w4 (u/w4) - Readit News

w4 commented on JetBrains working on higher-abstraction programming language infoworld.com/article/402... · Posted by u/pjmlp

kylecazar · 12 days ago

They keep calling it a language (Kotlin derivative), but then the CTO refers to it as "basically English", with maybe "some semantics".

Are we just talking about prompting with some enforced structure, or is it a programming language?

w4 · 12 days ago

Isn't this more or less what every procedural programming language is? It's especially obvious with examples like Apple's Objective-C APIs ([object doSomethingAndReturnATypeWith:anotherObject]), Cobol (a IS GREATER THAN b), or SQL (SELECT field FROM table WHERE condition), but even assembly is a mnemonic English-ish abstraction for binary.

I'm intrigued by the idea, but my major concern would be that moving up to a new level of abstraction would even further obscure the program's logic and would make debugging especially difficult. There's no avoiding the fact that the code will need to be translated to procedural logic for the CPU to execute at some point. But that is not necessarily fatal to the project, and I am sure that assembly programmers felt the same way about Fortran and C, and Fortran and C programmers felt the same way about Java and Python, and so on.

w4 commented on We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube ksagar.bearblog.dev/vjepa... · Posted by u/alexcos

liendolucas · 2 months ago

I didn't understand a single word about this post and what was supposed to be solved and had to stop reading.

Was this actually written by a human being? If so, the author(s) suffer from severe language communication problems. Doesn't seem to be grounded at least with reality and my personal experience with robotics. But here's my real world take:

Robotics is going to be partially solved when ROS/ROS2 becomes effectively exterminated and completely replaced by a sane robotics framework.

I seriously urge the authors to use ROS/ROS2. Show us, implementing your solution with ROS, pushing it to a repository and allow others to verify what you solved, maybe?. Suffer a bit with the framework and then write a real post about real robotics hands-on, and not just wander on fancy uncomprehensible stuff that probably no-one will ever do.

Then we can maybe start talking about robotics.

w4 · 2 months ago

It is readily understandable if you are fluent in the jargon surrounding state of the art LLMs and deep learning. It’s completely inscrutable if you aren’t. The article is also very high level and disconnected from specifics. You can skip to FAIR’s paper and code (linked at the article’s end) for specifics: https://github.com/facebookresearch/vjepa2

If I had to guess, it seems likely that there will be a serious cultural disconnect as 20-something deep learning researchers increasingly move into robotics, not unlike the cultural disconnect that happened in natural language processing in the 2010s and early 20s. Probably lots of interesting developments, and also lots of youngsters excitedly reinventing things that were solved decades ago.

w4 commented on Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf? · Posted by u/skarat

tacker2000 · 3 months ago

hijacking this thread: Whats the best AI tool for NeoVim ?

w4 · 3 months ago

I’ve really been enjoying the combination of CodeCompanion with Gemini 2.5 for chat, Copilot for completion, and Claude Code/OpenAI Codex for agentic workflows.

I had always wanted to get comfortable with Vim, but it never seemed worth the time commitment, especially with how much I’ve been using AI tools since 2021 when Copilot went into beta. But recently I became so frustrated by Cursor’s bugs and tab completion performance regressions that I disabled completions, and started checking out alternatives.

This particular combination of plugins has done a nice job of mostly replicating the Cursor functionality I used routinely. Some areas are more pleasant to use, some are a bit worse, but it’s nice overall. And I mostly get to use my own API keys and control the prompts and when things change.

I still need to try out Zed’s new features, but I’ve been enjoying daily driving this setup a lot.

w4 commented on Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet den.dev/blog/be-a-propert... · Posted by u/dend

Terr_ · 8 months ago

IANAL, but lately I've had this quixotic daydream of a combination accept-cookies / agree-to-TOS page that comes up, and the Terms of Service says by proceeding they agree to give the site-owner an perpetual, irrevocable, and royalty-free to use and re-license any future content that they create using any generative AI that was trained using the website contents.

Then you carefully log what LLM user-agents/IPs go past that agree, along with some very distinctive secretly crawlable pages which have contents that can be distinctively reproduced back out of the model if needed.

Then whenever SomeShittyLLM posts "articles", everybody with that TOS that was crawled gets to duplicate it without ads for free. :P

w4 · 8 months ago

This idea is reminiscent of the opening scene of Accelerando by Charlie Stross:

Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"

"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."

…

"Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"

"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right?”

- https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Amusing to also note that this excerpt predicted the current LLM training methodology quite well, in 2005.

w4 commented on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-... · Posted by u/maurycy

daemonologist · 8 months ago

This is interesting to consider, but I think the flaw here is that you'd need a "total mobilization" level workforce in order to build this mega datacenter in the first place. You put one human-hour into making B200s and cooling systems and power plants, you get less than one human-hour-equivalent of thinking back out.

w4 · 8 months ago

No you don’t. The US government has already completed projects at this scale without total economic mobilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center Presumably peer and near-peer states are similarly capable.

A private company, xAI, was able to build a datacenter on a similar scale in less than 6 months, with integrated power supply via large batteries: https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/first-in-depth...

Datacenter construction is a one-time cost. The intelligence the datacenter (might) provide is ongoing. It’s not an equal one to one trade, and well within reach for many state and non-state actors if it is desired.

It’s potentially going to be a very interesting decade.

w4 commented on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-... · Posted by u/maurycy

istjohn · 8 months ago

Your economic analysis is deeply flawed. If there was anything that valuable and that required that much manpower, it would already have driven up the cost of labor accordingly. The one property that could conceivably justify a substantially higher cost is secrecy. After all, you can't (legally) kill a human after your project ends to ensure total secrecy. But that takes us into thriller novel territory.

w4 · 8 months ago

I don't think that's right. Free societies don't tolerate total mobilization by their governments outside of war time, no matter how valuable the outcomes might be in the long term, in part because of the very economic impacts you describe. Human-level AI - even if it's very expensive - puts something that looks a lot like total mobilization within reach without the societal pushback. This is especially true when it comes to tasks that society as a whole may not sufficiently value, but that a state actor might value very much, and when paired with something like a co-located reactor and data center that does not impact the grid.

That said, this is all predicated on o3 or similar actually having achieved human level reasoning. That's yet to be fully proven. We'll see!

w4 commented on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-... · Posted by u/maurycy

w4 · 8 months ago

The cost to run the highest performance o3 model is estimated to be somewhere between $2,000 and $3,400 per task.[1] Based on these estimates, o3 costs about 100x what it would cost to have a human perform the exact same task. Many people are therefore dismissing the near-term impact of these models because of these extremely expensive costs.

I think this is a mistake.

Even if very high costs make o3 uneconomic for businesses, it could be an epoch defining development for nation states, assuming that it is true that o3 can reason like an averagely intelligent person.

Consider the following questions that a state actor might ask itself: What is the cost to raise and educate an average person? Correspondingly, what is the cost to build and run a datacenter with a nuclear power plant attached to it? And finally, how many person-equivilant AIs could be run in parallel per datacenter?

There are many state actors, corporations, and even individual people who can afford to ask these questions. There are also many things that they'd like to do but can't because there just aren't enough people available to do them. o3 might change that despite its high cost.

So if it is true that we've now got something like human-equivilant intelligence on demand - and that's a really big if - then we may see its impacts much sooner than we would otherwise intuit, especially in areas where economics takes a back seat to other priorities like national security and state competitiveness.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42473876

w4 commented on Show HN: I designed an espresso machine and coffee grinder velofuso.com... · Posted by u/smeeeeeeeeeeeee

w4 · 8 months ago

This is a gorgeously and uniquely designed product. Very cool.

w4 commented on Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust turso.tech/blog/introduci... · Posted by u/avinassh

znpy · 9 months ago

> (2) conversational casual chitchat : "open source" includes "public domain"

it's wrong though. like, can't be more wrong than that. you can't do whatever you want with open source software, the license tells what you can and cannot do.

with public domain software you can do most things.

w4 · 9 months ago

Open source means just that: that the source is open. The OSI and co. re-defining the term to suit their ideological preferences doesn’t really change that. SQLite is open source, even if it’s not Open Source.

Edit: FSF should have been OSI, I think. Fixed.