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smokelon Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality

I tried quite a lot. I've come to the conclusion that thinking (and logic) is probably some pattern that only seems interesting to itself.

(Yes, I am aware of the otherwise nonsensical concepts "pattern" and "interesting".)

smokelon Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality

But where does logic exist in, then? Does it not need consistency to be useful? And what causes the consistency? It's turtles all the way down.

smokelon Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality

Once the notion of objective truth is relinquished, what ontological or epistemic status remains for reasoning itself? Is it to be understood as a pragmatic construct, or as something with deeper necessity beyond empiricism?

smokelon A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool

It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.

The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.

Not taking sides here, just reasoning out loud.

smokelon What is intelligence? (2024)

Perhaps they are, but what does that tell you?

Note that you'd also have to be somewhat more precise as to what the "state" and "next state" are. It is likely that the state is everything that enters the brain (i.e. by means of sensing, such as what we see, hear, feel, introspect, etc.). However, parts of this state enter the brain at various places and at various frequencies. Abstracting that all away might be problematic.

smokelon React vs. Backbone in 2025

Interestingly, this is the case in Chrome, but in Firefox both React and Backbone exhibit the same behaviour.

smokelon First convex polyhedron found that can't pass through itself

The puzzle applies only to convex polyhedra.

smokelon Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an Nvidia Spark via brute force with Claude Code

It is indeed a disaster waiting to happen. Figuring out a way to run agents safely is apparently a harder problem than getting to AGI :)

smokelon Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs

Off-topic, but it would be great if everyone who voiced their opinion on something would add a small disclaimer with their actual knowledge about the subject. Thanks for sharing :)

smokelon The Karpathy Interview, 6 Months After AI 2027

If you enjoy this kind of trend forecasting, you might also be interested in seeing which colors are expected to dominate clothing stores this winter:

https://www.pantone.com/articles/fashion-color-trend-report/...

smokelon Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

The article raises several interesting points, but I find its claim that Claude Code relies primarily on grep for code search unconvincing. It's clear that Claude Code can parse and reason about code structure, employing techniques far beyond simple regex matching. Since this assumption underpins much of the article's argument, it makes me question the overall reliability of its conclusions a bit.

Or am I completely misunderstanding how Claude Code works?

smokelon BERT is just a single text diffusion step

For most serious texts I start with a tree outline, before I engage my literary skills.

smokelon Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

Technical competence and an interest in sociological development do not always coincide. Technology often seeks simplicity, whereas sociology examines inherently complex human behavior.

smokelon Astronomers 'image' a mysterious dark object in the distant Universe

Whether something is important or unimportant is something that only humans, and possibly some animals, and possibly some AI, can reason about. Most of the universe does not reason, and does not think that things are important or not.

Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.

smokelon Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG

Extreme price points, not honest service. It's all fairly hypothetical. I don 't know exactly where you'd like the discussion to go. In reality things are always more complicated. I just think that it is a generally a good idea to call out people on anti-social behavior. When, where and how to exactly do that differs in every situation.

smokelon Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG

I'm not a plumber, but I think the analogy would require the plumber to be strategical about every job they take on. Within a few months, our plumber would only be plumbing for millionaires, installing golden faucets at extreme price points. I would then stop befriending said plumber.

smokelon Why is everything so scalable?

ThoughtWorks gathers this phenomenon under the term "envy": Web Scale envy [1] or Big Data envy [2] are two relevant blips on their technology radar. It is typically better to keep things simple.

[1] https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/high-performan...

[2] https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/big-data-envy

smokelon Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice

Etymology to the rescue. "Valid" and "value" share a root, and so do "verify" and "verity." You validate something to see if it has value, meaning it works and is fit for purpose. You verify it to check that it is true and meets its specifications. Does that help? :)

smokelon Macro Splats 2025

That's quite the improvement over Stars/NoooN [1] showing off real-time rendering of (supposedly) 23,806 triangles on a 486.

[1] https://youtu.be/wEiBxHOGYps

smokelon Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG

Please don't read too much into this single word. The comment above mentioned "nearly every ounce of energy they expended on research was strategic", and I was keeping that in mind while writing my remark.

Please read my sibling comment where I expand a bit on what I meant to say.

smokelon Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

The TUNES [1] operating system and programming language project. The reason for its failure are described perfectly on the archival website:

> TUNES started in 1992-95 as an operating system project, but was never clearly defined, and it succumbed to design-by-committee syndrome and gradually failed. Compared to typical OS projects it had very ambitious goals, which you may find interesting.

[1] http://tunes.org/

smokelon The Flummoxagon

Very interesting, but I have a hard time differentiating the colors. The gradients seem to be there for aesthetics only, but they confuse me to no end :)

smokelon Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG

I agree that the system itself is dysfunctional, and I understand the argument that individuals are shaped or even constrained by it. However, in this case, we are talking about people who are both exceptionally intelligent and materially secure. I think it's reasonable to expect such individuals to feel some moral responsibility to use their abilities for broader good.

As for whether that expectation is "selfish" on my part, I think that question has been debated for centuries in ethics, and I'm quite comfortable landing on the side that says not all disapproval is self-interest. In my own case, I'm not benefiting much either :)

smokelon Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG

> I certainly didn't judge them because they are just playing the game.

Please do judge them for being parasitical. They might seem successful by certain measures, like the amount of money they make, but I for one simply dislike it when people only think about themselves.

As a society, we should be more cautious about narcissism and similar behaviors. Also, in the long run, this kind of behaviour makes them an annoying person at parties.

smokelon Examples are the best documentation

The Diátaxis framework [1] provides a nice suggestion of different types of documentation, and when to use them. None of these types is "best", each serves a different purpose.

[1] https://diataxis.fr/

smokelon Svelte’s characteristics that likely contribute most to improved performance

But it was published 5 Oct 2025.

smokelon Why I gave the world wide web away for free

Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)

The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?

smokelon Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without invoking authority in the title, no?

smokelon Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

He sort of counters his own argument by having so much influence as an individual :)

smokelon Nine things I learned in ninety years

The problem lies in the word "we". I personally don't think this, and neither do most other people who gave this subject some thought.

It's just that silly ideas get to live around for a long time, and simply proving them false has little to no effect.