Hacker News: tyho

New comment by tyho in "Artemis II and the invisible hazard on the way to the Moon"

tyho — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:02:00 +0000

Eat the gamma cookie, it's the worst option for any, but with gamma it won't matter much whether it's in your hand, pocket or gut.

Pocket the beta emitter, a little bit of shielding will make a big difference.

Hold the alpha emitter, if you hold it with just a pair of fingers you will be able to reduce you dosage a lot compared to holding it tightly.

New comment by tyho in "Hong Kong police can now demand phone passwords under new security rules"

tyho — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:20:26 +0000

Wow, what a free society! In the UK if you refuse to unlock your device you can be imprisoned indefinitely! In HK it's just one year!

New comment by tyho in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

tyho — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:34:36 +0000

4chan send their packets to their ISP, not the UK.

New comment by tyho in "Staying ahead of censors in 2025"

tyho — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:22:53 +0000

> following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.

The mass-murder was a consequence of the asylum system. Given what is publicly known, parents of Axel Rudakubana were overwhelmingly likely to have been asylum seekers.

New comment by tyho in "Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding"

tyho — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:32:53 +0000

Are we using different models? Here is a simulation of Chernobyl reactor 4 using research grade numerical modeling I made with it in a few days: https://rbmk-1000-simulator-162899759362.us-west1.run.app/

New comment by tyho in "Open models by OpenAI"

tyho — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:45:52 +0000

What's the easiest way to get these local models browsing the web right now?

New comment by tyho in "Embeddings are underrated (2024)"

tyho — Mon, 12 May 2025 20:04:25 +0000

FFS, it's too late for me to edit. You are of course correct.

New comment by tyho in "Embeddings are underrated (2024)"

tyho — Mon, 12 May 2025 15:51:31 +0000

> The 2D map analogy was a nice stepping stone for building intuition but now we need to cast it aside, because embeddings operate in hundreds or thousands of dimensions. It’s impossible for us lowly 3-dimensional creatures to visualize what “distance” looks like in 1000 dimensions. Also, we don’t know what each dimension represents, hence the section heading “Very weird multi-dimensional space”.5 One dimension might represent something close to color. The king - man + woman ≈ queen anecdote suggests that these models contain a dimension with some notion of gender. And so on. Well Dude, we just don’t know.

nit. This suggests that the model contains a direction with some notion of gender, not a dimension. Direction and dimension appear to be inextricably linked by definition, but with some handwavy maths, you find that the number of nearly orthogonal dimensions within n dimensional space is exponential with regards to n. This helps explain why spaces on the order of 1k dimensions can "fit" billions of concepts.

New comment by tyho in "The Story Behind “100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them”"

tyho — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:50:20 +0000

I wrote some code today and I relied on the new behaviour. I felt a little dirty.

New comment by tyho in "The Story Behind “100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them”"

tyho — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:22:33 +0000

The single example given here is incorrect. Since Go 1.22 loop variables have per-iteration scope, the "broken" code is deterministic and correct.

https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview

New comment by tyho in "Extensible WASM Applications with Go"

tyho — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:04:26 +0000

Uppercase for exported is actually one of my favorite go features.

https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.24.0:src/...

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Lu

there are plenty of non-latin scripts that have upper case letters.

New comment by tyho in "Reassessing Wayland"

tyho — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:41:31 +0000

Does anyone really use an X GUI on BSD?

New comment by tyho in "Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji"

tyho — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 15:58:11 +0000

A crude way: To watermark: First establish a keyed DRBG. For every nth token prediction: read a bit from the DRBG for every possible token to label them red/black. before selecting the next token, set the logit for black tokens to -Inf, this ensures a red token will be selected.

To detect: Establish the same DRBG. Tokenize, for each nth token, determine the red set of tokens in that position. If you only see red tokens in lots of positions, then you can be confident the content is watermarked with your key.

This would probably take a bit of fiddling to work well, but would be pretty much undetectable. Conceptually it's forcing the LLM to use a "flagged" synonym at key positions. A more sophisticated version of a shiboleth.

In practice you might chose to instead watermark all tokens, less heavy handedly (nudge logits, rather than override), and use highly robust error correcting codes.

New comment by tyho in "Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji"

tyho — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 14:30:48 +0000

There are way better ways to watermark LLM output. It's easy to make it undetectable, which this is'nt.

New comment by tyho in "I Tasted Honda's Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape – And I will do it again"

tyho — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:38:28 +0000

I tasted the coin cell bitterant when I replaced my Airtag battery. Didn't taste very bitter to me.

New comment by tyho in "Show HN: Chez Scheme txtar port from Go"

tyho — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 21:29:43 +0000

I have been using txtar to provide context to LLM's recently.

New comment by tyho in "AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers"

tyho — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 15:03:00 +0000

Is that actually happening? I use o1 a lot for brainstorming etc, but I don't think I could build a program of any significant size without understanding how to program myself so to guide o1 and stitch it's outputs together. It's also not at all uncommon for me to have to do stuff completely myself, it doesn't have great insights into deep problems for instance.

New comment by tyho in "Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images simultaneously"

tyho — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 06:07:36 +0000

I’m imaging a variable focal length across the image plane, decreasing as the distance to the centre increases.

New comment by tyho in "The Porsche Macan EV is being recalled because its headlights are too bright"

tyho — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:26:19 +0000

Yes. Do people not reliably dip beams in the US? that must be horrible!

New comment by tyho in "Lonely individuals tend to think and talk in an unusual way, study finds"

tyho — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:25:24 +0000

All psychology research falls in one of two categories:

a) common sense intuitive result

b) does not replicate