At first, I considered that diffusion models struggle with reasoning because they underweight 'prior beliefs', ie the propositions by which an argument advances.
Then I considered whether the universe of imagery is simply smaller than the universe of ideas—which must, itself, include the universe of images, too.
But finally, I'm thinking maybe images are just harder to benchmark.
Or maybe they're _not_ actually worth 1,000 words.
When it comes to reasoning specifically, it's a far simpler explanation IMO. Modern RLVR techniques like GRPO rely on the model understanding the likelihood of the generated phrase. This is really easy to compute for LLMs that are trained with next-word prediction. Diffusion models have a harder time accessing this likelihood value (i.e., you can approximate it but the approximation isn't good). Hence, reasoning doesn't work (yet) for diffusion models. Though, alternative approaches are currently being tried out in academia; so someone might crack it!
The purpose of node_modules is to reduce the surface of ancillary code which one must maintain.
This allows the maintainer to focus on business logic, delegating universal, undifferentiating concerns to projects that respect those concerns as their own raison d'etre.
Thus is all running software respected as central, and not peripheral, during its development. This raises the quality of the code—increasing functionality, and reducing defects.
But it strikes me as an affectation of technical austerity, i.e. you’re borrowing the credibility of a constrained medium without embracing its constraints.
Again, it's very pretty but... it's a bit like reconfiguring your Tesla to look more like a Citroën 2CV.
Ayyy that's a much more articulate way to put what I was also thinking.
"Being constructed of text characters" is a very loose definition of ASCII art. Not to say it's not visually interesting, but just that it's on the far ends of the histogram of what people think of when they hear "ASCII art".
Personally, I think the fact this is relying on colour for contrast makes this feel more like a shader that quantizes the input into little dots that just happen to be 1 of 3 characters, than ASCII Art. It's a vague border between that and an ASCII shader, and then ASCII art, but there's definitely some measureable distance between those peaks.
What do you think they should have called it? Any suggestion that is an unfamiliar term would mean that almost nobody would have clicked on the link and therefore it would not have risen to the top of HN and therefore none of us would even know this exists. I think I think I can accept a loose definition of ASCII art for actually being able to see this page.
Nahhhh you don't need a new term. It's just like... on the fringes of what the term means.
I'd call it an "ASCII-Art inspired shader", but some % of people would look at it and immediately call it "ASCII Art" with no confusion. Some other % of people are also going to scoff at me saying it's "ASCII-Art inspired" at all.
Should mention, I have no issue with this little project! I'm just agreeing with the parent comment that this is just hinting at the limitations of ASCII art without actually working with them, in our opinion. Thinking about art being an important step in appreciating art, and all of that.
So your point is that it's cool to misrepresent what things actually are in order to promote them, because if you were honest about what it actually is, nobody would be interested?
Agreed. It seems to be using a much more flexible set of colours than the two-shades-of-6-plus-black-white-and-2-greys limitation that some would expect even if allowing colour at all. And fully updating a full-screen of text like this to get the animated effect would create quite some flicker on a lot of hardware of the relevant eras (heck, also on some console/terminal apps now).
This is still very pretty though, and despite the above I do feel it gives off a good enough retro impression to elicit a pleasant nostalgia reaction.
Agree, though that’s the current trend of UI design. As you expressed eloquently, the purpose is exactly that: to try to project some values previously attributed by these visuals (eg slow craft, effort) to today’s products.
Reading a lot and writing a lot does not necessary leads to clunky unusual expressions. If you put a little effort in it, you can easily come up with more natural sounding expressions.
Ah, is it September[0] again already? Yes, our fun little clubs get popular, and the posers move in, and they're cheating or, well, they're not really cheating per se, but they're just no fun to play with, and they seem to be having fun without us, so we're going to take our ball and go home.
I can't really blame anyone involved in either side of the equation--Sindre Sorhus doesn't blame AI, and OP doesn't blame maintainers--this is just the natural evolution of.. everything! That which does not go extinct... evolves.
Happy to hear from a Concourser! The transition to Dagger isn't fully defined yet, but we're getting there. It's taken a lot of time to find the right primitives and build a solid engine for maximal caching, but we're excited about what we're launching soon. It covers the middle parts of a Concourse pipeline really well (build + test, CI checks) but we still need to solve the beginning/end (monitoring inputs, shipping/releasing).
> the exact stack you've been working on that whole time happens to be the perfect stack
Yes, because it was really only ever about communication with myself, and with teammates. There are a thousand different ways of characterizing the behavior of the system, and this is the one that makes sense to me in my language.
No, because I am always looking to expand my vocabulary and characterize behavior in new terms.
I've experimented with _Munder Difflin_, but it didn't provide enough transparency. I went back to micromanaging with _Agents of Empire._
I've also made extensive use of Hermes' built-in Kanban plugin, but somehow it's better than Munder Difflin's, even though I've _less_ transparency into individual Hermes kanban agents in "bot" mode.
These were on different projects, with different teams, so I probably have wildly different definitions of done, and wildly different expectations.
Then I considered whether the universe of imagery is simply smaller than the universe of ideas—which must, itself, include the universe of images, too.
But finally, I'm thinking maybe images are just harder to benchmark.
Or maybe they're _not_ actually worth 1,000 words.
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