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mcny

4,001 karma · joined August 8, 2017

https://padolsey.at.hn/

https://mcny.at.hn/

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mcny··on Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: A New Architecture, Towards Ultimate Cost-Efficiency
I reached point three and was nodding all along. I guess I am the NPC
mcny··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
I don't think this is true at all. I use opus 5 to build a small project. It bothers me that people simply handwave away concerns so easily.

The context size is still not nearly as big as it needs to be to store all the code an enterprise needs. And apparently as you increase the context size, there are more defects. So none of this is a solved problem. We are still in early days and there is a lot to be done.

I'm sure there are marketing people who will say "coding is solved" and other such snake oil but none of this is done, far from it!

That being said there is still enormous value in older models especially with tool calling which will let them access the latest data. I feel like we need to be a little more careful and the tools should cache in a smart way to avoid rework but clearly if we could have opus 4.8 level of work for like a one time payment of a system for local LLM it will have value for years into the future.

So I agree in a weird way that sol is good enough for certain tasks but really there is a long road ahead.

mcny··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
I don't think it is a fair comparison. The cost of raising a child can still be too high even in a fairly low gini country.

In fact I'd say gini has nothing to do with birth rate. Birth rate declines when parents have confidence that there is a good likelihood their children will survive to adulthood.

It is often easy to forget that just five hundred years ago almost one of two infants born didn't survive into adulthood. Low birth rates are good. Don't let anyone say otherwise.

mcny··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I tried to find some information about how Japan manages to get away from criticisms around forced labor in prison. It seems like Japan does have very poorly paid labor, as little as usd 0.05 an hour, but the incarceration rate is low.

Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.

From Google:

> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).

mcny··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
Yes, it is called carrier grade nat but the problem is you can't assume that an IP address maps to a user or even a household neatly. That's the problem.
mcny··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
If I could wave a magic wand, I would implement this like some kind of token replenishment or quota system like every IP address gets to access old dot like a very low number and if you log in with the same IP address you get more quota or replenished a little faster if you also come in with no auth like from a private window. Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to do anything like this but yes, regional is likely as well.

I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.

mcny··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
There are some defects like what does this mean?

> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->

https://news.kagi.com/s/3gskhn

mcny··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
> You must have a valid mobile phone number to sign up. SMS charges may apply.
mcny··on DEF CON crowd suspected in fake-hotspot attack on Delta flight
Is this really where our law enforcement should be spending its resources? I would say rescuing kittens from trees is a higher priority than this nonsense.

Also worth noting wherever we get a chance — the Computer Fruad And Abuse Act itself is nonsensical and must be abolished. There is no salvaging it. It must be repealed with no replacement.

I don't think the FBI has enough agents to play tech support to anyone who doesn't understand how wifi works.

mcny··on How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home
> Most people dramatically under-size their air purifiers, or run them on a very low fan setting, and then they throw up their hands and just say that air purifiers don't work.

I believe something is better than nothing here. One of the biggest complaints against air filters is noise so maybe a good compromise would be to run them at full speed and full noise for a certain amount of time or something when nobody is in the room?

mcny··on “Design me a highly resilient database”
If I am hiring, I need these characteristics:

1. Person who cares 2. Person who is knowledgeable 3. These two must be the same person!

mcny··on “Design me a highly resilient database”
The database is resilient. Your data is not
mcny··on How will OpenAI compete?
I'm trying to motivate one or hopefully both of these ideas

- if it is worth backup up or exporting, it is worth doing it early and often

- but more importantly if we backing up and exporting, we should be continuously thinking are we even on the right platform? Does a better alternative exist?

mcny··on Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
> To each their own,

And that is the gist of the problem, isn't it? As we approach our forties and beyond, chances are we have lived more than half our lives. So do I really want to spend hours watching something I might hate and might leave a bad taste in my mouth? (See game of thrones season 8 or worse, Westworld the HBO series which I don't even want to know what happened in season 3 or 4). I am sure there are people who will enjoy those but for the average person it is highly unlikely.

mcny··on How will OpenAI compete?
Ok so it worked correctly today, for you. How do we know it will continue to do so five years down the road when they are suffocating for cash? The more stuff we have there, the harder it becomes to verify their takeout will have everything.
mcny··on Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov
Pretty sure it is all performative and the actual audience is the voters in the US.
mcny··on Iranian Students Protest as Anger Grows
> At Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, students dressed in black shouted “Long Live the Shah,” a reference to Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last monarch, who has emerged as a leader of the recent protests.

This is unfortunate and gives the regime a chance to say "see, these people are puppets of the monarchy".

I feel like the people who want a monarchy installed are trying to fish in troubled waters.

mcny··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
You guys are talking about copyright but I think a bigger takeaway is there is a process breakdown at Microsoft. Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?

I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick?

(I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)

mcny··on AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
I would like to see the day when the context size is in gigabytes or tens of billions of tokens, not RAG or whatever, actual context.
mcny··on Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations
That's not an achievement. Even a non intelligent low to mid end compact SUV such as a 2024 Mazda CX30 has cruise control that can detect cars stopped ahead to slow down, stop if necessary, and continue when the car in front starts moving.

I'm just saying that "it avoids a collision" by not ramming into people or cars is table stakes and it makes us look incompetent if we tout it as a flagship feature.

mcny··on 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
My guess is there is some communication going out to every "manager", even the M1, that says this is your priority.

For example, I know of an unrelated mandate Microsoft has for its management. Anything security team analysis flags in code that you or your team owns must be fixed or somehow acceptably mitigated within the deadline specified. It doesn't matter if it is Newton soft json being "vulnerable" and the entire system is only built for use by msft employees. If you let this deadline slip, you have to explain yourself and might lose your bonus.

Ok so the remediation for the Newton soft case is easy enough that it is worth doing but the point is I have a conspiracy theory that internally msft has such a memo (yes, beyond what is publicly disclosed) going to all managers saying they must adopt copilot, whatever copilot means.

mcny··on AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet
I feel like we are talking past each other.

1. I write hobby code all the time. I've basically stopped writing these by hand and now use an LLM for most of these tasks. I don't think anyone is opposed to it. I had zero users before and I still have zero users. And that is ok.

2. There are actual free and open source projects that I use. Sometimes I find a paper cut or something that I think could be done better. I usually have no clue where to begin. I am not sure if it even is a defect most of the time. Could it be intentional? I don't know. Best I can do is reach out and ask. This is where the friction begins. Nobody bangs out perfect code on first attempt but usually maintainers are kind to newcomers because who knows maybe one of those newcomers could become one of the maintainers one day. "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

LLM changed that. The newcomers are more like Linguini than Remy. What's the point in mentoring someone who doesn't read what you write and merely feeds it into a text box for a next token predictor to do the work. To continue the analogy from the Disney Pixar movie Ratatouille, we need enthusiastic contributors like Remy, who want to learn how things work and care about the details. Most people are not like that. There is too much going on every day and it is simply not possible to go in depth about everything. We must pick our battles.

I almost forgot what I was trying to say. The bottom line is, if you are doing your own thing like I am, LLM is great. However, I would request everyone to have empathy and not spread our diarrhea into other people's kitchens.

If it wasn't an LLM, you wouldn't simply open a pull request without checking first with the maintainers, right?

mcny··on Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
I like to imagine the reference in the movie margin call is that of a merry go round or a game of Musical chair. Like we are all on a ride, none of us are the operator, and all we can do is guess when the music will stop (and the ride ends).

The problem with this AI stuff is we don't know how much we will be willing to pay for it, as individuals, as businesses, as nations. I guess we just don't know how far this stuff will be useful. The reasons for the high valuation is, in my guess, that there is more value here than what we have tapped so far, right?

The revenues that nVidia has reported is based on what we hope we will achieve in the future so I guess the whole thing is speculation?

mcny··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
LLMs lie all the time. Here is what Google search AI told me:

> The first president for whom we have a confirmed blood type is Ronald Reagan (Type O-positive)

When I pushed back, with this

> this can't be true. what about FDR?

It said FDR was AB-.

mcny··on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
The big brands should be penalized for doing the burning or destroying themselves, enforcing such destruction through contract laws or any formal communication, or even through punishment by denying future contracts.

The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.

At least that's how I see it.

mcny··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
You don't have to have a cookie popup if you don't do stupid stuff. Don't use anything other than strictly necessary cookies and you are good to go.

Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.

mcny··on Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation
I very much wanted Google Plus to succeed. Circles was a great idea in my opinion. Google Plus profiles could be the personal home page for the rest of us but of course, Google being Google...

That being said, tying bonuses for the whole company on the success of Google+ was too much even for me.

mcny··on Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter
I was hoping it would be under USD 20k including all taxes but now rumors say likely NOT under USD 25k?
mcny··on AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
The point is we have to fight for better working conditions, not just for ourselves but for our coworkers and future generations.
mcny··on AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it
> It’s called the market. If you can compete while providing better life balance, go ahead and compete with those bad companies

With friends like you, who needs enemies? Imagine if we said that about everything. Go ahead and start a garment factory with unlocked exit doors and see if you can compete against these bad garment companies. Go ahead and start your own coal mines that pay in real money and not funny money only redeemable at the company store. Go ahead and start your own factory and guarantee eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours recreation. It is called a market, BRO‽

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