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regularfry

9,430 karma · joined January 6, 2009

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regularfry··on The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency
The team. The organisation. The reviewer, if they care about team throughput.
regularfry··on The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency
That is the context switch I'm referring to. It's worth the reviewer suffering a 15 minute (say) flow state loss to avoid the multiple hours the ticket would otherwise have been waiting to be picked up.
regularfry··on The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency
For us, review latency was obviously a problem so we eliminated it (for most tickets, anyway) by making the handover synchronous. Get on a call with the reviewer when it goes into the review column. The win from eliminating review latency massively outweighs the context switch cost for the reviewer. All the more so when the patch is small enough to actually read through on the call, so if there is anything immediate to address you can ping-pong it without anything waiting.
regularfry··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
The reasoning trace would be far more interesting, and that's not exposed.
regularfry··on Qwen 3.8
Yeah, it's only a chat template change. So if you don't fancy re-downloading the whole model and can just hack the new chat template into your process, it's a lightweight test to do.
regularfry··on Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
That doesn't make the burden of proof magically mine.
regularfry··on Qwen 3.8
Worth knowing that Unsloth have just put out another Gemma 4 release from Google's upstream updates which should improve reliability. Bugs in the chat template affecting tool calling and other issues, apparently. https://www.reddit.com/r/unsloth/s/MpC6Hzs4Wj
regularfry··on Transcribe.cpp
I suspect the hard bit is that it sometimes needs to back up and redo, and that's an interface they haven't got figured out. I'm fairly sure I remember Dragon Naturally Speaking doing it in Word years ago though, so the interfaces should be there.
regularfry··on Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
Backwards. The government knows who has kids because they do things like issue birth certificates and operate state schools. In a lot of places it's legally very difficult not to be listed as a parent on government records.

So why should I have to prove I don't have kids when the government can know I'm not on any of those lists?

regularfry··on Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad
regularfry··on Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners
I get my team to review my code, AI generated or not. Goes through the same process as anything they produce. Two pairs of eyeballs on everything.
regularfry··on Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners
Parsing used to be "AI". If you look at proceedings of old AI conferences you get this impression that anything interesting you might program a computer to do has passed through the field at some point.
regularfry··on Netstrings (1997)
Tagged Netstrings (tnetstrings) was a related proposal from 15 years ago or so. It replaces the comma with a single-character type definition so you can do JSON-like objects with a couple of recursive types: you had ',', '#', '^', '!', and '~' for strings, integers, floats, booleans, and nulls, then ']' and '}' for lists and dictionaries.

Most of the links have bitrotted and I don't think it ever got much traction, but I did always like how simple it was. There's a copy someone grabbed of the original spec here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ged/tnetstrings.info/refs/...

regularfry··on Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon
The fanfare over multi-touch in phones is something I've never understood. It's flashy but phone use (certainly my phone use) is optimised for one thumb, not two fingers.
regularfry··on Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon
Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism but even back then that was partly down to Apple propaganda which caught on because people were used to cheap screens with rubbish resistive sensors. The touchscreen on the N900 was good: high resolution, rigid, fast, accurate, sensitive enough for fingertip use.
regularfry··on A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI
I'm yet to be convinced that number of PRs as a productivity metric is any less flawed than counting lines of code.

I can believe - easily - that there's a real uplift here, but attaching any meaning to the 24% number at all is a massive overstep.

regularfry··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
That's a stretch but it doesn't change the outcome.
regularfry··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
On 1 and 3, the obvious move is to shift the bulk of the harness behind a new API that's not based on raw LLM access. Then they get to hide secret sauce behind that API and all three go from commodity to premium while simultaneously being able to try out whatever tricks they can get away with to reduce their own inference costs. I'm almost surprised this hasn't happened already.
regularfry··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Terrible ideas get executed all the time, despite the problems with them being well understood.
regularfry··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Bedrock is really out of date with the models it offers, to the extent that I'm not sure they even have plans to update what's on there now they have the deal with Anthropic. They're still offering Qwen 3, not even 3.5 and certainly not 3.6. GLM 5 is the newest z.AI model they have, when it's 5.2 that would be the one to worry Sonnet.

There are some ok models on there (Qwen 3 Coder Next is usable and fast, for instance) but the lack of updates in a fast-moving field makes it something I don't want to recommend to my org.

regularfry··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
Wheels in a different configuration solve the stairs problem. https://www.sacktrucks.co.uk/stair-climber-trucks/
regularfry··on Claude Sonnet 5
Either

1) the company has device-level control to the degree that they can not only restrict which API endpoints people can connect to but which accounts they use to do so (in which case this already isn't an issue); or

2) they don't, and all bets are off anyway, open weights or not.

regularfry··on Ornith-1.0: self-improving open-source models for agentic coding
Seems weird. A 9B model would normally fit unquantised on a 24GB GPU.
regularfry··on Ornith-1.0: self-improving open-source models for agentic coding
With this model size I've found that the harness seems to matter more. I've moved on to little-coder rather than raw pi with qwen3.6 27b personally, it might be worth taking a look.
regularfry··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
Nah. There are already models at every size on the scale. If you want to run an open 1T model today, you can.

What's going to happen is that the capability at any given size point is going to get better over time as new training regimes cram more into the available space. A 27b model released next year will be better than a 27b model this year (else why release it?). Hardware will get more useful, not less.

regularfry··on Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)
That ends up begging the question, because the next step is "how high do you have to drop it from so that it's travelling twice as fast?" and you're immediately going round in circles.
regularfry··on Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years
"Eventually" doing a lot of work. Micron (and implicitly anyone signing this deal) are betting demand is going to outstrip capacity for several years, taking into account what new capacity can be brought online and when.
regularfry··on The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
I do think this is worth emphasising: the article only focuses on mortality. Not quality of life. Vitamin D makes me not feel like crap, it's cheap, and effectively zero risk. I'm not expecting it to make me live longer, I like that it makes me live better.
regularfry··on VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO
You could, but it's driving in the wrong direction to try to build that knowledge into the model weights because you'll always run into a capacity limit sooner with a small model than with a larger one. The thing the model is specialised for is linguistic understanding and the reasoning process itself, and you max that out at the expense of domain-specific knowledge. If you take "as few weights as possible" as a given, I think the interesting question is how small you can make the model with externalised memory. The openclaw and hermes people are all over this sort of memory problem: using the local filesystem or a local database of some sort is exactly a "very fast local memory" where the more you use it, the more knowledge it gathers. Whether that translates to it being "smarter" is a deeper question than it looks.
regularfry··on VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO
> First, if you know nothing you don't even know what you're missing or what to search for.

RAG on the initial prompt would be the first thing to try.

> Then, without unlimited context, you have to do research for every task all over again every time.

Thing is, we're really really good at building very fast search engines. Doing research all over again every time shouldn't be a problem.

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