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anactofgod

Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:15PM (#50127240)
It doesn’t fly. It jumps. Like the Mark V.

Apparently Pops Racer works for Tesla.

Re:Don't Wordle on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @02:55AM (#49444994)
FLAIL (232) --> CLEVE (24) --> CLUMP (4) --> CLOUS (3) --> CLOUD (2) --> CLOUR (1)

12 unused letters + 1 words remaining = No margin for error

Yeah. It is interesting to think about how to build that sovereign AI solution. <cough> cryptocurrency </cough>

These instructions are to achieve a much more modest goal than that!

Jeez… What’s a perso…er… penguin gotta do to have some privacy these days?
Re:I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLI on Sunday April 12, 2026 @09:02PM (#47746288)
Amazing. Thanks for your detailed posts on the bake-off between the Mac and GB10, Daniel, and on your learnings. I had trying similar on both compute platforms on my to-do list. Your post should save me a lot of debugs, sweat, and tears.
Whether by design or accident, the way Anthropic is managing the Claude Mythos release is creating a Glomar Trap for customers, competitors, and investors.
Re:The Seasons Are Wrong on Saturday April 11, 2026 @03:51AM (#47728443)
Do you want to define the seasons by temperature? Or by lengthening of the day? Because, to me, seasons are tied to weather in general, but temperature specifically. And temperature seems to correlates to length of day, but trails it by about a month. Which makes sense, since it takes time to heat/cool the enormous thermal mass. So, if weather is how you track the changing of the seasons, it’s close enough to correct as-is.
CLaRa (Continuous Latent Reasoning) is an approach Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that shortens context, reduces double-encoding, and improves quality of responses by compressing documents into a small set of "continuous memory tokens" that preserve the key information in the documents, and optimizes and performs retrieval and generation out of that shared latent space.
Re:If You're Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C? on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @01:00PM (#46208190)
Because, the programming languages best matched to a (natural human language-based) declarative programming paradigm (e.g., vibe coding) would be declarative programming languages, not imperative programming languages.
Re:"English Translators of Homer": A Review on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @08:28PM (#44577422)
Yes. Logue's are (brilliant) retellings, not translations. His source material were other English translations, since he was not literate in ancient Greek (as the article's author notes).

----------

See an East African lion Nose tip to tail tuft ten, eleven feet Slouching towards you Swaying its head from side to side Doubling its pace, its gold-black mane That stretches down its belly to its groin Catching the sunlight as it hits Twice its own length a beat, then leaps Great forepaws high great claws disclosed The scarlet insides of its mouth Parting a roar as loud as sail-sized flames And lands, slam-scattering the herd.

“This is how Hector came on us.”

----------

If only he were able to complete his retelling.

"People seem to think that having the internet at their finger­tips means they no longer need to know anything themselves. But in order to understand things, you need a lot of knowledge readily available in your head. Only then can the mind make the connections between the different points of data and come to new insights. This cannot happen when that knowledge is external, in a book or on some Wikipedia page that you have to look up first."

Or in an AI model.

Re:Apple Enlists Veteran Software Executive to Help Fix AI on Saturday January 25, 2025 @03:14PM (#42824428)
"Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She’s also put procedures in place that can catch and fix bugs."

"In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software."

Is Apple having a project management/delivery execution problem? Maybe.

But, it seems like they are actually having a deeper product envisioning problem for how Apple should be leverage AI to enhance their "bicycles for the mind". They need to figure out what the right things to build are, before they optimized how to build and deliver it.

Re:The Astronaut Wore Prada on Saturday October 19, 2024 @04:35PM (#41890591)
Re:Should I Haskell or OCaml? on Saturday September 16, 2023 @07:52PM (#37540026)
Up until a few days ago, I was also vacillating between learning OCaml or Haskell, before deciding on Haskell for reasons.

I surveyed many free and paid-for references to build my foundation, before picking John Whitington's "Haskell From the Very Beginning" (https://www.haskellfromtheverybeginning.com), because it "takes a no-prerequisites approach to teaching the basics of a modern general-purpose programming language".

I am also using Replit's "free-tier" as my Haskell learning environment. Replit let me jump right into the fun of Haskell, while postponing dealing with installation/configuration nuances until absolutely necessary. This is also letting me do learning any time I have a free moment from wherever I last left off on any computing device I have handy, including my tablets or smartphone.

So far, my learning experience has been a joy.

If you decide on OCaml, Whitington also wrote "OCaml From the Very Beginning" (http://ocaml-book.com), which available via free pdf or HTML thanks to the OCaml Software Foundation, and looks to be structured similar to his Haskell book.

Hope this helps.

Ready Player One
Re:Steve Roberts: Computing Across America on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @09:43PM (#35549770)
Heh. I remember reading this very magazine and reading this article.
A (timely) periodic revisit of Vernon Vinge's December 06, 1993 paper on the human implications of the progression towards achieving AI, IA, and the Singularity.

"The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur): (1) the development of computers that are 'awake' and superhumanly intelligent (to date, most controversy in the area of AI relates to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is 'yes, we can', then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter); (2) large computer networks (and their associated users) may 'wake up' as a superhumanly intelligent entity; (3) computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent; and (4) biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect. The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years."

"This was not an obvious solution..."

<rim shot>

Re:Ask HN: Where to find mentors for staff+ engineers? on Saturday January 21, 2023 @08:18PM (#34473014)
https://www.platohq.com may provide what you seek.

(I'm a volunteer/mentor on there.)

Re:Show HN: An AI Clone of Paul Graham on Sunday January 08, 2023 @04:24PM (#34303291)
You: What is Arc?

Paul: Arc is a new dialect of Lisp that was created by the speaker.

You: What is Lisp?

Paul: Lisp is a programming language that is intellectually prestigious, but not considered to be particularly hip or fashionable.

You: Why should I program in Arc?

Paul: Arc is not a programming language, so it is not possible to answer this question.

You: ...

You: Why should I program in Arc instead of Lisp?

Paul: It is not possible to answer this question given the context information provided. Arc is a programming language, while Lisp is a family of programming languages. Without prior knowledge of the differences between Arc and Lisp, it is not possible to answer the question.

You: ...

Re:Making $100k as an Employee versus Being Self-Employed on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @07:38PM (#27362851)
Kudos to the author for sharing a breakdown and analysis that could be helpful to folks considering the leap to freelancing.

I would add three related things to consider that were not highlighted by the author:

1. Business acquisition costs

2. Risks of being fired

3. Freedom to hire and fire clients

Business acquisition costs -- One benefit of being a salaried employee is that you don't have to allocate resources to source clients to will pay for your services. A freelancer has to spend some of their own resources (time, money, energy) on “business acquisition costs” to maintain their work pipeline flowrate commensurate to the duration and nature of the gigs that they land. This has to be accounted for in the freelancing budget.

Risks of being fired -- Despite best-laid plans, a freelancer may find themselves scrambling if a client contract ends earlier than anticipated. Freelancers are the first to get “fired” from projects that are downscoped or downsized. Therefore, freelancers have to expend more energy and develop more skills managing relationships and accurately “reading the tea leaves” than employees typically bother to do. It helps to have multiple simultaneous contracts so that if one terminates, some cash is still flowing in. If there is only one contract, a freelancer should start building and maintaining a work pipeline of even a few small projects. And, must bank as much as possible to build up a buffer. These are good practices for both freelancers and employees. The main difference is that most employees, unlike most freelancers, believe they have more job security than they actually do, and have to develop an action plan from scratch when they are fired. The only job security is recognizing the true nature of job insecurity and constantly acting to mitigating that risk.

Freedom to hire and fire clients -- The two points above is to call out that a freelancer actually has two jobs: the work they are doing for clients and the work they have to do to run their own business. A freelancer who figures out how to run their business well gets the biggest benefit of all — the ability to “hire and fire clients”. Not interested in what a client is asking you to do, or feeling that you are generating more value than you are being fairly compensated for? Negotiate a new agreement or an exit with them and move to something better. Hear about another project that is really interesting to you? Expend the resources required to chase and add it to your portfolio of work. It’s the rarer employee that has this level of freedom to make the most use of their working hours, and it is literally priceless.

I'd be curious to know what returns have IV realized for it's investors to date?

Also, "Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that IV kept asking the same companies to reinvest, and if they didn’t, the threat was that the company could always find something to sue one of the entities over."? Sounds like an extortion racket.

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