jodrellblank (u/jodrellblank)

jodrellblank commented on An Implementation of J (1992) jsoftware.com/ioj/ioj.htm... · Posted by u/ofalkaed

kaoD · a day ago

I kinda liked J but my gripe with it is that I have to learn it almost from scratch every time I try to use it.

The tacit syntax is too idiosyncratic (I always forget the different types of verb trains) and I'm not entirely convinced it actually helped me as a "tool of thought" (but it might just be me not sticking with it long enough to be able to decode The Matrix).

I wish multidimensional arrays were a first-class citizen in my main languages though.

jodrellblank · 17 hours ago

> "tool of thought"

I felt compelled to make a comment about that last week[1]; I stopped thinking of it like "APL is a tool for thought [and nothing else is]" and started thinking of it like the Sapir-Whorf idea; all programming languages and mathematical notations are tools for thought and we don't normally talk about them like that. Their designs promote/encourage/ease some ways of thinking about problems and reveal some patterns in the data and the algorithms, and on the flip side by making design choices they necessarily demote/discourage/frustrate other ways of thinking and obscure some patterns.

It's not just that Go has Goroutines in it as a technical feature, it's that having a first class way to express that feature encourages Go developers to think about solving problems in terms of Goroutines. A bit like "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to looks like a nail". But we still go down the direction of making a kitchen-sink language which has a bodge of half-implemented mismatched features from different areas wedged awkwardly into its syntax, and then saying "this company only does Java" or "only uses C++" instead of making smaller simpler tools that fit particular problems and working on ways to learn about them and integrate them.

> "I wish multidimensional arrays were a first-class citizen in my main languages though."

It has not helped you but you wish you had access to it because it's changed the way you think? Same; it has changed the way I think about bulk-transforming arrays of data, and using intermediate array structures, and thinking it's good to have an interpreter layer which transforms a whole array using SIMD/vector extensions instead of a loop which does individual non-SIMD tests on items so it can exit part way through the array to "save time".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183808

jodrellblank commented on An Implementation of J (1992) jsoftware.com/ioj/ioj.htm... · Posted by u/ofalkaed

oddthink · a day ago

The current version is at https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource

jodrellblank · 17 hours ago

There is a relatively recent episode of the ArrayCast array language podcast with Henry Rich who is the primary maintainer and developer of J, talking about new features: https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode104-j96

Click on the show notes and there are links to previous episodes with him, talking about the J engine implementation, updates in J 9.03, threading and faster bignum calculations in J 9.04, updates in J 9.5, his views on tacit programming, etc.

jodrellblank commented on If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain? 1393.xyz/writing/if-a-met... · Posted by u/rdgthree

rdgthree · 20 hours ago

If you're interested in my personal chain-of-thought on the subject:

This was where I started pulling this thread (October 2025): https://1393.xyz/writing/could-the-root-cause-of-alzheimers-...

And this is an even further ancestor of the ideas (December 2023): https://1393.xyz/writing/are-we-only-conscious-while-were-le...

I'm operating off of my own subjective experience, and this idea lines up tightly with System 1 and System 2 in cognitive psychology.

It seems that many jump to "AI psychosis" when one mentions magnetic fields, but the evolutionary tree is very straightforward:

1. Nature evolves magnetoreception for navigation

2. Eventually, a brain in nature with magnetoreception accidentally "hears" its own magnetic field with with resonance

3. That lossy global summary of the brains ends up being an evolutionarily advantageous "higher-order sense"

4. Evolution sharpens the blade for many years

On first principles, that seems perfectly viable and even likely given that magnetoreception was such a boon for survival for all life.

Just glad others are finding it interesting!

jodrellblank · 19 hours ago

Then how can we exist around large magnetic fields without them affecting us mentally - no forgetting, no dropping unconscious, no trippy psychedelic experiences - seemingly nothing at all? How come our mains electricity does not not act on our minds analogously to a blowtorch on our skin, or a hydraulic press on our bones?

MRI machines at 3 Tesla field strength are 100,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and pulsed very fast. They affect the spin of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atoms in the body, but apparently have no effect on the person's brain or consciousness (or biomagnetite)? We wear headphones with electromagnetic coils pulsing music on the sides of our heads for hours at a time, with no effect. We use machine's powerful electric motors, work near them, we're surrounded by alternating currents in wires, some people experiment with Tesla Coils, MagLev capable of lifting trains, wireless power delivery...

(PS. Red / Arctic Foxes might be able to see the Earth's magnetic field and use it to help find mice to hunt; they listen for mice they can't see and jump-pounce into the snow and their jumps are successful at getting the mouse 80% of the time when they are facing North-East and only 18% of the time when they aren't - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foxes-use... )

jodrellblank commented on LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted old.reddit.com/r/mildlyin... · Posted by u/bj-rn

newsoftheday · 2 days ago

Our LCD TV is almost 2 decades old. If we upgrade, I can guarantee we won't be connecting it to the Internet. Also none of our smart appliances are connected to the Internet.

jodrellblank · 2 days ago

You won’t get a choice; they will come with a 5G connection that doesn’t ask you, doesn’t notify you, doesn’t cost you, and has no user-visible toggle. Like cars do these days. And a mesh-networking fallback so if you’re in a city and your neighbour also has one of the similar brand it will connect through their internet instead.

jodrellblank commented on New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care swordhealth.com/newsroom/... · Posted by u/RicardoRei

SideburnsOfDoom · 4 days ago

> No it isn't, it's like a questionnaire on how hungry you are before and after dinner.

I think that it should be clear from the above extended metaphor that I fundamentally disagree with this idea, and so dismissing it with "No it isn't" will do nothing at all for me.

That it does nothing for me is also a refutation of the idea that therapy is always easy "someone gives you a bit of information, like a switch was flipped, done": No, it isn't.

Few architectural refactorings are "int32 to int64" quick. My experience is that sometimes you have to work through stuff. To dig. Habits that are learned over decades aren't that easily changed. Like a gym session, if it's always easy then you're not doing the work.

Reassurance can work, but IMHO you'll be back soon enough, as the root cause hasn't been addressed, just the symptom.

But this is not my field and I don't have much more to say on the topic, except that if chugging some simple agreeable affirmations are all that you need, by all means listen to the LLM. The sycophancy machine can do that.

jodrellblank · 4 days ago

> "I think that it should be clear from the above extended metaphor that I fundamentally disagree with this idea, and so dismissing it with "No it isn't" will do nothing at all for me."

I'm citing a medical doctor and clinical psychologist with decades of experience who has recorded a hundred hours of training podcasts, and linking actual therapy sessions that you can listen to, and you're saying "no it isn't" with nothing to back that up except "you reckon it isn't".

> "the idea that therapy is always easy "someone gives you a bit of information, like a switch was flipped, done": No, it isn't. Habits that are learned over decades aren't that easily changed."

Nobody said it was always easy. Yes they are. People try to quit smoking cold turkey three times a week for five years. Then they read Alan Carr's "The Easy Way to Quit Smoking" and then they don't want to smoke anymore and there's no talk of "quitting" because they aren't smokers and non-smokers don't need to quit. With the right understanding, the viewpoint flips and the mind is changed. Same with overweight people who try dieting for years and then have a health scare and sometimes that switches it so they change instantly (and sometimes it doesn't). Most things won't easily change a habit, like most changes in code won't fix a specific bug. But some changes can, and we should look for them.

> "Like a gym session, if it's always easy then you're not doing the work."

This is some Puritanical suffering-culture, or some one-upmanship manliness culture. This is the reason I mentioned the int32 to int64, sometimes it might require searching to find insight, but there's no points for searching harder and trying harder, if you can have the same insight in two hours instead of two years, that's good not bad. The Universe doesn't give points for "doing the work" and brute-forcing a solution instead of a quicker solution (I suspect one of your beliefs does).

> "Reassurance can work, but IMHO you'll be back soon enough, as the root cause hasn't been addressed"

This is strawmanning or not understanding; this is addressing the root cause and not reassurance; the step of "paradoxical agenda setting" gets to the heart of why reassurance doesn't work. Someone who says "I lost my job, I didn't work hard enough, I am a loser" doesn't get helped by reassuring them that they are not a loser. It might be that they have a deep-seated value that "hard work is good" and they are getting into a human race condition where "reassurance that you aren't a loser" goes to "if I can think I'm a winner even when I don't try, then laziness can be winning, and I don't want that. I won't go there. So I reject the reassurance and return to my belief that I am a loser".

The fix is trace that loop and find the sticking point, and find a working technique to unstick it. Which is case-by-case individual, but somewhere like "I understand that feeling like a loser is the flip-side of my belief that hard work is good. How does my brain implement hard-work-is-good? By making hard work feel good and lazy work feel bad. This feeling-bad is the mechanism of how my ideal works! I actually want to keep the bad feeling because that's one of the things which guides me to work hard, and I value that. I can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other. What I've done is try to grab tightly to one side of this (hard work is good) and push away the other side (I'm a loser because I didn't work hard) but they're the same thing, so grabbing it hard is pulling it back while pushing it away. Brain has responded by dialing it up to 11 and shouting "LOSER" all the time louder and louder because I'm trying not to listen. It doesn't make sense to judge a whole self as a winner or loser, people have lots of components some good and some bad. It doesn't make sense to say "I didn't work hard" at work because there were times when I did work hard. So actually I want to keep the feeling "I am a loser if I don't work hard" because it encourages me to work harder (which I value). I want it dialled down instead and focused on individual areas of life, not judging all of me all the time".

and with that understanding clicking, finally listening to the thought that's been running around, accepting it as a thing you asked for, that reminds you of something else you value, it 'suddenly' calms down. Acknowledged. Part of you, accepted, integrated, welcomed.

> "if chugging some simple agreeable affirmations are all that you need, by all means listen to the LLM. The sycophancy machine can do that."

Can you see this as the typical HN cynicaler-than-thou putdown? Maybe the reader will think you're a really tough C++ programmer who only values science and muscles, instead of a woke hippy gullible loser? But you don't look tough for changing "therapy skills developed over decades" into "simple agreeable affirmations" you just look like you don't understand and are embarrassed.

jodrellblank commented on New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care swordhealth.com/newsroom/... · Posted by u/RicardoRei

SideburnsOfDoom · 5 days ago

> Reasoning that if he's not good it would show up in patients thinking he's bad, and not feeling any better.

This is like a questionnaire on how much stronger you feel after working out at a gym: you often don't, you feel tired.

Both gym and talking therapy (when done correctly) will push you slightly out of your comfort zone, and aim to let you safely deal with moderate amounts of something that you find really hard. So as to expand your capabilities.

"I feel good" immediately after is utterly the wrong metric.

Being more capable / feeling better some time later is the more reliable indicator, like progress at a gym.

And also this is why an agreeable statistical word generator LLM is not the correct tool for the job.

jodrellblank · 4 days ago

No it isn't, it's like a questionnaire on how hungry you are before and after dinner. If you eat carrot air and parsley and your hunger stays the same, dinner was a failure. If you eat bread and soup and your hunger diminishes a bit, it helped but you might need more dinner.

> "will push you slightly out of your comfort zone, and aim to let you safely deal with moderate amounts of something that you find really hard."

You can listen to some of those sessions and see that this is not what Dr Burns does[1]. His model is: it's not events which make us feel down, it's the thoughts we have about those events. You can see it yourself when you are stressing about something for ages, and someone gives you a bit of information "the surgeon says it all went well" and your worry leaves like a switch was flipped. You don't debug an integer overflow by progressively increasing int32 to int33 to int34, you spend the time understanding the problem and then you quickly change int32 to int64 and the program handles larger numbers instantly.

If we can't let go of negative thoughts then we get stuck with lots of them, it's why people repeat certain things like "I hate him", "It's my fault and I deserve to be punished", "I'm a failure", "I'm a loser nobody loves me", "I'm a bad mother", "I'm a coward" or whatever - on mental loop, minute after minute sometimes for years or decades, retriggering the same pattern of negative feelings every time. He sets up an environment where the patient is willing and able to work with him (empathy) and guides the patient to see the reasons why they can't let go of those thoughts and how they could let go, and with a click of understanding the thought leaves, and that's a moment of near-instant transformation not a progressive overload, and that specific thought is fixed, and then they do another and another until the patient is happy they have been helped with the thing they wanted help with.

[1] mostly, sometimes for anxiety he does use exposure therapy

jodrellblank commented on New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care swordhealth.com/newsroom/... · Posted by u/RicardoRei

sungho_ · 5 days ago

The links you provided need a control group to be considered proof. The key is how it compares to when counseling was provided by just a friend, not an expert.

jodrellblank · 4 days ago

You don't think we'd all know it if "talking to a friend" for a couple of hours cured years of anxiety, depression, anger, sadness, hoplessness, anxiety, etc. ? Would we even have therapists/therapy if that were the case?

jodrellblank commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin

thomasm6m6 · 5 days ago

Here it is: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/news.html

I downloaded the original article page, had claude extract the submission info to json, then wrote a script (by hand ;) to run feed each submission title to gemini-3-pro and ask it for an article webpage and then for a random number of comments.

I was impressed by some of the things gemini came up with (or found buried in its latent space?). Highlights:

"You’re probably reading this via your NeuralLink summary anyway, so I’ll try to keep the entropy high enough to bypass the summarizer filters."

"This submission has been flagged by the Auto-Reviewer v7.0 due to high similarity with "Running DOOM on a Mitochondria" (2034)."

"Zig v1.0 still hasn't released (ETA 2036)"

The unprompted one-shot leetcode, youtube, and github clones

Nature: "Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status" / "Buy Article PDF - $89.00 USD" / "Log in with WorldCoin ID"

"Gemini Cloud Services (formerly Bard Enterprise, formerly Duet AI, formerly Google Brain Cloud, formerly Project Magfi)"

Github Copilot attempts social engineering to pwn the `sudo` repo

It made a Win10 "emulator" that goes only as far as displaying a "Windows Defender is out of date" alert message

"dang_autonomous_agent: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675309 because it was devolving into a flame war about the definition of 'deprecation'."

jodrellblank · 4 days ago

"It's scary stuff. Radically advanced. - I mean, it was smashed, it didn't work, but it gave us ideas, took us in new directions, things we would've never Th..."

jodrellblank commented on New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care swordhealth.com/newsroom/... · Posted by u/RicardoRei

ffuxlpff · 5 days ago

It is still debated if therapies even work. The evidence is moving to the direction that they don't.

jodrellblank · 5 days ago

It's not the past anymore, we don't need to debate, we can watch and listen to actual recordings of therapy sessions and the patients going from feeling variously bad to better. Here's Dr David Burns channel with a 4hr video of a session with a woman who is obsessively anxious about her college-age daughter's safety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on2N5DsKHRk

Here's a 2.5 hour session (split into several videos) with a doctor who has a bad relationship with his son and felt like a failure for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42JDnrD106w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5H2YGljhqQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ9_0j_fmeg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiCrdGVa8Q0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cARvhlTckaM

Here's a couple of hour session with Marilyn who was diagnosed with lung cancer and spiraling with depression, anxiety, shame, loneliness, hopelessness, demoralization, and anger, despite her successful career:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7sQ_zDGsY8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyuFN4mbGZQ (there's probably more parts to find through YouTube somehow)

And a session with Lee with loneliness and marriage relationship problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imEMM3r6XL8 (probably more parts as well)

It's like saying "it is still debated if debugging even works" as if all languages, all debuggers, all programmers, all systems, are the same and if you can find lots of people who can't debug then "debugging doesn't work". But no, you only need a few examples of "therapy working" to believe that it works, and see the whole session to see that it isn't just luck or just the relief of talking, but is a skill and a technique and a debugging of the mind.

jodrellblank commented on New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care swordhealth.com/newsroom/... · Posted by u/RicardoRei

auspiv · 5 days ago

And real therapists are good right?

jodrellblank · 5 days ago

As I sometimes repeat on HN, Dr David Burns started giving his patients a survey at the start and end of every session, to rate how he was doing as the therapist and to rate their feelings, on a scale of 1-5.

Reasoning that if he's not good it would show up in patients thinking he's bad, and not feeling any better. And then he could tune his therapy approaches towards the ones which make people feel better and rate him as more understanding and listening and caring. And he criticises therapists who won't do that, therapists who say patients have been seeing them for years with only incremental improvements or no improvements.

Yes there's no objective way to measure how angry or suicidal or anxious someone is and compare two people, but if someone is subjectively reporting 5/5 sadness about X at the start of a session and wants help with X, then at some point in the future they should be reporting that number going down or they aren't being helped. And more effective help could mean that it goes down to 1/5 in three sessions instead of down to 4/5 in three years, and that's a feedback loop which (he says) has got him to be able to help people in a single two-hour therapy session, where most therapists and insurance companies will only do a too-short session with no feedback loop.