skrellm

This is too bloated to my taste. I've written a similar solution, but mine is a dependency-free single function only library, uses military-grade encryption and has multi-arch, multi-language support too (JS, PHP, Python, Lua, C).

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/enigma

It's FOSS (permissive MIT license), so you can use it in ULDA too if you'd like.

Don't be fooled! This is AI generated slop.

The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.

> Crows are somewhat unique as an animal in that they've got the ability to pass information off to other members of the flock, and to continue passing information down through generations as necessary.

Not that unique. My grandfather was a forester, his favourite time passing was to whistle back bird's song, changing only a little bit at a time, turning it slowly into something totally different. The changed song was passed to other birds and offsprings no probs.

The result was quite hilarious, you went to the primeval woods and you could hear wild birds singing the Für Elise... I bet it freaked out ornithologists!

(My granddad died about 30 years ago, sadly the bird "dialect" has vanished since, but I still have some old tapes in the attic.)

LOL, man, you made my day! Thank you!

(ps. There's a new episode of Mini Fantasy Theater I haven't seen yet, hurray! https://www.davidrevoy.com/tag/minifantasytheater)

> Whenever I read this anecdote, I want to believe it is largely made up. I don't want to believe that none of these towering intellects (let alone von Neumann himself) didn't instantly recognize the more elegant way to view the problem.

Knowing some bright minds I totally believe it.

Smart people tend to focus (zoom in) on one problem, entirely forgetting about the bigger picture (unless they "take a bath"). I guess von Neumann was likewise. I can totally imagine that he had to do calculations like this on a daily basis when the puzzle was presented to him, so he simply did what he was doing all along without examining the puzzle from another angle.

This is my favorite:

In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision.

The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour.

As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series.”

An alien (a Martian to be precise), because Douglas Engelbart was the time traveler.

Eh, I meant to write "allies and enemies alike".

I've also created a boot loader with a native bootable disk image creator tool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685301

My solution is a single, dependency-free, multiplatform CLI tool, which Just Works (tm). It's like using zip or tar from command line, as simple as possible. 100% AI-free.

For the record, these are 100% AI-free, and already tested by hundreds of contributors on real hardware.

> Yet the market can remain irrational for much longer than we can reason about.

It's already overdue.

> it isn't clear to me that Altman et al don't virally weave themselves into the DNA of the state, both in the USA and in its adversaries.

In the USA? Maybe. In its adversaries? Definitely no. Thanks to Trump's "Make America Negligible Again" campaign being extremely successful.

Adversaries and enemies alike, no exception, nobody trusts US any more, so everyone is already building their own stuff to get independent ASAP. Tech-bros have already lost their influence outside of the US.

No, you forgot about the dependencies (others said it to be 700Mb). And 2,900 LOC is still way too much for handling a remote API call, especially in a high level language such as Python where the biggest part of the task is delegated to separate modules.

I wrote an entire https client from ground up in 117 LOC (and in a low level language, not Python): https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/skrellm/-/blob/main/src/https.c

Again, this guy and me disagree on what "not a bloat" means.

ROTFL, I had to laugh so hard!

"Without the Bloat"

vs.

"litellm routes LLM calls across providers and translates between message formats. That core is buried under 100k+ LOC"

Seriously anybody considering 100k+ LOC not a bloat? You made my day!

Let's just say the author's and my definition of bloat is not the same. Full disclosure, I'm the guy who reimplemented etcher (over 400Mb) in a mere 300Kb, Capstone (over 1Mb) in only 66Kb and who compressed LPC charactersheets (over 700Mb) into 4Mb. That's my interpretation of "non-bloated".

Yeah, UNICODE messed this up, really badly.

Sometimes there's an offset (like with Latin, +/- 32), sometimes lowercase and uppercase is interleaved (eg. Latin extended), and sometimes they are in totally different blocks simply because they forgot to add both letter cases at once... (the distance of the codepoints affects UTF-8 encoding difference the most).

I've also paid attention to optimize the most common case where both UTF-8 encodings' first bytes are the same (that's 40508 pairs out of 40549). But no escape, it must handle the remaining 41 pairs specially in a slower code path, which would not be needed at all should UNICODE guys did their homework better.

I've also implemented a SIMD accelerated, but case in-sensitive (*) search algorithm as an stb-style single header library, also based on Wojciech Muła's work.

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/fast_memcasemem

See the performance comparison in the README, it's about 6 times faster than libc.

(*) - full UTF-8 support, but only works for UNICODE codepoints where the UTF-8 encoding lengths are the same for lowercase and uppercase. There are only 27 out of 40576 pairs which aren't handled (listed in the README).

> Just wait until they manage to apply it to physical goods like cars and dishwashers.

This already happened... It's called subscription or mortgage loan.

Most households don't have that kind of money at once, they are already forced into a loan with regular payments. This means not the buyer but the bank owns the car until the last penny is paid.

And in some cases your car's on-board software needs a constant connection with the vendor's servers (meaning it must be up and you must pay for a license too). https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/what-happens-to-a-car-w...

It's even worse with houses. Most gen Zs will never ever own their homes, they are implicitly forced to rent only (no ownership in sight). https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-giving-up-on-buying-a-home...

Brave new world.

Yeah, okay, I made the same mistake as Sony. I wrote "buy", but what I meant was "spending money" in a general sense (regardless if it's buying ownership or paying a license fee). Second hand customers simply can't afford (or willing to pay) the price of a new copy. Trying to force these people to the Sony shop is a really bad move and won't work.

Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.

> Especially getting rid of physical second hand sells/buys will force consumer to buy the games straight from Sony

That's what lawyers and other corporate drones think, but they are plain wrong.

The only reason why people want to buy a copy from second hand is because they can't afford the price of a new one. In reality these people will never ever buy straight from Sony, simply because it's too expensive for them. Simple as that. They much more likely to turn to free pirate copies instead.

Yeah, but the link talks about `ZwMapViewOfSection`. From that page:

> For calls from kernel-mode drivers, the NtXxx and ZwXxx versions of a Windows Native System Services routine can behave differently in the way that they handle and interpret input parameters.

How "differently" exactly? That's undocumented. And lots of other small (but very important) details are undocumented as well.

> I really, really disagree with that statement.

But you're wrong, although not for the reasons you think (suggested by your examples).

> I don’t think ai models come close to nuclear weapons

Unless AI models are controlling the drones/icbms carrying those. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/autonomou...

> or to run-of-the-mill, everyday carbon emissions

Unless AI models are responsible for those said emissions. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/amazon-funds-big...

> What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened with an LLM so far?

That it's built solely on "trust me, bro"?

> right now I am not concerned at all.

You should be. There's no scenario where this ends well: if AI labs succeed, we all will loose our jobs. If they fail, then the bubble bursts. Economic crisis is inevitable either way, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

> If companies are willing to pay top dollar for the best models

But they are not willing to pay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566137

The referenced NYT article says Open Source LLM's market share increased to 58% from yesteryear's 10%.

This is great! It can finally substitute the entire upper management!

Their job is easier to automate than an engineer's or any creative's, and considering their salary it's a lot more gain for any company!

> So you've verified this?

Yes, verified. I would not have said it otherwise.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/terms-of-service/

> 14.5. Class Action Waiver. > YOU AND THE SONY ENTITY WITH WHICH YOU HAVE A DISPUTE AGREE THAT ARBITRATION WILL BE CONDUCTED ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT IN A CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION [...]

> Regardless, these sorts of things have been fought before, over and over.

This specific case BTW: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.47...

I'm no lawyer, but IMHO they probably will reply that Sony has indeed violated CA. AB 2426 (effective since 01-jan-2025) and that Sony illegally tried to restrict customer rights in the first place, as per McGill v. Citibank https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2017/s...

> Class action civil case should still be doable?

Nope, because there's a stance in EULA's footnote (with extremely small letters) that you give up your rights to class action civil case.

> the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI

Nope. The actual main problem are those people who totally ignore the real costs of AI.

Remind me, when was the last time when billions and trillions of dollars were spent on workers (education, healthcare, insurance, etc. all together)?

You try to compare the capabilities without comparing the costs. That won't do.

And who is going to pay the bills for that?

No AI companies were able to make profit so far, and unemployed masses surely won't buy expensive ChatGPT subscriptions.

Will AI labs make profit from AI using companies? Hardly, unemployed masses can't and won't buy their products either, therefore they won't be able to afford even more expensive ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions. (For crying out loud, even big corps like Uber can't pay all their AI bills.)

And if AI labs have no profits, how are they supposed to pay the hyperscalers for computing capacity? They will run out of investor money pretty soon.

And if hyperscalers can't rent out their data centers to AI labs, how are they supposed to pay for the electricity (gas/diesel/etc.) and water bills and repay their already enormous debts?

I honestly don't see how replacing all workers with AI could be profitable at all.

> but it on the official MSDN site, and it does document a call in Ntdll.dll.

Does it? What's FILE_BASIC_INFORMATION? Link gives me 404. How do you replace kernel32 API with this?

> It’s easy to find many more examples such as https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winternl..., so I don’t think that’s an accident.

Again, how do you replace kernel32 API with this?

> In addition a bunch are documented in the driver docs, such as https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d....

This has nothing to do with ntdll at all.

I still don't get it, what's wrong with using the user32 and kernel32 APIs? It's stable, well-documented, and is the official API on Windows. So why not use it?

> I'm not sure its really correct to call UEFI programs bare metal.

I think you can. UEFI is a firmware which comes with the hardware, stored on the motherboard. It's there and automatically runs when you turn on your machine.

It's okay to consider the firmware part of the "bare metal", IMHO.

> no, you can also call ntdll (or even syscalls although those aren't stable), there's plenty of documentation on the internet

I mean officially. Yes, you can find some on the internet, but nothing on the official MSDN.

> but also why would you, not much point except for very niche functionality

Exactly. Using system DLL API is backward and forward compatible, and just as standardized and well-documented as the POSIX API. I see no problem relying on it.

(Sidenote: as a bonus, MSDN is surprisingly good, understandable, well organized, lots of examples. I rarely say this, but well done MS, that's how a dev doc should be.)

Visual programming is not for everyone. I have two kids, one loves Scratch, the other despises it.

Fun fact, Scratch wasn't the first iteration of visual programming, and one could argue that Lego NXT was even more successful. https://www.nxtprograms.com/help/learn.html