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Scaevolus

7,583 karma · joined September 6, 2009

https://github.com/rmmh
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Scaevolus··on Platform-Independent SIMD in Go
It creates multiple versions of functions referencing SIMD and lifts the dispatch switching cost to their callers.

> The AST rewrite creates multiple specialized copies of functions, variables, and types that mention simd types, where simd types are replaced with references to size-specialized types in simd/internal/bridge. Each of these bridge types is defined as an archsimd type, but with a restricted set of methods. The specialized functions, variables, and types acquire a suffix of the form @simdNNN, where NNN is either a vector length (128, 256, or 512) or 0, indicating emulation. Functions that mention simd internally, but not in their signature, are converted to wrappers that switch on the SIMD level detected at program start, and call the appropriate specialized version of that function. Specialized functions call other specialized functions directly without dispatch overhead (and perhaps with inlining). This rewrite strategy was chosen as a compromise between code duplication and SIMD performance; the overhead is hoisted as high as necessary to avoid dispatch within SIMD computations, but not higher. If SIMD dispatch appears “too low” in a computation, a gratuitous mention of a simd type will move it upwards, as in this example:

Scaevolus··on Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash
This is a solid improvement over Needle 2, which I tried using for a tool-calling interface to a Runescape database site. Unfortunately it's still not quite capable enough for my target compared to FunctionGemma.

   Model                            Correct tool shape    Exact arguments
  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━  ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
   FunctionGemma fine-tune, BF16       209/230 (90.9%)    196/230 (85.2%)
  ───────────────────────────────  ────────────────────  ─────────────────
   Needle 3 fine-tuned W4A8             74/230 (32.2%)     47/230 (20.4%)
  ───────────────────────────────  ────────────────────  ─────────────────
   Needle 2 fine-tuned W4               59/230 (25.7%)     43/230 (18.7%)
Scaevolus··on The case against JPEG XL
It also compares the total time for jxl-rs's benchmark mode (which does a warmup and a test decode) for 16-bit RGB against 8-bit WebP to 4:2:0 YUV.
Scaevolus··on YuE2 · Frontier Music with Symbolic Planning
Engineers understand that every technology represents inherent tradeoffs.
Scaevolus··on Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
Aside: if you want a source of high quality Piano MIDI recordings, you should check out the MAESTRO dataset: https://magenta.withgoogle.com/datasets/maestro

> The dataset contains about 200 hours of paired audio and MIDI recordings from ten years of International Piano-e-Competition. The MIDI data includes key strike velocities and sustain/sostenuto/una corda pedal positions. Audio and MIDI files are aligned with ∼3 ms accuracy and sliced to individual musical pieces, which are annotated with composer, title, and year of performance. Uncompressed audio is of CD quality or higher (44.1–48 kHz 16-bit PCM stereo).

Scaevolus··on Recreating Minecraft Is Not a Benchmark
Did you try blender MCP and prompt for low-poly vertex colored assets?
Scaevolus··on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2
GPT-6 has a looped transformer / recurrent depth architecture, so it gets some internal CoT reasoning "for free" with no output tokens.

This also makes it much harder to monitor its reasoning.

Scaevolus··on Codefloe Is a Professionally Hosted Public Git Forge
See Cursor's recent blog post on launching a Github competitor, particularly the architectural history.
Scaevolus··on Firefox intent to ship: JPEG XL
Chrome doesn't use hardware acceleration for decoding any image codecs-- not for JPEG or WebP or AVIF. It has some code for it (using VA-API), but it's disabled by default. Hardware video decoders are generally hard to use for image decoding tasks.

Safari appears to be the only shipping browser using hardware decoding for JPEG and HEIF (HEVC based images). This is probably because vertical integration lets them make the decoders appropriate for image use.

Also, "AVIF video" is incorrect. AVIF is the image codec based on AV1 intra frames.

Scaevolus··on Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
"delivering up to 750 output tokens per second and without any quality compromise" seems pretty definitive.
Scaevolus··on G# – A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics
- it's easy to prompt an LLM to do it for you, especially if you're targeting a pre-existing runtime like CLR or transpiling to another language. previously you'd have to grind out the parser and compiler for a new language, but a lot of that work is mechanical

- "I want a language that works a little differently"

- programming language theory (PLT), generally

- languages are tools. the authors should explain what their languages are best suited for

- Obj C and C++ were both developed around the same time as extensions of C. Obj C was focused on message passing and Smalltalk's object system, while C++ was focused on adding as many abstractions as possible to C. Neither language has good support for avoiding null pointer dereferences, one of the primary things Swift addresses with its richer type system and Optionals.

Scaevolus··on Netstrings (1997)
BitTorrent's bencoding format, used in .torrent files, effectively uses netstrings-- but without the trailing commas, so it uses "5:hello" to represent filenames and similar.
Scaevolus··on Nul Characters in Strings in SQLite
It's not really a big problem. You should be storing arbitrary binary strings as blobs (and length() works properly with them), but the underlying encoding is nearly identical: https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html#record_format
Scaevolus··on Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises
if you happen to regenerate your protos 5 times in an hour you'll get ratelimited

it's a very frustrating system. you should spend a modicum of effort figuring out how to generate your things locally yourself instead, be that docker, arcane wasm...

Scaevolus··on WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter
The absolutely easiest way to write a JIT is to use Javascript and eval() (or "new Function()", which is just eval in a Java-shaped tuxedo). You can quite easily speed up little matching functions, especially arithmetic heavy ones, by just filling in some templates at runtime!

Here's an example used in PuzzleScript: https://github.com/increpare/PuzzleScript/blob/dc1e0fc979365...

Scaevolus··on The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
Cloudflare's Deepseek V4 Pro prices are 4x more than Deepseek's for input and output tokens, and 100x more for cached input tokens, which is crucial for the tool uses of agents which cause multi-turn conversations.
Scaevolus··on Sem: New primitive for code understanding – not LSPs, but entities on top of Git
Something like https://www.kythe.io/?
Scaevolus··on Splash Is a Colour Format
It's rgb with 3.3 bits per channel, basically 10 bit per pixel color (256 colors is 8bpp).
Scaevolus··on SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
Sqlite can quite easily do 5000+ insert+commits per second on typical NVMe drives.

Speed is rarely the constraint that makes it unsuitable for an application.

Scaevolus··on A History of IDEs at Google
The main thing holding most people back from web-based IDEs is restricted filesystem and tools integrations, but cloud office suites are extremely popular. Google has excellent infrastructure for distributed build and test cycles built into Cider to go along with the entirely remote version control system.

Best of luck on your web-based demos! Dropping people into a working dummy environment with a few tutorial prompts should really help conversions.

Scaevolus··on Fc, a lossless compressor for floating-point streams
I see you have ALP, but have you tried Chimp128 or Arrow's byte stream split?
Scaevolus··on Killed by Apple
Apple could easily support eGPUs if they wanted to, but they choose to have vertical integration over fragmentation or usefulness. It's the same as them not supporting OpenGL or Vulkan: they could if they wanted to be a better gaming/porting target, but compatibility of any sort is not a priority.
Scaevolus··on Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things
Pangram rates it as 100% AI generated.

Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!

Scaevolus··on Intel Arc Pro B70 Review
It's not that it's reserving power, but rather that you hit some bottleneck on a 3070 Ti before running into thermal limits-- it's likely limited by either tensor core saturation or RAM throughput. Running the workload with Nvidia's profiling tools should make the bottleneck obvious.
Scaevolus··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess
They are bullshit machines because they do not have an internal mental model of truth like a human does. The flagship models bullshit less, but their fundamental architectures prevent having truth interfere with output.

https://philosophersmag.com/large-language-models-and-the-co...

Scaevolus··on Telnyx package compromised on PyPI
I'm glad there's many teams with automated scans of pypi and npm running. It elevates the challenge of making a backdoor that can survive for any length of time.
Scaevolus··on An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD
That's a narrow fair use exception. Many of these open game engines are effectively 1:1 decompilations of the original games, and it would be shocking if they were not effectively copyrighted the same as the original.

I don't think this has been tested in court, but the recent flood of Nintendo game decompilations is likely to change that.

Scaevolus··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
Microsoft released a video that covers effectively all of the Xbox One security system, and it's referred to extensively in the talk. The specific methods of glitching don't require any insider knowledge.
Scaevolus··on The AI Vampire
You're reading more dismissal than I wrote.

Most businesses can and many businesses do run efficiently out of shared spreadsheets. Choosing the processes well is the hard part, but there's just not much computational complexity in the execution, nor more data than can be easily processed by a single machine.

Scaevolus··on The AI Vampire
Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements.

When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges.

A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic. There just isn't much complexity inherent in any of the feature sets.

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