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piokoch

3,825 karma · joined October 15, 2012

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piokoch··on Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space
Why the space? We have plenty of deserts on the Earth, they are inhabited but still much friendlier than the space. What makes the space more attractive?
piokoch··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash
But here you are in the text generating industry, the worst that can happen is bad grade because AI will mess up John Keats with John Cleese or your React application will have bugs. Inconvenient, but mostly harmless.
piokoch··on PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
Yup, this is "inclusive education" effects, predicted long time ago by education experts. Kids with special needs (from handicapped to criminals) are thrown into regular schools and classes, making education totally inefficient. In Poland one of the best on the World system of special education is being demolished in the name of this absurdity. But this is what people voted for.
piokoch··on Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
One more marketing stunt. We are so good, AI is so powerful so we need to use AI to fight with it. The message is: if you don't buy from us, your competitor will purchase all of this amazing power...

I understand that investors are buying this, after all they believed in all of other crap that led to the 2008 crisis, but please...

piokoch··on Get your Windows license refund
That's why I like Lenovo, you can just buy version without OS.
piokoch··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
Sorry, but what? EU literally destroyed its economy by forcing "green energy", so manufacturing was moved to Asia (who cannot care less about climate and uses whatever cheap energy source thy have so this was a rather stupid move), ETS and ETS-2 systems are putting huge taxes on EU citizens for any kind of emission, including building a house or having non-zero emission flat or house.

The "little" problem here is that all of this does not matter at all, as EU is emitting insignificant amount of CO2, comparing to Asia or USA.

piokoch··on Rewriting in Rust
"Typst instead of LaTeX"

Is this really an alternative? I would never replace battle proved TeX with consistent syntax, build for processing text, with great fonts, thousands of plugins for some Markdown mess, which is, in addition, paid.

Only because it is written in Rust, not in C.

piokoch··on PostgreSQL for Everything
In the times when everyone was installing Apache + PHP + "Some database" stack, the easy path was to use MySQL for a very simple reason: it had ready to use MS Windows installer.

Another thing: those were times when web applications were practically 99% reads, and not so great ACID was a non-issue.

Postgres is OK, but it has really a lot of quirks that are not that obvious.

piokoch··on A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
Why not MySQL/MariaDB? DuckDB and Quack might be new and flashy, but sooner or later you will need things like connection pooling, data retention, backups, replication. In a real setup there is nothing lightweight about DuckDB as it will have to answer the same issues other DB-s do.

If you want to go with something less mainstream, why not trying Firebird DB, a very solid solution.

piokoch··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
"I just don't see how you justify a trillion valuation for US AI"

- military applications - financial applications - medical - applied science

In all those cases it is achievable for those who have needed training data, and Chinese are not going to get them easily. US AI Labs are showing: give us the data, we will do wonders, promising "singularity"-level future achievements.

piokoch··on Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT
Great story, I am wondering if nowadays this kind of being hooked on in any kind of technology is possible. Kids have ipad style computers or smartphones which are not really hackable. There are things like Scratch, which provide kind of easy access to programming, but that's not the same thing (or maybe I am just old and miss the old times with Atari ST and IBM PC clone with 486DX processor).
piokoch··on Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy
The question is: is such policy even enforceable? If someone is "clever" enough to drop em-dashes and some bold highlights how one would know if something is AI generated or not?
piokoch··on Grok Build is open source
There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.

BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.

piokoch··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
"How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?" - It will be worst, as this will not be idiomatic Rust. That's kind of interesting, BTW, as in next iteration LLM will be trained on tones of crappy code, created as some random rewrites, AI slops, etc., I am curious if someone will be able to curate this or it will be the same process of crapification experienced by Google Search that finally lost the battle with SEO spammers.
piokoch··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff.

People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month.

Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff.

So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone.

We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.

piokoch··on Don't you mean extinct?
Yup, that is called progress. One freedom to live in a cave with his 6 spouses and hunting animals all day was indeed taken away. In exchange you don't need to hunt all day, you can go to groceries, you don't need six spouses and 20 kids, as kids death rate is not 80% but 0.001%.

One can, obviously, romanticize the times of cave live, that's fine with me, but I doubt that would be a common choice.

piokoch··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
No surprise, I've noticed that "agents", not only CC (I am using Copilot) are trying to be "clever", searching for a lot of data. This is good for LLM providers as this eats a lot of tokens.
piokoch··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
Sadly, European Union that could be really useful (all-EU, flagship AI model anyone? But no, better restrict AI development, what can go wrong?) so people would genuinely like it, chosen to fight the people and try to gag criticism.
piokoch··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
Think of 90 y.o. lonely people who can't care less about some company seeing the interior of their house. Surely, it is a risk, but being without any help and assistance.
piokoch··on ArXiv's Next Chapter
That worries me a bit. ArXiv was and is great and so useful to humanity, giving access to otherwise closed knowledge, hold by publishers cartel, that I would not like to see it is turning into a "non-profit" of OpenAI kind...
piokoch··on TabFM: A zero-shot foundation model for tabular data
You don't need to. Just sample 1% of data, let the model do the feature engineering, ask model model to replicate everything in Pandas (or R, or whatever else), so you can run it for a full dataset.
piokoch··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
You are talking about "stealing" from people who already used stolen texts to train their models.
piokoch··on Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
Thanks for the very interesting write up, I am teaching management studies programming Python (people who want to be quants, dana analysts, etc.) and I am struggling with the same problem - how the hell do grading to make it reliable.

LLMs has become good enough so whatever homework task I give, it can be solved easily by any LLM (and, in fact, this becomes unfair to those who are not able to pay for good model). I was asking to add comments & interpretation of results, this slightly helped, but LLMs are increasingly good in all this as well.

So, quite seriously, I am considering some on paper tests & quizes, because what else can be done?

Making people aware about importance of writing code is indeed a good hint to convince, at least part of the people to do this. Another thing is: they will leave university one day, they will search for employment and the employer might be much more hostile towards cheating during job interview and can easily make cheating with AI impossible... Question is, will it still matter?

piokoch··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
Yup "protecting kids" has a long, long history of being used as an excuse to restrict citizens rights, yet something like Epstein Island was happening with all the proponents of child protection being happy visitors of the said island.
piokoch··on The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
One of the striking things about LLM-s is verbosity. A junior guy had to do some task and create docs how (a rather simple) change needs to be done. He produced, using Copilot (all those hyphens, additional lines between paragraphs, etc.) , a long dissertation that included some rather poor analogies and that could have been summarized in 5 sentences. Yet I had to go through that writing.

Same with the code. Generate Apache Kafka listener using Spring Kafka. Here you go, my human boss, the code is ready. The code is ready, but, somehow some outdated tutorial or Stackoverflow answer must have kicked in, hence it produced some totally unnecessary factory of factories that Java loves so much, but could be replaced with a few lines in the properties file.

But, when notified, Copilot kindly agreed that that factory is not really need and I am right.

piokoch··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
One more wake up call for anyone outside USA, especially Europe. AI will be weaponized, on the battle ground too, but the bigger battle will be fought in the industry competition. Those who have access to state of the art models will have advantage over those who does not.

Hopefully open-weight models will catch up, hopefully we, as the people, engineers will find the way to maintain those open-weight models on pair with the closed ones.

I try to be optimistic, as we won some battles, against all odds, Linux is flourishing, open source solutions are mainstream.

piokoch··on Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions
We have too many videos (since creating one is so easy), too many music (since recording it is so easy), too many books (since publishing an e-book is so easy). Now the same story happens again, for software. But this time it causes more troubles...
piokoch··on OpenAI DayBreak – GPT-5.5-Cyber
Soon, very soon, if you will need something useful, like medical advice, financial advice, you will be told that, well, ok, but you need to pay for an "extended license" that gonna be in thousands of dollars per month, otherwise you need to hire someone who paid that money.

The only hope are Chinese models, as Chinese commies are playing a different game as long as they are behind the flagship models (but it will change soon, like with cheap Chinese cars) and maybe, finally, Europe will start working on their solutions, instead of regulations.

piokoch··on Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
Yup. That's a big disappointment they could not cram universal generics faster. But I get the problem - they have to preserve backwards compatibility. I can take 30 y.o. Java 1.0 JAR and run it on Java 27 and it will work.
piokoch··on Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers
There are big theories already born out of that glitch (like https://archive.ph/2OWwO#selection-1373.278-1377.12). The Doom is Coming!
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