smokel

The academic paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03811

It's not fully described how things work exactly, but apparently it does not transfer entire LLMs as part of the worm. Now that would be interesting :)

Well, people used MS-DOS which had basically no security model at all for at least 10 years. Most viruses were benign, but it was almost trivial to simply wipe the entire hard disk. People generally didn't care, and made backups.

Things have become a bit more complicated now that machines are connected all the time, and the risk of infection is no longer limited to physically inserting a floppy disk into a machine.

I suspect that the solution is not so much in trying to make our current systems secure, but to make disconnection more practical.

Looks really nice. Do you plan to support this in the future? Are you planning to foster a community of developers around it, or are you thinking about hosting it as a service?

Asking for a friend, who also enjoys building projects with LLMs, but publishing and supporting them not so much.

AutoCAD is $175 per user per month [1].

[1] https://www.autodesk.com/products/autocad/buy

Does this analysis factor in potential caching of tokens on the server side? It seems that if they organize things well (as a model provider), they can save quite a lot on that. Looking at my Cursor statistics makes it clear that the token calculations are not at all trivial.

For coding assistance, I have tried OpenCode with several large open models through OpenRouter. All were fairly bad compared to Claude Opus. Could you provide some hints on how I should be holding these open models so that I might get more value out of them?

I agree with the common trope that open models lag behind by about a year, but something magical happened just around a year ago when the state of the art models became extremely useful. By this reasoning we're about to see open models perform well, but I'm afraid there is more to it than just waiting for another revolution around the sun.

Note, my application is coding assistance. Open models can be great for other purposes.

In order to find out how real humans reply:

Please guess a number between 1 and 100.

There are only 2^128 of such demos. How much of those are valid DOS programs? If we narrow it down to ones that generate both video and sound, I guess there are much less, which should motivate more people to try and find one :)

I hoped this would help me solve some more Project Euler [1] problems. Unfortunately, the algorithms given are not explained in detail, so the learning experience is somewhat mediocre. Then again, I have ChatGPT to elucidate them for me.

This article [2] has some interesting details on the swinging factorial function n≀, but I can't seem to find the essay that it references: "Swing, divide and conquer the factorial", 2008.

[1] https://projecteuler.net/

[2] https://oeis.org/A000142/a000142.pdf

Not the one you're replying to, but "my" system is an Angular application that makes heavy use of CodeMirror.

One instance for the base editor, and one instance for the currently active cell. The other cells are rendered to HTML through a different code path (no CodeMirror involved there).

For rendering mathematical formulas it uses MathJax.

A global context-based keyboard handler such as the one in VSCode allows for Emacs key bindings.

Interesting. I recently "vibe-coded" my personal Obsidian clone, because I want proper Emacs keybindings, and Obsidian does not support those, not even through extensions.

I do not know what to do with my pet project. I'm using it myself, and it has tons of futures that took quite some effort to get right. For example, WYSIWYG table editing is not trivial, and Claude Opus agrees with me, in the sense that it could not manage it (at all) by itself.

Open-sourcing it is an option, but I don't look forward to negative feedback. If anyone else wants Emacs keybindings in Obsidian, I will change my mind :)

ChatGPT 5.5 responds:

> What data should I retrieve, and where should I get it from? Please specify at least: ...

And it then goes on to ask just exactly what is necessary, being all constructive about it.

There were early multitasking operating systems starting with the 286, but for demos you'd typically use the entire CPU. Part of the magic was that video routines would run at an extremely constant 50 (or 60) Hz, perfectly in sync with the hardware. This, and color bleeding, resulted in a buttery smooth experience, that I still miss.

One particular example of this experience was that you'd use "raster bars" to time the performance of your routines. If your main loop is synchronized with the vertical retrace, then switching the background color after a piece of code would show up in the margins of your screen.

Animations were tuned to move in constant pixel offsets. All the anti-aliasing in the world cannot bring back the true demoscene spirit :)

Did it find Girav [1]?

[1] https://www.girav.com/

People will not flock somewhere unless they sense some potential return on investment. If a website looks like it will disappear in a few months, it does not make sense for a user to invest time and effort into it.

You have to either invest a lot to get a critical mass to join your site, or make it extremely entertaining to be there from the start. Apart from all the criticism, this is what Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn got right from the start. For their intended audiences, it is either useful or fun to be on their platforms.

I don't see much added value for most arXiv extensions, except for SemanticScholar [1], which might have been lucky being one of the first.

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/

Multiple times have I blamed compilers, cosmic rays, quantum effects, or at the very least an obscure kernel bug, before realizing that I was the source of a bug.

A collision at 15,000 records is so unlikely that I would first suspect something else. Duplicate processing, replayed requests, reused objects, misleading logs, or another code path reusing the identifier.

Could you share a bit more of the surrounding code so we can check?

Actually, asking this multiple times to ChatGPT gives me different UUIDs every time, and it checked with a web search that they are not found in public data.

This essay seems to be related to the paper "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning" [1] which was discussed here recently [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.21691

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47893779

The preferred solution actually moves my arm around a bit so that it works in a physical office. For remote work, there are so called "mouse jigglers" [1], but those do not require sunglasses to work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_jiggler

It would be nice if someone invented a mouse with a tiny motor inside, so I could put on sunglasses, rest my hand on the mouse, doze off, and still look like I'm working hard.

Quite some people here dismiss requirements engineering as something non-agile and ancient.

If you are in this camp, consider educating yourself a bit on the V-model [1] and notice that this is not only used in the waterfall model, but that it is a way to decompose problems and verify that everything works properly.

This may not be required for a small hobby project, but if you start working at something with multiple companies in various technologies, it soon becomes extremely useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-model

No, code is not the same as a specification. There are a lot of accidental implementation details that the customer may not require. By making the code the specification, you end up with those details becoming requirements, and you can then no longer change that implementation.

Having functional behavior and implementation details separate can be really useful, even though it is typically a pain to keep them in sync.

Interestingly, most of scientific research is also not part of the public discourse.

Mechanical typewriters have different physical mechanisms to feed forward a line or make the carriage return. I think it doesn't turtle much further back than that.

I find it a bit depressing that this list is tied so closely to individuals. Obviously these individuals did great things, but it is typically by standing on the shoulders of giants (Isaac Newton) that any of this has been possible.

It might be a nice exercise to describe the larger waves of ideas that follow certain cultural currents. To list some random examples, capitalism has spurred many developments, as did religion. Setting up universities, introducing law, being able to replicate documents, all seem more relevant than some individuals taking credit for the cherry on top.

To contradict myself once more, where is Gutenberg in this list?

Humans are also, possibly apart from dogs, the only beings that think humans are incredible. If we take any other entity in the universe, then chances are they think pretty lowly of humans and their cherished intelligence, if at all.

This seems to be an ad for a fairly expensive book on a topic that is described in detail in many (free) resources.

See for example: https://rlabbe.github.io/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyth...

Is there something in this particular resource that makes it worth buying?

This is great news for those of us looking for baby names. So far my list includes: Pascal, Ada, Dylan, Crystal, Lisa, Julia, Ruby, and now Lisette.

What, an article on typing and keyboards, and no mention of Dvorak or Colemak? Let's have that eternal discussion again!

Swap Caps and Ctrl, use Emacs or vi keybindings, and save your wrist from moving to the arrow keys!

I think this is mostly about existing legislature, not about technology.

In any other context than when your paycheck depends on it, you would probably not be following orders from a random manager. If your paycheck depended on following the instructions of an AI robot, the world might start to look pretty scary real soon.