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froh

2,357 karma · joined September 18, 2013

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froh··on What's new in Emacs 31.1
I infer you don't use magic?
froh··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pulls?q=is%3A...

an active project indeed!

froh··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
wait. that's about the green field rewrite of Netscape. not about refactoring where needed.

actually it is very explicitly pushing to refactor and rejuvenate the working field tested code, instead of green field rewriting it.

elsewhere he goes on to what's needed for that, also see the great both entertaining and informative fosdem talks about rejuvenating LibreOffice

froh··on How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
funny indeed!

but no trash talk, no swear words, nothing gross or offending.

froh··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
maybe I simply don't know how this works ;-)

I was very much surprised and asked. give me demerits for the way of asking.

but the question stays: how come an encryption scheme inflates data by this order of magnitude and needs GB sized keys?

where can I learn about this? not the nutty gritty details proofs and all but an overview. assume I did my CS masters in the 1990s and worked as SW eng ever since.

NVM, I asked Gemini

https://share.google/aimode/pqZO1VF3cGTeetamq

froh··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
where does this factor "1000x" come from? I have doubts.
froh··on Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
this one numbers, man...
froh··on Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor
the banking was done via an external ram controller whose bank control register was mapped to some (unbanked) controller address.
froh··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
It's because of the basket with the fish. like ET, fishy fishy sail home.
froh··on It's not empowering to hand off the details
> It is empowering to hand off execution July 26, 2026

> I read David Nicholas Williams's short blog post titled It's not empowering to hand off the details, in which he argues that AI cannot replace expertise because doing good work requires deep familiarity with the details.

> I couldn't agree more!

> He articulates very well the puzzling phenomenon I see every day with "AI-pilled" colleagues (including many engineers) who trust the model with far more than they should. They delegate the thinking and designing along with the execution, lose touch with the codebase, miss out on critical learnings, and then complain when the slop they produced doesn't solve the original problem.

> But I think the argument is incomplete without a counterexample. There is one phase where handing off work to AI is genuinely empowering, and that is worth defining and formalizing.

froh··on The Birth of Prolog (1996)
Prolog (and common lisp) were all the rage for NLP in the 1990s, HPSG systems, le dernier cri, were implemented in them.

what confused me back then and still does is the strict determinism, the fact that program code order defines the output, not the fastest to prove valid binding.

I hoped for sth that would instead be driven by sth like A* guided by probabilities, learned from corpora...

in the early 2000s I then saw research doing exactly that, a* guided search guiding the unification algorithm. I wonder what has become of these approaches. (didn't find the specific paper any more, which to me was one of these sacred moments of reading something hard and useful being well explained, if I find it I'll update. I _believe_ it was from Stanford)

froh··on Gemini last models: temperature, top_p, and top_k are deprecated and ignored
hehe... fwiw, the un-editorialized title is "Using the *latest" Gemini models"

I speculate OP wanted to put focus on their chosen detail in the title...

froh··on The git history command
I meanwhile understood that you can commit a copy of a file and then edit both, and then the ancestry tracking options to git log resolve the two split parts ancestry just fine.
froh··on Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
I love and appreciate you doing and sharing them, with stats and details.

thank you.

froh··on Neither GCC nor Clang are compliant with standard C++
on the standard? or the compilers? or both?
froh··on Real-Time LuaTeX: Recompiling Large Documents in 1ms [pdf]
the purpose (from the paper):

> texlode, the browser-based book editor built on this architecture, is scheduled for public release in October 2026. It provides collaborative editing via conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), manu- script import from Word, proceedings management, cover design tools, and print-ready PDF output iden- tical to standard LuaLATEX. The accompanying con- ference talk demonstrates the editor in action. For details: texlode.com.

and also:

> (section) 6 Comparison to Typst

froh··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
they don't do that while flying though.
froh··on Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
> HAGHLUABLABG

??

froh··on The Git history command deserves more attention
TIL, thx :-)

somewhat related Q:

how do you give two files the same ancestor? so git log will for each show the history to the beginnings of the originally unsplit file? useful for splitting large files.

froh··on Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family
I get how you could read it that way, and of course the state as the thing that is collecting taxes and paying whatever does not profit.

and the state as all citizens, including those affected by gang and drug related violence also would benefit from dong things differently.

it's those who benefit off the current prison labor system who lobby to keep it running, and they make it seem "natural" and "without alternatives"...

and "the state" (as the tax collecting entity) pays for the prisons and the inmates while the labor "providing" companies benefit off the labor.

it's a very very clever system.

enslavement without being called such.

and I agree, no, "the state" (as the totality of citizens) doesn't benefit.

only "the state" as the entity that's controlled by lobbyists and _pretends_ being by the people, for the people, that has no motivation to change this.

froh··on Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family
at the bottom of the page there is guidelines and FAQ

they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them

especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.

froh··on Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family
yes! which is _the_ driving factor behind the US prison system with its private prison labor facilities.

there is zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates

did I mention disenfranchisement of the imprisoned?

froh··on GPT-5.6
rlhf = reinforcement learning from human feedback

(had to look it up)

froh··on GPT-5.6
> Yoda skill, there is?

ftfy

froh··on FAANG Simulator
yes! this enslavement mode is exactly the idea of those driving current policies.
froh··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
nah.

I'm talking TuSpo 1846 or Post SV or Dt. Alpenverein or Gesangsverein whathaveyou or Tanzsportverein Blau Weiss or Freunde der Modelleisenbahn sth or LSVD or Kleingartenverein etc etc etc

traditional clubs with a constitution and real self organized base democratic involvement and leadership

you get the idea.

not the "let's save some tax" scam pseudo clubs where you are not a voting member but just a service customer.

froh··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
nope.

C1 is high school

C2 is academics.

see sibling comment for links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828753

froh··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
indeed

C1 is high school level indeed and C2 is academics. this has been studied on native speakers:

me> I'm looking for studies which examine citizens language proficiency in their native tongue in the European language reference framework i.e. b2 C1 C2

Gemini> https://share.google/aimode/bImgIsAl5VfAcuoFl

has links to studies

also here is the "self assessment" on the CEFR home page:

Self-assessment grid - Table 2 (CEFR 3.3) : Common Reference levels - Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) https://share.google/E6POb6UYC53cUkxXg

froh··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
yes.

indeed.

C1 is high school.

C2 is academics.

see sibling comment for links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828753

froh··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
that relates to the C2/C1/B2 conversation in which way?
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