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dilap

8,831 karma · joined August 15, 2007

lucky number (lambda f: f(f))(lambda y: lambda f: f(lambda n: y(y)(f)(n)))(lambda f: lambda n: f(n-1) + f(n-2) if n > 2 else 1)(7)
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dilap··on Codex for almost everything
FWIW, I've found Codex with GPT-5.4 to be better than Opus-4.6; I would say it's at least worth checking out for your use case.
dilap··on Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence
Deepseek R1 was a publically-available, MoE model that was getting a ton of attention before llama4. Llama4 didn't get much attention because it wasn't good.
dilap··on Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)
i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top of each other is super-common for me, and the fact that they all peak thru each other (like the screenshot in the blog) looking absolutely terrible drives me crazy
dilap··on Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
I wish I could remember the details -- I know I got annoyed with things being slow and when I got a new computer decided to go the no-homebrew route. I'm using nix, and it seems fine so far, but I also really don't understand it at all, which is a little concerning. :-)
dilap··on Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
Horses for courses, but I've stopped using brew 'cuz it's too slow, so this might bring me back!

Edit: no, it won't...

dilap··on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
I thought this was parody until the last sentence.
dilap··on It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
I still remember the very first time I saw an emoji -- just an old-school dumb phone, and my friend sent me a message with an emoji, which the phone, amazingly, was able to display. I had no idea such a capability even existed, and wondered for a second if I was dreaming.
dilap··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
Welllll I'm not so sure that phrase is well-suited for your intended meaning, then. (Also, tangentially, I think could argue thinking models w/ the elided thought prelude satisfy "having hidden state where it first forms an opinion.")
dilap··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
Ha, thanks!
dilap··on Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
I don't know for a fact, but I'd bet a few digits of cold hard cash it's a SwiftUI rewrite that is to blame. (Any1 in the know want to chime in?)

And yeah, it's terrible. Apple doesn't make good apps anymore.

(This is part of why I think electron does so well -- it's not as good as a really good native app [e.g. Sublime Text], but it's way better than the sort of default whatever you'll get doing native. You get a lot of niceness that's built into the web stack.)

dilap··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
The fundamental nature of the model is that it consumes tokens as input and produces token probabilities as output, but there's nothing inherently "predictive" about it -- that's just perspective hangover from the historical development of how LLMs were trained. It is, fundamentally, I think, a general-purpose thinking machine, operating over the inputs and outputs of tokens.

(With this perspective, I can feel my own brain subtly oferring up a panoply of possible responses in a similar way. I can even turn up the temperature on my own brain, making it more likely to decide to say the less-obvious words in response, by having a drink or two.)

(Similarly, mimicry is in humans too a very good learning technique to get started -- kids learning to speak are little parrots, artists just starting out will often copy existing works, etc. Before going on to develop further into their own style.)

dilap··on Claude's Cycles [pdf]
That description is really only fair for base models†. Something like Opus 4.6 has all kinds of other training on top of that which teach it behaviors beyond "predict most probable token," like problem-solving and being a good chatbot.

(†And even then is kind of overly-dismissive and underspecified. The "most probable word" is defined over some training data set. So imagine if you train on e.g. mathematicians solving problems... To do a good job at predicting [w/o overfitting] your model will have to in fact get good at thinking like a mathematician. In general "to be able to predict what is likely to happen next" is probably one pretty good definition of intelligence.)

dilap··on Microgpt
MIT (https://gist.github.com/karpathy/8627fe009c40f57531cb1836010...)
dilap··on A better streams API is possible for JavaScript
I think you'd be much better served by writing something rough that maintains your own voice!
dilap··on A better streams API is possible for JavaScript
> The problems aren't bugs; they're consequences of design decisions that may have made sense a decade ago, but don't align with how JavaScript developers write code today.

> I'm not here to disparage the work that came before — I'm here to start a conversation about what can potentially come next.

Terrible LLM-slop style. Is Mr Snell letting an LLM write the article for him or has he just appropriated the style?

dilap··on Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags
Leadership matters!
dilap··on How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI
Well sure, but lots of big companies have all the resources in the world and can't execute. Google really did turn things around in an impressive way.
dilap··on Gnome dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger
Haven't used Linux in forever, but middle-click to paste was like the one thing that consistently worked everywhere. So it makes some sense that someone want to break it somewhere. With enough fingers meddling all conventions are broken. Wisdom of the crowds. Democracy.

(Actually I have been playing with Omarchy recently a tiny bit, inspired by the absolutely devestatingly bad macOS update. Initial tire-kicking was very positive. They had a "universal copy-paste" feature that still seemed WIP at the time...i.e. didn't work everywhere...)

dilap··on Show HN: Tidy Baby is a SET game but with words
It's neat!

Suggestionms:

A version where you actually need to find sets -- "have two, find third" is way too easy.

Monospaced font -- it's too hard visually to see difference in word length right now, w/o counting letters.

dilap··on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
I read about 4 paragraphs of the blog post, it does not at all read like it was written by ChatGPT!

Some people are perhaps overly focussed on superficial things like em-dashes. The real tells for ChatGPT writing are more subtle -- a tendency towards hyperboly (it's not A, it's [florid restatment of essentially A] B!), a certain kind of rhythym, and frequently a kind of hard to describe "emptiness" of claims.

(LLMs can write in mang styles, but this is the sort of "kid filling out the essay word count" style you get in chatgpt etc by default.)

dilap··on Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
Yeah, by design, of course, but I still think it's bad (& there are plenty of ways to scare grandma without lying to her, if you really need to do that).

In general I'd contend that the mindest which leads you to believe "we need to lie to our users because they are dumb" isn't conducive to making good software.

dilap··on Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
It's basically a "when to rip the band-aid off" type of situation.

Briefly poked around w/ linux again for the first time in years (Omarchy, DHH's tune of Arch + hyprland), and hoo boy, it's come a long way! Nothing like the KDE/Gnome+X jankery of the olden times. Very polished, very slick, very nice.

dilap··on Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
Saying "Foo.app is damaged" is lying to the user though, which is not nice, and not a good sign, in general, for the health of a company / its culture.
dilap··on Open-source Zig book
If you find it useful no harm in enjoying it! The main problem with AI content is it's just not good enough...yet. It'll get there. The LLMs just need more real-world feedback incorporated, rather than being the ultimate has-read-everything,-actually-knows-nothing dweeb (a lot of humans are like this too). (You can see the first signs of overcoming this w/ latest models coding skills, which are stronger via RL, I believe.) (Not first hand knowledge tho -- pot kettle black situation there.)
dilap··on Open-source Zig book
I read the first few paragraphs. Very much reads like LLM slop to me...

E.g., "Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it."

If we had a reliable oracle, I would happily bet a $K on significant LLM authorship.

dilap··on AI World Clocks
I'm a huge K2 fan, it has a personality that feels very distinct from other models (not syccophantic at all), and is quite smart. Also pretty good at creative writing (tho not 100% slop free).

K2 hosted on groq is pretty crazy for intellgence/second. (Low rate limits still, tho.)

dilap··on Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line
They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion on the part of Apple.)

(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)

dilap··on Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor), nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!

(The FYP, alas, sucks, and has since forever...)

dilap··on Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
Huge fan of X, but it's pissing in the face of your fans to tell such obvious lies.
dilap··on Roadmap for improving the type checker
Light-weight wrapper over C, so as fast as C when you want it to be. Message passing isn't as fast as, say, vtables, but is still quite snappy and flexible for loosely binding objects together. No generics avoids code bloat.

In practice obj-c apps were snappy, e.g., good perf on extremely limited hardware of original iPhone. SwiftUI (I assume) of MacOS settings app much slower than the old version it replaced -- too much heavy programmer framework magic resulting in slower final code? That's my diagnosis/guess from afar (I might be wrong ofc), a pitfall that objc did not tend to lead developers into.

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