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huijzer

3,982 karma · joined August 3, 2019

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huijzer··on Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning (2011)
> You can pose and answer questions that make sense within in the system.

Yes this is one of my critiques of the academic system (I have finished a PhD and will hopefully never work at a university ever again). Many papers in the introduction start with explaining how the study builds on plenty of previous research, but that alone doesn’t prove that something is a good direction to investigate. If academics were completely honest, many papers would write “We researched topic X because we got funding for it. But since we actually don’t care about X, we just wrote a proposal about our favorite niche topic that only one of the co-authors cares about, namely topic Y, and wrote it such that it sounds like X. Next we show that Y is actually very cool in the hope to convince others that it is cool plus to convince others of the conclusion that our most senior professor already found during the PhD which was 30 years ago. Apart from the professor, we don’t believe in the main argument of the paper but since he got the grant we’ll just go with it in the hope to one day be able to push our own ideas forward”.

huijzer··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
> Another way to view this is that driving a cybertruck every day is quite wasteful (no different than driving a full size gas pickup every day). One recharge cycle in a cybertruck uses enough energy to power a typical home for 8 days, 130kWh.

Driving in general uses a lot of energy. It’s the physically moving a 1,000 kg or more object that takes a lot of energy. Orders of magnitude more than a few lights or a phone. Same with flying of course; also moving a heavy object.

huijzer··on Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too
Biblically speaking, spirits from the vasty deep must be demons since they are from below and angels, God and Jesus are from above. So in that sense it’s not very impressive. Demons are something a sane person would rather avoid.
huijzer··on Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
I’m very much surprised but also not. I recently gave Astra a 3D model file and asked Astra to build a viewer for it, and it figured out the data structures in no time. What I mean to say is that AI is insanely good at things that we humans would never do since the work would be too monotonous.

I wouldn’t mind if AI progress would stop right here and now, but I fear it will continue, and increase inequality in society which is contrary to what the CEOs say (as usual).

huijzer··on GitHub Incident with Actions, Pages, and Webhooks
Ever since I switched to Forgejo (could do Gitea or other self-hosted too), my outages have gone down to basically zero. It’s only down when I do maintenance but since I’m not pushing code at the same time it doesn’t matter
huijzer··on If IPv4 were land
Unsurprisingly, the map is very similar to the World Population Density Map: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00
huijzer··on APC says let there be light, with standards to speed up photonics manufacturing
Very Biblical title (or anti-Biblical depending on how you look at it).

Genesis 1:3, "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

huijzer··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Say we have a trivial function like this

    func below_ten()
      if 10 < x
        println(“true”)
      else
        println(“false”)
      end
    end
Now what would a test for these two paths test? It would basically be writing down the same - easy to understand logic - in a less generalized way. Good perhaps to ensure that this function doesn’t accidentally change over time but apart from that it wouldn’t add much value.
huijzer··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
> Untyped languages often have tests that effectively implement a type system as software grows and the developer count grows. That seems like a waste…

Nicely put. A very verbose type system that is also placed too far away from the definitions indeed

huijzer··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
> 100% test coverage

I don’t believe in 100% test coverage. Especially outside some very specific cases, it just adds a lot of code with little to no value.

huijzer··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
It sounds essentially like 1984. Not that the world needed him for that though because with the most recent Samsung TV scandal about microphone and camera spying on users it seems also that fiction became reality to a certain extent.
huijzer··on Lean now ships with verified kernels
> A coworker recently remarked that lean seems like a new foundational language family that every programmer should be able to read

Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Why? I’ve worked a bit with proving systems in my studies, but it seems to me that it is very hard to turn precise mathematical statements into useful programs. Perhaps for the core logic, but GUIs or any other state with the outside world is going to be difficult it seems to me

huijzer··on DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017
> haven't fully realized/felt the cost implications of trainwreck software yet

As long as the API is private or not dependent on by automated systems and you have good test coverage, you can get away with bad code IMO since you can always refactor. If it looks stupid but it works (and can be refactored/fixed/improved later if needed) it aint stupid.

huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
From my few months of work, that seems likely yes. I'm way stronger in core and legs now.
huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
I don’t know where you live but here in the Netherlands we always turn the power off first. (Another thing I like about the trades so far are jokes like this.)
huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
Thanks! That's kind of you
huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
I'm in ship construction (industrial)
huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
I have done multiple studies and they were always technical, so the company took a shot and hired me and would train me on the job. So far it's going well. They say I'm picking up stuff quickly and I occasionally help the head engineers with problems on their computers. This would probably be the same for most programmers. Reading drawings, connecting electrical circuits, and doing troubleshooting is surprisingly similar to programming.
huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.

Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.

huijzer··on 90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks
> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.

huijzer··on Tiny Little Office
> AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you

Now I see your point. Fair enough

huijzer··on Tiny Little Office
> Landing pages are always a proxy for quality.

Always is a very strong claim.

Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.

huijzer··on An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust
Agreed. Especially given that I downloaded one app and got a generic launcher instead that then allowed me to download a specific app.
huijzer··on An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust
> and providing cloud features

I prefer to not have those in my text editor

huijzer··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
I don’t care much about both. Just like to be doing something useful for a change (I did a PhD before this).
huijzer··on I Deleted 168,000 Lines of Comments. My AI Agent Didn't Notice
Makes sense if the comments were AI generated as the author writes since AI during reading the code has roughly the same context as with which it produces the comments. I would be more curious for a test with human written comments.
huijzer··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
In a few days, I created a few apps with AI. One saves multiple mechanics 5-15 minutes per day and another can save multiple hours of mistakes during the project, and one saves a lead engineer 15 minutes per day. These savings should add up over multiple years assuming all keeps running as it does now. I’m having good hopes because there have been few bugs so far. Mostly just tweaking.
huijzer··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Disney. You mean the company that hid an image of topless woman in The Rescuers (1977) movie and from which many child stars have gone off the rails in later life, main actor kissing a 11 old in Blank Check (1994), and the 2026 lawsuit by Raquel Lee Bolleau among other scandals that anyone as a parent would hope not to be there
huijzer··on A Modern Web App in C
SQLite is a database. The main idea of a database is to support concurrent reads/writes although databases differ in how much concurrency they allow
huijzer··on A Modern Web App in C
But the real question is, does Caddy support it?

The answer is: it does but via community plugins.

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