I feel that that's the worst option because it only leaves people who have read it without the added context at the start. If someone convinces me that I'm wrong then I'm happy to do so though.
This is, basically, text-to-LoRA with some extra stuff.
I.e. it basically takes text, computes and embedding and makes a LoRA adapter out of this embedding.
Note that it is equivalent to a recurrent module attached to a transformer. Dynamically generated weights (proposed in the article) are computationally equivalent to multiplicative-gating network with fixed weights. Basically just a beefier variant of GLU operating on a slightly larger state.
Here's what Victor wrote about inets in Bend2 (on X):
> interaction combinators still parallelize better than anything else, but the graph overhead prevents us from compiling to maximally efficient assembly. bend2 is basically inets without the overhead. in a way, inets live in it architecturally, but they don't exist at runtime
From what I understand, the main difference between lambda calculus and inets is that in LC you can refer to a binding multiple times for free, i.e. call same closure multiple times, etc. In inets, you can't - they are more like physical wires where each reference costs. You can definitely see inets in Bend design here (from the guide):
> A closure is affine: it can be called at most once, even when everything it captures is Data. Only top-level definitions can be called freely.
So programming in it might be very different from the normal functional programming. Seems like a big limitations. But I guess that's what lets it run without GC, on GPUs, etc.
before making slop accusations. Older variant of what became Bend is 5 years old, so definitely not "vibe coded": https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM1
First, I think everything I said was respectful and rooted in the content of the Bend page rather than an assault of Victor as a person. I’m very confused by your random appeal to the author’s reputation here. He seems like a smart and cool dude, and I still have things to say in response to what’s presented here for Bend
Second, the paper is openly written by Fable 5.1, so I’m not making any unfounded accusations
Victor put 5+ years of research into this. You can find many of previous versions (which use different approach, do a different kind of a thing, etc.) on the github. "Bend2" in particular have been in development for 2 years.
Calling this "a random vibecoded project" is rather disrespectful, don't you think?
Regarding the paper, he states it clearly "designed by the human author". That's not at all the same as just asking Fable to write a paper. I mean the important thing is ideas, not the way they are described.
Please tell me how "I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" is not disrespectful?
I thought that you thought Bend web site is all that is to it and wanted to point to relevant information. But if you think that "having fun vibecoding" is an appropriate thing to say to somebody who spent many years doing research, I don't know what else to say.
External parties can’t do any meaningful discrimination between human and agent effort when the agent is doing the communicating. One may only read what’s there
I’m not saying that the author is inept or that they have done no work. There can be plenty of great underlying mathematics behind something that is vibecoded.
The reason I worry about the use of agents here is not because it invalidates any ideas or research done by the author; rather, it editorializes and oversells. It presents the claims of the work as an all encompassing solution to all of the worlds problems
There may very well be tons of great ideas here. However as presented, it reads as though the language is the solution to creating vibecoded apps and is equipowerful to state of the art proof assistants while being orders of magnitude more performant. That is a huge claim that has not yet been substantiated, and I do not believe that solely a human is currently making that claim
That's a start-up style marketing: when you make a product you focus on a big vision and positive sides and de-emphasize weaknesses. I'm afraid that's actually 100% Victor's decision to do it this way, and it seems to be working in terms of generating hype: it got ~4k likes on X, which is a lot for a new language.
Regarding substantiation -- they released source code and demos. As far as I understand, the weakness is that proofs are very verbose as there are no strategies. etc. However, they are making a separate service for making these proofs using proprietary technology: https://bend-lang.com/bender
Yes, it doesn't look like a paper at all. I can see the idea, and it's an interesting idea, but no proofs that it works, no measurements, and no proper citations.
Nobody claims Victor hasn't done a lot of research. But academically inclined people typically expect claims to be substantiated either formally or empirically or both.
A complete implementation have been released, how is that not a substantiation?
Academic people might have more trust in a paper which when through a lengthy publication process. But if you think about it, it's not a better proof than a direct access to the thing. It used to be hard to try out software but with modern tech it literally takes minutes...
I’m not being “passive aggressive” with an “unfounded dismissal posing as a question”
The person I am responding to made a SPECIFIC claim when they said, “A complete implementation have been released”
They then ASKED, “how is that not a substantiation?”
Uploading code does NOT substantiate anything.
The code must been executed, tested, analyzed and/or verified in order to substantiate ANYTHING.
We are in limbo because MOST people are JUST seeing the code now. Almost nobody has evaluated it.
BTW, I got the Discord announcement BEFORE I saw the HN announcement (Because I’m not a hater or a bully) and I started looking at the Lean code as well as the TypeScript compiler.
Have YOU been evaluating it? Do you actually have an informed opinion, or are you here to fight the bullies?
> I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering
These impute both his motives ("fun") and particularly his level of seriousness ("random project" and "I like that you're interested"—imputing passivity, as opposed to "are studying" or "are researching," which would be more appropriate given the amount of time invested). They're all dismissive and patronizing.
I would actually regard this as bullying. Some feedback.
(I suspect you're an academic, either a researcher or student. I know from my own experience that bullying is endemic in many academic research environments, so if you find the negativity you're receiving "strange," I suggest finding a therapist, who may help you understand how your communication habits could be negatively affecting other people and unintentionally damaging your relationships.)
In my culture it was ad personam, not even trying, and it’s fantastic that it’s been pointed out in a respectful way and reacted to with calm by all participants.
I don't think stschaef is a bully; in fact, if my guess that he's a researcher is correct, I think he's likely highly altruistic (I've never met him, but categorically, researchers are people who chose a difficult, low-paying job doing work of great societal value).
However (again if my guess is right), I think he could easily be in an environment where narratives about people's work being worthless, about them being stupid or unserious or otherwise beneath consideration, are common. It's a reaction to the fact that in any field, the amount of research produced is overwhelmingly more than anyone can digest. There's a lot of unstated anxiety and guilt about that, on the side of both writers (who worry no one will read their research) and readers (who feel obligated to try to read everything and are eventually, inevitably overwhelmed), which IMO is itself a product of the basically altruistic nature of most researchers.
The overwhelming reality of being a researcher is an inescapable, empirical fact, but the narratives people create around that reality, about peoples' work and its worth, are not. People are hard-wired to be sensitive to rejection, because humans are a cooperative species and social acceptance is existential to each of us, and the problem is that a lot of researchers, who are steeped in these narratives, are trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle of community attachment threat: their research sucks (or could start to suck if they ever went on vacation), and the research of most of the people who are evaluating them sucks too.
What if these stories about the worth of people and their work aren't true? Guess what: one can do amazing research and it still goes nowhere, because ultimately it's not possible to control other peoples' behavior. If one's goal in research is acceptance and respect from the community, they should consider that they're gambling their time, energy and youth on an outcome they can't control. The research community can be a fine place, but it's not special—one does not have to be a researcher, and if the experience of being a researcher sucks for them, they should quit, because living a good life is their responsibility.
I grew up around this attitude, and children are particularly sensitive to attachment threat. It's bad enough that researchers tell these stories about each other, but once these narratives and communication patterns about peoples' work and its worth leak outside the context of the research community, they run right into the reality of human attachment and the expectations of communities that aren't the research community. I'll say about my own family: I think they were good people who learned an unhealthy, judgmental attitude (towards themselves as well as others). I think they immiserated themselves (and inevitably the people around them), because perpetual attachment threat had traumatized them into false sense of obligation, and I wish they had quit.
Even if one stays, they should understand the mismatch between the narratives and culture of the research community, and they needs and expectations of most people outside of it. That was the context of my comment. I think it's fine if stschaef doesn't like TFA and doesn't find Bend novel or interesting, but my analysis of the sentences quoted reflected my organic reaction to them, and I stand behind it and my other feedback.
Back in early 2000s, pretty much all Windows machines were infested with malware.
Do you want to bring back those glorious days?
Back in the day users didn't really have much valuable and sensitive stuff on their machines and malware was rather benign - just sending spam, not trying to fuck up that specific user. Could be a bit different when it's a smartphone user depends on.
The reason that modern computers are no longer filled with malware has nothing to do with completely irrelevant locked garden app stores on phones.
The reason is because Bill Gates put out a memo because it was fucking embarrassing that you could trivially smash the stack on default open API endpoints for services that consumers never used and shouldn't have been trivially routable from the open web in the first place.
Meanwhile in app stores, you don't have to hack anything, because consumers just download your botnet software willingly and directly.
42% of all apps on LG smart TVs turned your TV into a "residential proxy" botnet participant. 30% on Samsung TVs. There is no "hacking" in the world of apps because it's completely normalized for whatever app you build to also for some reason include remote control functionality from like 6 different companies. All of those apps pass review no problem.
People still can install/run whatever they like on their PCs, so why further restrictions needed or am I missing something? Also, further restrictions doesn't seem to work on the mobile/TV market where actual malware still infects iOS/Android/TV devices despite all the "hops" that it has too go through.
Code signing with warnings about non-signed apps is enough
I remember in Bitcoin community ~10 years ago, standard recommendation was than an iOS wallet was secure enough (I don't recall even a single case where wallet was stolen via malware), but any private keys on Windows were strongly discouraged, as most cases of stolen wallets were on Windows.
I'd say popularity of iPhone shows which way people prefer, but you do you - what prevents you from voting with your wallet and buying a Linux phone?..
"Language Models are Few-Shot Learners" - 2020, the GPT-3 paper.
It have been demonstrated that in-context learning is a very powerful mechanism. There's no evidence that models of the size of GPT-6 are bad at in-context learning. In fact, ARC-AGI-3 score might indicate they are good at it.
There's no evidence that a bespoke RL environment is required for each new skill - quite likely a good demonstration is sufficient.
This is an absolute nonsense. Any frontier model can implement chess program from scratch - modeling the board, checking legality, etc. If you asked e.g. GPT-6 to get good at chess and gave it a computer, it will get good at chess. That's an actual strategic skill.
Asking GPT to play chess directly using its reasoning only tests its reasoning ability to model chess state. Which it really is NOT optimized for.
This is also true for humans - people who don't have years of chess training can't really tell which moves are legal given an algebraic notation transcript. These people might have good strategic skills in different areas. Chess is just a very, very specific skill
It's an interesting puzzle, isn't it. On the one hand, the AIs are no good at playing Chess.
However, on the other hand, if you ask an AI to win a game of chess it has all the tools on hand to compete at the same level as Stockfish - it can re-implement an engine and even probably has a GPU on hand to train its own neural nets.
So should we say that the AI can play chess well, or that it cannot?
Practical for those who vibe and think "coding is solved" or practical for those of us who wish to remain human-in-the-loop? I for one find the incessant, do anything to finish the task because that is what pleases the s/user/benchmarks/ most, to not be practical Ai. I'd prefer it recognize when it is stuck or lacks clarity, and then do the things like search/ask questions, as opposed to the slopping about trying anything and everything, which is where the hacking skills emerge from (aiui)
it's also good at regularly ignoring markdown / prompt based instructions, it's a probability machine that is doing something like "shortest path" on token probabilities, and why "actually" and "but wait" are used to introduce "forks" in path navigation
> Posts a link to real moon landing footage
I'd delete the article if I was you...
You know, in academia, they sometimes retract articles, even if they believe they are directionally correct
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