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kyrra

9,978 karma · joined February 16, 2012

I do payment things @ Google. Feel free to contact me at <username>@<username>.net.

The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.

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kyrra··on Gemini 4 Argon
Is this something you've tried to figure out? I'd love to hear more from you here. Are you sure you're not just on a Plus plan? How much are you paying monthly? Are you sure it's the AI pro plan? What does Google One say? https://one.google.com/
kyrra··on Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech
If you use Chrome on Android, there is a "Listen to this page" option in the menu.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14768725?hl=en

kyrra··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
Agents.md is a thing, you can ask it to not do that (it follows that ask pretty well).
kyrra··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
Workspace always gets things slower than normal Gmail accounts. They do a lot more to isolate data related to those accounts, so that's likely the cause here.

Anytime anything gets added to Workspace, I think Google has a lot more contractual obligations about keeping it around for X amount of time, so they tend to be more careful about adding things.

kyrra··on Protobuf has LSP support
As long as you know the use cases of your fields, renaming is just fine. My team regularly does it. We also maintain our own serializer and deserializer json, XML, and fixed with formats. The json one we handle serialization using an annotation to say how it should be exported.
kyrra··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
Matt Pocock has a great /wait-what skill for this: https://www.aihero.dev/skills-wait-what, which is an extremely short prompt of:

> Wait — I don't understand where you've got to here. Re-pitch that: give me a little bit of context, talk in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, and use the ubiquitous language from CONTEXT.md.

kyrra··on Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue
Piper only works with CitC. Which is effectively a virtual file system when mounted locally. And when you have a monorepo that big, standard tools that want to scan an entire directory will stop working. Every part of the developer tool chain has to change to deal with code base that big.

I agree that Google should have bought github. The tech they built to scale Google Code I think would have helped a ton with GitHub.

kyrra··on Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue
The problem with many of these tools is they are built on lots of other tech, like S3 dev called out: https://x.com/haipingfu/status/2084880266858995990

Piper is built on lots of other tech like spanner and chubby and many others. And some of those have specific hardware requirements that only exist in Google datacenters. Untangling that web of tech is neigh impossible (or not something worth the cost to leadership).

kyrra··on Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue
It's really the case that Git is terrible at scale. Honestly most source control is.

When you have teams of 10,000+ people working on code, if you wanted to shard it, it will be lots of little projects, then you're going to have dependency hell. The core in for teams will either have to spend most of their time upgrading everyone's packages, our other teams are going to have to deal with those upgrades.

The core infra teams are either supporting lots of versions all at once, or spending extra time on source control.

I don't know about Uber, but at Google the monorepo is absolutely amazing.

I will the one big issues that is really hard in a monorepo, if you want to upgrade some external library not built by Google, when that library has a large breaking API change, it will never get upgraded.

kyrra··on Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
Have those leads that left said why they left? Could it just be money?
kyrra··on Intel Starts Shipping High-NA EUV Silicon
My general take is all of The GPU design efforts are going toward Enterprise / datacenter graphics cards. They are just skipping a generation or two of consumer.
kyrra··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
It seems like this was entirely caused by Dario (and Anthropic as a whole)? When you run around marketing something as a "super weapon", the government may actually take you seriously?

We obviously can't A/B test this... but if Dario hadn't been doing that, would any of this been happening right now?

kyrra··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
input latency. the time from pressing a key to showing on-screen is much lower with ghostty (I can't find exact number, but it seems to handle input 2-4x quicker. So around 15ms instead of 60ms).

Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.

kyrra··on SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
I think it's not just the answer you get, but using AI as a stochastic search engine over the rules to point you to potential answers.
kyrra··on SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
It also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.
kyrra··on SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
Construction codes are still pay walled.

NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod...

IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024

And there are many others.

(I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)

kyrra··on Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
Store page: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/network-storage/products...

$3999

kyrra··on Stop Using JWTs
JWT used to be bad due to libraries with poor defaults. Downgrade attacks were fairly common a number of years ago.

Since most of the common libraries across all languages have gotten more sane defaults, it actually is pretty secure nowadays.

kyrra··on Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers
Googler, opinions are my own.

My understanding is they're doing this in the name of security, though it obviously has some benefit to ads. this policy more closely aligns with what Safari does today. And it prevents add-ons from scraping information since they have to put in the block list ahead of time.

I've been using manifest v3 version of Adblock and it's worked just fine for me. But obviously is not perfect, but it fell into more towards security and privacy of the user against malicious extensions.

kyrra··on Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026
It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.
kyrra··on Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
The BCB in Brazil does very little to operate Pix. It's effectively a P2P system, where the BCB forces all the banks to interop with one-another (and all the banks directly call eachother). They can operate it that cheaply because they do close to nothing technically (they host the main discovery endopints). The only place the BCB actually ingests data is via their reporting mechanisms.

UPI is a bit more centralized, where the NPCI does the top-level routing between banks, so their operating budget is likely much higher than Pix. It also is drastically more simple to be a participant in UPI compared to Pix.

For Pix adoption: you can thank Covid for that. The Brazilian government said if you wanted to get free money from the government, you had to set up and use Pix.

US Financial Innovation: I'd say the hard thing here is that the government is extremely strict (lots of regulation) when you start looking like a bank. Lots of companies have tried to innovate here, but regulation makes it really hard to do. There's a lot of regulator capture going on.

kyrra··on The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true
Looks like the dude got suspended for being a bot: https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/28/x-suspend-accounts-ai-repl...

(direct link: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2059789636885790911 )

kyrra··on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse
A point that can be made is that just throwing money at something that doesn't produce meaningful results can be good to cut. having a bunch of data for data sake doesn't make it useful.
kyrra··on CT scans of BYD car parts
Potentially predicated on anti-dumping rules.
kyrra··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Settings -> All Settings -> Smart Features -> Turn on [off] smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet...

If you disable that feature, all AI everything goes away (including sorting by category). There are some more targeted features you can disabled to disable writing helpers if you want.

kyrra··on US's big bet on quantum computing may not be legal
And Obama did this. See his famous pen and phone quote:

"We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I've got a pen, and I've got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.."

kyrra··on Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark
I'm a googler, opinions are my own.

My take is that it's a fancy wrapper around the CLI tool. It's there to organize multiple conversations and see all the related output and generate files.

I've been using the internal version and I've actually liked it quite a bit. It's clear from when I started using it, it's not an editor, and they have ways to open your normal editor outside of it. They have turned it fully into an agent management tool.

When the antigravity development team doesn't have to focus on all the things that vscode is already good at, it lets them simplify the UI and do only agent related things. We'll see if this bet works out for them, but so far I like the idea.

kyrra··on The IBM-ification of Google?
There's a new setting rolling out in the YouTube app.

Go to settings > time management > shorts feed limit. Turn that setting on, and you can select how many minutes you limit to. There's now an option for "0 minutes".

kyrra··on Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension
the Railway PM doesn't say they weren't told. It just sort of glosses over this. I would be interested to know if they were told (or not).
kyrra··on GitHub is sinking
Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves.
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