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achille

1,244 karma · joined October 12, 2008

private, fast, efficient, sovreign models

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/achille; my proof: https://keybase.io/achille/sigs/Ssp4aG3wvUFOueb-AgaGbO-EojacIux_KZ2Jw3UkTKk ]

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achille··on UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8
> Ken Thompson: "...i really dont think it is useful. it is like replacing ipv6 with ipv50"
achille··on OpenAI says my prepaid credits were consumed, refuses to show any record
file a ccpa data access request, they either have data to backup the usage (and must release it) or they don't have it (and should fix the issue)
achille··on A native graphical shell for SSH
This is amazing! Most definitely headed in the right direction. The separation layer between front and back must be cut at the smallest possible 'slice'.

Lots of people here snarking would understand if they 'felt' the latency and additional overhead. Not enough thought has been put in carfully slicing the data for individual use cases.

I'd go even further, in his demo of 'generating load by moving the config often' -- I think that 'top' app should have 'jit-ed' more of the rendering on the client such that the only information traversing pi<>client is compresed delta's of the ps hose.

achille··on A History of IDEs at Google
latency on the gBus was at the time ~250msish but would regularly spike much more on certain sections. Each keystroke would have to roundtrip before appearing on the screen.

Using something like mosh would mitigate it, but there was no UDP tunnel available through beyoundcorp.

Cider and MDProxy were running rendering locally so the keystrokes were nearly instant.

achille··on A History of IDEs at Google
Yep, I made my own! (Xoogler 2017-2023) this is my noogler IDE story, one of my favorite, proudest hacks!

I developed a fork of the IntelliJ IDE on my second week at google out of raw frustration over latency. At the time I was commuting 2-3hrs/day SF<>MTV on the gBus.

Connectivity on the bus wasn't optimal, and there was high latency. Cider didn't have deep integration, and wasn't able to let me explore and understand the internal APIs effectively. I found it easier to enter a debug session within Intellij then 'vibe' and explore the internal apis via superComplicatedObject.ini<tab>.

Faced with an alien architecture + ADHD-unfriendly flow-crushing remote desktop latency -- and the lack of discoverability, I started hacking at it and without any knowledge of the system and architecture. Just tracing Intellij execution, subprocesses and network calls.

I was able to hack together a prototype in a few days that allowed me to run IntelliJ on my Mac, while the heavy bits ran on my corp desktop. The system would mount the remote filesystem over sshfs, would monitor and patch network connections and setup transparent shim binaries. Half of Intellij was running on the Mac (the front end) and the other half ran on Linux. Intellij didn't "know" that that it was running on a mac. This was initially implemented in a ~250 line shell script that patched everything.

It was called MDProxy[1] and ended getting adopted and supported during COVID as more development went remote. This became a source of many peer bonuses and spot bonuses. circa 2017* remote coding options at the time:

         typing   | code
         latency  | integration
         --------------------------
 cider   low      | meh 
 mdproxy low      | great
 ssh+vi  med      | meh
 rdp+iJ  crushing | great
[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/intellij/blob/6b8f03c21172033a...
achille··on I am building a cloud
What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card
achille··on Flipbook – one-click file sharing for visual media scrubbing
url is 404'ing; what is the source for the skateboarding clip?
achille··on Anthropic has a blacklist on the word "OpenClaw"
what setup do you use for the bar at the bottom?
achille··on [dead]
due to library limitation, not language, they could use fancy-regex
achille··on Dobase – Open-source, self-hosted workspace with installable tools
i registered for their demo and it seems to be unable to do any of the advertised features. nearly everything crashes; feels like a ux wireframe not yet wired it
achille··on Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer
same here, would love to compare notes
achille··on Iran's attacks on Amazon data centers in UAE, Bahrain signal a new kind of war

  - local data residency & sovereignty
  - latency
  - bandwidth 
  - regulatory climate
  - competition
uae is business friendly

all cloud providers have middle east presence

refineries generate terabytes of sensor data per hour

the population and people there produce and consume a lot of data

achille··on Show HN: Modembin – A pastebin that encodes your text into real FSK modem audio
Fun challenge: I asked Claude/Gemini to decode the audio by just uploading it as puzzle.wav. Claude is able to decode it:

https://claude.ai/share/4262fb6b-3ca1-407f-af0d-4d014686e65d

achille··on We hid backdoors in ~40MB binaries and asked AI + Ghidra to find them
in the article they explicitly said they stripped symbols. If you look at the actual backdoors many are already minimal and quite obfuscated,

see:

- https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/BinaryAudit/blob/main/tasks/dns...

- https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/BinaryAudit/blob/main/tasks/dro...

achille··on SkillsBench: Benchmarking how well agent skills work across diverse tasks
Absolutely, they didn't give the agents autonomy to research or any additional data. No documentation, no web search, no reference materials.

What's the point of building skills like this?

achille··on The Gentle Seduction (1989)
Spoilers: https://areweseductionyet.pages.dev
achille··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Nice, that worked. It's even faster.

                 yours  yours+opt  claude
  ---------------------------------------
  Time (ns)        40.9      36.4    38.7
  sqrt/iter           3         2       1
  Instructions      207       187     241
Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.

https://gist.github.com/achille/23680e9100db87565a8e67038797...

achille··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat, elegant.

this sent me down a rabbit hole -- I asked a few models to solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to optimize it so it runs more efficiently.

chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it, and actually found a solution that is even more efficient. It only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more complex however.

                   yours  claude
  ------------------------------
  Time (ns/call)    40.5   38.3
  sqrt per iter        3      1
  Accuracy        4.8e-7 4.8e-7
Claude's trick: instead of calling sin/cos each iteration, it rotates the existing (cos,sin) pair by the small Newton step and renormalizes:

  // Rotate (c,s) by angle dt, then renormalize to unit circle
  float nc = c + dt*s, ns = s - dt*c;
  float len = sqrt(nc*nc + ns*ns);
  c = nc/len; s = ns/len;
See: https://gist.github.com/achille/d1eadf82aa54056b9ded7706e8f5...

p.s: it seems like Gemini has disabled the ability to share chats can anyone else confirm this?

achille··on FTX whistleblower Caroline Ellison set for early release next month
The analysis and tools were most definitely ai-aided, but this was done with homegrown forensics tooling, and about an hour of labor that involved cc, gemini (to check for synthid), chatgpt + a lot more. I also signed up for ideogram and generated more images to try and replicate the output: - e.g: https://ideogram.ai/g/fcqp-qTlQV-moS-OuhebhQ/1 (although I refused to pay for ideogram so I could not get a png output, only jpg)
achille··on FTX whistleblower Caroline Ellison set for early release next month
I ran some analysis on the source image — this is almost certainly AI-generated. In addition to the visual markers others noted (no photography in federal court, nonsensical positioning), here's what comes up in the original image:

  Filename: ..._simple_compose_01kdcxamjmekery2m9tay43szn.png
    - "simple_compose" + LSB common (e.g ideogram) output 

  Resolution: 1536x1024
    - Exact native output of GPT-image-1, Gemini/Imagen, Flux models

  PNG encoder fingerprint: 0x78 0xDA | single IDAT | 94.7% Average filter
    - Matches PIL/Pillow with optimize=True

  Steganographic watermark:
    - LSB entropy: 3.0/3.0 (maximum)
    - Bits 0-3 of RGB channels filled with encrypted payload
    - ~1.77 MB of pseudorandom data embedded
achille··on Show HN: Mysti – Claude, Codex, and Gemini debate your code, then synthesize
Could you share your skill and workflow? does claude launch codex in a tmux session?
achille··on Researchers develop a camera that can focus on different distances at once
Paper has some more useful examples:

https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/svaf/static/pdfs/Spatially_Varyin...

achille··on Thermodynamic Computing from Zero to One
also: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23972
achille··on Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration
Also see: https://www.vice.com/en/article/nuclear-bomb-earths-crust-ge...
achille··on Binocular Shot
you might be thinking of seinquotes -> click the image to get a video gif of the quote https://seinquotes.com/?search=hold+the+reservation
achille··on Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata
yes, think of it this way: why is it that bathing the Earth with 10^55 Boltzmann constants make it seemingly emit a Tesla?

can we construct a warm winter garment without having to manually pick open cotton poppies?

if we place energy in the right location, can we have slime mold do computation for us?

how do we organize matter and energy in order to watch a funny cat video?

achille··on Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata
i wasn't around to see the first humans land on the moon. i feel a similar deep sense of awe and excitement to see this revolution
achille··on Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata
https://xkcd.com/676 but now much, much more efficient
achille··on Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata
yes absolutely: current systems are wildly inefficient. the future is one of extreme energy efficiency.

re smoking: sorry let me clarify my statement. these things will be the dominant life forms on earth in terms of metabolism, exceeding the energy consumption of biological systems, over 1k petawatt hours per year, dwarfing everything else

the lines betwen us may blur metaphorically, we'll be connected to them how we're connected to ecosystems of plants and bacteria. these systems will join and merge in the same way we've merged with smartphones -- but on a much deeper level

achille··on Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata
these are going to be the dominant lifeforms on earth exceeding bacteria, plants and humans in terms of energy consumption

cellular automata that interact with their environment, ones that interact with low level systems and high level institutions. to some approximation we, humans are just individual cells interacting in these networks. the future of intelligence aint llms, but systems of automata with metabolic aspects. automata that co-evolve, consume energy and produce value. ones that compete, ones that model each other.

we're not being replaced, we're just participants in a transformation where boundaries between technological and cellular systems blur and eventually dissolve. i'm very thankful to be here to witness it

see: https://x.com/zzznah/status/1803712504910020687

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