WoodenChair

I thought this was going to be a post about learning robotics.

It seems more like a post about hooking up an LLM to a pre-made robotic arm.

While that's interesting, I wouldn't have labeled the post "my robotics crash course."

Unfortunately, I think this is in some sense another example of LLMs substituting for actual learning. While I'm sure the author is learning something about robotics from doing these experiments, I doubt it's as much as he would have gotten from say reading a couple chapters of an introductory robotics for dummies book.

Just a note that this is not novel. Automatic analysis of chess games built on traditional engines has existed for a long time. Without using stockfish as a sidekick, this wouldn’t be interesting because of the poor play of LLMs, however having an LLM enhance the commentary is interesting and I suspect has already been done by chess.com for years.

One of the researchers was using the product. They train on your private interactions unless you explicitly opt out in the settings.

> Absolutely not. There were plenty already on the market. Was it the first one to have a name, rather than some crappy codename? Maybe. But mostly it was the polished version of an existing product.

Please tell us about the mass market, affordable, WiFi routers before AirPort. Links please. AirPort came out in July, 1999. Apple did deep negotiations with Lucent to get the price of the equipment down. And they also innovated with an incredibly easy to use software interface that set the standard for WiFi products to this day. I don't know what products you're talking about that came before it that similarly cost $100 for client and $300 for router.

And if you can't see why great product and user interface design can be a type of big innovation (re iMac, iPod) then you're blind.

> the iMac was a refined workstation, the AirPort was a refined WiFi router, the Time Machine was a refined NAS, the iPod was a refined MP3 player...

The word "refined" is doing a lot of work here. Just a few examples:

- The iMac had a design unlike any desktop computer before it.

- While a couple products had come before it, AirPort was the first affordable, mass-market consumer Wi-Fi router.

- The iPod was the first MP3 player to incorporate the then brand new 1.8" Toshiba hard drives that enabled it to have for the time incredible capacity for the package size. And Apple innovated with the click-wheel user interface.

All three of these products most people would see as much more than "refinements" but actually big innovations compared to what was already available in the market.

Yes I stopped reading there after checking the source myself and seeing the same discrepancy. I had also noticed earlier in the article she wrote, "This finding was great news for Napoleon. The French were losing money, and perhaps more alarmingly, their reputation, exporting wine to the British – the wine would “spontaneously” go bad during shipping."

Pasteur was born after Napoleon was exiled. Maybe she is referring to Napoleon III, but then it's misleading to just write "Napoleon." Two factual mistakes in the first couple pages and I can't trust the rest. Especially on a topic I know little about so I can't be discerning regarding.

> Read the Tape gives players the same 5 S&P500 stock charts per day to predict. You select low, medium or high confidence and then call the chart UP or DOWN. It's a 1d chart which then resolves over 5 days. Alpha is scored against the Monkey Index, a basket of 11 random coin flips at low confidence which provides a tangible win/lose condition.

Your description here and on the website is not clear to me about what I am predicting. Am I predicting whether the stock is going to continue to go up the same day? Is the chart of one day and I am predicting whether it will go up or down the next day? In my opinion, you need to get the explanation of what I'm looking at and the directions of what I am predicting down to one clear sentence.

> These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.

According to Wikipedia, the Manhattan project only cost $28 billion in 2024 dollars. That's a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we're talking about here. I imagine the size of the investment here would even be hard for the US government to swallow.

Thanks, much appreciated.

> You can get a 1.67Ghz G4 Mac Mini on eBay with OS 9 preinstalled. It's wicked fast (especially with an IDE SSD adapter)

The fastest Mac mini G4 topped out at 1.5 GHz, not 1.67. I'm the guy selling many of those Mac mini G4s upgraded with SSDs on eBay... just a hobby business. Also sell on my website at https://os9.shop where there's a FAQ where you can read more about it and why it's a good model/upgrade to buy or build yourself.

Self promotion but relevant:

I have a hobby business doing something very similar, except I focus on a specific model—pretty much the most power efficient PowerPC desktop Mac you can get that can still run Mac OS 9, the Mac mini G4. It's at https://os9.shop

> What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market?

Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.

Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.

“ It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions…”

Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.

Yes, CHIP-8 is kind of the standard "I want to get into emulators" first project. In my latest book Computer Science from Scratch we go CHIP-8 -> NES in chapters 5 to 6. GBA is quite a step up from CHIP-8. I would suggest doing NES or GameBoy next, but of course with today's LLM help GBA is very reasonable if you are going that route.

Syntax is not the focus of your testing, but it’s often a pre-requisite to be clearly and accurately speaking the same language. Think not of taking off points for missing a semicolon but instead understanding the difference between the syntax for a method call and a property access. The different syntax conveys different meaning and so we should expect some basic level of accuracy to the language in question. At least that’s how I see it.

I agree with your premise about why accurate evaluation matters, but your post comes across as pretty bitter. Unless you’re at the job with him, you really don’t know that it’s a “I just need to show up” job he has at Booz Allen. Perhaps he has other great traits like a high social or emotional intelligence that make him good at his job beyond whatever was being evaluated on those projects you helped him with.

He definitely didn't have the book ghostwritten. It does have advice on issues that go beyond faith. But I think it's much more useful as a guide to the faithful than the non-faithful. We interviewed him last year about the book:

https://pnc.st/s/business-books/9720205c/the-juggling-act-wi...

He gets into many of the issues discussed in this thread: having faith while being a CEO and how to handle that.

I understand this if you’re not a native speaker. But if you are, I think this will generally make you sound wooden.

Their Mac UI is a thin layer of AppKit. Even there they're currently using Objective-C++ it looks like, not Swift:

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/UI/A...

No, I don't think you're missing anything. He never answered the title of the post ("Faster Than Dijkstra?"). Instead he went on a huge tangent about his experience writing software for routers and is dismissive of the algorithm because the router problem space he was working in did not deal with a node count high enough to warrant the need for a more complex algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm is used for problem spaces with far higher number of nodes than he mentions... basically an article that talks about some kind of interesting things but doesn't say much about its central question.

> (based on the table of contents)

So your opinion is based on just reading the table of contents? I always find it disconcerting when someone writes a multi-paragraph commentary on a work they didn't actually read or see.

I understand that you're commenting on the approach more than the contents, but you're pretty dismissive of it without actually reading the details of how they went about things.

You're not quite judging a book by its cover, but you're not that far beyond that.

Ironically this post comes across to me as written by an LLM. The em-dashes, the prepositions, the "not this, that" lines. As a college instructor, I can usually tell. I put it through GPTZero and it said it's 96% LLM written. GPTZero is not full-proof but I think it's likely right on this one and I find it very ironic.

PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java.

I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analogies.

The article starts with a philosophically bad analogy in my opinion. C-> Java != Java -> LLM because the intermediate product (the code) changed its form with previous transitions. LLMs still produce the same intermediate product. I expanded on this in a post a couple months back:

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm....

"The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal of a software development project is to produce robust maintainable source code. The end product is to produce a binary. New programming languages changed the intermediate product. When a team changed from using assembly, to C, to Java, it drastically changed its intermediate product. That came with new tools built around different language ecosystems and different programming paradigms and philosophies. Which in turn came with new ways of refactoring, thinking about software architecture, and working together.

LLMs don’t do that in the same way. The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.

Until LLMs are fully autonomous with virtually no human guidance or oversight, source code in existing languages will continue to be the intermediate product. And that means many of the ways that we work together will continue to be the same (how we architect source code, store and review it, collaborate on it, refactor it, etc.) in a way that it wasn’t with prior transitions. These processes are just supercharged and easier because the LLM is supporting us or doing much of the work for us."

"Earlier this month, top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two of them telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies planning to cut jobs anyway."

Yes, there are degrees of everything. There is cool, kinda cold, cold, very cold. I'm not exactly sure your point? Seems like you are arguing with a straw man. Who said there are not different degrees of flatness or degrees of hierarchy? The previous poster was just saying that there's always some hierarchy, even if it's unwritten, which aligns with "degrees of flatness."

I don't know but $7 million seems high for a non-profit that's in the midst of layoffs, dramatically losing marketshare, seems to have no direction, and has all of the other failures I mentioned above as Mozilla did in 2023. But point taken, without looking at a scale of other people in similar non-profit positions, it's hard to judge. I think the other points are strong though.

See the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550083

> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."