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stefan_

14,717 karma · joined February 19, 2018

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stefan_··on DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)
I don't understand why half the comments here are about the author list, this is very common practice in e.g. large-scale physics experiments and biology, and every new GPT release from OpenAI equally had papers with tons of authors
stefan_··on The Copilot+ PC brand is dead
We laugh at Google being deadly behind with Gemini but is there a place that has fumbled it like Microsoft? I guess Apple comes close, but with them you get the feeling they were never in it to begin with.
stefan_··on I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB
Citation needed. Have you read some of the skills slop Anthropic were pushing at some point? Here is "frontend design":

> Consider Chanel's advice: before leaving the house, take a look in the mirror and remove one accessory. Human creatives have memory and always try to do something new, so if you have a space to quickly jot down notes about what you've tried, it can help you in future passes.

How about "canvas design"?

> THE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLE: The topic is a subtle, niche reference embedded within the art itself - not always literal, always sophisticated. Someone familiar with the subject should feel it intuitively, while others simply experience a masterful abstract composition. The design philosophy provides the aesthetic language. The deduced topic provides the soul - the quiet conceptual DNA woven invisibly into form, color, and composition.

stefan_··on Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips
Curiously NVIDIA have long allowed consumer GPUs to be upgraded with larger memory chips - they could very easily reject booting those configurations. This is something done almost exclusively by unsavory Chinese actors who then sell on the bare retail PCBs (core removed, since they use different PCBs and heatsinks) to various scammers that foist them upon unsuspecting retail buyers.

In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.

stefan_··on Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death
But.. they did have that? What a bizarre argument.

And yes, if you make software that drives the car, release it into public traffic, and then your software runs someone over that would be plainly visible to a reasonable human driver (the misleading dashcam footage you release to make it seem way too dark [to a shitty dashcam sensor] notwithstanding) - you should absolutely bear responsibility! How is that even a question? You did that! Not whoever you put there as a "safety driver". We can adjudicate their responsibility separately, but it's certainly not 100%.

stefan_··on I am often wrong
The problem here is that the latest Claude models have gone off the deep end in their communication, and there seems to be neither awareness nor willingness to fix this. "Having your writing and talking turn into Claude is the risk nothing names" or what vapid strange meaningless thing would Opus say.
stefan_··on Laya the open source version of Jev
That's part of the irony here I guess. In specialized fields, think computer vision, there were lots of teams whose innovative state of the art model was essentially just a function of the limitless compute they could throw at the problem. Now there are just people with even bigger sticks.

There are lots of scenarios where specialized models still are the only option for real time, power efficiency, and so on. And transformers and other tech behind LLMs can equally produce better specialized models. But no sympathy for those who confused compute with innovation.

stefan_··on Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?
While we are on this, is there a comprehensive guide on how to "theft-proof" your iPhone? Not in the sense of preventing the theft, but rather the fallout on all our various online service access.

Using the iPhone backup to setup a new phone is a good reminder every time that not half of the stuff comes back correctly..

stefan_··on German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol
Theres probably some tender that says it must be a "open platform" "open ecosystem" "modular vendor independent" whatever. So you upload some slop to GitHub and tick the box.
stefan_··on Dario, Please
How could agents take over the internet yet refuse to shutdown your PC when you prompt them to on your PC? Of course the answer is that the lobotomized version you run is not the same they are running. Which makes for "intent", certainly "negligence", but hell freezes over before anyone will prosecute a tech company.
stefan_··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
X has been the most shameless, after all brand name advertisers left. Here is one state-level actor campaign that has been going on for months:

https://imgur.com/a/HZwfyNH

It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.

This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.

stefan_··on Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
This is pure sunk cost fallacy. CNNs were from the deep learning ImageNet heydays, but now everything in that domain is equally done better by transformers. All you are doing is wasting area and saddling software with outdated hardware, and myopic PMs insisting on its use will create inferior products. Now that sounds a lot like the Apple AI efforts..
stefan_··on Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time
Russia hasn't exported products in over a month now. If Diesel prices hit $6 today, it's purely because 6 months after the US president started his war on Iran, Iranian forces in Yemen have routed the Saudis and cut off the second of two SA oil export routes, damaging a vital pipeline in the process, sending crude to $100 and beyond.
stefan_··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
The open internet is now a cesspit, with very little new good data. Expect everyone to train on user data always. They just got clever about whitening it.
stefan_··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
Actually they just Arc<T> everything
stefan_··on GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all
"I don't know anything but I don't like Graphene"

Well we know Google isn't enabling MTE, while LLM-enabled exploits are multiplying rapidly. Maybe you need to get back to work?

stefan_··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.
stefan_··on Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
The systems jamming in Hormuz and Ukraine aren't exactly cheap and low powered, nor are those used by the US military in one of their many jamming exercises every year. Cheap GPS jammers fit in a cigarette lighter and are used by truckers who don't want their boss snooping on them, but they don't quite threaten aviation.

That aside, you don't need to give up on GPS just yet. As expensive as airplanes are, there is no reason not to have at least 8 element CRPA receivers in them. Mostly a military niche product in the past they are rapidly proliferating, and most fuselages make for a great ground plane.

stefan_··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
I don't think this is something anyone who has ever read a "thinking trace" would unironically say. Not that you can even see them in Claude.

When thinking first started and you would still see the whole "thinking process", I thought it was a ploy to 10x token use because it was just the most inane bullshit. "But wait, the user is asking me to" in loops.

stefan_··on Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal
It's crazy how much they have enshittified credit cards. It's not stuff like CVC, that's fine, but all the random failures! Nothing will turn me off your "payment system" more than having it randomly fail on me for utterly incomprehensible reasons when I'm simply trying to pay. It's five times worse when you are traveling, buying some small items in a shop and have it fail at the register.
stefan_··on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer
You can point AI at any AI produced code and ask it to review it, get back 10 bullet points and a few pages of prose. And the fun part is, you can do that over and over and over again!
stefan_··on Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
I think these "Flash" models are sort of an evolutionary dead end. Sure, there are some routine tasks and applications where they can be used. But for the actual novel development work? It's much better to run a big model at high power for 30 mins than watch the Flash model struggle for 2 hours and produce massive churn.

Same reason your phone has a few big CPU cores for real work, it's much better to "race to idle" than have an "efficient" core struggle. Shitty experience, shitty power efficiency.

stefan_··on AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds
The juniors I have seen don't even try to understand anymore what they are building. They don't understand the product, they don't understand the technology. So everything AI is building for them is nonsense. "Reviewing" it is impossible. Some of them think they are being extra clever having Claude process review comments for them. Even if you hire one, this way they are out the door within the month.
stefan_··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
They were also caught having their Grok code agent upload entire source code repositories in the background.

I guess the joke is "come to Origin, your code is already there".

stefan_··on AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira
That's mostly because at some point a wave of nonsense swept over the field that brought with it the Scrum master, agile, pairing, middle managers thinking up elaborate Git branching schemes (they don't understand Git) and of course, the mandatory code review.

It's best to take all these things in moderation.

stefan_··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
In Poland fees are capped at 0.3% for credit card, 0.2% for debit per EU. Which is why generally in the EU you don't have the insanity with credit card loyalty programs.
stefan_··on Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
I hope there is interesting research being done to stop models from 9B to 3T from authoritatively giving the wrong answers to factual questions instead of doing tool calls, but this article will tell you nothing about it. That's because it's clearly prompted by someone who simply noticed this deficiency very obvious to all practitioners and even users.
stefan_··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.
stefan_··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
There are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers.

PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.

stefan_··on Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
It's really getting extremely obnoxious. There is no point to the whole "shell commands output" view anymore because the model aggressively redirects everything to some scratchpad file, so besides the output viewer being a broken mess, it doesn't show anything regardless.

My favorite is when it wraps commands in convoluted pgrep wait patterns that end up matching it's own bullshit, and thus never exit. It also feels like Opus 5 will now always write some adhoc Python script to MAKE UPDATES TO FILES, which seems extremely terrible.

The complicated shell commands also constantly trip up against quoting rules, requiring another iteration.

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