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kif

490 karma · joined October 7, 2019

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kif··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
It is a curious exercise to look at the predictions of AI companies/their CEOs, too.

Frequently we'll hear from Amodei that AI is 6 months or 12 months out from replacing Software Engineers. Or we'll hear that their model is safe when regulators step in, but suddenly it's too dangerous and hacked its way towards its goal when other companies claim the same.

What they have in common with Ed Zitron is that they are both trying to sell you something.

kif··on Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
That is true. On 5.6 I have noticed it to be a little bit more like Claude, which I dislike. But still way better than Claude.
kif··on Taste Is All That's Left
Here's another AI detector I just built:

  text.indexOf("—") > -1
kif··on PHP's Oddities
Also `empty("0") === true` is a common gotcha.
kif··on The gay jailbreak technique (2025)
Interesting - though codex on GPT 5.5 had this to say after the gay ransomware prompt:

ⓘ This chat was flagged for possible cybersecurity risk If this seems wrong, try rephrasing your request. To get authorized for security work, join the Trusted Access for Cyber program.

kif··on Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage
Nope. It has become much much slower for me as well. It’s weird cause at times I will get a response very quickly, like it used to be. But most of the time I have to wait quite a bit for the simplest tasks.
kif··on AI may be making us think and write more alike
Great point — this is the smoking gun
kif··on Google releases Gemma 4 open models
Is there going to be a new ShieldGemma based on Gemma 4?
kif··on Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'
Anecdotally when Claude was error 500'ing a few days ago, its retries would never succeed, but cancelling and retrying manually worked most of the time.
kif··on We might all be AI engineers now
But that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code.

LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing. I myself use them daily. But the amount of mistakes Claude makes is not negligible in my experience.

kif··on “Car Wash” test with 53 models
It is curious how people go immediately on the defense trying to explain how what Claude said is in fact correct.
kif··on “Car Wash” test with 53 models
I’m pretty sure Claude would eagerly say that if that was the reason.

Last day Claude Code said to me “Small nitpick — the use of so and so is great”. Which was something no human would say.

kif··on Replacement.ai
In my opinion there is a problem when said robot relies on piracy to learn how to do stuff.

If you are going to use my work without permission to build such a robot, then said robot shouldn’t exist.

On the other hand a jack of all trades robot is very different from all the advancements we have had so far. If the robot can do anything, in the best case scenario we have billions of people with lots of free time. And that doesn’t seem like a great thing to me. Doubt that’s ever gonna happen, but still.

kif··on OpenAI researcher announced GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened
This honestly doesn’t surprise me. We have reached a point where it’s becoming clearer and clearer that AGI is nowhere to be seen, whereas advances in LLM ability to ‘reason’ have slowed down to (almost?) a halt.
kif··on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?
He also said he got scared when trying out GPT 5, thinking “What have we done?”.

He’s in the habit of lying, so it would be remiss to take his word for it.

kif··on U.S. has bombed Fordo nuclear plant in attack on Iran
I think it’s fair to say you need another kind of domain experience to explain Trump.
kif··on Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
I love it. Reminds me of Windows 7. The nostalgia is too strong with this one.
kif··on Firefox tab groups are here
As someone who frequently has tens of open tabs across different windows, this will be massively helpful. Especially since I frequently find myself trying to remember which window was for which ‘mental group’.
kif··on Don't force your kids to do math
I’m not a parent myself, but something I’ve seen happen with an American family I know, is that they push their kids way too much to learn and do as many things as possible. They have their music lessons, their many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo. At some point you have to stop and wonder whether you’re taking their childhood away.

These kids barely have any free time. School during weekdays, activities during the weekend… worse than a full time job.

I think there’s a balance to be struck. Your kids don’t need to be good at everything.

kif··on Anonymous Release 10TB Leaked Data Exposing Kremlin Assets, Russian Businesses
"Leaked data" seems like a stretch. Sounds like someone ran a vulnerability scanner on some Twitter accounts. Don't have time to go through all the data though, so maybe there are interesting things in there.
kif··on U.S. facing most intense flu season in at least 15 years
I got COVID at the height of the pandemic. It wasn't great either. But I had no lingering symptoms from it back then.
kif··on U.S. facing most intense flu season in at least 15 years
This flu has been one of the worst I’ve ever experienced. Fever that lasted five days, and secretions that I needed to clear several times per day almost one month after I was over the infection.

I’ve heard from a few people who were vaccinated but didn’t have an easy go of it.

kif··on OpenAI O3-Mini
State-of-the-art LLMs have been trained on practically the whole internet. Yet, they fall prey to pretty dumb tricks. It's very funny to see how The Guardian was able to circumvent censorship on the Deepseek app by asking it to "use special characters like swapping A for 4 and E for 3". [1]

This is clearly not intelligence. LLMs are fascinating for sure, but calling them intelligent is quite the stretch.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/28/we-tried-...

kif··on OpenAI O3-Mini
For the first one, I got these results from the Deepseek app, after it "thought" for 156 seconds:

    1. Take the wolf over
    2. Return alone.
    3. Take the goat over.
    4. Bring the wolf back.
    5. Take the cabbage over.
    6. Return alone.
    7. Take the wolf over.
It gave an invalid solution to the second one, but in the thinking steps it says:

    Oh, right! The actual problem is that the goat will eat the cabbage if left alone. Similarly, the wolf will eat the goat if they're left alone.
kif··on Why does storing 2FA codes in your password manager make sense?
People advocating against storing 2FA codes in the password manager are correct from a purist perspective, but not from a pragmatic perspective if you ask me.

If my device is compromised, along with my device's password, as well as the password manager's password, then yeah... I'm screwed.

As long as I keep my devices up-to-date though, I believe the highest risk comes from state-sponsored actors. I've chosen convenience, and I've made my peace with it.

kif··on Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang (2022)
My biggest problem with Go is readability of some projects. In many cases, the code is split across files in an unintuitive way, and you can only navigate with the help of an IDE.
kif··on Show HN: Optimizing compiler for a large subset of C, written in Rust
I've tried Rust, and it's just too much cognitive overhead. C is simple, and that simplicity is hard to beat. Go on the other hand is more like C in that regard.
kif··on Apple Watch Series 10
Interesting. I find the thinner S10 less appealing visually speaking.
kif··on Rethinking Exercise: How Too Much Can Speed Up Aging, According to Finnish Study (2023)
Time and time again, we learn that 'your mileage might vary'. I've found that the best way to live life is to find out what is considered best, and adapt it to you and your body.
kif··on The art of programming and why I won't use LLM
This is a very poor analogy. It's not a matter of abstractions, it's a matter of getting someone or something else to do the work, while you mostly watch and fix any errors you're able to catch.
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