rytill

This is probably a typo and only exists because it was written by a human.

What required expenditures does a company like yours have on lab equipment / software, if any, to validate material properties?

What about the other thing that’s the actually important part of my reply, modifiability/extensibility? You just chose the weaker of the two factors I provided. And didn’t even provide a convincing argument related to it.

You also didn’t clarify your position at all.

Explain why there is any benefit to outputting raw machine instructions compared to writing shorter, more interpretable, modifiable, extensible code and then using a compiler to turn it into machine code.

Why are agents not going to use compilers in the future?

Why would this be the case when the text that produces binaries (code) is usually both more token efficient and vastly more effectively organized for modification/extension?

Unless by bits you just mean text in general, or any data since it’s all bits, in which case what you’re saying is trivially already true.

It seems like you’re saying that long term LLMs will output pure machine code as the most effective way to use them.

The term "conflict" implies "there is a problem here". I would say it's very lightly disparaging, because it implies the author didn't even do basic research on other things that are also named the thing they decided to call it.

I actually checked HN rules and just saw this:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

So, there you go, I guess.

Almost every possible name that is not a portmanteau, made-up word, or combination of N words has a naming "conflict". This is not an interesting thing to say and I wish that people would stop saying this on everything anyone ever posts on HN. It almost feels like it should be against HN rules to point out that something else shares the same name with no additional statements.

At least for me, I often have a hard time believing people’s stated reasons for whatever they’re doing.

The substance <> narrative relationship is backwards a lot of the time. Someone does something for a nebulous multitude of reasons, and then post-hoc fits their decision-making into a logical explanation that sounds nice.

There is some psychology research supporting this as well.

I suppose if you see the narrative itself as part of the release, that might be interesting. But most of the time I’d rather just hear plainly and straightforwardly what the thing is.

Or at the very least, I am very accepting of releases which do not include rationalization / narrativization and don’t think it’s required to include.

Someone from Y Combinator made some software. Must there be narrativization of everything?

Well, it’s up to the user or post-trainer of the LLM what they believe to be above average. Then they can design around that.

In the case of real world LLMs and post-training, what is above average is defined roughly as: labeled good by expert humans, and scoring high on RL environments related to coding like debugging, passing tests, or running efficiently and verifiably correctly.

LLMs learn a distribution during pre-training, not only an average.

Then, by giving them context or by post-training, you can make them sample non-average parts of the distribution they learned.

I checked out your agent and it looks pretty well designed. Congrats on starting to share it with others!

One thing I noticed: "Your Tools: Aether agents get tools exclusively via MCP servers." "...Aether ships with 1st-party MCPs for file system operations..."

Can you share your thoughts on why you decided to use MCP as the core tool abstraction? I have heard many decry MCP as being context-wasteful. Is this not the case with your agent?

Why does its architecture or you knowing how AI is architected cause thoughts of it being conscious to go out the window?

It seems like the biggest factor has nothing to do with AI, but instead that you went from being someone who admits they don’t know how consciousness works to being someone who thinks they know how consciousness works now and can make confident assertions about it.

Hey! I played against a bot and it was pretty fun.

Small suggestion: too many queues can make it very difficult to build up a network of players at first. I'd suggest, for now, lowering the amount of available time control queues so that two players who happen to be on at the same time are more likely to actually find a game.