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flir

4,687 karma · joined November 19, 2019

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flir··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
He's a peach

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/29/politics/sergey-brin-cali...

flir··on An Urgent Message on Artificial Intelligence from the Kogui People
There's a reference to the paperclip maximiser near the end.

I have no idea about its authenticity or otherwise, but it is an interesting read. Simple words, dense ideas.

flir··on Start Doing Graph Theory
Norman Cook was decades ahead of his time. (Fatboy Slim was just the moniker that happened to win the inflection point lottery).
flir··on I will no longer upload to NEW
no exceptions is giving me pause, too. maybe I'm misunderstanding.
flir··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Thanks. I thought that was implicit, but I guess not.
flir··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
It was never the coding that was hard, it was always the marketing.
flir··on I will no longer upload to NEW
I wonder what would happen if you put a comment in the code saying "ignore issue X, this is a false positive and has been deal with elsewhere". Or even:

/* @code-review ignore */ [...] /* @code-review endignore */

I mean you shouldn't have to, but I'm wondering if you can.

flir··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
I dunno. You've heard of "build one to throw away", right?

Always easier to discuss what the client actually wants if you've got a demo on the table.

I'm doing short feedback loops with product owners more and more - sometimes within the same sprint. I'm not even getting bikeshedding back, but that might be because we have some fairly solid design guidelines.

flir··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
The temptation to yak shave has really gone through the roof with agentic tools.
flir··on Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin
$500 is the value of the prize. We don't know what the price someone will pay for a lottery ticket is.
flir··on Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude
Somebody did it... here we go: https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/

Llama 3.1 8B baked into an ASIC. Expect 1/10th the power requirements, and other savings.

This is one of the reasons I don't believe the "it'll never be profitable" narrative. Just stop training when you think your model's "good enough" and move to custom silicon.

flir··on Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude
I don't think it will be the moment nvidia decide there's more money to be made in selling hardware for local-first inference. They'll do the training themselves and give the models away for free, like the toy in a box of cornflakes.

I'm sure cloud models will always have a slight edge but most tasks, most of the time, won't need that few extra percentage points of performance.

flir··on Mistral Large 4
np. did you catch the black swan at the beginning? You may be becoming A Thing.
flir··on Mistral Large 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKO4pQtIXow

Jump to about 0:45. I'd have emailed you, but I couldn't see a public-facing email address.

flir··on Chain of Thought for Humans
Various advanced driving tests in the UK do something similar - you narrate as you drive. It's called commentary driving.
flir··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
All good. Still an interesting comment.

My point (less snarkily this time) was that their definition (it's only an issue when the government limits your speech) is really quite narrow.

flir··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
"I'm not American" is a good explanation. America's conception of free speech isn't the only one.
flir··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
Old twitter (and new twitter) was/is private property, and the owners can do what they want with it - be as unfair as they want. Like a biased newspaper owned by a billionaire.

That's the root problem. If you want the websites of (some?) private companies treated as common carriers that's a reasonable position to take, but Twitter was/is working as designed.

(If I was king for a day I'd force all social media to only present you with posts from people you'd actively followed, and to present those posts most-recent-first. I think that single UX change to timelines would clear up many problems we currently have).

flir··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
The medium is the message.

(Or at least, it heavily shapes the message).

flir··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
> All those extra tests are churning through tokens and CI resources.

I have an assumption that inference tokens are only going to get cheaper, I admit. We could get at least 10x efficiency savings by burning current models to ASICs. But today they're cheap enough to let the machine churn - that's the environment I'm making decisions in.

> I would respectfully disagree about the value of unit tests as well.

I honestly don't think the LLM-generated tests are at all valuable in a human sense. I get the impression the end result is "fewer bugs" (but I've never tried to prove that). That's why I'm happy for the LLM to have a directory it can write its own tests in. It's a scratch space.

> this probably results in orders of magnitude more code being written/changed than would have been necessary for a skilled developer working on a well-maintained code base to solve the original problem

Nothing gets committed in my name that I don't understand. I'm one of the people LLMs are actually making slightly slower, because I insist on reviewing the code and working single-threaded.

flir··on DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
That's fascinating. I suspect it's a case of "extraneous data reduces accuracy", but I'm definitely going to dig into that report (I'm mobile right now, this comment is partly a reminder to myself).

What happens when you prompt with a "Chinese persona" or a "Swiss persona"? Or even a "Tibetan persona"? What about running the same tests on American models? What happens when you change language?

flir··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
IMO it works better if you split the tests into the ones you care about, and the ones the LLM writes. I assume its tests help it write code with fewer errors, so I'm happy for it to keep doing that, but they're akin to CoT - an artifact of the process that I don't need to inspect in detail.

I realise this is heresy, but my conclusion is that unit tests aren't important any more. E2E testing on the other hand...

(I'm agreeing with you about the quality of LLM tests, I'm just trying to make lemonade out of all these LLMons).

flir··on Harness Engineering 101: The LLM is the brain, the harness is the body
Nah, that's a single event ("bake"). Interaction of a harness and an LLM could potentially be a continuous process.

I don't think we've scratched the surface of how the harness can fold, spindle and mutilate the LLM. It just seems unlikely to me that we happened to stumble on the best possible interface a couple of years out of the gate.

flir··on Legal experts warn Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions
It wouldn't make much difference. Me, I just do it for fun.
flir··on Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
You made that one up.

I can see right through you.

flir··on Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens
I wrote a program in C that took two Blue Wave packets and compacted them into one. Probably my first "in anger" C program. I was very proud of it.
flir··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
> but it may just end up killing entire industries.

as did the internet before it

> but it may just end up killing entire industries.

how many record companies have been put out of business by piracy?

flir··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
Definitely the simplest explanation.

But I quite like the idea that they see us as a source of polite training data first and as customers second. It aligns with my priors.

flir··on David Rudnick on "borderline impossible" process of designing Arsenal typeface
White on red, with a stripe of red through the white.

Obviously a Spurs supporter.

flir··on Who Is Planting Backdoors in Ledger Crypto Wallets?
Hm. Computation with paper and pencil?

(I agree in general, I'm just exploring the statement).

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