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convivialdingo

607 karma · joined May 16, 2014

$ openssl aes-256-cbc -d -a -k convivialdingo U2FsdGVkX1/RqrjOPvbJ7AJ5er1IZwLqgTyW49oBRrhozxRbI6rMoH3lkyO27zy7 7QswjRxCFcs4lti81teb99LgS1UK3UVUoJOoTJ+YMcTi07GJLvZGSNfGtTzEYNK5 UVMICrU+h2uDFaHbCq62SVV5iAusqnD/vFDtzWPEJDnB1+77NTL275cw9OxTDJ9b HTuSeMFPEi6k8vC7i39b5KEpIdhxLSLzpPqENY2O30I=
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convivialdingo··on Epileptic seizures nearly vanish after people receive experimental gene therapy
The way I read it is the genetic treatment improved the effectiveness of the drug, so it's great but not a cure.
convivialdingo··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
The Thundering Herd has thundered, apparently.
convivialdingo··on ChatGPT outage – Resolved
And now Claude is down - API Error 529 Overloaded

https://status.claude.com

convivialdingo··on Solod: Go can be a better C
That's incredible! I see you ran into many of the same MIR issues and limitations I did. I pulled several fork patches and wrote a thread local stack extension.

I'll definitely check it out and see what I could do. I added two compiler stages - a decent memory ptr ownership tracker and midopt compiler optimizer you could likely use without many changes that improved performance 35% over c2mir.

convivialdingo··on Show HN: Simulator for a custom 8-bit discreet logic computer
That's fantastic, love the ability to inspect each state and see it as a whole running in real-time. I remember seeing a C64 simulator that showed the memory/cpu state - but this goes beyond that.
convivialdingo··on Solod: Go can be a better C
I've been toying with a better C... https://github.com/panaflexx/classyc

Started with the excellent MIR compiler, and I wrote much of the class/string/json/dict, exceptions and AI made the generics,ownership tracking, and safety checks/traps. Added some go

The memory model is mixed, I ended up using arenas for dictionaries and adding a full ownership checking / safety checking compiler stage.

It's purely for the joy of making something interesting.

convivialdingo··on System76 on Age Verification Laws
Or anti-Democrat forum? Let's not pretend this isn't a California law, or a bipartisan political power grab.
convivialdingo··on Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk
Man, that's pretty excellent!

I once built a demo-ish encrypted network boot system using similar initrd techniques. It's a fun hack working in the preboot environment.

convivialdingo··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Anyone who's grown up around the upper class social strata understands this to be true.
convivialdingo··on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
Similar story for myself. It was long and tedious for my mental model to go from Basic, to Pascal, to C, and finally to ASM as a teen.

My recent experience is the opposite. With LLMs, I'm able to delve into the deepest parts of code and systems I never had time to learn. LLMs will get you to the 80% pretty quick - compiles and sometimes even runs.

convivialdingo··on Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video
That's super impressive! Definitely one of the best quality conversational agents I've tried syncing A/V and response times.

The text processing is running Qwen / Alibaba?

convivialdingo··on Show HN: Text-to-video model from scratch (2 brothers, 2 years, 2B params)
That’s amazing effort - I am impressed.

Awesome to see more small teams making impressive leaps.

convivialdingo··on Sopro TTS: A 169M model with zero-shot voice cloning that runs on the CPU
Impressive! The cloning and voice affect is great. Has a slight warble in the voice on long vowels, but not a huge issue. I'll definitely check it out - we could use voice generation for alerting on one of our projects (no GPUs on hardware).
convivialdingo··on Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
I spent a few months working on different edge compute NPUs (ARM mostly) with CNN models and it was really painful. A lot of impressive hardware, but I was always running into software fallbacks for models, custom half-baked NN formats, random caveats, and bad quantization.

In the end it was faster, cheaper, and more reliable to buy a fat server running our models and pay the bandwidth tax.

convivialdingo··on xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure
When I use the "think" mode it retains context for longer. I tested with 5k lines of c compiler code and I could 6 prompts in before it started forgetting or generalizing

I'll say that grok is really excellent at helping my understand the codebase, but some miss-named functions or variables will trip it up..

convivialdingo··on Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire
I tried replacing a DMA queue lock with lock-free CAS and it wasn't faster than a mutex or a standard rwlock.

I rewrote the entire queue with lock-free CAS to manage insertions/removals on the list and we finally got some better numbers. But not always! We found it worked best either as a single thread, or during massive contention. With a normal load it wasn't really much better.

convivialdingo··on New material gives copper superalloy-like strength
Wonder if this could work for li-ion batteries as a current collector? You could potentially lower charging times and handle higher power applications and higher temperature ranges.
convivialdingo··on Gemini 2.5 Flash
Downvote me all you want - the fact remains that previous Google models were so riddled with guardrails and political correctness that it was practically impossible to use for anything besides code and clean business data. Random text and opinion would trigger a filter and shut down output.

Even this model criticizes the failures of the previous models.

convivialdingo··on Gemini 2.5 Flash
Dang - Google finally made a quality model that doesn’t make me want to throw my computer out a window. It’s honest, neutral and clearly not trained by the ideologically rabid anti-bias but actually super biased regime.

Did I miss a revolt or something in googley land? A Google model saying “free speech is valuable and diverse opinions are good” is frankly bizarre to see.

convivialdingo··on Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly (2024)
Once things are a little more stable, I will put it up!

Right now you can just break before the (fun_call)() delegate and disassemble the fun_call in gdb.

The basic trick is to add reloc support to the x86 translate code, mark external calls and replace with 0x0 placeholders, and copy out the machine_code and data segment output to an object file.

I can do basic main functions with simple prints calls but not much more. It’s a hack for now but I’ll refactor it until it’s solid.

convivialdingo··on Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly (2024)
I’ve been modifying the the MIR c2mir JIT compiler to extend the c11 compiler to support simple classes, boxed strings(immutable, nun-nullable) with AOT support.

Imagine if Java and C had a love child, basically.

MIR is a fantastic piece of engineering.

Honestly the hardest part is representing types. Having played around with other compilers it seems to be a typical problem.

I’m stuck in the minutiae of representing highly structured complexity and defining behavior in c. I can understand why many languages have an intermediate compiler - it’s too much work and it will probably change over time.

convivialdingo··on All Tuberculosis programs funded by the U.S. Gov were officially terminated
Here's what I found researching this.

US domestic TB funding by CDC, through state and local programs, have not been cut.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is still funded by the US congressional appropriations through State department ($6B for 2023-2025) but future funding is in review.

USAID funding for the Global Drug Facility was cut. GDF is a treatment coordinator which helps deliver drugs and treatments to areas in need. GDF is managed by the Stop TB Partnership (a UN OPS program) and has largely been a success so it's not going away as it's funded by multiple nations and private organizations.

State Department could include GDF in the existing emergency humanitarian waiver.

convivialdingo··on USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them
You can thank Biden, actually.

On the merits, this Court previously held that no provision of § 8468 prevented the plaintiffs' removal. See Mem. Op. at 7. First, the Court noted that “the power of removal from office is incident to the power of appointment” “absent a specific provision to the contrary.” Id. at 6 (quoting Carlucci v. Doe, 488 U.S. 93, 95 (1988) (citation omitted)). Second, the Court held that the plain text of § 8468(b), which provides only that Board members “serve for three years each” on staggered terms, does not meet that standard. Id. at 7. Third, the Court read Parsons v. United States, 167 U.S. 324 (1897), and Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), to hold that term-of-office provisions, standing alone, do not confer removal protection.

https://casetext.com/case/spicer-v-biden-1

convivialdingo··on Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code
I guarantee that piece of code has a comment like

  /* This should never happen */
  if (waypoints.matchcount > 2) {
convivialdingo··on Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS
Wow, looks like a great product! That's a great idea to use NFS as the protocol. I honestly hadn't thought of that.

Perfect.

For IBM, I wrote a crypto filesystem that works similarly in concept, except it was a kernel filesystem. We crypto split the blocks up into 4 parts, stored into cache. A background daemon listened to events and sync'ed blocks to S3 orchestrated with a shared journal.

It's pure magic when you mount a filesystem on clean machine and all your data is "just there."

convivialdingo··on The sins of the 90s: Questioning a puzzling claim about mass surveillance
I used to work with the guy who was named by DJB in the crypto export case which removed the restrictions. IIRC, the NSA guy used to be his student!
convivialdingo··on European govt air-gapped systems breached using custom malware
Super old… my first experience with a “virus” was an Amiga boot sector attack from 1986!

At the time the morris worm had inspired some folks to see if they could spread binaries by infecting every disk inserted. That’s all it did….. spread. I think the virus lives off an interrupt generated by disk insertions.

Fortunately it was harmless (except for a few extra crashes) and I had my original OS disks that could be booted from to clean up the disks.

convivialdingo··on FFT-based ocean-wave rendering, implemented in Godot
Fourier was measuring tidal waves when he came up with wave frequency transforms - so in a way this is almost a full circle.

Very impressed!

convivialdingo··on Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
Another one to try is GameSalad. It’s paid but has a forum, knowledge base, support, and generally aims at the younger developers with visual coding.
convivialdingo··on Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC
Agreed.

Even the premise that it was always cheaper to manufacture abroad is flawed in many respects as Congress subsidized offshoring over many years as part of an effort to encourage globalization.

Companies often receive massive tax breaks with write-offs to close US plants, tax credits, zero percent import duties, and lower overall tax rates by shifting their profits and losses through offshore banks.

In many respects profitability has most often been determined by the policies we subsidize. and for decades those policies were essentially all in for the benefit of offshoring.

Comparing the actual cost of production by location is far more complicated than just the cost of materials and labor when there are so many subsidies and policies involved.

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