Is there anything I can read about the fixes to make it more stable? Or just a place to check out recent developments?

At the moment, no. Beyond just fixing problems I've found, for the last year I've been doing a lot of haphazard development inside of Sprite itself, so "fixes to bugs in released Sprite" are intermingled with "features I've added". The bigger problem is that getting data in/out of Sprite is ... harder than you'd imagine.

I am hoping to make a big writeup "soon", since there's a lot of interesting information about Sprite that's mostly been lost to time, where Sprite is mostly remembered as having "process migration" and "LFS". Meanwhile, it's mostly forgotten that Sprite was (apparently) one of the first OSes to adopt a mostly-GNU userland, had a modern event-loop style abstraction in C for handling I/O and timers (Fs_Dispatch), had a userspace filesystem abstraction akin to FUSE (PFS), implemented a PTY-like system entirely in userspace (the Td* functions in libc), and overcommitted memory by default.

That would be very interesting to read, other systems like Plan 9 get talked about a lot but I didn't know almost anything about Sprite until today.

It's the first book I read about computer history and made me interested in tech, a career I love doing every day :) this talk made me very happy.

I loaded credits into Tinfoil the other day and have had zero issues, thanks to smart folks around here and the security space recommending it.

It's now my open weight inference provider of choice, since on top of the privacy/security characteristics it's also reasonably cheap.

I think so. Maybe dang or tomhow could switch the link :)

The social rules work so well that I wish tech cos would just adopt these as baseline. They make interacting with other technical folks much more enjoyable.

@dang, I'm not sure what's changed with the Show HN lately, but it's been much more lovely to read. Thank you for whatever changes which were made.

I'm glad to hear you liked the post!

Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/show , it's definitely no longer a raw feed of show HN: from /new.

It's not clear what the change is, whether it is curation by hand or some other metrics, but it's a positive change, the old Show HN was getting flooded, as recently discussed. ( Although I can't work out how to find that discussion. )

Huge and positive change from the old “Show HN: Another vibe coded filesystem that I won’t even use but it was done with an LLM!”

I suppose the main thing so far is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... The hope is to be welcoming to new users while also nudging them toward the intended use of the site. I don't know how well this is going to work over time so your comment is encouraging!

Another anecdatum: it definitely seems better to me in the last few days.

Thanks again to you and tomhow for all your stellar work on keeping the site as close to its original intent as practical these days

Where do you think my confusion came from? All it says is that ai assists in resolving the gyroscope lock path, not why they decided to model the gyroscope lock path to begin with.

Please, keep your offensive comments to yourself when a clarifying comment might have sufficed.

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"

This is the original article text. It just looks like users skimmed and then flamed the author.

> distilling

A.k.a. as fabricating. No wonder they chose to use "AI".

Between this and DINOv3, Meta is doing a lot for the SOTA even if Llama 4 came up short compared to the Chinese models.

It's interesting to me to see how easily you can reach a much safer C without adding _everything_ from C++ as a toy project. I really enjoyed the read!

Though yes, you should probably just write C-like C++ at that point, and the result sum types used made me chuckle in that regard because they were added with C++17. This person REALLY wants modern CPP features..

I've seen Optuna used with some of the prompt optimization frameworks lately, where it's a really great fit and has yielded much better results than the "hyperparameter" tuning I had attempted myself. I can't stop mentioning how awesome a piece of software it is.

Also, I'm eager to see how well gpt-oss-120b gets uncensored if it really was using the phi-5 approach, since that seems fundamentally difficult given the training.

FWIW, I already used Heretic to decensor gpt-oss-20b [1], and it works just fine. Note that the number of refusals listed on the model card is actually an overestimate because refusal trigger words occur in the CoT, even though the model doesn't actually end up refusing in the end.

[1] https://huggingface.co/p-e-w/gpt-oss-20b-heretic

What's your intuition on other "directions"? Have you tried it on something other than "refusals"? Say "correctness" in math or something like that. I have some datasets prepared for DPO on "thinking" traces that are correct / incorrect, wondering if it'd be something that could work, or if it's out of scope (i.e. correctness is not a single direction, like refusal training)

The problem is that in order to do optimization, you need a classifier that can distinguish the two types of responses (like refusal/compliance). In case of refusals, that's relatively easy to do using trigger words like "disallowed" or "I can't". I imagine this would be much, much harder to do automatically for classes like correctness.

And I also suspect, as you hint at, that "correctness" isn't just a direction in residual space, but a concept so broad that no simple mechanistic description can capture it.

>the rights of non user vendors

Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt

>Because everyone was always a user

In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.

For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.

>In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.

I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".

>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.

Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:

```

This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art.

Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.

```

In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.

Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.