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- Hacker News
- > No multiplications. No divisions. No lookup tables. Just a few bitwise instructions.
Would have appreciated this article more if it was written by a human.
by smusamashah - I understand that a big portion of online content is now 100% AI-generated, and that can be somewhat problematic. But for creators like me, who have been publishing articles and books for over 10 years, this AI witch hunt can be quite demotivating.
I worked on this project for over one year. I wrote an entire distributed framework to calculate maximal triplets, and I have 130+ machines running 24/7 for 12 weeks on N=8192. This article is an extended version of the script for the video documentary that will be released before the end of the year.
If you look back at my website, I used to publish two small articles a week. I've since reduced to 1 or 2 large pieces a year. And one of the reasons was exactly to rise above the many blogs that post small, fragmented articles, which could be generated in 2 minutes by ChatGPT. If I wanted to continue in that direction, I could be publishing 100 short articles a week with ChatGPT.
I started writing practical shader tutorials back in 2014 because there were not enough good, accessible resources online. I'm now focusing on large, in-depth pieces with original research, because that's what's valuable right now that ChatGPT has replaced StackOverflow.
If you appreciated this article, I hope you'll appreciate it even more knowing that YES, it was written by a human (it's me, hi!). <3
by AlanZucconi - Ah yes, Xorshift, the RANDU [1] of the 21st century [2].
There is no real use case for better non-CS generators, as explained by adrian_b back in 2021 [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RANDU [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10020 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28886698
by saithound - I don't know about all that, but I use Marsaglias for generating noise samples in MCUs like Pico. It's the fastest option there is for such devices.by mallets
- I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly, but a use case for better non-CS generators has always been stochastic simulation, especially simulation/sampling approaches that are bound by the number and quality of uniform variates per second.
As someone who has spent considerable time working in these areas, I still appreciate advances.
by moregrist - I’ve replaced Lua’s random by this. I’ve posted about it here https://nullonerror.org/2025/08/02/replacing-lua-s-math-rand...by delduca
- Lua 5.4 and 5.5 use xoshiro256**: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-math.randomby dchest
- I'm really curious... How did you manage to post this link before I did?by AlanZucconi
- I have your feed in my RSS reader! This seemed like something HN would be interested in.by tobr