Hacker News: ux266478

New comment by ux266478 in "Lisp's Influence on Ruby"

ux266478 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:51:15 +0000

Limitation is the wrong way to think about things when computational equivalence is in play. It's about mental foundation. Lisp at its core is like driving a Turing machine, Clojure is not.

New comment by ux266478 in "Open source AI must win"

ux266478 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:46:41 +0000

What I'm saying is those 100x more expensive big guns are just normal GP HPC howitzers. Systems that are exclusively designed for AI and nothing else are more or less all just edge inference TPUs.

New comment by ux266478 in "Open source AI must win"

ux266478 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:43:38 +0000

I wouldn't consider those AI hardware, no. They're normal GPGPUs.

New comment by ux266478 in "Open source AI must win"

ux266478 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:09:48 +0000

AllegroLisp is very far behind SBCL.

New comment by ux266478 in "Open source AI must win"

ux266478 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:03:40 +0000

AI hardware is for inference, not training. Training uses normal HPC crap. Superpods aren't really power efficient, it's kind of a meme, and it stems from limiting the power draw of other components by having less of them. It's more of a rounding error.

> you'd end up consuming so much excess electricity it would be cheaper on net to simply take the money that would have gone to the power bill and spend it on your own datacenter.

Costs spread over a large population, it really doesn't matter. You're not getting hundreds of thousands of people to pitch half their monthly electric bill to pay for someone else's datacenter. They will pay the electricity themselves quite happily though, if all they need to do is give you compute. This isn't new.

Interconnect is the bottleneck for distributed training, nothing else really.

New comment by ux266478 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ux266478 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:46:30 +0000

Deepseek's base models aren't censored.

New comment by ux266478 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ux266478 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:39:09 +0000

Which is going out of control. Something not under control is out of control. If I jump out of a moving car, I deliberately relinquished control of it. It's still out of control. What a silly semantic game.

New comment by ux266478 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ux266478 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:37:10 +0000

The last few iterations show a logarithmic curve at best tbh. If we are to see a major advance, it'll be something like the implementation and infrastructure for byte-level transformers.

New comment by ux266478 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

ux266478 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:50:55 +0000

That's all very well and true. However where I disagree is built upon the context that Apple is a very large corporation with a very large market share. There is a point at which an organization, private it may be, has grown to encompass a mass of the commons. It follows that it must be compelled to act in the public interest, and in a moral manner. Failure to implement architectural standards like ARM SR inhibits software freedom in no small manner, and for a general purpose computer with a large market share, it can be considered a failure to act in the public interest. The lack of a legal obligation is precisely the problem. Of course I support such regulation.

New comment by ux266478 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

ux266478 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:33:29 +0000

That might be reasonable for a general purpose computer if we were talking about something like a Parallel Inference Machine running KL1 software on a KL0 kernel. But I think conflating Apple's products with that level of foundational engineering is highly disingenuous. They're not exactly trundling into the dark woods of exotic hardware and reinventing the bridge between human and computer. It's an ARM computer running a Unix clone. Apple's engineers aren't mapping every codepath and counting every micro-op, Darwin contains extensive amounts of third-party code.

New comment by ux266478 in "macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux"

ux266478 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:58:06 +0000

Pretty much all ARM platforms are. Even ARM devices designed from the ground up to be Linux devices are full of issues, like the MNT Pocket Reform's lack of HW suspend. The tight interop between vendor and implementation is a huge anti-pattern for software freedom, and the standardization initiatives like ARM SR are nowhere to be seen. It's probably the most problematic part of ARM being the future of personal computing, yet another impending manifestation of enshittification.

New comment by ux266478 in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

ux266478 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:30:45 +0000

Why is an opinionated build system for a language not useful software?

New comment by ux266478 in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

ux266478 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:07:38 +0000

It would be more appropriate to say it emerged (as a sovereign nation) because of anti-multiculturalism, to be perfectly clear. Otherwise, it would still be a part of Malaysia.

New comment by ux266478 in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

ux266478 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:14:59 +0000

Could be improved. Encode the image to webp with high compression settings and handle the ASCII mapping by spinning up a local LLM to do OCR on it. Individually. For each cell.

New comment by ux266478 in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

ux266478 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:53:01 +0000

If I saw our UI show up in the profiler eating 5ms of CPU time every frame, I'd send whoever was responsible to QA hell until they find some way to redeem themselves. Not even fancy animated 3D UIs, like what you get in Death Stranding, eat up these kinds of resources. Not even remotely close.

New comment by ux266478 in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

ux266478 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:47:22 +0000

How on earth are you spending more than 50us on a UI like this from start to finish? What the actual hell? 11ms to construct a scenegraph of this complexity? I don't even know what to say to that.

New comment by ux266478 in "The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern""

ux266478 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:56:37 +0000

Hot take: I liked Windows 8. It used less memory than Windows 7, increased battery life, the file manager and task manager were much improved, I could mount ISOs without third party software, among other things. In truth, I didn't even mind the start screen. And I certainly liked Metro as a UI paradigm much more than Aero.

Of course it was still Windows at the end of the day, but 8.1 was my last Windows. The laptop I ran it on is slowly bitrotting in a storage locker somewhere on the other end of the country. I didn't like the look of Windows 10, several aspects of it were hard dealbreakers, so I never swapped to it. Eventually I just changed over to using Linux as my primary OS and haven't really looked back.

New comment by ux266478 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

ux266478 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:07:35 +0000

Human beings sometimes get outsmarted by predators. It's certainly a strange thing to take pride in intelligence as an inviolable absolute.

New comment by ux266478 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

ux266478 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:38:44 +0000

It's unfortunately the most common on this topic. I've been in the position of advocating for the existence of cognition and sentience in generally less-than-considered places, like plants, for a long time. I wish I could say LLMs expanding the domain has been interesting, but it's mostly just created more people spouting the same boring identity-protective reactionary pessimism.

New comment by ux266478 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

ux266478 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:24:37 +0000

If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.

Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.