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etler commented on Show HN: Higher-order transform streams: 10x faster AI with recursive prompts   timetler.com/2025/08/23/p... · Posted by u/etler
uxabhishek · 4 months ago
The "relay pattern" and use of yield* for delegating between async iterables is elegant.

How does the overhead of managing the 50 agents affect overall resource utilization? Also, how does the system handle errors in one of the child streams? Does it cascade and halt the entire process, or is there a mechanism for retrying or gracefully degrading?

Looking forward to seeing how this develops!

etler · 4 months ago
Very good questions! I still need to flesh out the patterns. While streams of streams are common in functional programming environments, I simply haven't seen them in class based streaming patterns anywhere so they're things to figure out.

Of course, more streams means more resource utilization, there's not getting around that, but that's the cost of parallelism. The use of `yield*` should keep the overhead to a bare minimum. Since the streams are being left alone and aren't consumed until needed, that should preserve some of the back-pressure behavior, although I do need to look into that more deeply.

How the system handles errors probably doesn't have a single solution that works for all frameworks, so I think it should be up to the specific requirements of each use case, but there's also definitely more work to do to explore the options and the patterns.

These are all things I definitely want to hear ideas for as well!

The next thing I'm exploring is applying these patterns to web rendering which will be a real stress test for how they can be used.

etler commented on An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia   simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/tosh
etler · 4 months ago
I describe it as a word granularity search engine. Lossy encyclopedia is a great analogy too and fleshes it out.
etler commented on Something weird is going on with Switch 2 game development   polygon.com/switch-2-deve... · Posted by u/ezekg
etler · 4 months ago
They cited the demo of a port having performance issues several months before release. That seems like a complete non story to me. It's brand new hardware and nobody has experience porting to or optimizing for its specific specifications yet. Early ports being unstable and requiring optimizations all the way up to or even past the release date is standard at the point in a hardware cycle.
etler commented on A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in   nytimes.com/2025/08/26/te... · Posted by u/jaredwiener
stavros · 4 months ago
> When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing.
etler · 4 months ago
I think there is a need for the AI counseling use case, but it should not be provided by a general purpose AI assistant. It should be designed by professional psychologists and therapists, with greater safeguards like human check-ins to make sure users get the help they need.

The best way to stop this is to make those safeguards stronger and completely shut down the chat to refer users to seek help from a better service. Unfortunately those services don't really exist yet.

There would be false positives and that'll be annoying, but I think it's worth it to deal with some annoyance to ensure that general purpose AI assistants are not used for counseling people in a vulnerable mental state. They are not aligned to do that and they can easily be misaligned.

etler commented on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?    · Posted by u/stephenheron
etler · 4 months ago
Apple has vertical integration between their hardware and operating system meaning they have way more control. They can adapt their software to enable them to optimize their hardware in ways competitors can't.
etler commented on Malleable Software   mdubakov.me/malleable-sof... · Posted by u/tablet
etler · 4 months ago
For the Linear example, I would argue that adding too much flexibility would make the tool worse. Rigid workflows are consistent making them more robust and scalable. They work consistently needing less guidance or intervention.

When you find a rigid workflow that is both widely applicable and useful, that's how the most valuable companies are made. Those workflows can scale up with little intervention giving them incredibly high yield.

I think the new challenge is introducing flexibility in a controlled manner so we can minimize the added inconsistency needed to achieve broader goals. That way the workflow can find the right balance between robustness and flexiblity for the task at hand.

etler commented on F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash   cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/ala... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
dfox · 4 months ago
The article is somewhat sensationalistic. If you read the actual report you will find out that:

The pilot was not part of the conference call!

What froze was not hydraulic fluid for actuators (in some hydraulic line), but hydraulic fluid in the shock absorbers.

The last paragraph of the article and seems to be missing a few words and reads as the investigators blaming the people directly involved, which is essentially a complete opposite of what conclusions of the report say.

etler · 4 months ago
The call was being relayed to the pilot by the flight supervisor. While he wasn't "on" the call, I think it's fair to say he was "part" of the call. He's still getting live tech support and trying to trouble shoot the plane while flying it. He had an intermediary but I don't think that totally changes the scenario.
etler commented on F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash   cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/ala... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
diggan · 4 months ago
> The article is somewhat sensationalistic

somewhat sensationalistic?! The article clearly tries to give the impression the pilot was on the call:

> A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes on an airborne conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a problem with his fighter jet before he ejected

Knowing the quality of media these days, it wouldn't surprise me if it CNN just got it really wrong, but also wouldn't surprise me they'd do some brazen lie for clicks.

Edit: Reading the report, it seems like you, dear fellow HN commentator, got it wrong in this case, sorry to say :) Seems indeed the pilot itself was on the call:

> The mishap pilot (MP), assigned to the 354th FW, ejected safely before impact. [...] The MP initiated a conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers. The MA held for approximately 50 minutes while the team developed a plan of action

Page 35 from https://www.pacaf.af.mil/Portals/6/documents/3_AIB%20Report....

etler · 4 months ago
I think there's just some nuance to the scenario. The pilot wasn't directly on the call, but was participating in the call with the flight supervisor relaying the information.

I'd compare it to being in the room with someone on a conference phone call and they're relaying the conversation to you and them both ways. I would still say you were participating in the call even though you weren't directly on the call.

Also, he did initiate the call so "F-35 pilot held" is imprecise, but not totally wrong. Either way, the pilot was in an active tech support session with the plane engineers, making this one of the most intense tech support calls in history.

etler commented on Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming?    · Posted by u/amichail
etler · 4 months ago
I use AI 90% for research, learning, and prototyping. It's increased my interest because before, I felt that I didn't have time to do all those things, now I can expand my knowledge so much faster that it makes greater challenges feel more attainable.

u/etler

KarmaCake day884June 25, 2012
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