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azeirah

3,367 karma · joined May 9, 2014

Here for peace.

https://laura.fm

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azeirah··on Show HN: I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker
I would love to have a nix flake to install it easily with nix! Given it's built in bash that should be basically no issue whatsoever.

Thanks a lot for this! I was interested in beads but found the author's approach to software development quite erratic and honestly a bit unprofessional. Yes, LLMs are great, but no they shouldn't be the lead developer.

Beads is an incredibly difficult-to-follow mess for something that is at its core a pretty simple idea. You distilled it to its core, I will absolutely be checking this out :)

azeirah··on 1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long
A new kind of science is one of my favorite books, I read the entirety of the book during a dreadful vacation when I was 19 or 20 on an iPod touch.

It goes much beyond just cellular automata, the thousand pages or so all seem to drive down the same few points:

- "I, Stephen Wolfram, am an unprecedented genius" (not my favorite part of the book) - Simple rules lead to complexity when iterated upon - The invention of field of computation is as big and important of an invention as the field of mathematics

The last one is less explicit, but it's what I took away from it. Computation is of course part of mathematics, but it is a kind of "live" mathematics. Executable mathematics.

Super cool book and absolutely worth reading if you're into this kind of thing.

azeirah··on The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
> S-expressions are indisputably harder to learn to read.

Has this been studied? This is a very strong claim to make without any references.

What if you take two groups of software developers, one which has 5-10 years of experience in a popular language of choice, let's say C, and then take a group of people who write LISP professionally (maybe clojure? Common lisp? Academics who work with scheme/racket?) and then have scientists who know how to evaluate cognitive effort measure the difference in reading difficulty.

azeirah··on Nano Banana Pro
Isn't the space you're talking about the input images that are close to the textual prompt?

These models are trained on image+text pairs. So if you prompt something like "an apple" you get a conceptual average of all images containing apples. Depending on your dataset, it's likely going to be a photograph of an apple in the center.

azeirah··on Vertical integration is the only thing that matters
Luckily I work with laravel and that's a spiritual successor to rails.

The development experience is almost always really smooth and there are more and more tools to further smoothen that experience every day.

There are definitely better tools out there but given how the web ecosystem functions, it could be much worse.

azeirah··on Eating stinging nettles
I've been watching weird explorer for years and I had never considered I didn't know his name. I had _no_ idea he's caled Jared Rydelek!

His videos are incredibly interesting and fascinating

azeirah··on After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
Given the popularity and activity and pace of innovation seen on /r/LocalLLaMa, I do think models will keep improving. Likely not at the same pace as they are today, but those people love tinkering but it's mostly enthusiasts with a budget for a fancy setup in a garage, independent researchers and smaller businesses doing research there.

These people won't sit still and models will keep getting better as well as cheaper to run.

azeirah··on Testing is better than data structures and algorithms
I don't understand what the difference between a simulation and a test is?
azeirah··on An annual blast of Pacific cold water did not occur
Your url doesn't work, I can't read the article
azeirah··on Neural Nets vs. Cellular Automata
Exploring the site, the about page and the related links made me quite confident this isn't just vibe coded with claude.

It seems like a passion project and a niche interest by the author.

azeirah··on Obsidian Bases
The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that.

The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik

azeirah··on AI is propping up the US economy
For learning with self-study it has been amazing.
azeirah··on Does the Bitter Lesson Have Limits?
Sometimes awful is the best we have, we don't have anything that performs at a similar level to EUV machines by ASML but are much simpler or tenable than what we have right now, right?

Perhaps we will find something better in the future, but for now awful is the best we got for the cutting edge.

Also, when is cutting edge not the worst it's ever been?

azeirah··on Show HN: I wanted better book recommendations – so I made Lorekeep
I often have the issue that AI recommendation algorithms give me more of the same. I already know what I like.

I've found that when I read books in genres that I'd never thought of reading (for instance, biography of a writer in 1800 France) that were actually much more enriching and valuable additions to my bookcase.

I already know where to find the books that I know I will like for the most part.

azeirah··on Mercury: Ultra-fast language models based on diffusion
At the last place I worked at, which was just a small startup with 5 developers, I calculated that a server workstation in the office would be both cheaper and more performant than renting a similar machine in the cloud.

Bare metal makes such a big difference for test and CI scenarios. It even has an integrated a GPU to speed up webdev tests. Good luck finding an affordable machine in the cloud that has a proper GPU for this kind of a use-case

azeirah··on There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
Humans are known for their exceptional sensitivity in their hands and fingers. There are only few animals that come close to our ability to manipulate objects.

Only octopuses, elephants and apes are in a similar league with regards to dexterity and finesse.

azeirah··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
I'm active in the /r/localllama community and on the llama.cpp GitHub. For this use-case you absolutely do not need a big LLM. Even an 8B model will suffice, smaller models perform extremely well when the task is very clear and you provide a few shot prompt.

I've experimented in the past with running an LLM like this on a CPU-only VPS, and that actually just works.

If you host it on a server with a single GPU, you'll likely be able to easily fulfil all generation tasks for all customers. What many people don't know about inference is that it's _heavily_ memory bottlenecked, meaning that there is a lot of spare compute left over. What this means in practice is that even on a single GPU, you can serve many parallel chats at once. Think 10 "threads" of inference at 20 Tok/s.

Not only that, but there are also LLMs trained only on commons data.

azeirah··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
This was a wonderful read.

It's a bit sad to see that the book he's referring to at the end is a book released in 2003, to which this is the foreword.

Lisp is an incredible experience to write and experiment in, unlike any other language I've ever worked in.

Still, I believe there are many people out in the field that are mostly about "just delivering the spec" or about making money; pragmatists who care not too much about the art behind the software, and I suspect that will always remain the case.

Craftmanship marrying art and mastery is a niche, but that doesn't mean it's not thriving in spaces for enthusiasts.

azeirah··on Cray versus Raspberry Pi
Really? Tamagotchis seem to be one of those things that have charm beyond straight up nostalgia :o
azeirah··on Self-Adapting Language Models
Learning is strongly related to spaced repetition.

This is often associated with learning tools like anki and stuff, but the real world is all about encountering things at certain frequencies (day night cycles, seasons, places you visit, people you see.... everything, really)

I'm wondering if there maybe some sort of inverse to SR, maybe?

azeirah··on The rise of judgement over technical skill
I dunno, as an engineer who likes to make side projects, I can say with high certainty that LLMs have helped me compensate for things I'm worse at when coding a product.

I'm good at the engineering side of things, I'm good at UI, I'm good at UX, I'm good at css, I'm just not good at design.

So I tell the LLM to do it for me. It works incredibly well.

I don't know if it's a net increase in productivity for me, but I am absolutely certain that it is a net increase in my ability to ship a more complete product.

azeirah··on A critical look at MCP
This one frustrates me so, so much.
azeirah··on Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools
My personal recommendation is and remains "E-Myth".
azeirah··on Assignment 5: Cars and Key Fobs
adhd
azeirah··on I Cannot Be Technical
That is not what this is about. It's about being treated as non-technical because you happen to be a woman in tech.

The reality of being a woman in tech comes with serious problems, and how we're treated is one of the biggest contributors to those problems.

azeirah··on Controlling Language and Diffusion Models by Transporting Activations
True solution to the problem stated in the article? They're talking about fine-grained control over model outputs, how would multimodality help there?
azeirah··on Ecosia is teaming up with Qwant to build a European search index
Are there differences between what non-profits are allowed to do in Germany vs the US?

I'm assuming that German has stricter rules, but I wouldn't know.

azeirah··on My 16-month theanine self-experiment
Any experiment you perform on yourself has N=1. Self-science isn't as robust as gold standard double blind blablabla PhD trials, but come on.

How else are you going to find out whether a particular diet or medication works for you specifically? It's ALWAYS N=1.

azeirah··on Put a data center on the moon?
Microsoft did this iirc.
azeirah··on Vine: A programming language based on Interaction Nets
Do interaction nets have any interesting properties that make them useful for distributed computing? Think IoT, edge computing, embedded, that kind of thing?

And synchronization primitives?

I wanted to also say I loved reading the documentation. Your idea of places, spaces and values feels like a waaay more intuitive naming scheme for than what's common in CS.

The time-travel example also felt oddly intuitive to me. I don't really care that it uses black magic underneath, it's quite elegant!

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