saturnV's recent activity

  1. Comment on Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes in ~tech

    saturnV
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    I partially agree with this, but most of the interestingness of this mentioned in the article is the fact that previous models couldn't do this but the newest one can (and anyways it's not an...

    and the 100k lines of code are ridiculously high.

    I partially agree with this, but most of the interestingness of this mentioned in the article is the fact that previous models couldn't do this but the newest one can (and anyways it's not an insane amount of overhead given the fact it handles so many edge-cases), e.g. tcc is ~40k lines, maybe you'd expect this one to be less because rust is more expressive, but still only an order of mag overhead (generously) which isn't that bad

    also there really aren't that many non-toy c compilers, I would be careful making it out as trivial, and I think much of your comment reads as disingenuous when reading the article and seeing how plain and uninterested in hype it is, e.g.

    The compiler is an interesting artifact on its own, but I focus here on what I learned about designing harnesses for long-running autonomous agent teams: how to write tests that keep agents on track without human oversight, how to structure work so multiple agents can make progress in parallel, and where this approach hits its ceiling.

    The compiler, however, is not without limitations. These include:
    It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own).
    It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker.
    The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler.
    The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.
    The Rust code quality is reasonable, but is nowhere near the quality of what an expert Rust programmer might produce.

    The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

    Also I think it's relevant to this that the author nicolas carlini is a very skilled programmer in his own right, and has engaged deeply with the strengths and weaknesses of AI for years now (see https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing for both)

    3 votes

  2. Comment on SpaceX is acquiring xAI in ~space

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    It makes sense to do it before the IPO to avoid the regulatory hassles that come with publicly listed companies. While they're both still private, elon has zero accountability and can easily do...

    Suspiciously close to the rumored IPO?

    It makes sense to do it before the IPO to avoid the regulatory hassles that come with publicly listed companies. While they're both still private, elon has zero accountability and can easily do this, whereas after, he'd end up getting sued by shareholders and have to endure a long legal battle

    5 votes

  4. Comment on How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills in ~tech

    saturnV
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    Evidence from anthropic around the tradeoffs of different ways of using AI, where the more you delegate the more your skills will atrophy. However, using AI to generate code snippets can still be...

    Evidence from anthropic around the tradeoffs of different ways of using AI, where the more you delegate the more your skills will atrophy. However, using AI to generate code snippets can still be net positive. n=52 isn't super conclusive but still an interesting topic, looking forward to future research.

    Also interesting that this is something anthropic researchers feel comfortable publishing about when it could be pretty easily spun into something anti-AI

    11 votes

  7. Comment on China have a new sixty-centimeter dome Terahertz telescope in Antarctica, a two week trek from their station in ~space

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    update, author replied:

    update, author replied:

    The HEAT telescope did make some observations but they were never published, so scientists have found it hard to determine exactly what HEAT accomplished. I probably should have mentioned HEAT in the story.

    6 votes

  8. Comment on China have a new sixty-centimeter dome Terahertz telescope in Antarctica, a two week trek from their station in ~space

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    Wow yeah. do you mind if I email the author of the article about this? I feel like this needs a correction, or at least get re-edited to mention HEAT

    Wow yeah. do you mind if I email the author of the article about this? I feel like this needs a correction, or at least get re-edited to mention HEAT

    15 votes

  9. Comment on China have a new sixty-centimeter dome Terahertz telescope in Antarctica, a two week trek from their station in ~space

    saturnV
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    It is very difficult for astronomers to scan the terahertz frequencies between infrared and radio waves because water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them. Astronomers in China have managed to...

    It is very difficult for astronomers to scan the terahertz frequencies between infrared and radio waves because water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them. Astronomers in China have managed to make it work by putting a terahertz telescope in the driest place on Earth, but it wasn’t easy. The instrument, the Antarctic Terahertz Explorer, has a 60-centimeter dome and has been painstakingly hauled out to Dome A, the highest point on a plateau four kilometers above sea level on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The 1,228-kilometer trip from Zhongshan Station to Dome A took two weeks by tracked vehicle. The ATE60 is the first step of many, as the Chinese Academy of Sciences has agreed to fund at least two one-meter telescopes at Dome A.

    13 votes

  13. Comment on Postal arbitrage in ~finance

    saturnV
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    As of 2025, a stamp for a letter costs $0.78 in the United States. Amazon Prime sells items for less than that... with free shipping! Why send a postcard when you can send actual stuff?

    5 votes

  15. Comment on UK Conservative party would ban under-16s from social media in ~society

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    banning MPs from social media would probably massively increase the quality of discourse in the house of commons lol

    banning MPs from social media would probably massively increase the quality of discourse in the house of commons lol

    6 votes

  16. Comment on What’s a point that you think many people missed? in ~talk

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    this is just fraud, at least in the US the IRS have their own team of people who independently assess art values to prevent this

    this is just fraud, at least in the US the IRS have their own team of people who independently assess art values to prevent this

    11 votes

  17. Comment on Fascist, thus inefficient in ~movies

  18. Comment on Blue Origin sticks first New Glenn rocket landing and launches NASA spacecraft in ~space

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    eh, there's not that much there that's particularly useful for military purposes as far as I'm aware, so I'm not sure what that'd entail, do you have anything in mind when you say that?

    aggressively militarizing the Moon

    eh, there's not that much there that's particularly useful for military purposes as far as I'm aware, so I'm not sure what that'd entail, do you have anything in mind when you say that?

    1 vote

  19. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    Cool! I got a little bit into writing crafting interpreters in python before getting distracted (think I got lexer and parser working), it's cool to see that the underlying logic for a compiler...

    Cool! I got a little bit into writing crafting interpreters in python before getting distracted (think I got lexer and parser working), it's cool to see that the underlying logic for a compiler doesn't have to be that complicated

  20. Comment on The cognitive legion etrangere in ~society

    saturnV
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    A proposal for how to get truly neutral parties running important bits of government - just appoint people from neighbouring countries with less of a horse in the race. I don't think this idea is...

    A proposal for how to get truly neutral parties running important bits of government - just appoint people from neighbouring countries with less of a horse in the race.

    I don't think this idea is particularly sound as a general rule (and obviously many many people in the host country would hate it), but I feel like there must exist some places where this would be a cool viable solution, and also it's just a fun principle

    2 votes