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Tossrock

2,601 karma · joined April 27, 2011

I'm just this guy, you know?
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Tossrock··on Even 'uncensored' models can't say what they want
> Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago.

Of course it knows what it output a token ago, that's the whole point of attention and the whole basis of the quadratic curse.

Tossrock··on What game engines know about data that databases forgot
If anything, this confirms it for me. On his about page, there's this:

"Hi there, I am Loïc Baumann, I’m from Paris area, France I develop, since early 90s, first assembly, then C++ and nowadays mostly .net.

My area of interest are 3D programming, low-latency/highly-scalable/performant solutions and many other things."

Compare that style to what's in this most recent blog - mildly ungrammatical constructions typical of an ESL writer, straightforward and plain style vs breathless, feed-optimized "not x, but y", triplet/rule of three constructions, perfect native speaker grammar but an oddly hollow tone. Or look at this post from 2018: https://nockawa.github.io/microservice-or-not-microservice/ It's just radically different (at a concrete syntactic level, no emdashes). I'm sure he has technical chops and it's cool that he worked on DOTS, but I would bet a very large amount of money he wrote the bullet points describing this project and then prompted GPT 5.3 to expand them to a blog post to "save time".

Tossrock··on What game engines know about data that databases forgot
I agree that this triggered my AI writing senses. Points in favor:

- "It’s not an accident — it’s driven by the same physics." The classic "it's not x, it's y", with an em-dash thrown in for good measure

- "Typhon brings these into the component storage model — not as bolted-on workarounds, but as first-class citizens." More "not x, but y", this time with a leading clause joined by an emdash

- "Blittable, unmanaged, fixed-size, stored contiguously per type — that’s the ECS side." Short, punchy list of examples, emdash'd to a stinger, again typical of LLM writing

- "Schema in code, not SQL. Components are C# structs with attributes, not DDL statements. Natural for game developers, unfamiliar territory for database administrators. If your team thinks in SQL, this is a paradigm shift." This whole mini-paragraph is the x/y style, combined with the triplet / rule-of-three, just at the sentence scale. And then of course, the stinger at the end.

Definitive, no, but it certainly has a particular flavor that reads as LLM output to me.

Tossrock··on The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy
This is hilarious. You think middle school students know about the Avignon papacy? They don't even know about the Ford presidency.
Tossrock··on Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
If you think training a sparse autoencoder to extract concept vectors that are usable as steering injections into a modern LLM is pretty easy, you should probably go work for Anthropic's mech interp team ;)
Tossrock··on Hold on to Your Hardware
That sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or PrusaSlicer.
Tossrock··on Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)
It certainly feels that way. Some tells:

"Precision, for LEGO, isn't an engineering choice, it's a brand promise." - The classic "It's not just x, it's y", just minus the "just".

"One philosophy optimizes for cost, the other for perfection." - Again we see the x/y structure; AI writing often features these forms, eg comparisons (x vs y), conversions (x into y), negated emphasis (not x, but y), etc.

"When you have multiple parts in an assembly, use statistical analysis for tolerance stack-up rather than worst-case math. Traceability matters. Track your defects so feedback turns precision into reliability." - More x/y followed by a short stinger ("Z matters"), and the closing sentence again follows the "x/y" pattern.

For funsies I tossed the whole thing into a purported AI detector and it said 90+% confidence of AI. I don't trust those types of things very much and suspect they have high false positive rates, but I have read that AI writing generally has measurably lower entropy, so maybe it's plausible, and in this case it aligns with my existing beliefs, so it obviously must be true.

Tossrock··on Good software knows when to stop
Specifically the Ursula K. LeGuin translation :)
Tossrock··on The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
Tell Donald Knuth that: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...
Tossrock··on Good software knows when to stop
"To order, to govern,

is to begin naming;

when names proliferate

it’s time to stop.

If you know when to stop

you’re in no danger."

Tossrock··on Factory Logic
Fascinating interview - hearing two women of Chinese extraction working in the West candidly discuss their cultural origins and its effect of their mental state (dynamism vs scorn for weakness, the anxiety of stagnation), the specifics of Chinese worker culture (shamate, factory towns), and the inside view on "Belt & Road" in practice (empty sloganeering, lack of investment experience, etc) all really expanded my view of China. It's easy to get lost in the Western, pseudo-propagandized perception of China, and hearing the views of people who've truly seen both sides is a rare and valuable experience. Worth reading in its entirety, and I intend to watch the film now, too.
Tossrock··on Tell HN: There's something weird happening with the front page algo
Probably tripping the politics detector and being auto-deranked.
Tossrock··on OpenClaw is changing my life
You can try opus in the cheaper one if you enable extra usage, though.
Tossrock··on Show HN: I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books
Indeed, sci fi has always been a way for KSR to explore and animate his politics. But he's so skilled a writer that the spectacle and incredible technical detail of the sci fi wrappings can obscure subtlety of the political philosophy (as it should be, imo).
Tossrock··on Vouch
Inside the repo as metadata that can be consumed by a provider, like GHA config in .github/. Standardized, at least as an extension like git lfs so it's provider independent. Could work! I've long thought effective reputational models are a major missing piece of internet infrastructure, this could be the beginning of their existence given the new asymmetric threat of LLM output, combined with mitchellh's productivity and recognition.
Tossrock··on Tractor
I haven't seen welds that bad since visiting India, where I ran across some so dire I was compelled to photograph them in case the building fell down later: https://imgur.com/a/16FRlEW

Love the spirit of the build, though, and it's a case where weld cleanliness doesn't really matter, so, more power to him.

Tossrock··on Qwen3-Coder-Next
Ah okay, that makes sense. Sorry they pulled the plug on you!
Tossrock··on Qwen3-Coder-Next
But... Claude Code is already cloud-based. It relies on the Anthropic API. Your data is all already being ingested by them. Seems like a weird boundary to draw, trusting the company's model with your data but not their convenience web ui. Being local-only (ie OpenCode & open weights model running on your own hw) is consistent, at least.
Tossrock··on Qwen3-Coder-Next
They did ship that feature, it's called "&" / teleport from web. They also have an iOS app.
Tossrock··on Qwen3-Coder-Next
Don't forget gyms and other physical-space subscriptions. It's right up there with razor-and-blades for bog standard business models. Imagine if you got a gym membership and then were surprised when they cancelled your account for reselling gym access to your friends.
Tossrock··on Claude's new constitution
It's not a system prompt, it's a tool used during the training process to guide RL. You can read about it in their constitutional AI paper.
Tossrock··on Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)
Windows has the WSL for native Linux vms, these days (and also the past ~decade)
Tossrock··on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks
> but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems.

This is exactly what SGS-1 is, and it's better than this approach because it's actually a model trained to generate Breps, not just asking an LLM to write code to do it.

Tossrock··on Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator
Do you have a budget per-player of cloud usage? What happens if people really like the game and play it so much it starts getting expensive to keep running? I guess at $0.79 / Mtok llama70B is pretty affordable, but a per-player opex seems hard to handle without a subscription model.
Tossrock··on SendGrid isn’t emailing about ICE or BLM – it’s a phishing attack
It's true that a lot of established ML techniques were first popularized to fight spam (ie bayesian filtering), but it might also be the case that they're not applying the full might of eg Gemini-3-Pro to every email received. I suspect Gemini-3-Pro would do an effectively perfect job of determining if something is phishing, with negligible values in the false quadrants of the confusion matrix, but it's probably too expensive to use in that way. Which is why things like this can still slip through.
Tossrock··on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
It wasn't a generalized argument, though, it was a specific one, about AI.
Tossrock··on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
So where do I collect my prize for this 2015 comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9882217
Tossrock··on Claudeskills.cc – Share, Discover, and Reuse Claude/OpenAI Agent Skills
There's an awful lot of typos in the little Veo/Sora type clip. "Shar", "Evolue", "Transilate", etc.
Tossrock··on The pivot
That's a hydroelectric dam, not a water wheel. A water wheel captures mechanical energy directly for eg grain milling, not conversion to electricity via turbine.
Tossrock··on Libghostty is coming
You could run tmux inside it and bind cmd f to copy-mode + /
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