orbifold (u/orbifold)

orbifold commented on JOPA: Java compiler in C++, Jikes modernized to Java 6 with Claude github.com/7mind/jopa... · Posted by u/pshirshov

pshirshov · 24 days ago

> Is success mostly the result of it being able to test its output reliably, and of how easy it is to set up the environment for this testing?

I won't say so. From my experience the key to success is the ability to split big tasks into smaller ones and help the model with solutions when it's stuck.

Reproducible environments (Nix) help a lot, yes, same for sound testing strategies. But the ability to plan is the key.

orbifold · 24 days ago

One other thing I've observed is that Claude fares much better in a well engineered pre-existing codebase. It adopts to most of the style and has plenty of "positive" examples to follow. It also benefits from the existing test infrastructure. It will still tend to go in infinite loops or introduce bugs and then oscillate between them, but I've found it to be scarily efficient at implement medium sized features in complicated codebases.

orbifold commented on CDC to end all monkey research; will phase out HIV, infectious disease studies science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/zzzeek

gweinberg · a month ago

Right, just monkeys, and they only had 200 study monkeys in the first place. Pretty much a bacon double nothingingburger.

orbifold · a month ago

200 is a lot of monkeys

orbifold commented on US declines to join more than 70 countries in signing UN cybercrime treaty therecord.media/us-declin... · Posted by u/pcaharrier

tdb7893 · 2 months ago

One of my family members was a research director at the UN and came from a middle class American family. It has its problems (he certainly has his share of complaints) but the idea that they are all nepo babies is incorrect and they do have serious researchers. Also, are we sure that the $10.5 trillion is a UN generated number? Other people in the comments seem to think it was made up by some other organization.

orbifold · 2 months ago

A relative of mine worked for the UN and interfaced with the UN after they left for a non-profit. Anyone that knows anything about them and also just simply observing what and how they are doing things should have no doubt that it is filled with people that got there by using their connections. And you absolutely constantly run into people that have no business being there other than through nepotism. Btw. I am sure that US staff is less likely to be a total nepo baby, but because the UN "has" to hire from all over the world, most roles are not filled like that.

orbifold commented on US declines to join more than 70 countries in signing UN cybercrime treaty therecord.media/us-declin... · Posted by u/pcaharrier

nwellnhof · 2 months ago

> cybercrime — which the U.N. estimates costs $10.5 trillion around the world annually.

That's almost 10% of global GDP. Who comes up with these numbers?

orbifold · 2 months ago

It will all make sense once you realize who works at the UN, basically nepo babies of all colors and variety, including second cousins of Saudi royalty etc.

orbifold commented on Don't Force Your LLM to Write Terse [Q/Kdb] Code: An Information Theory Argument medium.com/@gabiteodoru/d... · Posted by u/gabiteodoru

neprotivo · 2 months ago

This approach of solving a problem by building a low-perplexity path towards the solution reminds me of Grothendieck's approach towards solving complex mathematical problems - you gradually build a theory which eventually makes the problem obvious.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/The+Rising+Sea

orbifold · 2 months ago

what is striking to me is how far reasoning by analogy and generalization can get you. some of the deepest theorems are about relating disparate things by analogy.

orbifold commented on Why did containers happen? buttondown.com/justincorm... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

alphazard · 2 months ago

Containers (meaning Docker) happened because CGroups and namespaces were arcane and required lots of specialized knowledge to create what most of us can intuitively understand as a "sandbox".

Cgroups and namespaces were added to Linux in an attempt to add security to a design (UNIX) which has a fundamentally poor approach to security (shared global namespace, users, etc.).

It's really not going all that well, and I hope something like SEL4 can replace Linux for cloud server workloads eventually. Most applications use almost none of the Linux kernel's features. We could have very secure, high performance web servers, which get capabilities to the network stack as initial arguments, and don't have access to anything more.

Drivers for virtual devices are simple, we don't need Linux's vast driver support for cloud VMs. We essentially need a virtual ethernet device driver for SEL4, a network stack that runs on SEL4, and a simple init process that loads the network stack with capabilities for the network device, and loads the application with a capability to the network stack. Make building an image for that as easy as compiling a binary, and you could eliminate maybe 10s of millions of lines of complexity from the deployment of most server applications. No Linux, no docker.

Because SEL4 is actually well designed, you can run a sub kernel as a process on SEL4 relatively easily. Tada, now you can get rid of K8s too.

orbifold · 2 months ago

It would be great if we got "kernel independent" Nvidia drivers. I have some experience with bare-metal development and it really seems like most of what an operating system provides could be provided in a much better way as a set of libraries that make specific pieces of hardware work, plus a very good "build" system.

orbifold commented on OpenTSLM: Language models that understand time series opentslm.com/... · Posted by u/rjakob

orbifold · 3 months ago

This is a terrible idea and direction but it will not stop people from pursuing it and as soon as they have a critical mass of people reviewing each other it will go on for quite a while. Transformers for time series is one of those things that seems to make sense but not really.

orbifold commented on TernFS – An exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem xtxmarkets.com/tech/2025-... · Posted by u/rostayob

Beijinger · 3 months ago

Me too. Is is really hard for me to understand, what XTX is actually doing. Trading? VC? AI/ML?

Have you seen their portfolio?

PS: Company seems legit. Impressive growth. But I still don't understand what they are doing. Provide "electronic liquidity". Well....

orbifold · 3 months ago

computing correlations between 50.000 financial instruments (X^T X) and doing linear regression ;).

orbifold commented on Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML mistral.ai/news/mistral-a... · Posted by u/TechTechTech

jacekm · 3 months ago

I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;)

I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations.

Does anyone know if there is any company that is proactively supported by the EU?

orbifold · 3 months ago

Airbus