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Bootvis

3,662 karma · joined June 12, 2010

Mail: bobjansen@hey.com

Project: ibexlang.org // Fast data frames

Blog: bobjansen.net

Moderator at http://quant.stackexchange.com

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Bootvis··on Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship
From the Stockfish docs at https://official-stockfish.github.io/docs/stockfish-wiki/Sto....

> Rating Stockfish against a human scale, such as FIDE Elo, has become virtually impossible. The gap in strength is so large that a human player cannot secure the necessary draws or wins for an accurate Elo measurement.

[1]: https://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/

Bootvis··on xAI joins SpaceX
A large telecommunications satellite operates at about 15kW. A Blackwell GPU consumes 1kW so you would be at 15 Blackwells per satellite. The cooling surface needs to scale linearly so there is little return to scale.

This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

Bootvis··on In praise of –dry-run
There is no relation.
Bootvis··on Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning
The phone not being steady matters for sound recording? How?
Bootvis··on I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
The author was frustrated that the error message identified him as an organisation (that was disabled) and mockingly refers to himself as the (disabled) organisation in the post.

At least, that’s my reading but it appears it confuses about half of the commenters here.

Bootvis··on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
Should have asked Claude how to write it better.
Bootvis··on Which programming languages are most token-efficient?
I understand your logic but I found LLM's to be quite strong at C#. It makes little mistakes and the mistakes seem related to the complexity of what I'm doing, not the language itself.
Bootvis··on Sabotaging Bitcoin
This is incorrect. The miner just changes the header of the block and rehashes. The transaction set is fixed for many tries.
Bootvis··on Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)
I agree this is easy enough to follow but I'd like to quibble about something else:

Comments should answer the question why you are not using some kind of hash set and do a single pass over the data and why it's OK to reorder the strings. One could reasonable expect that Dedupe shows first occurrences in order.

Bootvis··on Sabotaging Bitcoin
This can have another explanation as well: the moment a block is found, the miner starts building on top of the previous block but hasn't constructed a new full block of transactions yet as that costs a bit of time to calculate and distribute. In this period, a new block could be found.
Bootvis··on Aliasing
The whole series is excellent and as a non regular user of assembly I learned a ton.
Bootvis··on AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2
Maybe, but buffer overflows would occur written in assembler written by experts as well. C is a fine portable assembler (could probably be better with the knowledge we have now) but programming is hard. My point: you can roughly expect an expert C programmer to produce as many bugs per unit of functionality as an expert assembly programmer.

I believe it to be likely that the C programmer would even writes the code faster and better because of the useful abstractions. An LLM will certainly write the code faster but it will contain more bugs (IME).

Bootvis··on Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files
Not kidding, I bet llm’s are excellent at triaging these reports. Humans, in a corporate setting, are apparently not.
Bootvis··on Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files
Use AI for that :)
Bootvis··on Student perceptions of AI coding assistants in learning
My point is, needing to use something with care doesn't prevent it becoming from wildly successful. LLM's are wrong way more often but are also more versatile than a calculator.
Bootvis··on Student perceptions of AI coding assistants in learning
It does if you’re a clumsy operator and those are not rare.
Bootvis··on Why I love OCaml (2023)
What about a strict subset of C#. The use case for F# seems to be shrinking because MS is putting all its energy in language.
Bootvis··on Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware
This seems like an actually useful computation to do, unlike earlier results. Is that a reasonable reading of this article?
Bootvis··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
An AI powered meal planner that helps you create recipes, plan your weeks and manage your groceries:

https://github.com/bobjansen/mealmcp

There is a website too so you don’t actually need to use MCP:

https://meals.bobjansen.net/

Bootvis··on No reachable chess position with more than 218 moves
I understand this as follows:

Legal: doesn’t break the rules of chess. For example: no pawns on the eighth rank or in check when it’s not their turn.

Reachable: there is a series of moves that lead to this position from the standard starting position.

Bootvis··on Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
This “feature” amazes me. It is badly done and a bad idea. I haver never watched a dubbed video so why show me a translated title? It’s also surprising, Google has plenty ESL employees on staff.
Bootvis··on Flunking my Anthropic interview again
The point is that bit of information doesn’t tell you anything about yourself and your own skills and intrinsic value. You could be there best hire to date but someone even better than you shows up, or the bosses nephew or funding went away, etc. All events outside of your control.
Bootvis··on AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive
Really, what are you making that a 5% increase in productivity doesn’t justify a Copilot subscription?
Bootvis··on Proposed NOAA Budget Kills Program Designed to Prevent Satellite Collisions
There is a Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision

Bootvis··on The Bleach Community Is Ready for RFK Jr. To Make Their Dreams Come True
I weep for the poor kids with parents in the "Bleach community".
Bootvis··on Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules
Maybe the LLM should be trained to interface with text using some ed/vim dialect to only work on blocks of text.
Bootvis··on Normalizing Flows Are Capable Generative Models
I can upgrade to a bigger LLM I use through an API with one click. If it runs on my device device I need to buy a new phone.
Bootvis··on EchoLeak – 0-Click AI Vulnerability Enabling Data Exfiltration from 365 Copilot
The way I understand it:

The attacker sends an email to the user which is intercepted by Copilot which processes the email and embeds the email for RAG. The mail is crafted to have a high likelihood to be retrieved during regular prompting. Then Copilot will write evil markdown crafted to exfiltrate data using GET parameters so the attack runs when the mail is received.

Bootvis··on What happens when people don't understand how AI works
I too am never surprised by my brains narration but: Maybe the brain tricks you in never being surprised and acting like your thoughts are following a perfectly sensible sequence.

It would be incredibly tedious to be surprised every 5 seconds.

Bootvis··on When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?
The interest in speculating, to me at least, is the impact of intelligent life still existing. It puts an upper bound on the life span on single planet species.
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