nathan_douglas (u/nathan_douglas)

nathan_douglas commented on Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs arxiv.org/abs/2512.20798... · Posted by u/tiny-automates

sigmoid10 · a day ago

>who during their "careers" in the military were in effect being "kept", by being provided housing, clothing and free meals.

Long term I can see this happen for all humanity where AI takes over thinking and governance and humans just get to play pretend in their echo chambers. Might not even be a downgrade for current society.

nathan_douglas · a day ago

    All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (Richard Brautigan)

    I like to think (and
    the sooner the better!)
    of a cybernetic meadow
    where mammals and computers
    live together in mutually
    programming harmony
    like pure water
    touching clear sky.

    I like to think
    (right now, please!)
    of a cybernetic forest
    filled with pines and electronics
    where deer stroll peacefully
    past computers
    as if they were flowers
    with spinning blossoms.

    I like to think
    (it has to be!)
    of a cybernetic ecology
    where we are free of our labors
    and joined back to nature,
    returned to our mammal
    brothers and sisters,
    and all watched over
    by machines of loving grace.

nathan_douglas commented on Reverse Engineering the Prom for the SGI O2 mattst88.com/blog/2026/02... · Posted by u/mattst88

userbinator · 3 days ago

In the PC world this would be known as "BIOS modding".

The first two instructions looked legitimate, but the third looked unlikely to be a real instruction.

Given that the first appears to be a branch, that's not surprising. When disassembling, not following the flow will likely not give you anything meaningful. If the author is reading this: have you tried Ghidra?

That said, this seems a lot simpler than PC BIOSes in structure, as the latter are usually written in a combination of C and Asm (I can see why no one wanted to write MIPS Asm) and are self-extracting compressed archives.

nathan_douglas · 2 days ago

> I can see why no one wanted to write MIPS Asm

At least in comparison to x86 assembly, MIPS assembly seemed very elegant and rich to me at the time. I wanna say that MIP R4K had 32 integer registers and 16/32 double- or single-precision float registers, but don't quote me on that. Either way, it was an embarrassment of riches :)

nathan_douglas commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) · Posted by u/david927

nathan_douglas · 2 days ago

Bitwit: Learn CS, logic, and math theory (_not_ DSA) with spaced repetition: https://bit-wit.com/

I was hit by a big wave of depression last year. That crisis gave me a couple of periods of hyperfocus, and I thought I might as well use them to try to improve my mind and my ability to reason.

I haven't had good results learning certain subjects, like CS/math, with Anki or other flash card systems. The only thing that ever seemed to work for me was doing a lot of problems with pencil and paper. But without problems exercising those tools or techniques, they tended to just evaporate from my mind.

So my idea was to combine spaced repetition and problem presentation, and create a system for generating problems and validating their solutions randomly and parametrically. So successive presentations of the same card would present a different problem... and the overall effect would hopefully be that you learn the invariants that each card is trying to present, instead of memorizing some combination of variables and values. Sort of MathAcademy but for CS.

I _think_ it's feature-complete at this point, though I'm still working on validating and publishing cards (and there are a couple of things I wanna do to improve security). I'm pretty early in the dogfooding process, and I'm still the only person using it, and there are definitely bugs. But if anyone would like to try it out, I'd be delighted to hear your feedback (email in profile, also on site). Just maybe go a little easy on me right now, lol :/

The Boolean Logic and Lambda Calculus subjects are free forever, and the first topic of each other subject is also free, so if you're intrigued you can use it for quite some time (literally months) before even needing to provide an email address. No need to pay for anything.

nathan_douglas commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026) · Posted by u/whoishiring

nathan_douglas · 9 days ago

    Location: US/Ohio
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Backend / DevOps / Infra / Platform
    Résumé/CV: https://ndouglas.github.io/resume/resume.pdf
    LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nug-doug/
    GitHub: https://github.com/ndouglas/
    Email: smooth.gift2502 AT tenesm DOT us

Pretty boring dude, 14+ years of experience in various areas of engineering. I'm looking to switch jobs only because I intend to move to Europe in ~2.5 years and that's a no-go with my current employer. I'm very interested in science and research.

My professional work's covered in my résumé, but that's mostly boring. I've also written a NES emulator [1], an ECS-based Lisp machine/rule engine [2], a self-organizing gossip mesh that learns to play Flappy Bird [3], and ported _Zork_ to Clojure for no good reason [4]. I also started working on a Math/CS educational site late last year to combat a wave of depression [5].

I'm a bit of an odd duck and don't fit what many teams are seeking, but I'm always growing and getting better, usually in the weirdest possible way. If you're interested, I'd love to hear from you.

[1] https://github.com/ndouglas/greenstone [2] https://github.com/ndouglas/longtable [3] https://github.com/ndouglas/whispers [4] https://github.com/ndouglas/clork [5] https://bit-wit.com/

nathan_douglas commented on Apple, What Have You Done? onlinegoddess.net/2026/01... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

OhMeadhbh · 16 days ago

Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1]

Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing.

[1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s.

[2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.

nathan_douglas · 16 days ago

I'd love to read that memoir. I feel like the NeXT era is really interesting but somewhat less covered than other periods.

nathan_douglas commented on I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years (2016) snellman.net/blog/archive... · Posted by u/flaghacker

Neywiny · 2 months ago

And yet here I sit, writing ring buffers, and never thinking about this idea. Probably because of the power of two issue. Which isn't actually a problem because as he points out, who would do that? But it makes me think that it's a restriction that it just isn't.

But in all honesty, look for more embedded jobs, then. We can certainly use the help.

nathan_douglas · 2 months ago

What do you work with (if you don't mind answering)? I'm looking for a change and like low-level stuff about as much as I like any other level. I've done some cycle-accurate NES emulation and VM implementation stuff - I'm not much of a DSA guy but performance and efficiency appeal to me.

nathan_douglas commented on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas' finalroundai.com/blog/aws... · Posted by u/birdculture

GeoAtreides · 2 months ago

When I first opened QBasic, <N> years ago, when I was a wee lad, the online QBasic help didn't replace my trusty qbasic book (it supplemented it, maybe), nor did it write the programs for me. It was just there, doing nothing, waiting for me to press F1.

AI, on the other hand...

nathan_douglas · 2 months ago

I couldn't make head nor tails of the QBasic help back in the day. I wanted to. I remember reading the sections about integers and booleans and trying to make sense out of them. I think I did manage to figure out how to use subroutines eventually, but it took quite a lot of time and frustration. I wish I'd had a book... or a deeper programming class. The one I had never went further than loops. No arrays, etc.

</resurgent-childhood-trauma>

nathan_douglas commented on Terrain Diffusion: A Diffusion-Based Successor to Perlin Noise arxiv.org/abs/2512.08309... · Posted by u/kelseyfrog

unconed · 2 months ago

1) A system that needs _seconds per tile_ is not suitable for real-time anything imo.

The irony is that you explicitly posited your thing as a successor to Perlin noise when in fact, it's just a system that hallucinates detail on top of Perlin (feature) noise. This is dishonest paper bait and the kind of AI hubris that will piss off veterans in the scene.

2) I'm also disappointed that nowhere is there any mention of Rune Johansen's LayerGen which is the pre-AI tech that is the real precedent here.

Every time I see a paper from someone trying to apply AI to classic graphics tech, it seems they haven't done the proper literature study and just cite other AI papers. It seems they also haven't talked to anyone who knows the literature either. https://runevision.com/tech/layerprocgen/

3) >The top level input is perlin noise because it is genuinely the best tool for generating terrain at continental scale

This is a non-sense statement. I don't know what you are thinking here at all, except maybe that you are mistakenly using "Perlin" as a group noun for an entire style of functions.

Perlin has all sorts of well-known issues, from the overall "sameyness" (due to the mandatory zero-crossings and consistent grid size) as well as the vertical symmetry which fails to mimic erosion. Using it as the input to a feature vector isn't going to change that at all.

The idea of using plate tectonics is much better, but, vastly _different_ from what you have done. And btw, every plate tectonics simulation that I've seen does not look convincing. If you treat it as a simple transport problem, the result just looks like a Civilization 1 map. But if you want to treat it seriously, then the tectonics have to be the source of all your elevation changes, and not just some AI hallucination on top afterwards. The features would all have to make sense.

Your abstract states that classic terrains are "fundamentally limited in coherence"... but even to my non-geologist eye, your generated heightmaps seem incredibly blobby and uncanny. This makes me think that a real geologist would immediately spot all sorts of things that don't make any sense. For example, if you added water and rivers to the terrain, would it work, or would you end up with non-sense loops and Escher-like watersheds?

(mostly I'm disappointed that the level of expertise in AI tech is so low that all these things have to be pointed out instead of being things you already knew)

nathan_douglas · 2 months ago

> And btw, every plate tectonics simulation that I've seen does not look convincing.

It's an amazing problem! I haven't spent much time on it - maybe 20-30 hours spread out over several years - but it _is_ something I come back to from time to time. And it usually ends up with me sitting there, staring at my laptop screen, thinking, "but what if I... no, crap. Or if we... well... no..."

TBH it's one of the things that excites me, because it makes it clear how far we still have to go in terms of figuring out these planet-scale physical processes, simulating them, deriving any meaningful conclusions, etc. Still so much to learn!

nathan_douglas commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled? reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon

aynyc · 2 months ago

I don't know about Stanford students' actual disability, so I can't say much to that. I went to shitty high school and decent middle school in relatively poor middle class neighborhood. Now, I live in a wealthy school district. The way parents in the two different neighborhood treat "learning disability" is mind blowing.

In my current school district, IEP (Individual Education Program) is assigned to students that need help, and parents are actively and explicitly ask for it, even if the kids are borderline. Please note that, this doesn't take away resource for regular kids, in fact, classrooms with IEP student get more teachers so everyone in that class benefits. IEP students are also assigned to regular classroom so they are not treated differently and their identities aren't top secret. Mind you, the parents here can easily afford additional help if needed.

In other neighborhood, a long time family friend with two young children, the older one doesn't talk in school, period. Their speech is clearly behind. The parents refuse to have the kids assign IEP and insist that as long as the child is not disruptive, there is no reason to do so. Why the parents don't want to get help, because they feel the older child will get labelled and bullied and treated differently. The older child hates school and they are only in kindergarten. Teachers don't know what to do with the child.

nathan_douglas · 2 months ago

My kid hated school in kindergarten as well. As did I. I didn't get any kind of intervention, and I feel like that set me on a terrible course.

My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.

I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.

nathan_douglas commented on The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-... · Posted by u/pondsider

stevenalowe · 2 months ago

The commercial problem with Thinking Machines was that they had to ship a programmer with every one sold because almost no one knew how to program a SIMD machine in Occam

nathan_douglas · 2 months ago

No wonder Dennis Nedry was so aggrieved...