Viewing profile — darkstarsys

If I'm any example, I'm on the other side. I got into computers in the '70s: plotter art, BASIC, then Z-80s, forth, PDP11s, Amigas and so to now with GPUs and supercomputers and vi…

If you think LLMs can't "jump," watch Terence Tao engage with ChatGPT to try to understand the intellectual leaps achieved by Claude Fable 5 in finding a counterexample to the Jaco…

Yes, emphatically! I wouldn't be where I am today without tools like Emacs and Linux. This is why I created [pcons]( https://pcons.org ) because software build tools (like all dev …

Exactly the opposite for me. I've gotten into a whirlwind of productivity, working through my lifetime backlog of "somebody out to do thing X" — now I'm doing ALL of them (all open…

The enshittification begins.

Exactly the same thing happened when Google appeared on the scene. (Not that this makes it any better!)

Indeed. Perhaps my article here will be of interest to some: https://blog.oberbrunner.com/blog/ai-math-as-humanities/

See also my log-scale timeline of the universe — hand-curated rather than a giant import, and I hope also a bit nicer/simpler UI: https://deep-timeline.org

Owners of capital, yes, but also owners of the means of production (which now means AI companies). See https://blog.oberbrunner.com/blog/ai-risks-taxonomy/#economi...

I'm on my third Surface Pro (an 11 this time) and basically love it. Tablet form factor, lightweight, multitouch, with a real desktop OS (I mean not ipad's iOS). Decent battery lif…

What happens to humanity when AIs are better at being human than most humans? (More patient, more empathetic even if it's simulated empathy, more knowledgeable)

I spend a lot of time doing this too -- cutting up band rehearsal tapes into songs and exporting all. As weird as Audacity's UI is, I haven't found anything better than it at this.…

Absolutely gorgeous as an art piece.

I'm newly mostly-retired as a VFX software developer & CTO. I'm writing about AI, climate change and more in my blog, https://oberbrunner.com , running Long Now Boston ( https://lo…

I'm mostly retired from a lifetime as a graphics programmer and CTO, and now I'm working through my lifetime of fun backlog projects. https://pcons.org , https://deep-timeline.org …

As a heavy AI-assisted open source code creator (and someone with 40+ years of dev experience), this seems wrong-headed to me. I think it is an excellent policy, as they say, to "v…

I've been really gratified to see a bit of uptake of pcons in the open-source community, so I thought I'd post an update since it's up to v0.14.1 now. Pcons is a new open-source bu…

But what about copyright? Asking for a friend.

I hate CMake as much as anyone, but I actually did something about it: https://github.com/DarkStarSystems/pcons . As one of the original developers of SCons, I tried to get the bes…

I find correction is rarely necessary with Opus 4.6. Definitely not so much that "it's not really the LLM writing it anymore." More like it's the author and I'm the editor (in this…

I can't agree here. https://pelorus-nav.com/ (one of my side projects) is 95-98% written by Claude Opus 4.6, all in very nice typescript which I carefully review and correct, and u…

This post is excellent, and accurately describes my experience writing pcons (pcons.org) as a side project. I was one of the original developers of SCons and have wanted to rebuild…

I agree with this article, and I think it goes further than astrophysics or even physics. As agentic LLMs are starting to prove long-standing open mathematical conjectures and even…

Yes, and this is an incredibly powerful idea. Running fluid flow simulations inside an optimization loop (monte carlo + gradient descent) revolutionized aircraft design, nuclear si…

straight and elpaca etc. are just as vulnerable. Maybe more so.