Super interesting. I wish this article wasn’t written by an LLM though. It feels soulless and plastic.
AI tends to write like it is getting paid by the word. This article wasn't too egregious but an editor could have improved it.
We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
161–170 of 213 posts
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people judge blindly, the are more likely to think the human is the AI and the AI is the human. 73% judged GPT 4.5 (edit: had incorrectly said 4o before)to be the human. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 Not only are people bad at judging this, but are directionally wrong.
There is research showing the contrary that is far more convincing: > Our experiments show that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback. In fact, the majority vote among five such “expert” annotators misclassifies only 1 of 300 articles, significantly outperforming most commercial and open-source detectors we evaluate…
Great find, I've submitted this preprint as a standalone item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678270
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#163[flagged]
I don't think apollo 11's toilet malfunctioned, it was just not very good. Everything smelled like poop mixed with chemicals, and that was by design.
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#164Still my all time favorite snippet of code. TC BANKCALL # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE CADR STOPRATE # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE TC DOWNFLAG # PERMIT X-AXIS OVERRIDE https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
Cadr here has no relation with lisp cadr, right?
Correct.
CADR is an AGC assembly directive defining a "complete address" including a memory bank, in this case a subroutine to be called by the preceding BANKCALL (TC = transfer control, i.e., store return address and jump to subroutine), which switches to the memory bank specified in the CADR before jumping to the address specified in the CADR.
For a brief explanation of AGC subroutine calls, see [1].
CAR and CDR in Lisp come from the original implementation on the IBM 704, where pointers to the two components of a cons cell were stored as the (C)ontents of the (A)ddress and (D)ecrement fields of a (R)egister (memory word).
(CADR x) is just shorthand for (CAR (CDR x)), i.e., a function that returns the second element of a list (assuming x is a well-formed list).
[1] https://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/inostr-yazyki/American_...
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you pick out AI native and miss the rest of the SAME sentence? > We found this defect by distilling a behavioural specification of the IMU subsystem using Allium, an AI-native behavioural specification language.
That does not answer my confusion, especially when static analysis could reveal the same conclusion with that language. It's not clear what role ai played at all.
It seems pretty clear when you follow the link?
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the top reply on a substantial percentage of HN posts now and we should discourage it. It is: - sneering - a shallow dismissal (please address the content) - curmudgeonly - a tangential annoyance All things explicitly discouraged in the site guidelines. [1] Downvoting is the tool for items that you think don't belong on the front page. We don't need the same comment on every single article. [1] - https://news…
It's not a shallow dismissal; it's a dismissal for good reason. It's tangential to the topic, but not to HN overall. It's only curmudgeonly if you assume AI-written posts are the inevitable and good future (aka begging the question). I really don't know how it's "sneering", so I won't address that.
It is a witch hunt with no evidence whatsoever, all based on intuition. It is distraction from the main topic, a topic that enough people find interesting to stay on the top page. What was intellectually interesting has now become a bore fest of repeated back and forth. That’s disrespectful and inconsiderate. Write a new post about why do you think AI writing is dangerous. I don’t mind that. I’d upvote it.
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse, the other child comments are speculating (and didn't RTFA either) when the answer is clear in the article. > We found this defect by distilling a behavioural specification of the IMU subsystem using Allium, an AI-native behavioural specification language.
That's the opposite of clear to me.
Has the article been updated?
2nd paragraph starts with: "We used Claude and Allium"
And later on: "With that obligation written down, Claude traced every path that runs after gyros_busy is set to true"
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#168Still my all time favorite snippet of code. TC BANKCALL # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE CADR STOPRATE # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE TC DOWNFLAG # PERMIT X-AXIS OVERRIDE https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
I'm having a really bad Mandala effect right now where I remember some XKCD that wrote a poem about this. Maybe I'm thinking of another comic.
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#169[flagged]
The code was inconsistent with itself: that's not circular. Every path dropped the lock except one.
Re: We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
#170Another CTO "published" an AI slop to get attention to their vibe-coded company that will disappear in two years. Tell me something new...