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nmfisher

3,718 karma · joined March 19, 2015

Bluesky ------ https://nickfisherau.bsky.social/

Twitter ------ https://twitter.com/NickFisherAU

GitHub ------ https://github.com/nmfisher

Blog ------ https://hydroxide.dev

Company ------ https://holotype.com.sg

Working On ------ https://mixreel.ai

Gumroad ------ https://nickfisher.gumroad.com/l/tvzndw

submissionscomments
nmfisher··on Waymo in Singapore
Bet you they won't, because many (most?) Singaporeans think that owning a car is somehow a life achievement.
nmfisher··on Normalizing Vertex Group Weights in Blender
Thanks! Hope it was helpful.
nmfisher··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
There's a difference between "this is allowed under their ToS" and "it is academically unethical to fail to credit the people whose specific conversations were fed into a model that was used to solve a problem".

I don't think these people would be so miffed if they had been properly credited - that's how academia works (at least, that's my understanding of it).

nmfisher··on Flutter 3.47
> Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.

While I’m a bit ambivalent towards Flutter, I totally disagree with you on Dart. To me it’s a better version of Java/Typescript with a very mature cross-platform and JIT/AOT compiler. Admittedly there are some things I wish they would take from TS (like discriminated unions), and I haven’t tried “modern” Java either so maybe that’s improved, but even so, I rarely feel like Dart is getting in the way.

nmfisher··on Flutter 3.47
> how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms

Because Impeller has had quite a bumpy ride. Even as recently as June I reported a bug/regression with basic stuff (lines with partial transparency on desktop). All my Android apps are still built with --no-enable-impeller because I've had many instances where the app just shows a blank screen due to driver conflicts.

It may be getting close to stable now, but it wasn't a smooth transition at all.

nmfisher··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
> But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.

Funnily enough, their core revenue driver (Google Ads) is very broken too. I'm trying to run some ads, but for a week they haven't been showing due to some invisible combination of flags when the campaign was created. There's no way of knowing they're not showing from the dashboard, it only becomes apparent when you try and preview the ads with one of your search terms.

I know everyone is long Google but that experience seriously makes me question how valuable their ad business will stay in the future.

nmfisher··on That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
Probably explains why Microsoft hasn't made a good product in...as long as I can remember. It's all shibboleths and gate-keeping.
nmfisher··on Starling – a Linux desktop environment made with Swift
"made with Swift" buries the lede a bit here, it's actually using Skia via the Flutter engine under the hood to draw windows, compositing, etc. The Swift part is just the author rewriting parts of the Flutter API surface (not my cup of tea personally, but I try not to miss the forest for the trees). Really cool project!
nmfisher··on Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes
How much usage do you get out of the $100 Moonshot plan? I haven't heard great things.
nmfisher··on Our position on open-weights models
He was directly asked in a Bloomberg interview whether Claude was used in the bombing of the girl’s school in Iran, and his answer was “We don’t know”.

His redline was autonomous weapons, not the death of 100 innocent girls.

nmfisher··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
Still there for me: "The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026"
nmfisher··on The lost joy of music piracy
If you're on Bandcamp or Soundcloud it's usually because you want to support artists directly, I doubt many people are purely interested in getting free music rips.
nmfisher··on Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
Completely agree. Slow but smart models (Fable, Sol, GLM5.2 etc) are great, but they leave me with zero mental model of the code that's been written. Most of the time my mind wanders off and I go check social media or fire off a prompt for some other random project, it's a big productivity drain.

Working with models that are super fast, but slightly dumber (like mimo-v2.5-pro-ultraspeed) is amazing, I feel like I'm still the one that's actually making every decision.

nmfisher··on Old and new apps, via modern coding agents by Terry Tao
Or he just finds it an incredible time-saving tool to help him do more maths.
nmfisher··on Inference Optimization for MiMo v2.5: Pushing Hybrid SWA Efficiency to the Limit
I'm not a regular v2.5 user, so I don't really know. But given the TileRT team write-up says the entire network gets quantized to FP8 (and experts get quantized to FP4)[0], I'm assuming there's at least a modest drop in quality.

[0] https://www.tilert.ai/blog/breaking-1000-tps.html

nmfisher··on Inference Optimization for MiMo v2.5: Pushing Hybrid SWA Efficiency to the Limit
Related, I was given access to mimo-v2.5-ultraspeed, which is amazing. This is now my expectation for speed, it’s fast enough for me to stay mentally engaged rather than getting distracted waiting for the agent to churn.
nmfisher··on Hy3
I was playing with Hy3 via openrouter yesterday (and I've also been using DS4 Flash/Pro as a daily driver since I cancelled my Anthropic sub a week ago).

I've found DS4 Flash to be very temperental (via Claude Code). The speed is great, but it often builds a completely wrong mental model and charges off down the wrong path. I find myself needing to rein it in regularly (and also compact the history, which undercuts the whole cache price advantage).

Hy3 isn't as fast, but so far it seems to stay on track much more reliably than DS4 Flash. It also doesn't seem to degrade as much with longer context. I'm not sure what the real pricing is, but I feel like it's a very competitive model.

As an aside, I also nabbed a 50m token pack for LongCat 2.0 to give it a whirl. Not free, but it's so cheap they're basically giving it away. Very impressed too - seems roughly on par with Hy3. Not frontier-level intelligence, but a dependable workhorse that can navigate a codebase well and can reliably execute what you tell it to do.

nmfisher··on AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
Maybe this is what Medusa Halo will turn out to be?
nmfisher··on GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex
> If you look at everything through their safe AGI mission it all makes sense.

Except for, you know, all the outside investors and the forthcoming IPO.

nmfisher··on Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Not saying the results were bad - quite the opposite. But it was very slow (and if I was paying API rates, hideously expensive).
nmfisher··on Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
From my brief window of Fable usage, speed wasn't its strong point at all.

For actually building software, I'm starting to suspect a human with a dumber (but faster) model is going to get the job done quicker than Fable (and possibly even cheaper). Bug-finding and vulnerability detection is a different story.

nmfisher··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
I haven't tried their Hermes agent yet, because I only want a coding agent and I wasn't sure if theirs was suitable. Would you recommend it?
nmfisher··on Knoppix
This is a blast from the past. Knoppix saved my life a few times, it was the easiest way to mount a drive with a broken partition table or something else went that haywire with a dual-boot system. It was also the safest option for doing something on a public computer without leaving a trace (though back then NIC drivers were always a bit finicky).

My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.

nmfisher··on The Baffling World of Masayoshi Son's Presentations (2020)
Quick Google suggests Uber is up 66% on its IPO price, but the S&P index is up 85% over the same time period. I think Softbank also sold out around 2022, so the return (vs IPO price) would have been even lower. Didn't check for stock splits etc but I don't think Uber was a home-run for Softbank at all.
nmfisher··on DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]
The investment round only closed in the last few weeks, it would have had zero influence on anything up to & including DeepSeek V4.

Whether that now changes, who knows. It appears the CEO will remain the largest investor/shareholder, though, so I'm hoping not much changes.

nmfisher··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
It makes no difference to me if a coding model has an opinion about Tiananmen Square, Americans bombing schoolgirls in Iran, how many genders there are, or anything else other than designing and writing code.

A coding model is a tool, as long as it follows its user's instructions for building software I don't really care what opinion it spits out about world history.

Yes, it is important to ensure that aren't hidden guardrails that are affecting its ability to perform its function. But the great thing about open weight models is that you can actually evaluate this rigorously, and retrain to remove any prejudices you don't like.

nmfisher··on DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]
Until recently, DeepSeek were self-financed (it was a spin-out from a hedge fund). They just raised ~50million RMB (US$7bn), and according to media [0] (which admittedly can be unreliable), the lead investors were:

1) The CEO himself 2) Tencent 3) CALT (the battery company) 4) NetEase (internet/media company) 5) JD.com (ecommerce) 6) Chinese investment firms

What are they expecting in return? I'd say the same thing that all those investors in OpenAI and Anthropic are expecting - profit.

[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/stock/vcpe/2026-06-11/doc-iniazi...

nmfisher··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
What you said is not "a matter of fact" because it's simply untrue.

These companies were not "created by" the Chinese government. Specifically, I'm talking about DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiMo (Xiaomi), Kimi (Moonshot), Qwen (Alibaba). "Subject to" certainly does not mean "created by", it just means that the government ultimately has the power to tell them what to do. The US government has the exact same power, hence why none of us has access to Fable at the moment, but you wouldn't say that OpenAI or Anthropic were "created by" the US government.

There is zero evidence that open-sourcing their models is part of some grand strategy from the Chinese government. In DeepSeek's case, I think it probably is a genuine commitment to open source, for the others I think it's probably just a convenient business decision to gain market share (though Zhipu is probably more aligned, given their academic lineage from Tsinghua).

At some point in the future, the Chinese government may decide it's not in their national interest for Chinese companies to open source their frontier AI models, and DeepSeek et al will be restricted from doing so. I'm well aware of that. But until that point in time, the rest of the world is unanimously better off with open-source Chinese models. We should put as much reliance on Chinese companies long-term as we do on American companies - zero.

nmfisher··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
None of those companies are created by the Chinese government. They're obviously subject to the Chinese government, whose whims may change at any given moment, but as we're seeing at the moment, so are the American companies.

And while I don't have a very positive view of the Chinese government, last I checked, they haven't been dropping bombs on innocent schoolchildren recently.

nmfisher··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
With current paradigms, yes. I'm hoping to see more focus on architectures that are more amenable to distributed training in the near future.
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