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  • Hacker News
  • is this the two types of tech posts that will exist moving forward?

    1. look at this (maybe) new thing i made by prompting an LLM that i now (may or may not be able to) explain, ghostwritten by an LLM

    2. look at this thing i artisanally handcrafted because i'm such a badass, owning Big LLM and its subhuman followers so hard with this, and i totally do not feel persistently paranoid about being intellectually cucked by LLMs whatsoever

    superoptimizers existed long before LLMs were even a naughty thought, and an LLM would have written one for this problem without any issues, likely without even any specific steering that way. which matters exactly none whatsoever if exploring superoptimization oneself was earnestly the goal.

    it's hard to genuinely blame the author for (possibly) feeling compelled to frame things this way, so i deleted a previous version of this comment that was even meaner about this. but that only helps so much in offsetting how incessant this type of blogpost is. now if this framing was more of an intentional choice however...

    by perching_aix
  • to optimize such small piece of code you need micro benchmarks, and running one micro benchmark for each combination is not realistic
    by likoya
  • I shared a toy superoptimizer I made a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117950

    It was a really fun project!

    by azhenley
  • I was curious about whether one of the count bits instructions can help. Of course I'm lazy now and asked an llm to check... The llm noticed that the articles solution includes a floating point subtract in the end. This is fine since the target is wasm which has fsub/fadd, but was initially odd to see in a floating point emulator.

    Apparently a ctz solution is a bit longer, but doesn't cross from the floating to integer domain at all, so might be better in the overall algorithm. There are hidden implicit floating to int convert instructions.

    This was a really cool little problem!

    by neerajsi

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