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smallerizeon Gemini 4 Carbon

But Gemini (the app/website) lets you set the Thinking level for Flash or even Flash-Lite. And Flash with Low thinking is the default.

smallerizeon Gemini 4 Carbon

It was only in beta for 5 years. 17 years ago.

smallerizeon Tell HN: I know Firefox has update when it starts to glitch

What version are you on now?

Edit: I ask because releases are scheduled in advance, you can see the calendar here: https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar/

smallerizeon Genie 4

I don't think so, and in fact an em dash would be much less confusing.

audio, e.g. music

audio — like music

smallerizeon Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

You only vote once every couple years. Political movements mean less waiting.

smallerizeon New iPad mini

If your phone is choppy when scrolling a list on a 60 Hz display, it's not going to scroll smoothly on a 120Hz display.

smallerizeon Nikon photography contest winner loses title after scientists spot signs of AI

That one is dead, and not flagged dead. Maybe email the Contact link at the bottom of the page and ask what's up.

smallerizeon Nikon photography contest winner loses title after scientists spot signs of AI

I still don't think the disqualified photographer was intentionally cheating. He was pretty open about his process, and Nikon took some time to determine whether it was within the rules or not. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/winning-nikon-small-...

Edit: an earlier statement from Nikon said that he was complying with the investigation and "At this time, we don't see that any rules were violated" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck4gjn1yzprno

smallerizeon Dream-1

It only takes a few upvotes to get any story to the front page briefly. And on Saturdays there is just less competition.

smallerizeon Sam Altman: 'I No Longer Think We're Gonna Be Able to Just Patch All the Bugs'

Notably, those didn't need a ton of patching over time. I mean relatively speaking. We've known how to build and deploy defensible software for a long time. We might just have to stop using the projects that need constant patching to keep up, and migrate to ones that are designed better.

smallerizeon The alien space of science: Coherent but cognitively unavailable directions

Damn, this was the killer app for semantic spaces I'd been waiting for since Word2vec.

smallerizeon Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans

AI thinks atheism is "controversial"

smallerizeon I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories

They mean it's technically possible, but you wouldn't want to.

smallerizeon Subscribe and Save items have a price increase

Is this the first time you have ever seen a price increase on a subscription item? It's pretty routine.

This probably isn't about Covid (although Covid is still killing and disabling people). The prices that wholesalers pay for goods (Producer Price Index) went up a whole percent just last month, bringing their prices to 6% above where they were a year ago. So not all of it is price-gouging.

We already had one disastrous Trump administration. Why did you expect a second one to go any better? You elected this government with your eyes wide open.

smallerizeon Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not

The HTML spec actually includes how to parse broken HTML. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parse-er...

smallerizeon Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not

The main one is that even a slightly broken XHTML document will fail to render. HTML is much more forgiving.

smallerizeon Bleached corals thrive within days when touching healthy neighbour

I think the article says they just haven't tested other cases. I wouldn't expect the symbiotic microalgae to be that picky.

Edit - The article makes Okkef's point, I just missed it.

smallerizeon Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time

China's power generation is still >50% coal, so I don't know if I would call renewables "overbuilt" yet.

smallerizeon Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time

Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.

China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.

(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)

So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.

smallerizeon US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion

$1 billion/day way the initial estimate, but it was never actually that high. CBO estimates $38B through August 1, or ~ $7B/month. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62756

smallerizeon Plex Media Server Unauth RCE Exploit

https://zmain.info/blog/plex2shell

Some of those individual bugs are egregious. A guard that doesn't work at all? A /player/timeline endpoint that doesn't check the token value?

smallerizeon Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia

I would be surprised if these robots were taking many jobs. Aren't they mostly piloted by people?

smallerizeon Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit

What I mean is, using LLMs for search and coding, they return the wrong answer all the time, unpredictably. Often if I redirect them, they will agree that they were wrong. So even though the knowledge that I need is in there somewhere, it doesn't get applied reliably. I don't want that experience for my infrastructure, where the model usually gets it right, but it just goes wrong a noticeable fraction of the time.

Do you know what I mean?

smallerizeon Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit

The randomness is biased, so it's usually fine. But sometimes the output is gibberish. Ask your LLM what sampling temperature is.

smallerizeon "We're not going to make rules that say you can't use tools for X"

Most projects don't have "lieutenants" that triage incoming patch sets. I totally get why projects smaller than the Linux kernel ban AI code out of self-defense against the tidal wave of crap.

smallerizeon Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit

I'm being very literal about the randomness. The language model outputs a distribution over all possible output tokens, and the chosen output is sampled from that distribution. The process intentionally includes output that is not the top-ranked token according to the model.

smallerizeon We are entering a period of overlapping crises

The term "polycrisis" started getting popular in 2023.

smallerizeon Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit

I understand that it works most of the time. I just want to be clear about what the stakes are.

"Because I have config backups/know how to unbrick?" This is the important part for me. I'm not going to gamble with more than I can afford to lose.

smallerizeon Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit

I'm at a loss why you would put a random number generator in front of such a sensitive operation. It's literally a matter of time before the output sampler chooses a somewhat-less-probable string like the one xatt posted. Or just deletes your stuff.

smallerizeon Thunderbird for iOS

I don't understand how scrolling is so bad. There's some kind of frame-in-a-frame effect where both frames try to scroll at the same time, and it just rapidly blinks one of the scroll bars on the edge.