HN user

achille

1,230 karma

Hit me up if you're in LA and care about private, low-latency, energy efficient models, legaltech and diffusing ai meaningfully

achille.brighton@venice.vision

Posts20
Comments155
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extropic.ai 8mo ago

Thermodynamic Computing from Zero to One

achille
17pts3
www.bloomberg.com 2y ago

Ex-Google & Stability Ai to Build AI Inspired by swarm intelligence

achille
2pts1
www.philadelphiafed.org 7y ago

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Partisan Conflict Index

achille
1pts0
brighton.io 10y ago

Next Silicon Valley (list)

achille
39pts44
www.reedsmith.com 11y ago

Chicago introduces 9% tax on cloud services (on AWS, Netflix etc.)

achille
4pts1
blog.ezyang.com 13y ago

Extremist Programming

achille
167pts66
h30261.www3.hp.com 13y ago

HP takes a $8.8 billion writeoff, alleging Autonomy accounting fraud

achille
136pts104
www.computerworld.com 14y ago

Nasdaq's Facebook glitch caused by 'race conditions'

achille
3pts0
online.wsj.com 14y ago

LightSquared files for Chapter 11

achille
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

This hit hard: The one sentence that will convince you to return/skip the iPad

achille
48pts73
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Regarding the iPad naming ambiguity: It makes sense.

achille
18pts12
www.eff.org 14y ago

Stanford researcher: Google Circumvents iOS Privacy protection in AdSense ads

achille
102pts50
www.spielzeugz.de 14y ago

Comparing the performance of Canvas, Flash, DOM & CSS3 Transitions

achille
8pts6
www.linusakesson.net 14y ago

From physical teletypes to the modern day Linux TTY Subsystem

achille
1pts0
appleinsider.com 15y ago

Rumor: Apple plans to move laptops from Intel to ARM processors

achille
4pts1
www.mercurynews.com 15y ago

New Apple showcase store: All-glass roof, trees growing inside, glass walls.

achille
3pts0
www.techradar.com 15y ago

The death of digg is not exagerated

achille
3pts2
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Be warned of transparent affiliate links. Summary: They highjack on_clicks

achille
7pts1
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Are there any online resume-building tools -- would anyone be interested in one?

achille
2pts2
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Has anyone run SunSpider (or any other performance metric) on the iPad?

achille
1pts0

This is amazing! Most definitely headed in the right direction. The separation layer between front and back must be cut at the smallest possible 'slice'.

Lots of people here snarking would understand if they 'felt' the latency and additional overhead. Not enough thought has been put in carfully slicing the data for individual use cases.

I'd go even further, in his demo of 'generating load by moving the config often' -- I think that 'top' app should have 'jit-ed' more of the rendering on the client such that the only information traversing pi<>client is compresed delta's of the ps hose.

latency on the gBus was at the time ~250msish but would regularly spike much more on certain sections. Each keystroke would have to roundtrip before appearing on the screen.

Using something like mosh would mitigate it, but there was no UDP tunnel available through beyoundcorp.

Cider and MDProxy were running rendering locally so the keystrokes were nearly instant.

Yep, I made my own! (Xoogler 2017-2023) this is my noogler IDE story, one of my favorite, proudest hacks!

I developed a fork of the IntelliJ IDE on my second week at google out of raw frustration over latency. At the time I was commuting 2-3hrs/day SF<>MTV on the gBus.

Connectivity on the bus wasn't optimal, and there was high latency. Cider didn't have deep integration, and wasn't able to let me explore and understand the internal APIs effectively. I found it easier to enter a debug session within Intellij then 'vibe' and explore the internal apis via superComplicatedObject.ini<tab>.

Faced with an alien architecture + ADHD-unfriendly flow-crushing remote desktop latency -- and the lack of discoverability, I started hacking at it and without any knowledge of the system and architecture. Just tracing Intellij execution, subprocesses and network calls.

I was able to hack together a prototype in a few days that allowed me to run IntelliJ on my Mac, while the heavy bits ran on my corp desktop. The system would mount the remote filesystem over sshfs, would monitor and patch network connections and setup transparent shim binaries. Half of Intellij was running on the Mac (the front end) and the other half ran on Linux. Intellij didn't "know" that that it was running on a mac. This was initially implemented in a ~250 line shell script that patched everything.

It was called MDProxy[1] and ended getting adopted and supported during COVID as more development went remote. This became a source of many peer bonuses and spot bonuses. circa 2017* remote coding options at the time:

         typing   | code
         latency  | integration
         --------------------------
 cider   low      | meh 
 mdproxy low      | great
 ssh+vi  med      | meh
 rdp+iJ  crushing | great
[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/intellij/blob/6b8f03c21172033a...

What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card

[dead] 4 months ago

due to library limitation, not language, they could use fancy-regex

Nice, that worked. It's even faster.

                 yours  yours+opt  claude
  ---------------------------------------
  Time (ns)        40.9      36.4    38.7
  sqrt/iter           3         2       1
  Instructions      207       187     241
Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.

https://gist.github.com/achille/23680e9100db87565a8e67038797...

thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat, elegant.

this sent me down a rabbit hole -- I asked a few models to solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to optimize it so it runs more efficiently.

chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it, and actually found a solution that is even more efficient. It only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more complex however.

                   yours  claude
  ------------------------------
  Time (ns/call)    40.5   38.3
  sqrt per iter        3      1
  Accuracy        4.8e-7 4.8e-7
Claude's trick: instead of calling sin/cos each iteration, it rotates the existing (cos,sin) pair by the small Newton step and renormalizes:
  // Rotate (c,s) by angle dt, then renormalize to unit circle
  float nc = c + dt*s, ns = s - dt*c;
  float len = sqrt(nc*nc + ns*ns);
  c = nc/len; s = ns/len;
See: https://gist.github.com/achille/d1eadf82aa54056b9ded7706e8f5...

p.s: it seems like Gemini has disabled the ability to share chats can anyone else confirm this?

The analysis and tools were most definitely ai-aided, but this was done with homegrown forensics tooling, and about an hour of labor that involved cc, gemini (to check for synthid), chatgpt + a lot more. I also signed up for ideogram and generated more images to try and replicate the output: - e.g: https://ideogram.ai/g/fcqp-qTlQV-moS-OuhebhQ/1 (although I refused to pay for ideogram so I could not get a png output, only jpg)

I ran some analysis on the source image — this is almost certainly AI-generated. In addition to the visual markers others noted (no photography in federal court, nonsensical positioning), here's what comes up in the original image:

  Filename: ..._simple_compose_01kdcxamjmekery2m9tay43szn.png
    - "simple_compose" + LSB common (e.g ideogram) output 

  Resolution: 1536x1024
    - Exact native output of GPT-image-1, Gemini/Imagen, Flux models

  PNG encoder fingerprint: 0x78 0xDA | single IDAT | 94.7% Average filter
    - Matches PIL/Pillow with optimize=True

  Steganographic watermark:
    - LSB entropy: 3.0/3.0 (maximum)
    - Bits 0-3 of RGB channels filled with encrypted payload
    - ~1.77 MB of pseudorandom data embedded

yes, think of it this way: why is it that bathing the Earth with 10^55 Boltzmann constants make it seemingly emit a Tesla?

can we construct a warm winter garment without having to manually pick open cotton poppies?

if we place energy in the right location, can we have slime mold do computation for us?

how do we organize matter and energy in order to watch a funny cat video?

yes absolutely: current systems are wildly inefficient. the future is one of extreme energy efficiency.

re smoking: sorry let me clarify my statement. these things will be the dominant life forms on earth in terms of metabolism, exceeding the energy consumption of biological systems, over 1k petawatt hours per year, dwarfing everything else

the lines betwen us may blur metaphorically, we'll be connected to them how we're connected to ecosystems of plants and bacteria. these systems will join and merge in the same way we've merged with smartphones -- but on a much deeper level

these are going to be the dominant lifeforms on earth exceeding bacteria, plants and humans in terms of energy consumption

cellular automata that interact with their environment, ones that interact with low level systems and high level institutions. to some approximation we, humans are just individual cells interacting in these networks. the future of intelligence aint llms, but systems of automata with metabolic aspects. automata that co-evolve, consume energy and produce value. ones that compete, ones that model each other.

we're not being replaced, we're just participants in a transformation where boundaries between technological and cellular systems blur and eventually dissolve. i'm very thankful to be here to witness it

see: https://x.com/zzznah/status/1803712504910020687

Just listened to Vogue on my headphones, and I'm unable to notice anything unique about the soundscape of this song. What do you folks hear and when do you hear it? At what point in the song?