ashkankiani

I took a lot of inspiration from MLton for my WIP programming language. I want to take inspiration from ATS but it's a bit more complicated. I keep it as a bit of a potential north star.

These are definitely all languages I wish more people learned about when designing. I think LLMs are at least helpful in pointing them out when used for deep research but only if people are thinking in that direction.

I meant web design in general not ttao’s blog, which is excellent. My point was that broader shitty design has instilled bad habits which carry over to even straightforward UIs.

And let's not forget that the US is heavy into short term debt that needs to renew: "As of Q3 FY2026, approximately 33% of U.S. publicly held marketable debt is due to mature and require renewal (refinancing) within 12 months."

oh ok then I'll just give up on hoping things change, thanks for saving us all the time

I agree, but I would also blame the entirely atrocious web design that has made it so that people don't expect there to be useful information anywhere on the page and just jump to the body. It's very practical to start subconsciously learning to skim when you're assaulted with noise.

90% of the time I can't even find the fucking time an article was written or last updated easily on the web.

why do we need to anthropomorphize everything. what it's like is altering the model weights of a computation graph, because that's what it is.

Adjudicating over public good is literally the point of the government. What are you talking about...? Do you think we live in a libertarian free market paradise?

Yeah, well trodden paths by tourists will be more accomodating, but it doesn't take much deviation from that well trodden path to hit roadblocks. Even in Tokyo. Japan is huge. And tbh a lot of the experiences are soft-locked behind language comprehension.

Never use unsigned values as your loop counter variables if you can help it. It is way too easy to underflow, and no one needs to iterate more than 2^31 or 2^63 times. You will die before exhausting int64.

Lived in Japan for 4 years:

  - yes you need to speak and read Japanese
    - a lot of sites embed the information inside of images, not text, which is not that easy to translate automatically and your AI agent probably won't think to check it unless you use screenshot navigation by default
    - a lot of the booking will be done or expedited by phone calls
  - yes you need a Japanese phone number
  - yes you need a Japanese debit/credit card most of the time for online systems (or pay at the conbini, aka physical locations in Japan, American credits cards also work usually)

Japan is what it is. It's not super friendly infrastructure if you're not living there. No they don't want to change it.

I think at that point I’ll be doing carpentry instead of computing.

I agree with that but the cat is out of the bag now. Unless you believe in exponential improvement (which I don’t), the open models might be at a resource disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t catch up or surpass the closed ones. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee success.

I mainly just want to point out the value of human ingenuity coupled with a model like DS4.1 is technically enough to get most people to where they want to go, and that includes smarter open models.

I bought my box for $3k last year because I hadn't updated my PC since the first threadripper 1950x, and the Strix Halo is the only x86 with unified memory that's optimized for the kind of CPU intensive stuff I do, and they finally have proper AVX512 too. It was the perfect upgrade for me (except for lack of PCIe 5 & ECC), which coincidentally happened to be perfectly positioned for local inferrence.

and I liked it so much (and saw that the RAM drought was going to last for at least a few years) so I bought a second one to use as a general server for myself and my family.

It can run on one strix halo machine, which is what I have. For everything else, there’s a vibrant community brute forcing more efficient engines and quantizations. There’s a minimum bar right now, so it depends on your hardware.

Even if Deepseek v4.1 is the last open source LLM I have access to, I would be perfectly fine with that. My secret is that I have this relatively unknown technique for solving problems where I use this quantum engine that developed from just atoms over 4.54 billion years into the most sophisticated machine in the known universe. It's a frontier model that every human has access too, actually.

So when I really want to solve a problem, I just think on it. And when I need something to iterate through the things I thought of quickly, I use deepseek.

I'm stupid so explain it in small words for me.

Meta shares responsible for genocide and we're still too fucking scared to go after them for that properly.

I do this with google's bullshit free AI training captchas. If I see a site using those, I never use it again. I've canceled paid services for this before.

Use a proper rate limiting scheme, obviously. You're using access patterns associated with human volumes, so you can only ever scrape at human speeds (except that you get the advantage of constantly saturating the pipe and running 24/7)

That's funny, I got tired of tmux the other day (it got into 100% spin loop from an unsigned int underflow used as a loop condition variable. and I debugged it all by myself like a big boy, without LLMs!) and built something that seems to be identical in architecture in terms of the "supervisor which allocates pty, just stream bytes, client decodes" part. I even use libghostty for the HW accelerated GUI I built. It's the right way to go imo and it's not too difficult to build... hence...

I don't really understand why they would turn this into a company. I become suspicious of products that raise a lot of VC money, implying that they expect a unicorn-ish valuation, where I don't see them being able to justify their valuation via obvious monetization techniques (e.g. selling a classic license for a GUI app where you get updates for some period of time, usually a year, and then you get to keep the software, but no longer get updates, just in case people forgot how things worked before subscriptions).

That usually implies something like selling cloud subscriptions, vendor lock-in, or selling data. I'm happy to be wrong, but it's just an extremely common pattern. And as an aside, I know there's an impulse to monetize everything, but I think we should probably fight that impulse.

Watch Yanis Varoufakis videos on youtube.

That's only if they target Bitcoin and not some other coin which doesn't have an ASIC and has a GPU-friendly hash.

Do you have some personal financial or other incentive to be “aggressively pro AI”?

Convincing the government to regulate their competition while lobbying for laxer requirements for the big guys who have government contracts and get/give kick-backs isn't a far fetched scenario at all considering it's literally happened over and over and over and over again.

I regret not getting addicted to Lisp early. At Berkeley for EECS, the normal CS61A curriculum was based on scheme, but instead we had a guest lecturer from Google who did it on Python. Sure, I got an A+ and I know Python’s internals well, but damn what a miss for me. I much prefer the functional train.

What’s the best way to get started with Common Lisp now for a very very experienced programmer?

Thank you for not forgetting about him. I bring up this insane and tragic persecution and prosecutorial injustice and hypocrisy whenever I can.

I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.

You're doing something similar to what I've been prototyping for the automatic metadata enrichment part. So far I've been using deterministic older techniques + manual for my personal data stream, but I'm trying to learn what the state of the art is for efficiently annotating data with LLMs and newer ML.

This seems interesting, but if anyone else is also doing a similar thing, I'd appreciate tips on how to approach it. So far, I think I have some small RAG model in a demo or the very small qwen models. I think fine tuning seems interesting too. Some of the decision models applied in layers (like a binary search on a pre-generated corpus) could be fast enough to help too?

idk too many options, i'm sure this is a solved problem lol

Thank you for your work on this. When I was working on neovim core and started dealing more and more with the edge cases of libvterm and terminal emulation in general, I had the same thought "we should just have a gold standard library for this." But that was 6/7 years ago (2019) and a lot of stuff happened in that interim unrelated to engineering that demotivated me from pursuing it.

Periodically, I would run into TUI issues and think "I should just finally do it," especially around wanting to replace tmux in general. But I knew from experience the long tail of annoying issues for terminals that it's more time consuming than it appears, and so I again never bothered.

Thanks for the good work to raise all boats :)

I tend to move away from terminal emulation towards GUI when I can (and using custom remote protocols somewhat inspired by arcan), but TUI is still useful for a while. I actually had a need for a good terminal emulation library for the fallback TUI/pty attachment for non-gui programs for my supervisor, so I'll try out libghostty.

This is exactly what I did. I'm glad I started reimplementing everything when I was younger because I might not have had the patience for the grind. But after 7 years of that, I have enough momentum that it's easier and easier. It also helps to have good architectural principles. I don't treat my hobby projects like throwaways because that's how you end up with frustration.

The end result is being completely unaffected by version changes, the trends in programming that go up and down (javascript, python, whatever, doesn't matter to me what's happening in their world).

It helps that I was also an early adopter of Rust from pre-1.0 in college around 2011, and so I've had a relatively stable implementation language. That combined with C and Luajit is my permanent stack right now, but I'm in the progress of migrating to my own programming language.

The natural terminus of the path you are suggesting is to reimplement everything. Be prepared for a long road, even with LLMs at your disposal now. An LLM can't design what you want because it can't read your mind.

It doesn't take a billionaire to do it at this point. In case you've forgotten, there are still plenty of very intelligent humans around. All it takes is one intelligent misanthrope with sufficient access to the resources (not even that expensive relatively, likely not more than $1 million in tools, but i would guess far less is possible), to pull off an attack like that.

I guess billionaires are more malignant/misanthropic/sociopathic/narcissistic than most, and so I could see them being a higher risk factor.

I was kind of joking with you before, but tbh we actually are closer aligned on this than I expected. Including how strange the "effective altruists" are. I was expecting you to be talking about a much more far fetched scenario based on the language in the parent comment.