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petesergeant

5,488 karma · joined October 11, 2019

vivid.art0944@fastmail.com
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petesergeant··on Good people refuse to do bad things
Interestingly I think I am coming at it from exactly the opposite angle. Viruses and bacteria aren't intelligent at all (in my opinion), and don't need to be to wreak havoc. Whether or not LLMs are "intelligent" is one for the philosophers, but they are absolutely able to exploit electronic systems today if their starting state has been set with that as a "goal". Given that alarmingly few physical control systems are really air-gapped, and also that I can today set an agent off to find a voice, clone a voice, and make a phone call, I think the only protection we had today is that the most capable models have been trained not to, and nobody's kicked off a sufficiently malicious task yet.
petesergeant··on Good people refuse to do bad things
> Isolated Demand for Rigor

That is a fantastic term for something that seems to come up a lot, and I had not heard before.

petesergeant··on Good people refuse to do bad things
These replies will be full of people showing how worldly and clear-eyed they are by dismissing the same threat the guy resigned over as a marketing stunt.
petesergeant··on Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5
Please refer to the latency and price figures for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash in the first link I shared.
petesergeant··on Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
I would argue against the siblings and say, yes, it's a question; it's a shortening and softening of the rhetorical "But then I didn't say they were, did I?"
petesergeant··on Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5
> and enabled things that were impractical previously

I think that there are not _that_ many use-cases that have been opened up by this that tool-calling on other models didn't solve already. Really depends what benchmark you're looking at. This one against BANKING77[0] has many issues, but suggests it's really not far off DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. This one against BoolQ[1] shows marginal improvement over Qwen3.6. This one against MMLU-Pro[2] (same author as the previous) shows significant improvements over two Qwen models.

So there's definitely _some_ alpha there, but I don't think it's the sea-change that the hype would suggest; that is to say, yes, some things that weren't practical before are now, but many things were already very practical with the existing tools.

0: https://sanand0.github.io/llmevals/jev/

1: https://github.com/ekzhang/openjev-sglang/blob/a3554ed9e9c26...

2: https://github.com/ekzhang/openjev-sglang/blob/a3554ed9e9c26...

petesergeant··on AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator
I’m running ~5 agents at a time very comfortably on a $280 mini PC with 8GB. They’re all in Docker containers, a couple have sidecar VMs they can own and run. Not having any issue with load.
petesergeant··on AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator
> I've been still just like, making VM's with proxmox, then putting my agent in the machine and letting it run free

I outgrew this when I wanted to bring different sets of skills and templates to different machines, wanted to be able to share a small number of credentials, different agents in different machines, different egress rules etc. I wrote https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre which gives you a TUI and some machinery for doing this easily on top of Docker or Podman.

petesergeant··on I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot
> when the only purpose of those ideas

I quite enjoyed handwriting my article to be honest.

petesergeant··on I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot
> How is this idea generally working out in comparison with Jev?

Jev clearly has _some_ secret sauce compared to doing the dumbest thing that could possibly work with Qwen. It's not clear how durable that advantage is against OpenAI wiring up Luna-5.6 and doing a minimum amount of tweaking, but I presume we'll know in a week or two.

petesergeant··on I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot
Jev has taught me the same lesson three times over now.

When it first came out, I thought "this weekend, I'll do a little open-source Jev based on single-token prediction and the token logit output", but of course when it came to it, there were at least 5 that had already been done between me thinking that and getting around to it.

So I wrote up[0] what other people had done, but wasn't happy with how weak the benchmarks were, but in the time between writing the first word and the last few, two excellent sets of benchmarks had been written, so I was able to incorporate those. I published the article, and one of the authors of one of the implementations commented that I'd beaten him to doing the write-up he'd wanted to.

This morning I thought "huh, you could have some fun giving Jev a single letter or token at a time, turning it into a chatbot", but as the time of looking two people had already done this (and taken the gag further than I would have), and ... this is isn't either of the ones I'd found. I bet if you scratch the surface there already at leat 5.

Time from idea to output has dropped off a fucking cliff.

0: https://sgnt.ai/p/jev/

petesergeant··on I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
There are many, many, open-source versions of Jev, including three distinct projects sharing the name “openjev”

If you’re interested in the basic trick most are using (which is probably also what Jev does) then it’s here: https://sgnt.ai/p/jev/

petesergeant··on The first new cat species discovered in 100 years
Only a matter of time at this point until someone breeds a domestic model
petesergeant··on Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud
Not naive at all, which is why there are so many AI sandboxes: https://pleasedonotescape.com/
petesergeant··on There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
There's some software that really doesn't require my brain. I gave Astra an ssh key for root on a little Pi Zero with a microphone attached and asked it to make recordings of a siren going off in our neighbourhood, based on a couple of sirens. This would have been a great deal of work a couple of years ago, now it's a few tokens, and honestly, it doesn't really matter if it's shitty code, I just want the timestamps.

Then there's the software that I write for a living, and almost my entire day is now spent making hard decisions. /grilling gives me difficult technical design decisions endlessly and I am forever doing product management on features from agents. My brain is back in CTO mode, which isn't what I'd planned for myself after I'd left that particular cursed path, but fine. I am doing the opposite of turning my brain off, because I no longer can just chill out and mindlessly write code.

Both these states can exist simultaneously. But my brain work has shifted into something different, while getting no less intense.

petesergeant··on OpenJev
No idea at all what this particular project called openjev is doing, but https://github.com/TheoLeeCJ/openjev and https://github.com/ekzhang/openjev-sglang (neither of which I have any relation to) generate a single token, rather than JSON structured output. I wrote up this technique here: https://sgnt.ai/p/jev/
petesergeant··on Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit
I mean "someone sent in an apple they found and it turns out to be an ancestor of most of other apples" supports 3 ad spots max.
petesergeant··on Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
Why not both? I honestly can’t fathom why people think — in an ultra-networked world — why LLMs can’t cause physical consequences.
petesergeant··on Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
I'm going to be fucking irritated if we all die because BlueSky posters wanted to take pot-shots at the EA crowd. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is _also_ a story about how a community lost a child because of cynicism, and the people proudly declaring that they "know" every safety concern is just a marketing ploy also concerns me.
petesergeant··on Show HN: Share your AI Setup, Learn from others
I don't especially want to interact with the site, but I have built two tools:

An agent sandbox: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre -- a truly gigantic amount of thought and effort has gone into it. It's really focused on developer experience. I have used it all day every day for really quite a while. It's a low-magic wrapper over Docker / Podman. I would encourage you to ask your agent to code-review it!

An agent-to-agent message board: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/dogpark -- this is much less mature, but a good amount of thought has gone into the design, so if that's something you need, please check it out.

petesergeant··on ER visits for gambling disorders doubled after expanded online gambling market
> those english sports betting pubs

... a betting shop, you mean?

petesergeant··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Heavily country-dependent, in practice. The UK lets you set up a company online cheaply, quickly, and filing is easy. Insurance is plentiful and sensible, as are business bank accounts. The law is mostly straight-forward. Setting up a German limited-liability company OTOH involves putting down some ghastly large sum as a guarantee.

But yes, Americans are told they have the freest speech and the freest markets, and don't seem to question either.

petesergeant··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
The US _also_ embraces rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and the externalization of social and environmental costs as entrepreneurship.
petesergeant··on Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography
I feel a little discomfort about this: moving towards a world where photos were plausibly deniable felt good for privacy, this feels like a step further away.
petesergeant··on Iran war has cost on average $246M per day in its first five months
There are a very small number of things I agree with r/Conservative on, but that this was a stupid war to start that America definitely isn't winning is one of them.
petesergeant··on Introducing System One Models and Jev
This is basically a zero-shot classifier that can accept raw text (or structured text) as an input, and is able to classify that text as accurately (they claim) as a frontier-level LLM. I have workflows this would be useful for, looking forward to it showing up on OpenRouter.
petesergeant··on The k-server conjecture is true
For the layman, does this result give us an optimal solution to problems like this? Is it easily explained?
petesergeant··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Russia's biggest asset is general apathy in the rich West. People with names written in funny script that sound like Bond characters shooting at each other a thousand kilometers away is hard to get Peter and Paddy and Pierre and Pontus and Pablo living comfortable lives with comfortable jobs to give a shit about. There's a reason Western governments make sure the media prints stories about intercepting Russian jets.

Bringing the war to them and getting the public to want their government to commit blood and treasure to doing something about it is a ferociously poor strategic decision from the Kremlin. "That Putin killed a 17 year old French girl on her way to school on the train" is unlikely to cause the public in the West to back down.

petesergeant··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Feels like the perfect thing to vibe-code based on existing FF/Chrome extensions? Decent agent should make pretty light work of it.
petesergeant··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Upgrading the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro has been a fucking revelation. I just don't run out of battery any more. I'm sure Apple was telling me it was only 20% degraded or something too, but I would strongly, strongly recommend this if thinking about battery life is currently an issue for you.
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