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Mumps

174 karma · joined June 4, 2018

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Mumps··on Sonnet 5.5
roughly how much code are you outputting? I'm shocked to hear that API pricing could be lower than subscription. Do you mind sharing how much you're spending monthly on Luna API ?
Mumps··on Jev introduces a new shape of LLM
This is off topic.

Do people not feel like LLM speak (Claudisms) is infecting their own diction? Saying 'a new "shape" of LLM' sits so very poorly.

Mumps··on Noodle Gallery – Self-hosted photo and video manager forked from Immich
Thank you
Mumps··on Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5
Are you on the foundation research team for Thomson? (If so, hiya from B!) Why would you expect Thomson to be particularly good at spam clf? I figured your additional corpus was all news and legal?
Mumps··on A warning about 'model welfare'
I get where you're going, but the argument isn't quite right.

A LLM never has and, in their current architecture, never can/could experience suffering or real change of state.

The general and expected case for humans is that capacity. A human my indeed lose capacity, e.g. being braindead and in severe cases we do indeed say that they are not conscious or able to suffer (different argument: some would of course say that is suffering in and of itself)

Mumps··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
This is beautiful and I'm now itching to make a workbench (finally! that initial "how many sheets and what for what size" problem has been the mental blocker)

+1.0mm vote to adding metric please!

Mumps··on Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
What's the problem with "eliminate deictic language" ?

It is clear, specific, and terse. It keeps both llm tokens down and human prose-reading to a minimum.

Mumps··on HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
Thank you!

Christ in pijamas. TLAs should be a capitol offence. Even worse so, somehow, when undefined.

Mumps··on GitHub and the crime against software
I absolutely LOVE Tailscale. but uhh. I think they shoulder exactly the same risk, right?
Mumps··on Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
I like this. I thought to iterate on it a bit, for the folk who respond better to higher-tact phrasing:

"Thanks. I have access to ChatGPT as well. But I ask people for help when it fails. Your thoughts are smarter than GPT's, please provide those, next time."

Though, I'd like to be more succinct/terse.

Mumps··on NanoGPT Slowrun: Language Modeling with Limited Data, Infinite Compute
I feel like you really need to mention BabyLM. For example you have:

> Directions we think are wide open ... Curriculum learning

BabyLM and offshoot published a pretty convincing body of work on exactly that (which suggests it's not particularly relevant to LM training).

As I read your page, I really felt like the brevity-thoroughness tradeoff went the wrong way.

Mumps··on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
Isn't the converse then equally appropriate?

Move to DST and if you want the ability to start your day later and end later, [...].

Mumps··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
Yes, if OP did a full vocabulary comparison and took just those sub-threshold, it would be hacking. I'm not sure that's the case here, though? Given that (the post) OP started with em-dash, and probably didn't do repeated sampling, then it should be a pretty fair hypothesis that em-dash usage is a marker.

Your comment about p<0.05, feels out of place to me. The p-values here are << 0.05. Like waaaaay lower.

Perhaps Fisher's exact is more appropriate, on the per-word basis?

Mumps··on Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for sharing!

Like OP, I've been similarly struggling to get as much value from CC (grok et c) as "everyone" else seems to be.

I'm quite curious about the workflow around the spec you link. To me, it looks like quite an extensive amount of work/writing. Comparable or greater than the coding work, by amount, even. Basically trading writing code files for writing .md files. 150 chat sessions is also nothing to sneeze at.

Would you say that the spec work was significantly faster (pure time) than coding up the project would have been? Or perhaps a less taxing cognitive input?

Mumps··on UK government launches fuel forecourt price API
Thanks for putting this together! Couple QoL features I'd love to see:

1. filter slider, decreasing on price, to see places closest to me disappearing 2. on the left panel, when I click on a low priced area, it should highlight it on the map, so I know where it is. The 'go to pump' button, I guess is good. but I'd only want to commit to gmaps if I already know that it's a reasonable place for me to. be going.

Mumps··on The Q, K, V Matrices
You are correct. This is pronoun ambiguity. I also immediately noticed it and was displeased to see it as the opener of the article. As in, I no longer expected correctness of anything else the author would write (I wouldn't normally be so harsh, but this is about text processing. Being correct about simple linguistic cases is critical)

For anyone interested, the textbook example would be:

> "The trophy would not fit in the suitcase because it was too big."

"it" may refer to either the suitcase or the trophy. It is reasonable here to assume "it" refers to the trophy being too large, as that makes the sentence logically valid. But change the sentence to

> "The trophy would not fit in the suitcase because it was too small."

Mumps··on History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
This is an anthropomorphization. LLMs do not think they are anything, no concept of self, no thinking at all (despite the lovely marketing around thinking/reasoning models). I'm quite sad that more hasn't been done to dispel this.

When you ask gpt 4.1 et c to describe itself, it doesn't have singular concept of "itself". It has some training data around what LLMs are in general and can feed back a reasonable response given.

Mumps··on The emergence and diversification of dog morphology
If I'm reading your meaning correctly, about lifespans, I think the comparison isn't quite correct?

lifespan seems to be more strongly correlated by size, not squashed-nosed-ness.

Consider chihuahua, shitzu's (and crosses: bichon-shitzu, ...), poodle crosses, heck lagotto (lagotti?). All can live well past 15.

Versus GSPs, great danes, Irish wolfhounds, and so on, coming in closer to say 6-10 years.

I've never really heard argument on lifespan of pugs et al versus other dogs, though. More around (perceived) ugliness/prettiness, and their breathing issues.

Mumps··on TOON – Token Oriented Object Notation
Do you mean the [0] Token Benchmarks section? I only see token count numbers.

Which doesn't address the question: do LLMs understand TOON the same as they would JSON? It's quite likely that this notation is not interpreted the same by most LLM, as they would JSON. So benchmarks on, say, data processing tasks, would be warranted.

[0] https://github.com/johannschopplich/toon?tab=readme-ov-file#...

Mumps··on Show HN: I built an 8-bit CPU simulator in Python from scratch
Avoided? Rather, probably personal preference.

But it is outdated since 3.9+ over just `list` . Same for `tuple`, `dict`, and so on)[0].

[0]: https://peps.python.org/pep-0585/

Mumps··on Show HN: I built an 8-bit CPU simulator in Python from scratch
Other giveaways like insistence on

`from typing import List`

(I'm yet to see a model be trained on modern-biased python enough to not bother with that import)

Mumps··on Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app
Thank you!

It's one of those awful situations of "nobody does it, so nobody is going to do it".

Mumps··on Show HN: Cadence – A guitar theory app
bit late, but hopefully you still see replies:

Any chance you could please add a filthy lefty setting? That is, mirror the chord diagrams. It would be so nice.

Mumps··on Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads
Tangent discussion if I may. This is the first I've ever seen gitAds, And well, I'm not even sure what I want to ask:

* Wouldn't github disapprove of it?

* The website doesn't give a ton of credibility to it (e.g. the user story slider) and I couldn't find much from a cursory web search on it. Do you find them trustworthy?

* Are you even finding it valuable?

Mumps··on Which colours dominate movie posters and why?
To me it's the distinction between orange and brown (since they're the same colour).

Raises the question if the author could have or should have included grey in the analyses.

Mumps··on What is it like to be a bat?
You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online):

I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.

I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.

I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.

Mumps··on OpenMower – An open source lawn mower
If the poster is in the USA couldn't it be explained by Trump Tariffs (in addition to inflation)
Mumps··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
Thanks for addressing, really!

Nope, not soured. And don't worry, I totally get that things take a bunch of effort and time (doubly so as a solo project). I'll give it a re-look in a little while :)

Mumps··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
I was quite eager to check this out. As some polite feedback, a few things turned me off quite strongly:

1. I want to get confirmation that the language I want is covered (Hungarian). "120+" doesn't confirm it for me, as Hungarian seems fairly rare for language apps. Can we not just have a "search your language" field?

2. I need to see what the app actually looks like, how it proposes it'll teach me.

I'm one of the eager-to-pay people, because Duolingo is frankly dogshit (ok. Mostly polite) at teaching languages (doubly so ones that it doesn't care about like Hungarian). But I'm so suspicious of language apps, due to being burnt a dozen times.

Mumps··on Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
lovely application!

Genuine question: why not use (Modern)BERT instead for classification? (Is the json-output explanation so critical?)

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