Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,091 posts.
The balance of software copyright protection and openness has always been fraught with minutiae and detail that bores all but the most nerdy of pedants. Yet, through much effort and 40 years of debate we had reached an equilibrium. Now AI has thrown that out the window.
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I’ve been doing lots of experiments with GPT , though I’ve only written about one until now… the more serious something is the harder it is to call it finished or identify the outcomes. Here I’ll describe something a bit lighter: world building, or specifically city building, with GPT .
I thought we were done for major model releases in 2024, but apparently not: Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Apache 2.0 licensed Qwen licensed (the license changed) QvQ-72B-Preview, “an …
My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment).
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
Seriously - why do we need all these vector databases? Do we need dozens of them?
A free, self-contained introduction to neural networks and differentiable programming, from automatic differentiation to transformers, with additional chapters on advanced topics.
This weekend I went to BSides SF 2023 and had a blast. I went to some really interesting talks (including an excellent one about adversarial machine learning), but mostly I spent my time solving CTF hacking challenges. And this time, I did it with the help of GPT-4, the
Projects and Ramblings
Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. Like a cruise ship hea…
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
Researchers show LLMs respond with improved performance when prompted with emotional context
By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
I got OpenAI's o1 to play codenames and the results were surprisingly good
A ridiculously deep dive into Oblivion’s controversial AI system and its legacy
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
To understand the differences between automatic differentiation libraries, let’s talk about the engineering trade-offs that were made. I would personally say that none of these libraries are “better” than another, they simply all make engineering trade-offs based on the domains and use cases they were aiming to…
THE ROBOT AND THE BABY
Discussions: Hacker News (63 points, 8 comments), Reddit r/programming (312 points, 37 comments) Translations: Arabic, French, Spanish Update: Part 2 is now live: A Visual And Interactive Look at Basic Neural Network Math Motivation I’m not a machine learning expert. I’m a software engineer by training and I’ve had…
I’ve been working with Machine Learning models both in academic and industrial settings for a few years now. I’ve recently been watching the excellent Scalable ML from Mikio Braun, this…
Results and speed for other programs on enwik8 and enwik9 are available at the Large Text Compression Benchmark .
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of…
