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IsTom

1,697 karma · joined March 27, 2012

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IsTom··on Show HN: Run an 80B Qwen in 4.3 GB of RAM on a Mac, and a 35B on an iPhone
There is a limit how much you can squeeze out of given hardware. Betting on it being closer to 100t/s than 6t/s is only that, a bet.
IsTom··on Karpathy’s Pelican
Aren't they still bad at understanding how bicycle frame works? Especially the steering part?
IsTom··on Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
And still that requires X to not be particularly large. It could conceivably be in ballpark of BB(40).
IsTom··on The AI Aesthetic
I might be an old man yelling at cloud, but for things coming after win98 era this feels demonstrably false in many cases.
IsTom··on Are We Stuck with Lean?
Intuitionistic logic can prove less than classical logic, but what you gain is that proofs are constructive. Also you can use it to reason about things for which law of excluded middle doesn't hold (typically types).
IsTom··on Are We Stuck with Lean?
So that link(https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117002106099986943) buried in the comments of comments sounds pretty damning.
IsTom··on Some thoughts about Anthropic's new cryptanalysis results
I think it's just that we have hard time pinning down what is it that intelligence factor that isn't well-covered by LLMs. Just like we've had trouble with discerning human intelligence in the past.

It turns out that a savant with all the knowledge isn't "it".

IsTom··on Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac
That kind of sounds like a branch predictor in a CPU.
IsTom··on Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
Have they factored 21 yet? That metric hasn't changed for some time.
IsTom··on Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)
You could read it through internet archive if it's this important.
IsTom··on DIY Home Solar System for under $5000 (2025)
Especially as browser History API allows you to change the hash without making new history entries.
IsTom··on How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
If what they're claiming is true then what were they supposed to do? Go "Hey guys, it's the biggest project in Zig and it sucks, don't look at it"? Not exactly a good PR move.
IsTom··on Why care about programming languages
That sounds like Haskell's ST monad and yeah, that could work. These are very specific "escape hatches" though and typically people want more.
IsTom··on Why care about programming languages
> escape hatches for performance

These allow the model to cheat in ways that are harder to detect. In actually pure FP you can be sure that it's not counting function invocations to bypass tests.

IsTom··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
I feel that this is because people have been reinventing the wheel a lot in IT.

A lot of innovation that finally lands in programming languages has been done decades earlier, but now it's mostly awkwardly bolted on existing languages and frameworks.

IsTom··on Kill The Cookie Banner
EULAs are restricted in power in EU and at least to me these cookie banners are similar in spirit.
IsTom··on PartialString – A finite-difference time-domain physical modelling synthesiser
Physical strings have some stiffness and it causes overtones to not have perfect integer ratios of frequency. It's one of many things to consider that makes it sound a bit more natural.
IsTom··on PartialString – A finite-difference time-domain physical modelling synthesiser
Considering that there's a pickup in the model, air doesn't matter. And in typical string instruments the loud part you mostly hear is coming from sound box through bridge, not from strings themselves.
IsTom··on PartialString – A finite-difference time-domain physical modelling synthesiser
Does it take nonlinearity of strings into account? In the demo I can't really hear it and to me it ends up sounding like the comb filter synths you get without it.
IsTom··on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16
Are dogfights still relevant? Isn't it mostly shooting missiles outside of visual range these days?
IsTom··on Advertise in ChatGPT
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
IsTom··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
Yeah, this happens broadly in shell with globbing. It's a bit ridiculous.
IsTom··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
To be pendantic

    ls -- **/*.sh
Otherwise it will fail if you've got a file named e.g. --help
IsTom··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
I don't think this is how this works. The next step is to determine for what kinds of polynomials the jacobian conjecture is true and for what kinds of polynomials it's false.
IsTom··on The Act and the Outcome of Creation
> Creating should be done like:

That's some bold statements when a lot of great art came from a place that isn't joy and rainbows like author would want it to.

IsTom··on Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
To be fair, they don't have the text editor highlighting all the matching parens. I'd be lost too.
IsTom··on OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says
The scale current of money-burning is just wild. I'm not sure you can compare it to anything else this century.
IsTom··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
My memory is pretty spotty, but wasn't it similar with other hype-cycle topics like cryptocurrencies?
IsTom··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
Is this like, a real sum of money americans pay for a degree? Overhead must be mind-boggiling if like just two students are needed to pay educator's salary for the period.
IsTom··on GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]
It would be nice, but I don't have much hope as it doesn't help next quarter's profits.
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