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mediaman

6,536 karma · joined April 20, 2009

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mediaman··on Pangram Image 1.0
Why are you so skeptical of text detection?

Do you believe it generally doesn't work or do you believe that if you work at it you can evade them and therefore there's no point to it?

mediaman··on US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 months
This is inaccurate. A conditional commitment to spend is not necessarily debt.

The difference is whether it is an executory contract.

If I sign a contract committing me to spend $10m in the future, but the other party is obligated to deliver that $10m of services, that is an executory contract and it is not considered a liability under IFRS because the commitment is contingent on the other party performing.

You're mixing this up with property leases, which create a debt because the tenant has obtained a Right of Use (ROU) asset, which is offset by the debt (lease payments). Leasing a property for ten years gives you both an asset and an offset liability, but only once the lease has commenced.

An obligation to pay that is contingent on the other party's performance of a contract is absolutely not a "debt".

Now, once that data center is built and turned over to the client, that may create an ROU that would generate both an asset (the ROU) and the offsetting liability. But if it's some future data center that will be built, it does not.

Even then, once the data center is built, an ROU may not be created: if the commitment is for a million GPU hours, with the seller having some freedom on how to deliver those GPU hours, that does not create an ROU. If it's for 100 specific GPUs for 10,000 hours each, it does, because it's about the right of use for those specific pieces of property.

For lease accounting, the asset and debt are only created at the point the lease begins, not the signing of the contract, so your reference to IFRS isn't relevant here.

mediaman··on GPT-Rosalind-6 System Card Addendum
This is because of the democratically elected government demanding these controls. Remember Fable?
mediaman··on Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts
It does if LLMs are generally poor writers, which they currently are, because it is extremely difficult to RLVR essay quality.
mediaman··on Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update
This comment doesn't make any sense. The products are mostly different categories. One is a VPN replacement and the other is encrypted shell access. Most people use ssh over tailscale. Tailscale does have a "Tailscale SSH" product but it's not that widely used compared to regular ssh over Tailscale.
mediaman··on GPT-6.1 Terra
You are showing a selection from some third-party interface that mixes together models from six different suppliers: Mistral, Kimi, OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic and Google, with a bunch of old obsolete models.

Are you presenting this as evidence that OpenAI's naming scheme is bad?

If you don't want to spend the time to know the difference between all these different suppliers and their models, then why are you using whatever this program is that gives you so many choices, most of which are bad? Why is this OpenAI's fault?

mediaman··on GPT-6.1 Terra
But what's the ask? This is the cleanest way I see of them doing it.

I see a ton of criticism and not a single person coming up with anything better, unless it's to take away options, like removing effort level.

What about buying Intel CPUs? A car? Electrical components?

If you're not just using this at a consumer level to ask about cooking recipes (and if that's your use case, you really don't care about API pricing, or any of this, and can just use the default), and are using it professionally, then this seems like a low bar of effort to understand what you're buying.

I do grant you the relationship between model and effort level has an unclear relationship, but there are also tradeoffs in most complex technical products that are not always clear; this is exacerbated by the fact that this product is stochastic.

Why are engineers using this as a professional tool expecting this to be bought like a consumer gadget and then blaming the maker?

mediaman··on GPT-6.1 Terra
I don't understand what's so confusing about this.

The lineup of models is still the same.

There are four models: luna, terra, sol, and astra.

Pricing increases for each level. This new 6.1 Terra is 50% cheaper than Sol 6.1.

They are lowering prices for newer releases, so yes if you compare Sol 6.1 to 5.6 Terra it won't look right, but why are you doing that? Look at the same release version for comparable numbers.

Each model improves in successive releases but they maintain pricing and capability coherency within a release version.

Yes, Sol 6.1 is supposed to rival Astra for some work, which is what you'd expect from a later versioned release model against a prior release bigger model.

Assuming they release Astra 6.1 at some point, I expect it'll be better than Sol 6.1, at a higher price.

I don't understand what people are asking for here? No reductions in pricing? Different model names on every version release? Not releasing any models for a version number until they're all ready?

mediaman··on Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name
This is a great way to destroy public transit!

The plan is to let anyone on the subway, with no fares. It turns out that the violent, unstable people who make public spaces unwelcoming are disproportionately represented among those who cannot pay $2.50 for a fare. So they scare off regular transit riders who mode shift to something else. It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare, so it's financially and logistically impossible to actually keep it safe. Then your transit ridership tanks and people who hate funding transit can declare the whole thing a giant waste of money and any new funding dies politically because now there's no public ridership constituency left.

Nobody cares about the revenue gained from $2.50 fares. What matters is the tiny amount of resistance that offers to the small number of people who are largely responsible for making public transit unwelcoming.

mediaman··on OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud
GAAP does not permit booking contracted future revenue onto the balance sheet or income statement, because the spend is not actually an unconditional debt until the service has been rendered.

It doesn't matter if it's committed or not, it still won't be recognized on the formal financial statements.

mediaman··on Tesla Roadster
I'm glad it was asked too and enjoyed the answer.

The OP's question was clearly skeptical though:

---

napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.

Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?

---

Implication being that writing on the back of cig packs does not make sense. I'd agree with your reading if not for the "at least kind of make sense" bit.

mediaman··on Jev meets the Trolley Problem
I think you would be less annoyed if you worked with these systems and used them in production.

Jev's pricing is 4.2 cents per million input tokens, less than half of Gemma 4. Qwen, gemma etc all have terrible non-uniform probabilities; in my testing, Jev's probability scores perform much, much better.

I'm usually seeing round trip classifications from Jev at <200ms for a completed query even with 10k+ input tokens. Gemma 4, depending on the provider, is about 200 ms time to first token - not time to completion. You can likely get better response running it locally, but then you're arguing why you're renting a low utilization 5090 when you could be paying $42 per billion tokens.

Jev can also run dozens of dimensions of classification in one call, without autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens. (i.e., it is much faster and has less order dependency.)

I've been running jev in some specific use cases and see much better speed and better accuracy than just using structured output from gemma/qwen.

I don't understand how the "just use gemma" crowd has this belief if they've actually built and tested the systems against each other.

mediaman··on Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics
Liability issues will exist regardless of whether compute is on-device or central.

However, if the robot is in a contained environment like a home, there is less third party liability than for something like vehicles. Not none, of course, but less. And when you can get your arms around third party liability, first party liability can be better controlled by contractual agreements.

In general I expect on-device motor execution will allow it to safely come to a stop or enter a safe position if it loses the link to the execution planning cloud model.

mediaman··on Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics
There are a lot of guys with garages that have a $40k CNC mill in it. If you've got the money -- and in America, a LOT of people have the money -- $30k to be able to experiment with a fairly open platform that may play, as a category, a pivotable role in humanity for the next 15+ years is not very crazy.

New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

mediaman··on Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
They’re not just trained on human prose. They’re sent to RLHF, and also their language changes as a result of RL on verifiable rewards.

Getting it to write well is really hard because there’s no real way to verify whether it’s good prose or not. You and I can tell, but we can’t write a verifier that codifies our judgment.

Maybe they’ll find a way to improve this, but for now it’s certainly one of the harder problems to solve for LLMs.

Part of it is that I think they also have poor theory of mind, which I imagine is also a hard thing to train it to do.

mediaman··on Yes, and
And no-one pays $2k/mo for marketing consulting, which they could do in-house.

No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional CFO.

No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional sales head.

No-one pays $2k/mo for environmental paperwork consulting for a manufacturer.

They can do it all in house. Why would they?

Right?

Except all of these actually do happen, of course, and each is a big industry.

As soon as this industry lost the inscrutability of the syntax of the work product, it began catastrophizing about the total end of any commercial demand at all.

Yet by this logic there should be almost no service providers at all for any industry that lacks legal certification barriers.

mediaman··on Why were Victorian elites so effective?
Do those huge pools of money wanted restrictions on immigration and high tariffs?

Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?

mediaman··on Decisions API is in public beta
Why would I run it myself? It's $0.10 per million tokens. Dirt cheap. (Jev is even cheaper.)

You could ask the same question about why anyone would rent a VPS. I can just run my own hardware, it's just a computer!

Buy vs rent is not just about what's possible, it's about what's economic.

mediaman··on RIP, vector database
Yes, that construct is, like em dashes, something that humans have been writing for a long time. That's the problem with triggering on one isolated tic. The tic comes from human practice, it's not like they invented it!
mediaman··on Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees
We protect kids because they are people, and we socially recognize that even if a person is potentially more likely to cause damage, there is a public interest in not discriminating against people based on age, or gender, or race.

Dogs are not people. Many in Seattle think their dogs are people, or even prefer dogs over people, but they are not, and they do not enjoy the same protections against discrimination.

If you have never been a landlord, I can see why you would think that "if they damage the property, they pay for it" is a reasonable rule that would work, because if your dog destroyed a door, the carpet, and the blinds, you are likely to be willing (if unhappy) to pay to fix it. If you have been a landlord, you know why this doesn't work, and you would also know why pursuing the damages in court also doesn't work.

(If you are wondering why: people do not pay. Deposits, which they also now capped in Seattle, often don't cover the damage. And suing people who have no money in order to get a judgment that you can't collect on is expensive and pointless.)

This just socializes the cost of pet damage onto everyone, which is why this is populist slop.

(Some of the other junk fees make much more sense: mandatory fees that you have to pay, that are fixed in nature, should just be in the advertised lease price. Think "common area fees" you can't opt out of.)

mediaman··on Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain
I did not say the EU forces Meta to ban it; perhaps you should re-read the comment.

It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.

You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).

The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.

I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.

mediaman··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
Yes, and instead of sending an letter by post I could send a carrier pigeon. I don't "need" the postal service at all! Why am I shoehorning the postal service in where it doesn't belong?
mediaman··on Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain
Meta does not do this outside the EU. It's a EU problem, and was caused by the EU's TTPA enacted last year which imposes heavy bureaucratic compliance process on any advertising that touches on any social or political topics.

Meta doesn't do this outside the EU, and they didn't do this in the EU prior to the TTPA. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a "meta problem."

mediaman··on Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain
The article doesn't mention this, of course, but Meta prohibits "socially sensitive" advertising due to the EU's TTPA law, or "Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising."

It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.

Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.

This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.

mediaman··on I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
It is lazy and wasteful if you ignore the costs of specialized skills in doing it the "right way." If you stop looking at things in a narrow technical frame, and look at it as an organization, it's not wasteful. And lazy is a useless pejorative used against products that let people do things easily. Lazy is good. When you learn how to make products that allow people to be more lazy, you will become successful.
mediaman··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.

But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!

Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.

mediaman··on Tell the speakers that you liked their talks
I don't know. I dislike camera asymmetry (mine on, others off) but when everyone's is off it's just like the phone conference calls of olden days. I like it because I can pace around, stand up, stare at the ceiling to allow me to concentrate.
mediaman··on I have a theory that software drives people insane
Agreed. I find it really fun to work with customers. It keeps you focused on real problems. And there are so many problems in 'boring' industries that need solving. Just a ridiculous number. There's so much bad software out there, or things being done manually, still now so many decades into the industry.

But you have to be willing to break out of the bubble, including getting on a plane, and I see very few people being willing to do that.

mediaman··on Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra
This is a groundless criticism. TB2.1 is saturated. TB4 is not. Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?

Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.

mediaman··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
No, that's not correct for any reasonable definition of "impossible." Look up pangram's accuracy ratings. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. LLMs in fact leave very distinguishing traces of their logit distributions in the text they write. It's one of the reasons why it's so easy for humans to also smell them.

It is possible to trick pangram - they bias toward a low false positive and a higher false negative - but it is not true that it is essentially random.

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