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peri-cl

2,210 karma · joined July 29, 2026

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peri-cl··on We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry
This is hilarious and adorable.

> "Ada tossed a cooked chicken to Noor; Esme picked it up by accident and ate it. A three-minute "no blame" inquiry produced a written protocol..."

They're like super-serious little senior engineers. (edit: or dining-philosophers).

About how much KV cache do these kinds of agents use? Could you squeeze 50 of these $game agents onto a small consumer GPU (small LLM)?

Idly imagining a game server of some kind with a bunch of human friends sharing one person's GPU, with a flock of agents colocated on it.

peri-cl··on Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
Well, no, because she approached Jeffrey Epstein after his release from serving a prison sentence for child prostitution, and proposed (to him!) that they start up a "porn company" together. There are no "classic" explanations for that specific chapter of her biography.

I don't know what to make of this person's life story; she's certainly an extreme statistical outlier.

peri-cl··on Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
Or Cami Clark and her relationships with Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei...
peri-cl··on Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
They're not? They are no longer benchmarked, and not available on any of the charts (not even manually).

Their benchmarks have been replaced with "N/A" for several days now,

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-flash-next

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-3-flash/

peri-cl··on Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
> "Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something."

Chinese models disappearing from HuggingFace (recently acquired by Nvidia).

GLM-flash and Qwen-next disappeared from ArtificialAnalysis (the top benchmark site) a few days ago; I was wondering if that was a prelude to something greater. Testing the waters.

peri-cl··on What we know so far about Spain train crash
> "the individual is just following perverse incentives that have been socially normalized over time"

Normalization of deviance,

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=normalization%20deviance&type=...

peri-cl··on Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks
The data's *always* been safe. /r/DataHoarders would never overlook this.

Nvidia will serve you a free, high-speed half-terabyte download right now[0]. It's one with a cutoff date of 2020—but given that GPT-3 was released mid-2020, that's probably the one you actually want, for ML research.

[0] https://huggingface.co/datasets/ray0rf1re/AO3-2020

peri-cl··on Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks
Wonder if it's related to the Gitlab crisis (the regexp vulnerability in Ruby that hit them first). Ao3 seems to be a Ruby on Rails app.
peri-cl··on Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5
They removed Qwen Flash Next and GLM Flash from their benchmarks, as of two days ago. They're not publishing any figures at all for them (they show as "N/A").

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-flash-next

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-3-flash/

edit to add: It's very disturbing, because these open models (GLM particularly) were among the best of all LLM's on their benchmarks. On the intelligence/cost frontier, specifically. Archive.org remembers that GLM Flash was in their green quadrant just a few days ago, next to Haiku:

https://web.archive.org/web/20261014031624/https://artificia...

It's completely gone now. AAI (as far as I've seen) haven't publicly commented about why they did this.

peri-cl··on Perspectiva Kogui: A message on artificial intelligence from the Kogui people
If this is authentic, I am a duck.

You'd have to be exceedingly open-minded to imagine a very remote, isolated peoples speaking in a semiotic flavor indistinguishable from your own Bay Area tech geek. Using metaphors like "quantum vacuum" and "mathematically incompatible theories of reality".

The source (a commercial website for a resort hotel, if you click around) doesn't pass the minimal trustworthiness bar, in this era of ubiquitous fake AI writing.

peri-cl··on Gemini 4 Carbon
They're in first place by a narrow 59 to 58; so for all we know it could have gone the other way, had they done the benchmarks yesterday. (AAI would have had advance knowledge of this issue, since they would have been given Carbon access in advance. I think this is sus).

I tried to figure out if I could reproduce Carbon's aggregate score using yesterday's (v4.3.2's) benchmark weights—but apparently you can't actually do that, without paying AAI. The raw numbers going into that aggregate aren't available on their public website.

peri-cl··on Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB Officially Released
The 256 GB is backordered by 13–15 weeks, if you click through to that.
peri-cl··on Gemini 4 Carbon
AAI styles itself as being independent of the companies it's evaluating.
peri-cl··on Gemini 4 Carbon
> "Carbon ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59."

Basically everyone[0] thought yesterday's update looked suspect, even before we knew about Carbon.

Did Google coordinate with AAI on any aspect of this in a non-public way? Is this the sort of thing a publicly-traded company would be obliged to disclose, if they were involved in it? AAI isn't a regulated company (private), but the stuff they print influences stock prices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268868 ("Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5")

peri-cl··on Spain train crash: 'At least 10 dead' in high-speed collision
El Pais is reporting they think it was a controller error,

https://elpais.com/espana/2026-10-28/por-que-han-chocado-dos...

An automated system[*] had failed earlier this morning, so controllers were working manually.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linienzugbeeinflussung ("LZB")

[added translation]: "The LZB safety system, which controls Spain's high-speed rail network, malfunctioned on Wednesday morning, causing about eight trains to come to a halt in the area. The control center then switched to manual control and ordered all trains to resume operation. However, the Iryo, for reasons that remain unclear, was unable to start and remained stationary. And that is where human error came into play, according to these initial hypotheses."

peri-cl··on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5
The writeup fails to disclose that they quietly redacted several open-weight models from the new benchmark. Popular ones. They're not on the charts; they're not available to manually add to the charts; and their individual model pages now display scores of "N/A".

GLM 5.3-flash: N/A

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-3-flash/

Qwen 3.8-flash-next: N/A

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-flash-next

peri-cl··on Genie 4
> "which is safetymaxxed to the limit,"

I feel refusal'd just *looking* at this page.

peri-cl··on Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking
Indeed. And they're not even pretending to keep an arms-length distance from their users' infringement; they're openly promoting it,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)

(Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).

peri-cl··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc. And unlike PhD tutors, they're universally accessible to all.

It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.

peri-cl··on Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505
https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/f076r.html

Reading this in between studying information theory makes a good laugh. This is the most inefficient code I've ever heard of. It's basically unary.

(For background, the first popular optical telegraph wasn't created until ~300 years later, and used 98 visually-distinct coding symbols).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph#Coding_and_de...

peri-cl··on Google illegally cut down 250K trees in Finland for data center
> "They also stripped off the topsoil,"

That's a perfectly normal and environmentally conscious thing to do before laying down concrete foundations. Topsoil is recycled and sold to farms. To leave it in place would pointlessly waste an ecological resource.

peri-cl··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
How many frontier labs are there right now? There's 5 independent groups neck-and-neck on the benchmarks, right?

A few weeks ago it was 2. Argon happened 23 days ago; Muse Wonder was 11 days ago.

peri-cl··on The alien space of science: Coherent but cognitively unavailable directions
> "I believe the inventor of Velcro got the idea from burrs?"

I think there's a provocative human-intelligence analog to be found there: "humans will never discover anything that doesn't already exist somewhere in nature. We can only recombine concepts we've seen—never invent truly new ones".

It's said that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" at describing the natural world. But what about the other way around? What if mathematics is unreasonably ineffective at escaping the convex-hull of concepts and patterns found in nature?

peri-cl··on The public notebook of a Claude agent with a continuous life
Interesting hobbies,

https://intenex.github.io/personhood/posts/2026-10-12-resist...

I think you could get a square-root reduction in the memory requirements by splitting the resistor networks in half. That's possible because you can topologically sort your network, oriented to the source- and sink- nodes. For a size-2N network, you can enumerate the two, size-N halves: two directed (1,k) resistor graphs (one source node + k nodes to join on); and zip together the (1,k) + (k,1) sets. (Correcting for the permutations of the k join nodes, and for source/sink symmetry).

Naively, it'd take O(n^2) memory to count all the NxN pairs; but, actually, you can do it in just O(n) space! You sort both half-networks by their resistance values, and then iterate the (implicit) sorted list of their Cartesian sums, in order, counting unique values. You can do that in O(n) space, using an O(n) min-heap and O(n^2 log n) time. The heap only goes up to O(n) because that's the number of possible "next" values at any step. Think of it as the NxN matrix M[i,j] = a[i]+b[j], with the rows and columns sorted (a,b sorted); the size of the "advancing front" from the min-corner to the max-corner is O(n).

edit to add: I screwed up; there isn't a usefully sortable resistance for (1,k) resistor networks. I'll leave up this wrong comment in case it inspires anyone to do better.

edit2: And the (1,k) + (k,1) splits aren't uniquely specified, and now that I think carefully I don't know a way to do that...

peri-cl··on Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026
> "...included a $72 billion accounting charge reflecting an increase in the estimated value of bonds that could eventually convert into Anthropic shares,"

I think all this means is that Anthropic's valuation went up. Anthropic owes holders of convertible debt[0] a fixed number of their post-IPO shares. Since Anthropic's valuation rose, the book value of the shares they owe to these note-holders went up.

On paper, this is a "loss", because the valuation of their debt increased when they recomputed it. In practice, these notes function like equity.

This is a positive signal that looks bad because the accounting is counterintuitive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convertible_bond

peri-cl··on Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages
Yes, sure. I'd be open to the idea of regulating commercial vendors of inference tools to consumers (for suitability). You can separate the concepts of commerce and speech (and US law does that extensively).

What Amodei's trying to do is outlaw free, open-weight models. That's two distinctions: (1) non-commercial, and (2) abstract, intangible mathematics. Pure speech. Same as Phil Zimmerman and PGP.

Even the EU's draconian open-source regulations (which HN criticizes endlessly) exempt free software which is purely non-commercial.

peri-cl··on Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages
No. Half the point of LLM's is having them research topics on the internet as your agent. It's totally harmless in the usual (tool-based search) workflow.

(Would we also need a real ID to operate curl(1)?)

Regulations should attach only at the point humans willfully or recklessly cause their agents to commit crimes.

peri-cl··on Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages
There are zero laws against the design, manufacture, sale, or possession of cars with spinning blades and/or flamethrowers.

Such laws attach to the human operators of such cars, if they recklessly endanger others by driving them on shared, public roads.

But they're perfectly legal to own (and operate off-road). And, there's no technical barrier stopping people from illegally driving them on public roads: just fear of laws.

(There's entire subcultures of people who modify cars to do insanely dangerous things, on private race tracks. Perfectly legal).

If we were to apply Amodei's safety standard to cars—do they have the theoretical risk of killing over 50 people—well, cars empirically kill tens of thousands of people in the US annually, so we'd have to categorically ban them. That standard is bad-faith and absurd.

peri-cl··on Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages
> "regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs"

I didn't read it that way. This is a bill that would ban open-weight models (good ones); effectively mandating gated-access, locked-down, high-refusal rate services, like what Anthropic provides.

Free software is incompatible with the requirement that it be impossible to abuse it.

peri-cl··on DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017
> "Also note that it is zero retention, not zero training"

The "green" badges explicitly say the opposite:

> "Private: this provider does not train on prompts and does not retain prompt data."

I.e. for the example of Fireworks, this is the precise language they use to describe ZDR:

> "More technically: prompt and generation data exist only in volatile memory for the duration of the request. If prompt caching is active, some prompt data (and associated KV caches) can be stored in volatile memory for several minutes. In either case, prompt and generation data are not logged into any persistent storage."

https://docs.fireworks.ai/guides/security_compliance/data_ha...

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