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sim04ful

237 karma · joined August 17, 2018

me@simdijinkins.com
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sim04ful··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Samuel Butler's adaptation of Homer.
sim04ful··on Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)
I've been thinking about this issue. One thing i realized early on is that the presentation layer is transcient it doesn't matter as much as data representation and storage.
sim04ful··on Tells of a Slop UI
The one thing that vexxes me up so much is the model bring up internal decisions in consumer facing views.
sim04ful··on Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5
Hi, I'm currently planning on launching a product like this "Grammarly for Design" in a few weeks. Would you be interested in being part of the alpha group ?
sim04ful··on OpenJev
This is a problem that i'm actively working on (https://fudge.design), what i've realised is that it's simply not an issue of capability - given a well crafted site and a competently written visually aware harness, most recent models can replicate that website.

So it's what lies between saying "I want x website" -[.....] -> Code+Assets

The issue has to do with specification fidelity, in short a grill-me style aesthetic interrogation using illustrative tooling - ascii diagrams for specifying layout, copy and user-flow, image-gen mockups for higher fidelity mockups. References are also very important for nailing down the aesthetical qualities. I've noticed it's far better vs purely text description to simply gather up a mood-board telling the llm to find commonalities and come up with a design system and brand guide.

So I don't believe it's an unsolvable problem, it's simply a lack of effort on the implementors part. Also there's probably some survivor's bias here (you won't notice an intentionally designed vibe-coded site)

For example here's one reference exploration site i recently made with grok: https://explorer.withfudge.com/

sim04ful··on Introducing System One Models and Jev
This sort of stuff almost sends shivers down my spine, it's like i'm looking 5 years into the future.
sim04ful··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
https://fudge.design Gives AI agents better design taste by enabling them search for references.
sim04ful··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Playing a devil's advocate. Why do we need understanding ? To take an example i would say ~99% of the population do not understand how combustion engines or how semiconductors work, what say another 1% ? Is the fear post-apocalyptic in nature ? We need some human priesthood to carry on tradition ? why ?

Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.

What say the 1% ?

Lifted up my comment for addition visibility

sim04ful··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Playing a devil's advocate. Why do we need understanding ? To take an example i would say ~99% of the population do not understand how combustion engines or how semiconductors work, what say another 1% ?

Is the fear post-apocalyptic in nature ? We need some human priesthood to carry on tradition ? why ?

Let's assume in the next decade GPT-7 PRO Ultra is cheaply ubiquitous, inspectable, reproducible, transferable, reasonably un-constrained by any institutional interests.

What say the 1% ?

Just a thought.

sim04ful··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
"We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose"

Suppose we eventually have GPT-7-class models running practically on $100 devices, with their activity transparent, inspectable, and reproducible. At that point, what exactly is left for us to fear from this threat?

sim04ful··on OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
Claude will release another employee ballast, the valid but in-conceived alarmism will surely reach POTUS ears.
sim04ful··on Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]
Where does the strange loop reside in LLMs ?
sim04ful··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
Now I'm curious what the evolutionary ramifications of this would be.
sim04ful··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
This looks like another homerun for a24
sim04ful··on ChatGPT outage – Resolved
Hear hear!
sim04ful··on ChatGPT Is Throwing 404
Interesting enough, none of the chinese companies are down (deepseek, kimi, qwen)
sim04ful··on ChatGPT outage – Resolved
If this isn't a warning shot that you shouldn't silo your knowledge work behind a specific provider i don't know what is.
sim04ful··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
Initially thought this was due to some internal mis-configuration from today's expected Astra release, but now that this is affecting claude and grok. I'm gonna assign the suspicion to cloudflare.
sim04ful··on I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis
Yup, picked that wording to evoke this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_arch
sim04ful··on I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis
I reached a similar conclusion: LLMs should only really sit at the terminals of request fulfilment.

1. User request understanding: natural language -> a more rigorous representation, in my case Datalog.

2. Result interpretation: facts and derived facts -> natural language.

Between those terminals, the work should be mechanical reasoning over some ontology or formal knowledge structure.

That connects to another principle I've been thinking about, which I call Weathering: useful reasoning should change the shape of the system. If an LLM has already had to infer a relation, mapping, rule, or abstraction, repeated use should wear that inference into the system so that the next similar request doesn't require discovering it again from scratch.

With continued use, a weathering-capable system should therefore require less and less probabilistic intelligence for recurring work. Put another way, there should be a declining marginal cost of cognition since the products of intelligence harden into structure that can subsequently be reused and evaluated mechanically.

sim04ful··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2026 – Show and tell
https://explorer.withfudge.com

It's well on the way to make $600+/month now, almost doubling since last month. I've realised given the ease at which software can be ideated and maintained, i would rather focus on having a more dataset-intensive moat.

It's a database of website section screenshots I've been hand collecting with others for almost 2 years now (it's crowdsourced via a seperate chrome extension), each section has styling metadata linked - typography usage (leading, weights, tracking, sizes,etc), font details (foundry, designer), colors and alot more.

What really helped was my positioning, instead of trying to compete with established players (mobbin, landbook, refero), decided to focus on the MCP integration; the giving LLMs design taste angle.

sim04ful··on Could a computer scientist build a brain?
Imo, thinking is just adaptation happening on a shorter timescale.

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

It's doing all that it can.

sim04ful··on Could a computer scientist build a brain?
Imo, there isn't anything fundamentally special about the brain as a cognitive substrate. Even a pool of water could have cognition (reservoir computing), i feel that it's a general property that can emerge in any sufficiently high-dimensional physical system with enough internal degrees of freedom to explore many configurations, and enough coupling and stability to remain coherent, and enough plasticity for experience to leave persistent changes in its future dynamics.

And subjecting such a system to sustained external objective pressure...where some internal organisations perform better than others and it would progressively accumulate some useful structure about its environment.

The brain is just a really old artefact of billions of years of blind environmental weathering of matter being repeatedly shaped by the requirement that its host continue to exist as a coherent, persistent entity.

In short the brain is not fundamentally special in the principles that make cognition feasible.

What i'm trying to say in response to this article is that he's working at a far higher level of abstraction than is required. It's putting software before physics.

Also this somewhat chimes the same tune from the bitter lesson; it’s extremely non-trivial to reverse-engineer from the top down the residue of eons of evolutionary search. You’re basically trying to infer some smarter way of achieving this one absurdly overfit artefact it left behind...won't be betting against the full brunt of mother nature's massively parallel search.

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

sim04ful··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Could you by any chance, share the conversation link here ? there's a share button at the top right
sim04ful··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Thanks for the feedback, working on it.
sim04ful··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
https://design.withfudge.com.

It gives agents the ability to find website design references to improve their design skills via the mcp - https://design.withfudge.com/mcp

You can also critic your existing designs against competition.

sim04ful··on Harness engineering for self-improvement
All this work for something we already solved 40+ years ago with ontologies and expert systems
sim04ful··on Show HN: Drop your site, get design feedback based on similar sites
Tokens cost money, there's got to be some gating to prevent abuse.
sim04ful··on DeepSeek-V4-Flash Update
That's an absolutely terrible idea for any non-trivial project consuming it.
sim04ful··on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
I can't help but feel the timing coinciding with luna's price updates to be somewhat strategic. But without multi-modality it's slightly dead-in-the-water for my usecase: https://design.withfudge.com. I'm currently using Minimax-M3, but Luna ekes out abit futher on the intelligence, so i'll be switching to it very soon.
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