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mackeye

75 karma · joined January 27, 2025

https://makki.moe :>
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mackeye··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
why take the least charitable possible reading D; i've always read and intended it as inviting informality. i also don't find it harder to read at all (most people don't know some find it harder to read: i didn't)
mackeye··on Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone
the u.s. and israel are actively using AI for weapons, auto-targeting, surveillance, research. why not mention them?
mackeye··on It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
> except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government.

do you think the average american could estimate the order of magnitude of the number of koreans we killed in the korean war? or the fact we continually bombed cuba, installed N military dictatorships across the world (and when), etc.? america isn't less guilty of censorship, we were just arguably smarter about it

mackeye··on Back to Kagi
i love that geeksforgeeks is the website everyone mentions wanting to block :D
mackeye··on My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992
for advanced undergrads, the university of michigan (i'm speaking from my own experience here) has a course progression of (1) programming languages for 1st year grad students, (2) compilers for undergraduates, (3) compiler optimization for 1st year grad students. the expectation is that you can write a fast implementation of a simple language (~scheme) on your own, and you have the knowledge to write a simple optimizing compiler for e.g. c89/99 if you were to take it on as a longer project. any compiler written in a semester probably doesn't have enough manpower to be optimized to a point of usefulness, and you'll learn some things only via implementation struggles, but you'll have the capability to try, search for literature to get unstuck, etc. which is cool!
mackeye··on Wolfram Language and Mathematica Version 15, AI Assistant, Symbolic Music, More
it has the nicest calculator syntax (imho) among the tools i've tried (python/julia/array langs/matlab/etc...) with extensive docs for each function and a nice notebook interface, but i've never written a program in it that was longer than one expression.
mackeye··on The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
awesome article! i appreciated the alternatives and misc. workarounds to OT/unicode typesetting toward the end, very helpful :D (go blue!)
mackeye··on Why Janet? (2023)
this is good to know :) my use for janet hasn't involved much processing of external data but i'll keep bb in mind when the use case arises. thank you for the information!
mackeye··on A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)
"we" didn't pass them --- i don't think changing the severity of law enforcement alone can achieve what i wish for in society, but the existence of many laws (and severity of their punishment) i disagree with and thus do not want enforced
mackeye··on Why Janet? (2023)
janet has replaced sh, python, awk, etc. for me, for system scripts over a certain length! it has a very fast startup time (on my system, 1.4ms via hyperfine vs. 1ms for dash) for scripts (not compiled executables), and its sh-dsl module allows typing shell commands very elegantly, like ($ cmda w x | cmdb y z). the ability to load an image to debug is a big help, too. i've started using it very recently but it's probably one of my favorite languages now, and the only other lisp i've used is mit scheme for sicp.
mackeye··on Gemini Omni
i've tried not to
mackeye··on Gemini Omni
god help us if we have to choose between the two );
mackeye··on Gemini Omni
i do photo restoration as part of my research (bizarre place to be for a math undergrad), so i do think AI is a lifesaver for very small adjustments that would be tedious or subpar otherwise. i just disagree that its creative output is of value (which isn't the case you made, anyway).
mackeye··on Gemini Omni
you would watch a movie generated with the sterility of an LLM?
mackeye··on We are retiring our bug bounty program
:D https://github.com/UnsafeLabs/Bounty-Hunters
mackeye··on The soul of maintaining a new machine
not much to add but this was an excellent read :D
mackeye··on Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
umich currently has a course like this (but it's a bit of a blowoff)
mackeye··on Kasane: New drop-in Kakoune front end with GPU rendering and WASM Plugins
the original kakoune is just cli; the binary has a json ui client option to allow communication with the kakoune server, with the intent of any gui or alternative client being separated from the kak binary/repo. that being said, this seems entirely ai-generated :( i had planned to write a kakoune frontend that supported rtl text (arabic in particular) + unicode, prop fonts, etc., and might look to how some things were done here, but i'd be blown away if this didn't have a great number of rough edges w.r.t. line wrap, unicode, rtl, etc. ...
mackeye··on SDF Public Access Unix System
just got my stickers from there yesterday! :-) i wish my less cs-oriented friends could see how cool i think the sdf is, lol; and, that some kind of "small-web" system, complete with the self-expression the sdf offers via web-hosting, a radio station(!), etc., was accessible to more people (not at the fault of anyone; just that there's a lot to the internet that most people will never see). :>
mackeye··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
adding a zero to the left of a binary integer doesn't double it
mackeye··on You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
i don't entirely disagree, but

> the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo

is, imo, false. cc pro, $20 per month, gets you a lot of sonnet usage, and code review with opus (which i find very valuable, even as someone who tries to use ai little). i guess it depends how you use ai, but if you use it to plan, debug, and review, rather than having it write code, i think pro is pretty comfortable.

to add, i've seen people say these subscriptions will get far more expensive, as they're offered at a loss. but, it seems far more likely that free tiers will be degraded or disappear, as (especially for openai?) the relative number of subscribers to free users is very small, so the latter probably dominates compute time greatly. anthropic probably has a higher relative number of people who pay for claude code (and use it to its fullest), so this is probably less true. i can see pro getting less usage, and max increasing in cost.

mackeye··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
western liberal democracies tend to use "autocratic" as an epithet (though, i guess, there are fewer countries that marker is used against for which it's false now than ~50 years ago). for the first sentence, "the opposite" of western liberal ideas will yield 10 answers from 9 people :-)
mackeye··on 27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates
what would you say makes a UI look as if it's for a computer (genuine)? aside from purely(!) cosmetic things, like the skin on the windows 11 taskbar vs. 10. i think to windows <= xp, or tiling window managers (bar hyprland, probably) as the two most popular evolutions of mouse- vs. keyboard-based UIs (plan 9 probably fits well under the former, too). i guess i'd prefer if macos looked like dwm, but i wonder what else would need to change for the friction i feel with it to disappear.
mackeye··on Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB
a readable version seems to have just been added! https://github.com/datavorous/sameshi/tree/master/readable
mackeye··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.
mackeye··on Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in
some would say their money is our money via the ltv :-)
mackeye··on Understanding C++ Ownership System
many schools (like mine) don't teach unique pointers in the pure "programming" class sequence, but offer a primer in advanced classes where c++ happens to be used, with the intent to teach manual memory management for a clearer transition to e.g. upper-levels which use c.
mackeye··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://makki.moe
mackeye··on C++ std::move doesn't move anything: A deep dive into Value Categories
a member of the c++ committee (herb sutter) is writing an compiler for an alternative c++ syntax [0], to c++, with the intent to restrict some semantics of the language for less UB, surprises, etc. i think less implementation-defined behavior is incredibly important; rvo vs std::move, dynamic function call optimization, i wish i didn't have to search asm to check for...

[0]: https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

mackeye··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
if a handwritten letter is a "faithful image," then say a typed letter or email is a simulacra, with little original today. an AI letter is a step below, wherein the words have utterly no meaning, and the gesture of bothering to send the email at all is the only available intention to read into. i get this is hyperbole, but it's still reductive to equate such unique intentions
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