Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.

As do we all.

View on HN

I don't know about your friends, but as we're on HN, I'm sure others here have friends like mine, who absolutely have conversations about how the low level shit that facilitates our world works.

Idk all my friends are alcoholics and we only talk about stupid stuff

How do I join yall

In my experience:

1. Start building stuff that is hard to build that requires touching these niche topics. Especially stuff you don't know how to build

2. As you encounter problems, you'll have to scour for solutions (AI doesn't know these things due to lack of training data). In the process you will find people who are also working on these problems. Ask these people well-formed, intelligent questions.

I am skeptical of your second claim here… if you can “scour for solutions”, and you find something about it on the internet, then AI could find it the same way.

Just cause the AI could find the info definitely does not mean it will find and apply that knowledge correctly to solve a problem.

I find AI shockingly bad ad searching the web, as SEO blogspam sites heavily pollute AI context windows, while relevant and important resources are typically very densely presented reference material which must be constantly revisited.

It doesn’t need to. It has already all the fundamental knowledge it needs. Just set it up on a system with an editable proc file system and it would be able to figure it out.

Yeah AI definitely can figure this stuff out. Doesn’t mean you can’t also seek out people.

A lot of the solutions are buried in places AI can't scrape or train on. Like inside people's brains or inside private codebases or chatrooms not open to bots. However you can find these people and the products and services they're making and start talking to them.

Most LLMs can't even count parentheses properly to build basic Lispy stuff. Building something niche like a logic solver in Scheme macros only? Forgetaboutit.

Are AI companies training off discord chat history? There's so much technical information locked up in them these days.

This is exactly the kind of conversation I can have with some coworkers and in some Discord channels. Aren't people awesome?

Where do you think this stuff [1] is cooked up? To be fair, we mostly use Signal though.

[1] https://github.com/AngryUEFI/ZenUtils

God forbid people have hobbies

By 'talk' I suspect he means discord and by friends he means display names. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I catch myself saying 'talk' when I'm talking about something a friend told me over chat.

How does that distinction matter here?

It’s a different situation if you are researching something and chatting about that vs talking about something while in a bar for example

They are two different situations but why is the distinction meaningful here? I rarely even remember the venue of most conversations, just that it happened.

Because for a lot of us it’s hard to imagine finding a half dozen or so people who can talk in person like that outside of a conference or workplace. Discord facilitates that because it assembles people based on interests and such. You’re just going to more easily have that kind of conversation than you would “out in the real world.”

My guess is they are functionally saying “this probably happened on discord if anybody is wondering how this is even possible and not made up for effect” but I might be interpreting too much

Well it’s not so far fetched if the friends are people you studied with and have common interests with, but don’t currently work together with.

I have good friends that love to discuss highly technical topics over a beer or whiskey.

My friends and I share interests but they can’t all talk about the relative pros/cons of full frame vs. cropped sensors in digital cinema with me. That’s kind of the framing here if that makes sense. We share a lot of interest and can talk in depth about certain topics, but there are plenty of topics that I am interested in or just know a lot more about that none of them can really discuss with me, so I have to find those communities elsewhere

> I have good friends

Ahhh, I see, I see...

It’s easier to have very specialized friends of they are geographically far away.

I don't see what distance has to do with it. I had a number of specialized friends in close proximity at university.

Presumably because they all traveled there for a temporary part of their lives. And after university, they presumably scattered to the places where they built their careers and families.

"at university"

Clearly proximity is involved

>> A weeks ago, my friends and I were talking about the inner workings of Zen 5. We were talking about how the CPUID instruction works, and how AMD MSRs are technically editable if you ask the processor nicely.

> As do we all.

I think they interpreted “as do we all” as pointing out humorously that this is an unusual friend group. So, speculation that it might have formed online makes sense, because online spaces can sometimes facilitate that sort of thing.

Have you ever been in a hackspace? That's where you'll usually find such discussions IRL.

Other examples include "let's build a submarine" https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11828-how_to_build_a_submarine_a..., creating your own 2000s style phone ringtone/wallpaper subscription service https://blamba.de/ or running toslink audio over regular long-distance fiber links https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/sfp-experiment-ultra-long-ra...

OP here: Yep, it's Discord. This all happened on a Discord server for a tech youtuber, I'm not sure if they want to be "outed" but they're an 800K subscriber-ish youtube channel with a five-ish thousand member private discord. There were a bunch of people involved, but you might see Arae around in the Reddit thread, she was the one with the actual 9700X in question. None of us have met IRL and we do stay fairly anonymous, but we do chat quite regularly (I've known Arae in particular for at least six months now).

If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com