Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 02/10/2026Includes a description of my hash table implementation, of which I'm quite proud. Last week I read a comment on HN from someone who was impressed by a C implementation ("I didn't even think it was possible!") and it was so amusing to see that after completing my assembly implementation :-) 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 02/10/2026It's funny that the file with the explanation of how it works is bigger than the assembled .COM file. 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 02/10/2026Yay! I've written up how my DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 microprocessor works: github.com/jtarrio/pasm...github.compasm/HOW-IT-WORKS.md at main · jtarrio/pasmA homemade DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 processor - jtarrio/pasm 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 02/10/2026That's not bad at all! Not bad for me either. playoutlier.com/s/X7BFZ8playoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 135jacobo scored 910 on Day 135. Can you beat them? 010
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 01/10/2026Any day I get as many points as Rah is a good day :-) playoutlier.com/s/RL7SHMplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 134jacobo scored 917 on Day 134. Can you beat them? 120
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 01/10/2026Estoy de guardia en el curro y todas y cada una de las veces que me pitó el móvil ayer con el tono que le tengo puesto a las alertas se me escapó un "holy shit!". 011
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 30/09/2026"Hey Jacobo you're using a lot of LLM!" (Brightly) "Yep!" "I'm glad you came around!" (Brightly) "Yep!" "Remember you used to say you only used LLMs when you didn't care about the result?" (Brightly) "Yep!" "I don't know what made you change your mind but keep it up!" (Brightly) "Yep!" 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 30/09/2026Jokes aside, I think I'm finally (FINALLY!) out of my mourning period. (It's normal to mourn when someone takes away something you cared very much about and they don't even acknowledge how important it was to you, right?) Now I'm motivated by spite, which will work great for the rest of my career. 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 30/09/2026My consolation is that real AI specialists are as fucked as we are. "I need to classify these documents" Real AI person: "oh, I'll use NLP with an autoclustering model which..." AI dweeb: "LLM'll do it" "I want to extract data from this printed page" Real AI: "OCR and a ..." AI dweeb: "LLM" 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 29/09/2026A, R, H, but no C :-) Two pioneer finds, though. playoutlier.com/s/E4ECYXplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 132jacobo scored 880 on Day 132. Can you beat them? 010
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 28/09/2026(Michael just took a note: "no more of those letters all together") 020
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 28/09/2026If in previous occasions I mined the seam of ore, this time I did full-on mountaintop removal. playoutlier.com/s/PL3QMKplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 131jacobo scored 925 on Day 131. Can you beat them? 140
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 28/09/2026Coa axuda dun balde de auga e un recipiente graduado podemos calcular a diferenza de presión entre as dúas localidades. Que vai ser bastante considerable: xa no edificio no que traballo (52 pisos) a diferenza entre o cumio e o chan é duns 25 milibares, así que estimo uns 85 para o teu. 110
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/09/2026It was so bad! Plus my usual "I can't believe this word is not way rarer" thing. playoutlier.com/s/5K6VURplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 130jacobo scored 878 on Day 130. Can you beat them? 020
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/09/2026I've been working on my 8086 assembler and after implementing hash tables and optimizing hot code paths, I got it to build itself 6x faster. After that, I improved the README with bootstrapping instructions and an offer that I really hope someone will take me up on. github.com/jtarrio/pasm 010
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 27/09/2026This is why, even if I do write my assembly code by hand, I like using LLMs to review it. 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 26/09/2026I found a Rarity-83 word worth 94 pts in OUTLIER. EAGLE EYES · 905 points · 10 rare words. Only 8 players have ever found it in all of Outlier. 9 finds no one else found today. OUTLIER: the daily word hunt where the rarest words win. Can you beat me? playoutlier.com/s/FU93A8playoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 129jacobo scored 905 on Day 129. Can you beat them? 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/09/2026Yeah, wanted an M so badly. I started strong, but then tripped. playoutlier.com/s/U879P9playoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 128jacobo scored 905 on Day 128. Can you beat them? 120
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/09/2026(No estoy diciendo que se venga todo el mundo al extranjero. Lo que estoy diciendo es que no tiene sentido pagar un premium por vivir en España). 030
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/09/2026Ya adelantándome a lo que he oído tantas veces: "Ah, pero todo cuesta más" Hace 20 años sí, pero compensaba. Ahora cuesta lo mismo. "Pero la terracita y la cervecita y el jamoncito." Y el mercado de navidad y el biergarten. "Pero anochece tan pronto" Y en España amanece tan tarde. 120
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 25/09/2026I wrote a DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 microprocessor! github.com/jtarrio/pasm In fact, I wrote it twice: once in Go, and then again in assembly, so you can bootstrap it and then run it in your DOS machine. Only 10 kB so you can have it in the same 5¼" floppy disk as your source code!github.comGitHub - jtarrio/pasm: A homemade DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 processorA homemade DOS assembler for the Intel 8086/8088 processor - jtarrio/pasm 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 24/09/2026Well, it looks like I've been successful in writing a 8086 assembler in 8086 assembly. The assembler can assemble itself, yielding the same binary, which is less than 10kB. I need to finish it up and then there's some text I want to write before I publish it. 001
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026I got a first-ever outlier! playoutlier.com/s/FL7ZFL Though I am extremely surprised that the astronomy term is less rare than this.playoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 126jacobo scored 890 on Day 126. Can you beat them? 111
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026Como me dijo mi padre un día que me quejaba, todo indignado, de los privilegios de otros: "Pero a ver, ¿tú qué quieres? ¿Tener lo que tienen ellos o quitarles a ellos lo que no tienes tú?" 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026Until four years ago, the only ones on this planet who could tell stories were Us, so suddenly we encounter this thing that can tell stories and our brains think it's Us too. But you don't need intelligence to tell stories! You only need a sufficiently large Mad Libs with a good dictionary. 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026When I was at Google we had access to an LLM chatbot a couple of ¿years? before the public did, and that's totally what it was. You could go through a whole customer service session with it, including sending emails and everything, except that it was all in the LLM's "mind". There were no emails. 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 23/09/2026Someone with the same view of LLMs as me! Though I call them "machines for telling stories". An LLM does not fix your k8s setup; it tells the story of how your k8s setup was fixed, and it's attached to a harness that makes the story reality. 111
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 21/09/2026Yeah, I have a classification-shaped project that I was for sure not going to use an LLM for because of cost, but I can consider it with Jev. 030
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 21/09/2026I was going ok and then I was robbed. Robbed! playoutlier.com/s/LD3LLPplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 124jacobo scored 868 on Day 124. Can you beat them? 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 21/09/2026Absolutely, I was so surprised, I dropped my monocle. 010
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 21/09/2026I'll be honest with you: I routed two airplanes at the same altitude on the same path despite instructions to the contrary on the AGENTS file, and that's on me. I'll save a memory so I will avoid doing that next time. There was already a memory! No updates needed. 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026Oh wow that's impressive. I beat my record *and* got three outliers, but I started with two whoppers so my score wasn't as high as it could have been. A good one anyway. playoutlier.com/s/RT74KSplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 123jacobo scored 909 on Day 123. Can you beat them? 131
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026Every job posting nowadays: "we use AI to revolutionize healthcare finance with prediction markets!" 010
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026I've been getting pretty ok at writing 8086 assembly. 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026Now, I'm not saying that sandboxing LLMs is easy. It is hard. But there is trying and there is "not even trying". 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026There's also the type of sandbox. Some people put a gVisor or a seccomp-based sandbox and... Ok, the LLM can't read from /proc but it can still connect to gmail and send copies of your most embarrassing purchases to your parents. 110
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026You could build proxies for the services you want your LLM to access, that only allow some operations and use "fake" keys so the LLM never sees the real key. But then you have to build and maintain those. You could use an LLM to help you, but ¿weren't you trying to limit the LLM in the first place? 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026The problem is that an effective sandbox has to actually block things, and when you want your LLM to be able to do "everything but bad things"... There is no way you can effectively sandbox that. You could do a lot of credential and permissions management, but that's hard and only takes you so far. 100
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 20/09/2026Having built sandboxes, it is so fucking painful to read about what passes for a sandbox in the LLM world. 101
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 19/09/2026I beat my record still mining yesterday's seam, but my best word was one I stole from you :-) playoutlier.com/s/AYHFQ5playoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 122jacobo scored 905 on Day 122. Can you beat them? 120
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 19/09/2026"The Oxford comma removes ambiguity." The Oxford comma: 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026They feel normal to me, yours are fancy :-) Today I found a seam of ore so I exploited it a little. playoutlier.com/s/NQPRSLplayoutlier.comOUTLIER · Day 121jacobo scored 895 on Day 121. Can you beat them? 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026The funniest joke the guy told us during my citizenship ceremony was "now you are not required to carry id". 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026If you choose the $50k, your thinking is _so_ short-termist. 000
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026You can choose between receiving $50,000 guaranteed, or infinite pulls at a slot machine that gives you a 50% chance of winning $1,000,000: you lose on the first Avogadro's Number of pulls, win on the next Avogadro's Number of pulls, and so on. Which one do you choose? 101
Jacobo Tarrío @jacobo.tarrio.org · 18/09/2026So many echoes of "$50k guaranteed or 50% chance at $1M". 000