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fintler

2,373 karma · joined April 2, 2008

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fintler··on Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
> Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.

He didn’t seem to have a problem using them against civilian targets.

fintler··on Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai
Don't forget about the (awesome) cluster scheduler, Flux.

https://hpc-tutorials.llnl.gov/flux/

fintler··on It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle
Yes!

I started going down the path of building a ripple carry adder already (which seems to work fine). Then I was going to try for a full on ALU, then some sort of ISA that sits on top of it all.

I have no idea what the end result will look like if it all comes together. Hopefully I'll find some weird primitives along the way. :D

It's very hand-wavy, but I'm kinda hoping I can somehow have a machine manually constructed out of neurons that can naturally interact with one built with looser hebbian learning rules.

fintler··on It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle
I had fun reading this. Thanks for sharing.

With dendritic compartments, this seems like a waste of a perfectly good neuron that we could productively use elsewhere. ;)

Note that a SINGLE neuron can compute nonlinear functions like XOR.

Shameless plug: If anyone is interested, I did a post a while back on how neurons can act as logic gates:

https://blog.typeobject.com/posts/2025-neural-logic-gates/

This article builds on the first and creates a half adder out of neurons:

https://blog.typeobject.com/posts/2026-timing-is-the-bit/

fintler··on No way to parse integers in C (2022)
Although vcpkg is probably the most popular, I’m a fan of https://conan.io/center
fintler··on Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
Need to pee? Take the a-trap to Shell.
fintler··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
Its an eternal september moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

fintler··on Tesla is committing automotive suicide
Don't get me wrong, both are pretty terrible. I'm not going to defend Tesla.

But BYD is on a whole different level with that stuff (e.g. human trafficking, suicides and the factory that collapsed and killed a bunch of people).

There's no way that being able to cut costs to that level doesn't help their bottom line.

fintler··on Tesla is committing automotive suicide
BYD uses slave labor.

"In the dormitories of the Jinjiang Group, the company hired by BYD to carry out the work, there were no mattresses on the beds, and the few toilets served hundreds of workers in extremely unhygienic conditions. The workers also had food stored without refrigeration.

The Brazilian Labor Prosecutor's Office (MTP) also accused the companies of withholding the workers' passports and keeping 60% of their wages; the remaining 40% would be paid in Chinese currency."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...

It's hard for any company to compete with that (I hope they don't).

fintler··on Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws
Speaking from past experience with the DoE (I'm happy I don't need to deal with security like this anymore), there were constant and randomized checks to make sure fiber cables (they were all fiber to make it harder to tamper with and to avoid accidental RF) were fully visible (e.g. not hidden under a desk or something) and not tampered with. Also, lots of locks and doors, both electrical and mechanical. The guy at the front desk with a big gun probably helped too.
fintler··on Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws
They have multiple networks. One of them is definitely airgapped (red for RD). The medium security one is protected by annoyingly strict network ACLs (yellow for ITAR). Then there's a low security one for stuff like sharepoint (green).

This article is full of nonsense and speculation.

fintler··on Sandia turns on brain-like storage-free supercomputer
They already have CUDA cores in production. This is a lab that's looking for the next big thing.
fintler··on Neuromorphic computing
Probably because they're hosting an exascale-class cluster with a bazillion GH200s. Also, they launched a new "National Security AI Office".
fintler··on Starcloud
Not to be confused with StarTree Cloud:

https://startree.ai/products/startree-cloud

fintler··on Square Root Day
2025/5/5 is the next square root day. The next one won't happen until 2036/6/6.

Also, the year itself is a square (45^2=2025).

If I'm calculating right, the last time this was the case was on 1936/6/6 (44^2=1936).

fintler··on Reversible computing with mechanical links and pivots
Classical reversible computing feels like it would be a good way to interface with a quantum computer (since it's also reversible in theory).
fintler··on Reversible computing with mechanical links and pivots
It's very similiar. The rod logic in diamond age (Eric Drexler was the one who originally came up with it) moves linearly -- not rotationally like this does. It's also reversible.
fintler··on Northguard: Scalable Log Storage at LinkedIn [video]
On several of the slides in this, it compares Northguard with Kafka.
fintler··on What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?
Yeah, it's definitely a significant shift. The Xinfra component helps with Kafka compatibility, but that still has quite a bit of complexity to it. Also, it's written in C++, so that requires a different mindset to operate.
fintler··on What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?
Keep an eye out for Northguard. It's the name of LinkedIn's rewrite of Kafka that was announced at a stream processing meetup about a week ago.
fintler··on Rust to C compiler – 95.9% test pass rate, odd platforms
> do you think GCC’s m68k backend (to pick an arbitrary one) has been as battle-tested as their AArch64 one

m68k might be a bad example to pick. I was using gcc to target m68k on netbsd in the mid 1990s. It's very battle tested.

Also, don't forget that m68k used to be in all of the macs that Apple sold at one point before they switched to powerpc (before switching to x86 and the current arm chips). You could use gcc (with mpw's libs and headers) on pre-osx (e.g. system 7) m68k macs.

fintler··on Quantum Speedup Found for Class of Hard Problems
If I’m reading it right:

    dqi = O(m^2)
    classical = O(2^n)

    m = variables
    n = constraints
fintler··on TikTok ban: data reveals sharp traffic decline and rapid shift to alternatives
Late yesterday I was blocked, but today I have access again. Same source IP.
fintler··on Portrait of the Hilbert Curve (2010)
Here's a nice example of the curve to index transpose in a well established codebase:

https://github.com/SchedMD/slurm/blob/abebf13e9009831376a2d7...

It greatly simplifies the job scheduler to cluster across index instead of some n-dimensional space when calculating placement in the cluster. Consider that each server in the cluster has multiple connections to other servers which all form a sort of hypercube with the Hilbert curve conceptually drawn inside it.

It also shows how simple the transpose operation can be. It's just a few loops and bit shifts.

fintler··on Reversible computing escapes the lab
I doubt it would use DRAM. Maybe some sort of MRAM/FeRAM would be a better fit. Or maybe a tiny amount of memory (e.g. Josephson junction) in a quantum circuit at some point in the future.
fintler··on Indexing Code at Scale with Glean
glean.com is pretty awesome. The responses it generates will have citations from our internal Jira, Wiki, Slack, Github, etc.

It's also great for when I get pulled into a busy Slack channel and need a summary of what's been going on in there for the past week.

fintler··on The Age of PageRank Is Over (2022)
https://kagi.com/smallweb
fintler··on Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?
If you don’t have time to join a league, you can buy Spike Prime sets directly. It comes with hour-long lessons that you can walk through at your own pace. It’s been excellent for my 7 year old, she has no problem with it.

https://education.lego.com/en-us/products/lego-education-spi...

fintler··on Open source AI is the path forward
For the DoE, take a look at:

https://doeleadershipcomputing.org/

fintler··on My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website
> The dog is squeezed!

We talked about that, and she thought it looked better that way.

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