skrellm

Well said, I totally agree.

> If an agent has goal A, and they believe (strong believe) the way to reach A is via method P, and that any criticism of P is invalid no matter what, they will keep trying P until it arrives as A, since they know P eventually leads to A.

> Reality doesn't care about strong beliefs though. If reiterating over P in reality leads to result B, that's what doing P will achieve, always and invariably.

Yeah, some say that repeating the same thing and expecting different result is the definition of stupidity.

> If you read the goals (A) of Marxism, they're pretty nice, all things considered. The problem is that Marxism (P) doesn't lead to those results, but to a very different set of outcomes (B).

I'm not sure. I mean nobody knows if it could lead to its goal, because Marxism in practice is yet to be seen. What the USSR implemented was not Marxism (and not even Communism), but in fact Leninism and Socialism. This latter is a freaky, twisted, sick version of it with an actual ruling class, no different to the bourgeoisie or the former feudal nobility (Stalin effectively acting like a czar and his inner circle being the new nobles).

> With American conservatives in general, and MAGA in particular, it's the same. A, B and P are different, but the dynamic is the same.

So true. But I would go even further, the actual ideology doesn't matter at all. The root cause of the problem, just like you've said, is "ideological purity requirements never allow P to be questioned". When there's no feedback on P (or worse, only false positive feedback), then this is like flying blind, no matter what the ideology in question is, the result will surely be an epic fail and fall.

> There appears to be a crossing point, which you say has happened already, where China is the greater superpower. I think that point is still approaching. We do not disagree by much.

I'm not sure if there's one explicit crossing point. All I see is, as time passes China is gaining on the USA in more and more fields. I'm not sure if they already have the advantage in most fields, or in the most important fields, but if things do not change, they surely will.

> I'm not a military buff, but a couple of tubers say that China's navy includes a lot of coastal tonnage.

Could be. But it's worrying that they have 4 times as many ships and numbers are growing.

> In China's favour, they seem to be getting more R&D "purchasing power".

Not just that. I can't cite any scientific paper in the last decade which does not have at least one Chinese name as its author. They got the know-how while USA was paying the bill...

> The space race is wide open.

Maybe. But only China is able to sustain its own space station, nobody else.

> Do not underestimate the power of Hollywood to set the frame for political conversations everywhere.

Not any more. Since Scientology took over and brainwashed people started writing the scripts, everybody is laughing at Hollywood and their expensive but shitty movies (just take a look at box office numbers outside of the USA). And the last nail in their coffin was the rise of streaming, Hollywood has already lost its power too. https://planetoffilms.com/hollywood-box-office-failures-2025...

> Apart from anything else, immigration is America's safety net against demographics.

And also the reason for its success. Von Neumann, von Brown, Einstein, Pulitzer, Schwarzenegger, Natalie Portman, Henry Kissinger, Nikola Tesla, Rupert Murdoch, hell, even Elon Musk is an immigrant.

Thanks to Trump and it's ICE rampage, now great minds are literally fleeing the USA. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-scientists-ar... Again, by loosing these people USA will surely loose the advantage in R&D too, if haven't lost it already.

All in all, the trends not looking good.

> America is still the most powerful military force

Not true (not anymore). China always had more manpower for recruitment, their current navy fleet is already bigger (64 submarines both, but 4 times as many ships than USA), moreover Chinese fleet is top of the line and brand new, while USA's is old and rusty. Chinese are way ahead in space too. God knows what technology they have in their military satellites and in Tiangong. They have already demonstrated (potential) military maneuvers in space that US military is just dreaming of. https://interestingengineering.com/beyond-earth/shijian-chin...

> and the largest economy

Not true either. https://economicsinsider.com/largest-economies-with-highest-... China's economy is not just bigger, but the USA is indebted to China. Badly. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080615/china...

> and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots.

Which does not really do much, and as a matter of fact, places where they carry water from wells are subjugated by Russian militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Afr... or are hopelessly indebted to China https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-m... USA has already lost being a power in those places.

> Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore.

I'd argue that other nations are now working on solutions to exclude the USA as much as possible on every front possible, so basically to ignore. Agreed, they are not there yet, but they are actively working towards to that goal so they will be (soon).

If this is what they want to achieve, why are they doing the opposite?

a) this isn't going well, Iran just showed the finger to Trump.

b) this isn't going well either, Putin just made a fool of Trump (again). And I'm sure Xi Jinping does not agree either, he has his own agenda.

c) if so, then why destroying the softpower of USA? https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/05/04/trump-soft-...

If really this is their goal, they are doing it very very wrong.

> I think that you need to re-read "escape sequences" and "American National Standards Institute" a few more times until it clicks that these are two entirely different noun phrases.

LOL, why is the page called "ANSI escape sequences" then? Why were the driver called ANSI.SYS then? I think it is you who should re-read that escape sequences were standardized by ANSI a few more times until it clicks.

> You can start with CSI, value 0x009B, not being an ASCII character.

CSI is NOT 0x009B (in fact C1 shorthand is not supported anywhere, not in the old 7-bit video terminals, and not in the modern UTF-8 aware terminal emulators either).

From the wiki page, I quote: "For Control Sequence Introducer, or CSI, commands, the ESC [ (written as \e[, \x1b[ or \033[ in several programming languages) is followed by any number (including none) of "parameter bytes" in the range 0x30–0x3F"

That's all 7-bit ASCII characters in the full sequence (introducer, parameters, separators, terminators as well), dude. It is definitely you who should re-read a few more times until it clicks.

> 16 colour SGR sequences beloved of CGA-like and VGA-like art are not in the standards

LOL, one: CGA had 4 colors and not 16, and second: the 16 colors in SGR are defined by the standard alright. See for yourself, ECMA-48 section 8.3.117 page 62: https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-4... (8 base colors named explicitly and their high intensity variants in mode 1, thus making up 16 colors in total).

Please don't spread false information.

> The damage he did was low-to-moderate, all things considered.

I don't think that's true. I'd say it was more like a Phantom Menace, like arming a ticking bomb with a postponed effect.

> Now, the damage is beyond repair. The USA is fucked, on a downward spiral that will be difficult(near impossible) to correct.

Yeah. Instead of MAGA, he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years, that's some achievement history will surely remember.

But I don't think everything is lost, although extremely hard and might take at least a century or so to correct (assuming no further damages, that China won't take over and of course that there will still be a human civilization to speak of by the end of the century).

> The USA assumed Donald Trump #2 would be similar to Donald Trump #1(Trump mostly golfing).

What are you talking about?

Donald Trump #1 is the reason why Iran started the nuclear arm race in the first place https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-iran-deal-then-and-now/

Donald Trump #1 is the reason why Putin got his hands on modern drone technology https://asiatimes.com/2026/02/irans-drones-giving-russia-a-c...

Donald Trump #1 is the reason why there's now a high tension in Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Korea%E2%80%93Unite... https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/17/politics/fact-check-trump...

Donald Trump #1 is the reason why the USA is so dependent on (now more and more expensive) oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_fi...

Donald Trump #1 is (one of) the reasons why Britain went through Brexit https://ukandeu.ac.uk/trump-and-brexit-two-nations-divided/

...etc.

He was definitely not "mostly golfing", he was actively destroying US allies and was actively helping US adversaries, and obvious from the Capitol incident that he already started building a fascist dictatorship.

Yep, I agree. You can already run them locally on a top-shelf gamer PC with decent token throughput: https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata That's today.

As for tomorrow, consider that literally every chip maker is working on better and better NPUs to boost local performance (Ryzen AI, Intel Ultra, Apple M7, Broadcom PON, Huawei Ascend, Snapdragon X Elite, etc.), and imagine optimized models running on these, yeah, insanely huge potential.

As of 2026Q4 I wouldn't bet on any cloud AI, that's for sure.

> "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.

Yes, they do. All the color escape sequences (CSI) used in these were standardized by ANSI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

More importantly, where the name is originating from, is the DOS driver. By default DOS did not interpret color codes, one would have to load ANSI.SYS for that, and that's where the term "ANSI art" comes from. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI.SYS

I honestly believe that these neat projects (smallest possible, locally run LLMs) are the real future of AI on the long run.

The man himself (Orbán) said in 2018: "[UN secretaries are] Bureaucrats, some politicians who failed at home and parachuted into UN, desperately wishing to continue their politics."

https://444.hu/2026/10/26/orban-2018-ban-a-burokratak-nehany...

FYI "parachuted" is a political slang for "incompetent persons appointed by higher ups abusing their authority", as in "dropped into position from above and must not be questioned why".

This is too bloated to my taste. I've written a similar solution, but mine is a dependency-free single function only library, uses military-grade encryption and has multi-arch, multi-language support too (JS, PHP, Python, Lua, C).

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/enigma

It's FOSS (permissive MIT license), so you can use it in ULDA too if you'd like.

Don't be fooled! This is AI generated slop.

The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.

> Crows are somewhat unique as an animal in that they've got the ability to pass information off to other members of the flock, and to continue passing information down through generations as necessary.

Not that unique. My grandfather was a forester, his favourite time passing was to whistle back bird's song, changing only a little bit at a time, turning it slowly into something totally different. The changed song was passed to other birds and offsprings no probs.

The result was quite hilarious, you went to the primeval woods and you could hear wild birds singing the Für Elise... I bet it freaked out ornithologists!

(My granddad died about 30 years ago, sadly the bird "dialect" has vanished since, but I still have some old tapes in the attic.)

LOL, man, you made my day! Thank you!

(ps. There's a new episode of Mini Fantasy Theater I haven't seen yet, hurray! https://www.davidrevoy.com/tag/minifantasytheater)

> Whenever I read this anecdote, I want to believe it is largely made up. I don't want to believe that none of these towering intellects (let alone von Neumann himself) didn't instantly recognize the more elegant way to view the problem.

Knowing some bright minds I totally believe it.

Smart people tend to focus (zoom in) on one problem, entirely forgetting about the bigger picture (unless they "take a bath"). I guess von Neumann was likewise. I can totally imagine that he had to do calculations like this on a daily basis when the puzzle was presented to him, so he simply did what he was doing all along without examining the puzzle from another angle.

This is my favorite:

In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision.

The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour.

As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series.”

An alien (a Martian to be precise), because Douglas Engelbart was the time traveler.

Eh, I meant to write "allies and enemies alike".

I've also created a boot loader with a native bootable disk image creator tool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685301

My solution is a single, dependency-free, multiplatform CLI tool, which Just Works (tm). It's like using zip or tar from command line, as simple as possible. 100% AI-free.

For the record, these are 100% AI-free, and already tested by hundreds of contributors on real hardware.

> Yet the market can remain irrational for much longer than we can reason about.

It's already overdue.

> it isn't clear to me that Altman et al don't virally weave themselves into the DNA of the state, both in the USA and in its adversaries.

In the USA? Maybe. In its adversaries? Definitely no. Thanks to Trump's "Make America Negligible Again" campaign being extremely successful.

Adversaries and enemies alike, no exception, nobody trusts US any more, so everyone is already building their own stuff to get independent ASAP. Tech-bros have already lost their influence outside of the US.

No, you forgot about the dependencies (others said it to be 700Mb). And 2,900 LOC is still way too much for handling a remote API call, especially in a high level language such as Python where the biggest part of the task is delegated to separate modules.

I wrote an entire https client from ground up in 117 LOC (and in a low level language, not Python): https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/skrellm/-/blob/main/src/https.c

Again, this guy and me disagree on what "not a bloat" means.

ROTFL, I had to laugh so hard!

"Without the Bloat"

vs.

"litellm routes LLM calls across providers and translates between message formats. That core is buried under 100k+ LOC"

Seriously anybody considering 100k+ LOC not a bloat? You made my day!

Let's just say the author's and my definition of bloat is not the same. Full disclosure, I'm the guy who reimplemented etcher (over 400Mb) in a mere 300Kb, Capstone (over 1Mb) in only 66Kb and who compressed LPC charactersheets (over 700Mb) into 4Mb. That's my interpretation of "non-bloated".

Yeah, UNICODE messed this up, really badly.

Sometimes there's an offset (like with Latin, +/- 32), sometimes lowercase and uppercase is interleaved (eg. Latin extended), and sometimes they are in totally different blocks simply because they forgot to add both letter cases at once... (the distance of the codepoints affects UTF-8 encoding difference the most).

I've also paid attention to optimize the most common case where both UTF-8 encodings' first bytes are the same (that's 40508 pairs out of 40549). But no escape, it must handle the remaining 41 pairs specially in a slower code path, which would not be needed at all should UNICODE guys did their homework better.

I've also implemented a SIMD accelerated, but case in-sensitive (*) search algorithm as an stb-style single header library, also based on Wojciech Muła's work.

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/fast_memcasemem

See the performance comparison in the README, it's about 6 times faster than libc.

(*) - full UTF-8 support, but only works for UNICODE codepoints where the UTF-8 encoding lengths are the same for lowercase and uppercase. There are only 27 out of 40576 pairs which aren't handled (listed in the README).

> Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.

This already happened... It's called subscription or mortgage loan.

Most households don't have that kind of money at once, they are already forced into a loan with regular payments. This means not the buyer but the bank owns the car until the last penny is paid.

And in some cases your car's on-board software needs a constant connection with the vendor's servers (meaning it must be up and you must pay for a license too). https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/what-happens-to-a-car-w...

It's even worse with houses. Most gen Zs will never ever own their homes, they are implicitly forced to rent only (no ownership in sight). https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-giving-up-on-buying-a-home...

Brave new world.

Yeah, okay, I made the same mistake as Sony. I wrote "buy", but what I meant was "spending money" in a general sense (regardless if it's buying ownership or paying a license fee). Second hand customers simply can't afford (or willing to pay) the price of a new copy. Trying to force these people to the Sony shop is a really bad move and won't work.

Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.