alkyon

503 karma · joined February 23, 2017

alkyonon Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

I think you meant lossy compression and not lossless. I'm not suggesting this as a method to extract those books from the models, which by their nature are not databases. Just commenting on the somewhat surprising fact that the bigger the model the more likely it is to produce some (short) excerpts of the original training material

alkyonon Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

Gemini should be trained on those books already, so in theory it could regurgitate some verbatim fragments (as NYT lawsuit against OpenAI showed some time ago).

alkyonon Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

I wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?

alkyonon Why I Stopped Arguing with People

Nice quote from Tao Te Ching about complexity and simplicity completing each other.

The rules of go could be explained to a 4 years old. On the other hand, the superficial complexity of so many framworks/systems is just a facade and nothing more.

The same goes for NP-hard problems where complex solutions have trivial verification methods.

alkyonon Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)

Explanation that is not intuitive at all: because physical units need to agree (kg * m^2 / s^2)

alkyonon No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

This is a moot point though. Before all the jobs are replaced in 2036, shouldn't we see data centres burning? Revolutions tend to succeed with only 1% of population taking part. I think it's probably that this revolution will ultimately fail for various reasons, but still it's a valid scenario, which at the very least should be mentioned.

alkyonon 22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'

Seven previously unknown compositions for flute and harp is not minor

alkyonon Introduction to Making Makefiles

Nice intro. Makefile is a complex beast but here it appears simple and user friendly

alkyonon The Traditional Vi (2007)

Repeat ZZ to save & exit if there are more files to edit

ZQ - discard & exit

alkyonon How many of the 170k English words do you know?

I only got 4 wrong as a non-native speaker. Okay, I'm widely read in English, but among LLM-generated definitions it's just too easy to spot the right one.

alkyonon How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296888725_Geology_a...

The article is in French, but geology is the key factor. Do you need to bore rock or sandy soil with tar? Is the area seismically active like in Los Angeles? This affects the cost and timeline of metro construction more than just wages.

alkyonon Midjourney Medical

We are at pets.com stage of AI bubble. This time the business model is LLM-generated, though.

alkyonon What the Fuck Happened to Nerds

Invoking LOTR analogy, Woz would be Tom Bombadil of the industry. Musk, Altman & Thiel, on the other hand, quite the opposite.

alkyonon Thoughts on AI and Jobs

This blog post offers no new insights.

Let's imagine that half of the jobs or more are lost. It would create a shock for the economy as a whole, incomparable with anything that happened before.

It's a snake eating its own tail paradox. It means massive bankruptcies across all sectors and some governments defaulting on their debts. We can forget about UBI in these circumstances. Yes, OpenAI and Anthropic will pay more taxes but the economy as a whole will be uprooted.

alkyonon AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit

I normally exclude all AUR packages from system updates to speed things up, so I shouldn't be affected either.

alkyonon MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second

Sounds like exponential growth of crappy software. I'm not saying that before we didn't have mass produced crap in SE, but now it will turn into explosive overflow.

alkyonon Zig: Build System Reworked

Carpentry would have been ideal career. Building real things, artisanal or not, and nobody insisting yet that the chest of drawers you're building include AI

alkyonon Please Use AI

Poetic licence, it's poetry or poetic prose and not some random blog post about LLMs

alkyonon Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics

Was mentioned in a twin thread:

"27 is a Tao prime. Terence Tao suggested 27 was a prime number on The Colbert Report in 2014. He was likely very nervous."

alkyonon Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics

I just noticed that it's 60-3 without any divisibility tests.

Tao's 27 prime was much more embarassing but understandable as he's no a calculator.

Savants are for things like remembering the first million primes. Someone like Tao or Grothendieck can't remeber them beyond 20, but it doesn't mean they can't actuly reason about them.

alkyonon AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

Not really, because investors will sooner or later want to see real returns on what they invested. Tokens are suddenly not dirt cheap and enterprises are screwed.

It's like selling dope, once they're addicted, a dealer could turn the screw on them

alkyonon Venom and hot peppers offer a key to killing resistant bacteria

"The team was able to isolate two colorless molecules called benzoquinones—heterocyclic compounds that do not contain amino acids"

Hats off, not only were they able to isolate just two molecules, but also established that they were colorless.

I don't think this is a usual definition for benzoquinones:

"heterocyclic compounds that do not contain amino acids".

I can smell Sam Altman's socks reading this article.

alkyonon Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

In chronological sense.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989

Round Table agreement, which paved the way to the partially free elections in 1989 won by the opposition, preceded similar events in other countries by several months including Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Fall of Berlin Wall.

alkyonon Ask HN: Shouldn't we increase flagging threshold?

Very good point. As an added benefit, new accounts would be gathering karma slower by creating valuable comments as opposed to some more or less random submissions.

alkyonon Woman who never stopped updating her lost dog's chip reunites with him after 11y

Reminds me of this superb part of the Odyssey where Odysseus is reunited with his dog, Argos, after 20 years of absence. Odysseus was in disguise, but it's only him that could pass the test and recognize the returning king, after which he died.

https://scaife.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.t...

alkyonon Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

Still preferable to just pasting it without revealing the source. LLMs have become a brain prosthesis for some people which is incredibly sad.

alkyonon Algebraic topology: knots links and braids

Horned sphere is a recursive beauty. Nice thing to refresh my memory on path-connected vs simply connected propety.

alkyonon Iranians describe scenes of catastrophe after Tehran's oil depots bombed

We don't know what happened with the bulk of Epstein's private island videos. Who knows, they may well have resurfaced in Tel Aviv or Moscow. Both countries have a lot to gain from this disastrous campaign.

alkyonon US economy sheds 92,000 jobs in February in sharp slide

You're recursively funny :]

alkyonon Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans

Pizza like its predecessor Focaccia (panis focacius in Roman times) was initially tomato-less. Even today many pizzerias offer pizza bianca in their menus