timClicks (u/timClicks)

timClicks commented on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden andyljones.com/posts/hors... · Posted by u/pbui

anon7000 · 15 days ago

> Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours

I mean, that basically just sums up how capitalism works. Profit growth is literally (even legally!) the only thing a company can care about. Everything else, like product quality, pays service to that goal.

timClicks · 15 days ago

Sorry if this is somewhat pedantic, but I believe that only US companies (and possibly only Delaware corporations?) are bound by the requirement to maximize shareholder value and then only by case law rather than statue. Other jurisdictions allow the directors more discretion, or place more weight on the company's constitution/charter.

timClicks commented on Inside Rust's std and parking_lot mutexes – who wins? blog.cuongle.dev/p/inside... · Posted by u/signa11

Rusky · a month ago

Hypothetically Rust could make `Mutex<InnerBlah>` work with just two bits in the same way it makes `Option<&T>` the same size as `&T`. Annotate `InnerBlah` with the information about which bits are available and let `Mutex` use them.

timClicks · a month ago

References only have a single bit available as a niche (the null byte), which Option makes use of for null pointer optimization (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/index.html#representati...).

In principle, you Rust could create something like std::num::NonZero and its corresponding sealed trait ZeroablePrimitive to mark that two bits are unused. But that doesn't exist yet as far as I know.

timClicks commented on Markdown is holding you back newsletter.bphogan.com/ar... · Posted by u/zdw

timClicks · a month ago

Asciidoc corresponds directly to DocBook XML. They're two formats with exactly the same semantics.

timClicks commented on What if you don't need MCP at all? mariozechner.at/posts/202... · Posted by u/jdkee

whoknowsidont · a month ago

MCP was a really shitty attempt at building a plugin framework that was vague enough to lure people into and then allow other companies to build plugin platforms to take care of the MCP non-sense.

"What is MCP, what does it bring to the table? Who knows. What does it do? The LLM stuff! Pay us $10 a month thanks!"

LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP.

Not only do you not need MCP, but you should actively avoid using it.

Stick with tried and proven API standards that are actually observable and secure and let your models/agents directly interact with those API endpoints.

timClicks · a month ago

MCP is an example of "worse is better". Everyone knows that it's not very good, but it gets the job done.

timClicks commented on Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics twitter.com/SebastienBube... · Posted by u/marcuschong

wenc · 4 months ago

A lot of interesting possibilities lie in latent space. For those unfamiliar, this means the underlying set of variables that drive everything else.

For instance, you can put a thousand temperature sensors in a room, which give you 1000 temperature readouts. But all these temperature sensors are correlated, and if you project them down to latent space (using PCA or PLS if linear, projection to manifolds if nonlinear) you’ll create maybe 4 new latent variables (which are usually linear combinations of all other variables) that describe all the sensor readings (it’s a kind of compression). All you have to do then is control those 4 variables, not 1000.

In the chemical space, there are thousands of possible combinations of process conditions and mixtures that produce certain characteristics, but when you project them down to latent variables, there are usually less than 10 variables that give you the properties you want. So if you want to create a new chemical, all you have to do is target those few variables. You want a new product with particular characteristics? Figure out how to get < 10 variables (not 1000s) to their targets, and you have a new product.

timClicks · 4 months ago

It's been a while since I've played in the area, but is PCA still the go to method for dimensionality reduction?

timClicks commented on Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? · Posted by u/paulwilsonn

erulabs · 5 months ago

When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again.

Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well, comparatively.

timClicks · 5 months ago

This reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list.

One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.

timClicks commented on The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine github.com/deepseek-ai/op... · Posted by u/Palmik

avodonosov · 8 months ago

What motivates the commercial AI companies to share their research results and know-how?

Why did Google published the Transformer architecture instead of keeping it to themselves?

I understand that people may want to do good things for humanity, facilitate progress, etc. But if an action goes against commercial interest, how can the company management take it and not get objections from shareholders?

Or there is a commercial logic that motivates sharing of information and intellectual property? What logic is that?

timClicks · 8 months ago

There are a few commercially valid strategies.

1. Goodwill and mindshare. If you're known as "the best" or "the most innovative", then you'll attract customers.

2. Talent acquisition. Smart people like working with smart people.

3. Becoming the standard. If your technology becomes widely adopted, and you've been using it the longest, then you're suddenly be the best placed in your industry to make use of the technology while everyone retools.

4. Deception. Sometimes you publish work that's "old" internally but is still state of the art. This provides your competition with a false sense of where your research actually is.

5. Freeride on others' work. Maybe experimenting with extending an idea is too expensive/risky to fund internally? Perhaps a wave of startups will try. Acquire one of them that actually makes it work.

6. Undercut the market leader. If your industry has a clear market leader, the others can use open source to cooperate to erode that leadership position.

timClicks commented on Hacktical C: practical hacker's guide to the C programming language github.com/codr7/hacktica... · Posted by u/signa11

NoTeslaThrow · 8 months ago

> When your computer is a PDP-11, otherwise it is a high level systems language like any other.

Describing C as "high-level" seems like deliberate abuse of the term. The virtual machine abstraction doesn't imply any benefits to the developer.

timClicks · 8 months ago

That's a curious remark, although I guess it doesn't look high level from the eyes of someone looking at programming languages today.

C has always been classed as a high level language since its inception. That term's meaning has shifted though. When C was created, it wasn't assembly (middle) or directly writing CPU op codes in binary/hex (low level).

timClicks commented on PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth) blog.vectorchord.ai/postg... · Posted by u/VoVAllen

danpalmer · 8 months ago

> Mistake #1: Calculating tsvector On-the-Fly (Major issue)

I'm shocked that the original post being referred to made this mistake. I recently implemented Postgres FTS in a personal project, and did so by just reading the Postgres documentation on FTS following the instructions. The docs lead you through the process of creating the base unoptimized case, and then optimising it, explaining the purpose of each step and why it's faster. It's really clear that is what it's doing, and I could only assume that someone making this mistake is either doing so to intentionally misrepresent Postgres FTS, or because they haven't read the basic documentation.

timClicks · 8 months ago

Perhaps the most generous interpretation is that the authors were writing an article for people who do the naïve thing without reading the docs. There are quite a few people in that category.

timClicks commented on Obituary for Cyc yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

timClicks · 8 months ago

> The secretive nature of Cyc has multiple causes. Lenat personally did not release the source code of his PhD project or EURISKO, remained unimpressed with open source, and disliked academia as much as academia disliked him.

One thing that's not mentioned here, but something that I took away from Wolfram's obituary of Lenat (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/remembering-doug...) was that Lenat was very easily distracted ("Could we somehow usefully connect [Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language] to CYC? ... But when I was at SXSW the next year Doug had something else he wanted to show me. It was a math education game.").

My armchair diagnosis is untreated ADHD. He might have had had discussing the internals of CYC on his todo list since its first prototype, but the draft was never ready.