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drsopp

339 karma · joined January 19, 2017

C64, Amiga, Demoscene, Computer Security, Databases, Programming, Mathematics, Mathematics Didactics, LaTeX, Typography, Teaching, Mathematical Modelling, Webdesign, Beer brewing

jostein at trondal dot no

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drsopp··on Show HN: Lossless-memory – a personal AI memory that never summarizes
I can't resist the opportunity to paste some of the text I wrote in the Anthropic AI interview last December on an idea I had about adding temporal awareness to Claude.

Anthropic: Let's focus on AI with capabilities that feel within reach—not necessarily limited to exactly what exists today, but the kind of AI tools you can reasonably imagine existing in the near future. What would you want AI to help you with?

Me: There is something fundamental missing in today's capabilities that is well within reach of the tech today. I thought I would make a Github repo with a prototype but too much in my life right now. If a human in Anthropic reads this, please let me know if you run with this idea: The missing thing is lack of the bot's initiative. It is always the human who takes initiative and writes something, then the bot makes a (perhaps) elaborate response and shuts up. So something seemingly very simple like telling the bot: "Write me a limerick about a swedish chef, wait 50 seconds, then write a recipe for a danish christmas dinner not involving duck". The bot will not be able to do this. It has no concept of time. No ability to take initiative. There are many ways to frame this but you get the point. I am confident there must be a way to implement this. I read some research on this but all articles I could find are (in my opinion) unnecessarily complicated. The current chat style is Query, Response. The bot waits forever for the next input. This is not natural. When you (A) chat with customer support (B) (a real human), the context is such that it is natural for both A and B to give many inputs in a row before the other party gives their input. And, crucially, if either A or B takes too long to give input, the other party will react to that. This applies to most conversations between humans. So a way to get this behavior from a bot is as follows: the moment either the human or the bot gives any input, the chat system tries to understand the current context, and immediately decides how long time it is natural to wait until the bot should say something by its own initiative, and what it is that it should say. Then the system has a simple timer in the background that waits this amount of time and then says the thing. Very simple. Would it work? I have no idea, but it is worth a shot. This should probably be a separate mode, Proactive Messaging. it could be linked to an agent dynamically. So for example, i have a conversation in Proactive Messaging asking claude to follow the lowest price of something and let me now if it goes below a certain value. Then a few weeks down the line, i get a popup from claude about this if it happens. There should also be a menu in this case with what tasks like this have been defined.

drsopp··on Measuring the sloppiness of code
Goodharts law is invoked here with no discussion. Are we sure that optimizing for minimum LOC that pass all necessary tests produces sloppy code? And: What is sloppy code anyway? If we could define it, could we throw the definition into context and tell the LLM to avoid it?
drsopp··on Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article
My favorite instruction the last few weeks for getting Claude to explain something complex to me is: dumb it down
drsopp··on Iowa-led states ask OpenAI to keep their bots on a leash
The relevant word here is airgapping, not sandboxing.
drsopp··on Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations
I don't understand the logic of running these models this way without airgapping.
drsopp··on Help I accidentally a wigglegram
I made these in 2007 https://trondal.com/oygardstjonn
drsopp··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
Many people share this sentiment, many people don't.

Who you belong to depend on at least two things: A) How knowledgable is the AI on what you are working on, B) How well do you wield these new tools to work better than before? (Better here can mean many different things).

drsopp··on San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names
This is nothing compared to the peachtreestreets in Atlanta.
drsopp··on Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight
I didnt inspect the rest of the code but I guess the table is fetched from L2 on every call? I think the L1 data cache is flooded by other stuff going on all the time.

About dropping the interpolation: Yes you are right of course. I was thinking about the speed. No noticable speed improvement by dropping interpolation. The asin calls are only a small fraction of everything.

drsopp··on Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight
I experimented a bit with the code. Various tables with different datatypes. There is enough noise from the Monte Carlo to not make a difference if you use smaller data types than double or float. Even dropping interpolation worked fine, and got the speed to be on par with the best in the article, but not faster.
drsopp··on Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight
Did some quick calculations, and at this precision, it seems a table lookup might be able to fit in the L1 cache depending on the CPU model.
drsopp··on BitNet: Inference framework for 1-bit LLMs
"1-bit LLMs" is just marketing. The Shannon entropy of one letter with a 3 symbol alphabet (-1, 0, 1) is 1.58.
drsopp··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://trondal.com
drsopp··on Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
It destabilized after a few minutes on my phone.
drsopp··on The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
Oo, I'd like to get a roll of these. But I live in Norway.
drsopp··on Munich's surfers left stunned after famed river wave vanishes
I guess they could model the river mathematically. I would not be surprised if there are two or more "stable" stream patterns. Perhaps it resets naturally after one year.
drsopp··on Why do Stanford math professors still use chalk? (2021)
One of my math teachers in university always brought with him a dry sponge in a small blue bag. (a lighter sponge that you don't wet before use). Brilliant lecturer.
drsopp··on Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]
I wonder why the DOI link on the bottom left of the first page does not work:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3719027.3765198

drsopp··on Show HN: TheAuditor – Offline security scanner for AI-generated code
How come AST parsing fails? Does that imply syntax errors in the code?
drsopp··on The cost of interrupted work (2023)
Conversely, I often think about the value I add by being interruptable, by helping my colleague with something that might save him more time than I lose. Good for the company.
drsopp··on Who Invented Backpropagation?
This I agree with completely.
drsopp··on Who Invented Backpropagation?
> The point is that a reader may want to know that the text they're reading is something a human took the time to write themselves.

The reader may also simply want information that helps them.

> They just haven't commented.

Yes, they did.

drsopp··on Who Invented Backpropagation?
Who cares if it is low effort? I got lots of upvotes for my link to Claude about this, and pncnmnp seems happy. The downvoted comment from ChatGPT was maybe a bit spammy?
drsopp··on Who Invented Backpropagation?
Why?
drsopp··on Who Invented Backpropagation?
Perhaps this:

Henry J. Kelley (1960). Gradient Theory of Optimal Flight Paths.

[1] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8e1dfe2b-69b0-4f2c-88f5-0...

drsopp··on Roman dodecahedron: 12-sided object has baffled archaeologists for centuries
Maybe one shop made these in a big city. Adventurous men bought them, brought them home and gave them to their wife. A great novelty noone has seen at home. So precious they bring them to their grave.
drsopp··on How to Store Data on Paper?
(2020)
drsopp··on Estimating Camera Motion from a Single Motion-Blurred Image
I should have read the abstract.
drsopp··on Estimating Camera Motion from a Single Motion-Blurred Image
Isn't a logical next step to extract the depth field? Possible?
drsopp··on Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf]
I was hoping the paper was on _learning_ theory.
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