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Retro_Dev

882 karma · joined May 29, 2025

Religious, Linux user, Programmer.
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Retro_Dev··on A new way to manage memory: no garbage collection, extremely fast & safe access
Yep. 95% AI and 5% "mixed" analysis. Is it a good article? Well, I don't care to check because it doesn't feel like any effort was put into this. For all I know and guess, this was stolen from real humans.
Retro_Dev··on I wrote a ray tracer in Brainfuck
Well the proper analogy would be that you write your programs in assembly. I think the more impressive thing here isn't the ray tracer, but the C (or was it C++?) to brainf** transpiler. That would be equivalent to you writing both C code and the C compiler. Pretty impressive, but depending on the complexity of the program not as impressive as writing whatever it is in assembly directly. A raytracer would be PAIN to write directly in brainf** - I think I'd want to use fixed precision everywhere rather than emulated floating point. (on second glance, it does look like the author of the article is also using fixed precision arithmetic, but confusing the label for the layout of the number with the type of number representation itself?)
Retro_Dev··on Tokens too cheap to meter
I cannot wait for my cowsay coprocessor.
Retro_Dev··on Mercury 2.5 LLM hits 770 tokens per second
Yep it's fast alright. I wonder how much faster Mercury would become if hosted on Cerebras.
Retro_Dev··on Show HN: JevBench, a reproducible benchmark for typed decision models
Isn't the entire deal with jev that it is fast? I'd be interested to know how the energy cost of the Qwen-based model compares with Jev. Of course, Jev is currently locked up so we don't know... "Trust me bro Jev is revolutionary and amazing, pay more money for our inferior product which costs more to run, and of which you need to access by sending us the data"
Retro_Dev··on Claude Opus 5.5
I'm fine if they put preventative measures in place to protect their work. They already do so. I am NOT fine with their mass manipulation of public opinion to fuel an entirely hypocritical viewpoint. Like, any argument here is hypocritical - but they aren't saying what is REALLY HAPPENING ("distillation steals our work and reduces our profits"), and are actually saying words that make other people fight their battle ("national security", etc).
Retro_Dev··on Claude Opus 5.5
> Distillation attacks, in which attackers use thousands of fake accounts to extract a model’s capabilities at industrial scale, create safety and national security risks. Distillation allows bad actors to create highly capable models without the safeguards we build into Claude. Our September 2026 threat intelligence report details the illicit distillation activity we’ve detected and disrupted so far.

Such a negative tone they put on this. Distillation is amazing, because it means anthropic and openai fail to keep a monopoly. Who even are they who claim it's unethical? If it is truly unethical, then so is the mass data scraping they do on my personal website on a regular basis (without my consent), and all the unauthorized use of content produced by authors, blog writers, wikipedia contributors, and creators everywhere. If it is truly unethical, then anthropic, openai, meta, google... all these companies should have deleted their LLMs long ago. This wording disgusts me.

Heck, it would be amazing if we had more models without guardrails - some of the models that are produced via heretic[1] are actually quite nice to use - in particular, I've enjoyed investigating Chinese censorship by interacting with an abliterated model of Qwen3.8-27b. If security is really a concern, then secure your systems - don't attempt to dumb-down the tools we use. If someone breaks your window, then they are responsible, not the hammer they use to do so.

[1]: https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic

Retro_Dev··on Spymarks, Not Watermarks
My bad folks - future links I share will be better displayed (as a foot note).
Retro_Dev··on Spymarks, not Watermarks
Spymarks just seem like another word for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography. On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced (for example: a camera we are certain does not watermark, an image editor we are certain doesn't watermark, an image compressor we are certain can't watermark, etc). One vector that I am particularly concerned about is social media. Most images and videos uploaded to most social media is re-compressed by the target platform. This is a door to tracking that is far too easy for social media platforms to open. They might rationalize it (if discovered/announced) by saying that our memes won't be reposted, images or work stolen, etc... but honestly I'd rather my work be stolen than tracking information inserted in there. Oh, we also have stuff which is way more secure, like time-stamped cryptographic signatures.
Retro_Dev··on Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard
Does it even matter if it distills other models? ethically no, because the information was originally stolen from us users... it is indirectly harming anthropic if it is happening, but who cares? It is better for everyone except anthropic that anthropic doesn't have a monopoly.
Retro_Dev··on Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash
A very cool project, but of course not perfect. I'd rather have 30 megabytes of phrases mapped to the perfect and correct control changes in a home, rather than a heuristic built around 30 megabytes. I tried to "warm the house" (increase the temperature of the thermostat), but the model actually turned the lights to a "warm brightness" - reasoninig being `"'warm the house' -> set_lights to warm brightness. No specific room given, so use default 'living room' as default."`
Retro_Dev··on Korea raises data breach fines to 10% of revenue
I especially hope this holds true, because I don't want my information being leaked by anyone.
Retro_Dev··on Korea raises data breach fines to 10% of revenue
> there’s no such thing as a secure computer system

Where is your source for this? It is entirely possible to make a secure computer system, though it does require effort. The article specifically mentions "up to" 10% and the fines applying to companies leaking data on purpose or through negligence. I doubt the fines will be nearly as high for a company that tries to secure a system (and thus prevents more leaks) rather than a company that does not try to secure a system (assuming that leaks will occur), if the same breach happens.

Computers are deterministic (excluding cases where practically impossible cosmic ray events occur), so while we have the power to ensure system security, we should ensure system security. Heck, even just encrypting consumer information and protecting just the keys to this data would already decrease the effectiveness of many data breaches.

Retro_Dev··on Korea raises data breach fines to 10% of revenue
Um, I think it does the opposite of what you are suggesting - this aims to reduce data breaches and incentivize people to prevent these breaches.
Retro_Dev··on Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard
A restart of the process does not necessarily mean reverting the model state. I don't know why you would even do that, because you'd lose all the progress you made.
Retro_Dev··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
finding simple bipartite expander graphs for better LDPC (expander) codes
Retro_Dev··on I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times
this! - the reason Zig defaults to one semantic analysis thread is due to current (to be improved) limitations; some ideas for Zig also will require one compilation unit - the restricted function pointers proposal being a good example: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23367

The bun team tried to parallelize Zig's semantic analysis a while back - and it DID compile about 4x as fast... YET the builds were no longer deterministic, which is a hard requirement for lots of things. More effort will need to be spent here than naively adding a thread pool. Hopefully Zig's Sema.zig gets faster, but Rust is also super slow at compiling and needs to improve. Oh - one last thing to note, Zig has very fast debug compilation and incremental compilation, it's a real nice thing to work with that you simply can't approach in most other languages right now.

Retro_Dev··on We must pace the frontier
Ideally there is some sort of regulation, but one that cripples the leading companies like OpenAI and Anthropic... rather than helping them.
Retro_Dev··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
It's reasonable to believe not, because OpenAI has money and is using it to get what they want. Example: OpenAI is declining the 1 million USD from the navier stokes millennium problem prize, which is essentially a "bribe" because it would now cost one million USD to go with the other side in this controversy.
Retro_Dev··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
I used a similar (same?) service that claimed no data was uploaded and "all processing happens on-device"... I decided to record network packets with wireshark and found out the tool DID upload a significant amount of data (about 2 megabytes) through its lifetime. I wouldn't trust these tools farther than you can throw them.
Retro_Dev··on Claude is no longer available for minors
I have not, do not, and will continue to not allow my data to be used for AI training... Yet for some reason my blog website is still scraped by some AI data slurper every 10 seconds. If 99% of people don't care (or know) about their data being ingested, it doesn't justify the scraping, because there is still a (rightly infuriated) 1% who do care.
Retro_Dev··on How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments
My bad - I misread your original post as general company announcements, rather than feature announcements. Now my question is, if your internal staff are not requesting these features and are struggling to adapt fast enough, how useful are they? To your last question - what do you mean by velocity? Velocity is speed and direction. You may have speed, but beware the brownian motion that is stochastic predictive models, as that will give you net zero velocity. I have my goals and know what I am doing, and to be frank, it matters more that I read and understand my own code than race to a local optimum.
Retro_Dev··on How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments
Do you also have a graph for more useful metrics, like number of requested features delivered? Commits, lines of code, headscratch count... there are a lot of metrics you can use, but LLMs are notorious for increasing code verbosity - which adds noise to the already imprecise metric you linked.
Retro_Dev··on How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments
I'd imagine that OpenAI would try to stagger their announcements, rather than publishing them recently close to each other. Is this because their previous post (about navier stokes problem) was met with controversy?
Retro_Dev··on Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished
"can" is different from "do" - they do scrape our data without permission, but it doesn't mean they can (are morally correct in doing so)
Retro_Dev··on bzip3
That's like comparing apples to pears. OpenZL is not general purpose. You specify a format for data and it compresses that format. Specifying a general "could be anything" format would be interesting, but I doubt it would compress as well.
Retro_Dev··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
I should have checked the timestamps, my bad.
Retro_Dev··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
Retro_Dev··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003
Retro_Dev··on QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
Let me amend:

We can't find someone to blame for forces of nature. This includes an earthquake, tsunami, etc. Insurance can help recover from these events, but nobody is "responsible" for the events happening. This may or may not include healthy trees falling. LLMs are not a force of nature, and we can and do expect them to have erroneous output. We can and do assign responsibility to the humans who use LLMs. Again, they are not a force of nature. We control them, we give them the ability to do bad things, so it's pretty obvious that there would be responsibility and blame attached for when things go wrong.

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