I don't think labs really mind Pangram, so outside of some niche open models that might want to try, I'm not sure anyone is maximizing for stealth. And open models don't have the advantage in a GAN war, since one is open and the other not.

Anthropic is barely doing the minimum to keep Claude's writing tics bearable to read.

New comment by tux3 in "I think we might lose public key cryptography"

tux3 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:37:32 +0000

https://nitter.kareem.one/matthew_d_green/status/21082788505...

New comment by tux3 in "New CRAM method offers giant boost to compressed memory reads"

tux3 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:58:55 +0000

Unfortunately the recording is missing audio for half the talk. A frequent issue for the plumbers livestreams this year.

https://www.youtube.com/live/OPRciCSsdS4?t=2031

New comment by tux3 in "Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have"

tux3 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:12:44 +0000

Detection tools in general have a bad selectivity and sensitivity, but there's consensus that Pangram is generally accurate and reliable. I don't use these tools much, but that's the word among people I trust, and that's what I see when I try it.

And, well, neither of us really knows the ground truth. Maybe the guy who has a repo filled with articles co-authored by Claude is actually not posting slop this time and HN users are wrong and Pangram flagging it is just a false positive. But I can't blame anyone for being tired of giving this the benefit of the doubt.

I'm ESL. The mistakes I make are part of what makes me human. If HN'ers are having an allergic reaction at the first hint of slop, it's because we've been drowning in it for months.

New comment by tux3 in "Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have"

tux3 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:29:08 +0000

The recently released models have improved their writing styles. I don't know about this article, but if that's any indication of their writing habits, the author's github pages repo is full of posts generated by Claude.

New comment by tux3 in "Mystery Function"

tux3 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:58:50 +0000

A good first input in general probably looks like a bad password, like 123abcXYZ! with a little bit of every type of character (lower, upper, num, symbols)

(The NIST SP 800-63 Standard Password "Fall2026!" also works, but it's less efficient, and changes every quarter!)

New comment by tux3 in "Understanding Frontier Artificial Intelligence"

tux3 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 08:53:00 +0000

There's many fields where it's easier to find new problems than to solve them, and it's easier to check the solution once you have it.

They're doing RL on open problems these days, not just next token prediction.

New comment by tux3 in "You delete a file on Linux while a program has it open. What happens? (quiz)"

tux3 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:23:42 +0000

Correct! It's still an inode, even without a path.

New comment by tux3 in "You delete a file on Linux while a program has it open. What happens? (quiz)"

tux3 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:48:39 +0000

Followup quizz:

A file is held open read only by a process, and then you delete the file. Under memory pressure and without swap, can Linux evict those pages to reclaim memory?

New comment by tux3 in "Stabilizing Rust's Never Type"

tux3 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:49:55 +0000

The Default trait provides a function that actually constructs the type in question. But here the ! type can never be constructed, so the only way to implement Default would be to have it panic, loop infinitely, or otherwise fail at runtime.

So this would risk turning a compile-time error into a runtime error.

New comment by tux3 in "Fuck it, make it anyway"

tux3 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:45:03 +0000

Of course. Auto-vectorization isn't magic, for one. In any video codec, the hot kernels will all be in hand-written assembly.

Now I'm not saying AI can't write ASM. I'm saying that compilers have a hard job. They output bad assembly, because the task is difficult.

New comment by tux3 in "LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features"

tux3 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:20:27 +0000

They're saying the weekly numbers grow a little bit every week, so every week is technically record breaking.

The absolute number of lifetime downloads can of course only go up (but that's even more vacuous).

New comment by tux3 in "How the Disaster of "Forever Chemicals" Was Kept Secret"

tux3 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:08:21 +0000

As the saying goes, the optimal amount of cheating is not zero.

I'm saying it's variable, not that cheating can disappear completely.

In other words, utopia is fictional, but that doesn't mean the real world couldn't be better.

New comment by tux3 in "Balrogg: Demonically compacting (up to 15%) lossless Vorbis/Opus recompressor"

tux3 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:47:56 +0000

I see, my bad. I tried to follow the comment and jumped to conclusions, sorry about that.

New comment by tux3 in "Balrogg: Demonically compacting (up to 15%) lossless Vorbis/Opus recompressor"

tux3 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:08:03 +0000

I admit I'm not a fan of the loop macros, or writing constants like 0xd80000 in decimal, or having all of that code inlined with no further explanation or git history.

But I think it's just that this file is lifting parts of the logic from PAQ8 (the inlined num_states/next_state named in a comment sure look exactly like PAQ functions translated into C, which, kudos to PAQ for having extensive comments in their code by the way).

I'm a bit disappointed that PAQ isn't mentioned in the README, and only very obliquely in the code, if that's where those functions come from. PAQ is GPLv3, at least a mention could have been nice (assuming I'm not wrong about the source of that logic).

New comment by tux3 in "QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes"

tux3 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:13:13 +0000

If OP is willing to cooperate, I'd like to offer an independent investigation on site, and I will be bringing pizza

New comment by tux3 in "Balrogg: Demonically compacting (up to 15%) lossless Vorbis/Opus recompressor"

tux3 — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:07:46 +0000

So, it looks like this tries to build a model (or rather, multiple layers of models combined with something called context mixing[0]), potentially analyzing the whole file first? Is it fair to call this a very fancy entropy coder, replacing the last phase of what a traditional audio codec does (the lossless part, after quantization)?

I like the code style, this is pretty nice C. It's refreshing to see human code.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_mixing

New comment by tux3 in "Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA"

tux3 — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:36:02 +0000

Short statement from the WMF in response: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/09/03/us-staff-uni...

They seem to say they'll accept the outcome and pledge to engage in good-faith. Which is the only correct response, really, so time will tell if these words are more than generic PR.

New comment by tux3 in "Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA"

tux3 — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:25:47 +0000

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, editors are not employees. Even the admins are not employees.

(As far as I know you only have to sign any kind of formal documents if you have one of the few roles (as a non-employee) where you may have access to sensitive personal data, which is very few people.)