Just a quick PSA. A handful of my scripts broke today after installing macOS 27. Turns out they decided to redact the interface hardware ether/MAC addresses, all of them report 02:00:00:00:00:00

(…unless you run with "sudo")

Luckily, you can still get the MAC addresses with

    networksetup -getmacaddress en0

Hi HN, I built Gat because I wanted one thing from data versioning: check out an old Git commit and recover the datasets, model weights, or assets that belong to it. It's basically a lock file for large files.

I’d appreciate any feedback!

I built EthosLM to turn a description of a place into something you can walk around in Minecraft.

The demo starts with “Build me Ba Sing Se.” It produces a city with districts, roads, walls and furnished interiors. Here's the one-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgixrYLWfhc

It works by separating planning from construction. The model chooses the layout and style. A deterministic library generates the buildings, places the blocks and checks the result.

Buildings use reusable procedural generators rather than completed schematics. The same system can build a wide variety of things from villages to castles in any terrain.

JJL is a small esoteric programming language inspired by Brainfuck, featuring absolute memory navigation, multiplier arithmetic, non-destructive inspection, and inline conditionals. Originally conceived as a small programming experiment, it turned into a surprisingly entertaining exercise in language design and interpreter implementation.

I'm not a computer science guy, but I had a play with Jev and found it impressive. It allowed me to offer non-technical researchers the ability to classify arbitrary things their participants enter, without prior training or classification, at near instant speed, and negligible cost. My users may find that very helpful in the qualitative research world.

I showed them an innocuous working example of how they could classify thousands of participant entries as "mentioning Italian food" whether it mentioned "pasta", "penne", "rigatone", etc etc. Jev did this task with high confidence, and showed it could differentiate between the inverse, eg had very low confidence when I switch entry to mentioning "hamburgers". I find that a very useful tool to pass on to non-technical colleagues.

But on HN, there are lots of much more qualified people saying Jev is a con, a step backwards, or bonkers that people are impressed. Will one of them tell me plainly what software was doing this prior to Jev, and the like? I don't doubt it existed, but I never came across it. I'm interested to hear from people more expert than myself.

To be precise, software must be able to: - Classify thousands of entries with arbitrary themes or topics, even if entry doesn't mention that theme or topic directly, with high enough confidence to be useful. - Do it with thousands of entries in 0-3seconds. - Do it at negligible cost, eg sub 0.1cents