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mamp

So you want to close down Chinatown?
Re:Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @08:46AM (#49800350)
I was at WWDC in 1996. Each presentation showing off a new feature of Copeland required booting a custom build of the binary, and even then it was flakey as hell because it didn't implement proper memory protection. I vividly remember getting a sudden realisation that Copeland was never going to ship.
Re:Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test on Sunday September 20, 2026 @07:35PM (#49781267)
The 18 Pro enables 'pro' features in the default camera app that finally allows you to set the white balance, shutter speed, aperture, but not the ISO.
Re:Why building a Rust LSP is hard on Saturday September 19, 2026 @01:46AM (#49763684)
I've never heard of anyone calling SOM 'better' at anything this century. I came across it when it was the foundation for OpenDoc at Apple, your comment brought back many bad memories
Re:Prolog Coding Horror on Monday May 18, 2026 @12:34AM (#48175619)
One doesn’t simply create a Warren Abstract Machine by accident
Re:Nobody knows how the whole system works on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:43AM (#46942269)
Strange article. The problem isn’t that everyone doesn’t know how everything works, it’s that AI coding could mean there is no one who knows how a system works.
Sadly, the US is more likely to at war with Europe than China
Re:Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @04:48AM (#45977689)
I haven't been writing Rust for that long (about 2 years) but every time I see .unwrap() I read it as 'panic in production'. Clippy needs to have harder checks on unwrap.
Re:Rule-Based Expert Systems: The Mycin Experiments (1984) on Monday October 06, 2025 @01:27AM (#45487918)
To be fair the performance of rules or Bayesian networks or statistical models wasn't the problem (performance compared to existing practice). DeDombal showed in 1972 that a simple Bayes model was better than most ED physicians in triaging abdominal pain.

The main barrier to scaling was workflow integration due to lack of electronic data, and if it was available, interoperability (as it is today). The other barriers were problems with maintenance and performance monitoring, which are still issues today in healthcare and other industries.

I do agree the 5th Generation project never made sense, but as you point out they had developed hardware to accelerate Prolog and wanted to show it off and overused the tech. Hmmm, sounds familiar...

Re:Rule-Based Expert Systems: The Mycin Experiments (1984) on Monday October 06, 2025 @01:11AM (#45487825)
Don’t attribute to jealousy that can be adequately explained by vanishing gradients.

BTW the ad hoc treatment of uncertainty in Mycin (certainty factors) motivated the work of Bayesian network.

Re:Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @02:33PM (#44880143)
Unfortunately, I think the context rot paper [1] found that the performance degradation when context increased still occurred in models using attention sinks.

1. https://research.trychroma.com/context-rot

Re:Gemini 2.5 Flash on Thursday April 17, 2025 @07:13PM (#43723220)
I've been using Gemini 2.5 and Claude 3.7 for Rust development and I have been very impressed with Claude, which wasn't the case for some architectural discussions where Gemini impressed with it's structure and scope. OpenAI 4.5 and o1 have been disappointing in both contexts.

Gemini doesn't seem to be as keen to agree with me so I find it makes small improvements where Claude and OpenAI will go along with initial suggestions until specifically asked to make improvements.

Re:M4 Mac mini's efficiency on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @07:03PM (#42121417)
When do you turn it off? I have a Mac M1 Studio and I just let it sleep. If things get weird I reboot. I think I recall using the power button about a year ago after returning from vacation after I had shut it down.
Re:Master Hexagonal Architecture in Rust on Tuesday September 17, 2024 @10:48AM (#41568137)
But unfortunately it’s not premature. It’s been a problem for so long!
Re:Show HN: Cursor AI Rules Directory (Open Source) on Sunday August 25, 2024 @09:46AM (#41347279)
I suspect it's not so much the "expert" instruction but the list of subjects of the expertise. These words will generate embeddings that have a better chance of activating useful pathways and relationships within the LLM's generation path.

My understanding is the goal is to prime the LLM with context that it will use when generating answers, rather than hoping it will infer connections in the feed forward layers when generating answers based on a sparse prompt.

Was it the "map of Tasmania"? Then I could understand why...

https://info.umkc.edu/womenc/2016/05/20/showin-off-her-map-o....

Re:How Meta trains large language models at scale on Thursday June 13, 2024 @12:28AM (#40665946)
Apple’s first in-house designed chip was the A4 in 2010.
I agree with your assessment.

The real challenge is how can organisations best leverage super stars to achieve great things. It's difficult because managers have to be smart and confident, and the super star can't be allowed to undermine others.

The high prevalence of insecure managers and arrogant super stars makes this hard to do.

Re:Amazon cuts 'several hundred' jobs in Alexa division on Friday November 17, 2023 @01:26PM (#38307735)
With ChatGPT some of the limitations of the tech are handled by the user e.g. starting a new chat when you want to discuss a new topic. An assistant has to detect changes in user context somehow. Also, I think it would be harder to know what to inject in the prompt since conversations are more like context based RAG rather than topic (embedding) based.

Then you have all the usual generative issues: hallucinations, alignment, sticking within guardrails, no repeatable testing, drift. The potential for errors at that scale is pretty staggering.

Re:Was Rust Worth It? on Thursday October 26, 2023 @12:34AM (#38021631)
ChatGPT has helped me survive learning Rust.
Re:WordStar: Arrogant, Difficult, Powerful (2022) on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @03:36AM (#37925851)
I went from playing with Wordstar at my dad’s office to Zardax on the Apple II which was a breeze in comparison.

https://archive.org/details/ZardaxWordProcessorManualAppleII...

Yes, a real “Flowers for Algernon” vibe
Re:Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already on Saturday May 20, 2023 @11:00PM (#36017648)
It turns out to accurately predict the next word requires huge amounts of implicit contextual knowledge i.e. understanding about the world.

Next word prediction was the trigger, the optimisation for the task results in a broad (but currently unreliable) model of the world.

Re:Why I Program in Erlang on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @06:38PM (#33428661)
Elixir has a vector library Nx that’s designed for these use cases.
Re:Why Rust? on Tuesday October 18, 2022 @07:11AM (#33245566)
F#, Swift
Re:My Future with Elixir: set-theoretic types on Thursday October 06, 2022 @03:43AM (#33105587)
I read it as even if extra type information was there the BEAM doesn’t use type information to optimise across modules.
Re:Rule-Based Expert Systems (1984) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @08:06AM (#29440586)
Actually I think de Dombal’s work showed better than expert performance in 1974 (one of the references in the book):

de Dombal, E T., Leaper, D. J., Horrocks, J. C., Staniland, J. R., and McCann, A. E 1974. Human and computer aided diagnosis of abdominal pain: Further report with emphasis on the performance of clinicians. British Medical Journal 1: 376-380.

Re:Rule-Based Expert Systems (1984) on Saturday December 04, 2021 @08:00AM (#29440564)
Interestingly Mycin was used to demonstrate the limitations of rule based inference and with trying to handle uncertainty in Rule based systems by two of Shortliffe’s students in the fantastic paper “The myth of modularity” [1] which argued for probabilistic approaches to reasoning.

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3090

Re:Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess on Saturday June 19, 2021 @08:56AM (#27560059)
I think their hoping tab groups will reduce the 35 tab situation, but it’s too hard to organise when in information gathering mode. I hope they put a preference option to go back to the current interface. I’ll be filing a bug report.
Re:iOS4 Built in SwiftUI on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @11:53PM (#27456483)
Very cool project but definitely not best practice. You could reduce the number of State variables using one or more shared state objects and access via environment at certain points in the view hierarchy.

Generally it’s better to compose views, by that I mean you often have to because of the compiler. I’m surprised this file even compiles! The Swift compiler usually chokes on much smaller views.

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