Viewing profile — rahen

Four day old repo with 92K lines added per day, okay... There is basically no evidence of human competence in this repo. This is yet another "rewrite in Rust with Claude" project t…

This was common back then. The PDP-8 had eight primary instructions, although one of them was multi-purpose. This helped keep the hardware simple when we didn't have ICs. RISC isn'…

The author has also published a Setun-70 emulator (a Soviet ternary computer rather than a binary one): https://github.com/Zaneham/setun70-emulator

I was initially surprised because this is not a good use case for Scheme. The current C implementation is clean and efficient, and I'd rather use Scheme to replace some messy Pytho…

Not very far off, the IBM 1130 was very much built around its punch-card reader. I've written a backprop in Fortran IV for the 1130 and while it works, it was tedious. Add ten more…

What kind of virtualization do you use internally? I assume some kind of LXD fork? OrbStack really feels like a single-node Incus host.

The first AI winter was largely triggered by Minsky in a book he published in 1969, which mathematically proved that single-layer perceptrons couldn't solve non-linear problems. Fa…

In the early days of machine learning (before the first AI winter), networks like this were often implemented and trained in hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADALINE That wa…

The Gamma 3, which competed with the 604, only had about 400 tubes as far as I remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_Gamma_3 Both the 604 and the G3 were bit serial to save …

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Scheme has a coherent and minimalist design, but its ecosystem and abstraction facilities feel too sparse for large applications. When I started building a Lisp-based machine learn…

I was thinking of curated replay buffers, which would act like "dreams". To prevent collapse, the offline dataset would mix the new mid-term data with a baseline of anchor data (th…

That's an idea I had a few months ago: after going through a compaction once the KV cache is nearing capacity, accumulate this knowledge into a dataset to fine-tune a LoRA during o…

Strictly speaking, this is very domain-specific and doesn't enable any performance that Triton couldn't already achieve (eliminating global memory round-trips via epilogue fusion i…

There is ongoing research on neural cellular automata, as they seem to be a very efficient way to generate pretraining tokens: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.10055v1

Emacs Lisp is a descendant of PDP-10 MAClisp, which makes it one of the oldest Lisp dialects still actively maintained. Whether it's version 24.5 or 30.2 doesn't make much of a dif…

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47861270

Obvious slop still makes it to the front page of HN, and sometimes farms GitHub stars. These posts also usually get all these glowing comments from users who clearly haven't checke…

Ink is the Electron of text-based apps. I tried OpenCode out of curiosity, it routinely used hundreds of megabytes of memory. I'll stick with Emacs as my TUI platform of choice, es…

> try making a DAW in it... It would in fact work pretty well for a tracker.