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square_usual

3,041 karma · joined October 3, 2019

I like talking to strangers, so feel free to email me. shrikanth at abis dot moe. Also @shrikanthup on x, formerly twitter.
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square_usual··on What we know so far about Spain train crash
Anybody can privatize their rail system???
square_usual··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
From "I suspect it was Anthropic" to "Nah it was anthropic", it's amazing how disinformation spreads... when even your source says:

> but it is unclear whether his account or another part of the publishing process was compromised.

God, people get so conspiratorial on HN when it comes to Ant

square_usual··on What we know so far about Spain train crash
Japan is a terrible comparison here because their rail network is privatized. They're also paying their pensions with debt, and their economy is really stagnant and not a shining example of a country doing well with a pension burden that high.
square_usual··on Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5
Yeah, Golden Gate claude was in 2024! But I think the most recent/relevant thing was the monosemanticity discovery.
square_usual··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
Do you understand what the ethical objection the person who requested this exemption has?
square_usual··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
If you don't "want" to do something, that's not a religious or ethical exemption, that's just you not wanting to do something.
square_usual··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
Do you think it is unethical to be a manager?
square_usual··on Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI
Yeah, and is this person going to turn down becoming a manager, ever, because they'll have to delegate the actual solution to someone else? Or are they going to micromanage them due to their ethical commitments?
square_usual··on PHP 8.2.35
Yeah I'd rather they spend 2x on compute than leak my data
square_usual··on Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code
I don't get what your point is WRT this article. They aren't announcing a result? They're describing a technique they used in real projects to prevent new vulnerabilities, including a change that is merged into OpenSSL. What is the "rush to announce a result" here? What are you saying they don't understand?
square_usual··on Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
square_usual··on Gemini 4 Argon
That is the standard pricing for Opus-class models these days.
square_usual··on Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' towards Claude
https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790

> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude

(E to add, for those who don't know, tszzl/roon is an MTS at OpenAI and a pretty influential researcher/personality in the AI world)

square_usual··on JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
Orca is too maximalist IMO, and it isn't a lot of work to switch together something with Herdr and a few vibed up plugins to get much (if not all) of the benefits that matter to you without the complexity and weight.
square_usual··on Mistral Large 4
No, it's a play on the Twitter/Reddit memeing about "Le Chaton Fat", see: https://www.reddit.com/r/MistralAI/comments/1u6f0dm/what_is_...

You'd be surprised how much of the AI world is fueled by memes.

square_usual··on Don't Be Fooled by this Summer of AI Hype
> AI companies claim that they have solved Millennium Prize problems, when really they plagiarized other academics' work

Ok, clearly you don't know anything, moving on then.

square_usual··on Don't Be Fooled by this Summer of AI Hype
Why should anyone listen to Timnit Gebru or Emily Blender after how consistently they've been wrong about everything? What insight or value do they bring to this?
square_usual··on Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Not universally. The author wants to live in a city, so of course they're not going to enjoy living in a suburb. It sounds like they'd be better off in an East-cost metropolis like New York instead.
square_usual··on Pentagon Influencer Called Liberal Women 'Pestilence' Who Will End Civilization
There is a ridiculous irony to making such a hateful, intolerant comment about this, lol
square_usual··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
My company IT forced us to upgrade to Tahoe :(
square_usual··on Sonnet 5.5
Once again, once you hit the high/xhigh level you're better off using Opus low/medium to get better results for around the same price. So I suppose the main point of this release is that you have a lower end than Opus low, which I suppose some people will like?
square_usual··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
It's crazy that the top comment on HN these days is this kind of crackpot conspiracy thinking.
square_usual··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
That's their API pricing. There's no way they actually paid $15M in compute. I'd say much more likely it's in the order of $1M.
square_usual··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
> and learned of the general approach they were taking. Only after learning the secret to cracking the problem did they send the first prompt.

Do you have any evidence of this? They don't dispute the timeline, but they never said they knew what Levant/Buckmaster were doing.

square_usual··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
I think this is stupid, for three reasons:

1. The researches didn't actually have the breakthroughs. In the Navier-Stokes case they didn't solve the full problem, in this case too they didn't actually have the solution, they were experimenting with the methods.

2. Different OpenAI employees have come to out to say the only reason they can't definitively say no is that for privacy reasons they can't go see whether they actually did get any data out of a given user.

3. In any case, nobody at any point has suggested that opted-out user data was used for training. The author of the new tweet explicitly said they only opted out in late June, which is well after any RL on Sol would've ended (AFAICT OpenAI used 5.6 sol for those solutions)

square_usual··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
The tweet is from Asha Sharma, the leader of Xbox!

> It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.

No??? You can quibble about the article, but you must've failed to read:

> The fourth quarter alone showed a sharper split. Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, fell 10 percent in the quarter. Hardware revenue dropped 13 percent over the same three months

This is further bolstered by MS's own press release:

> XBOX content and services revenue decreased 10%

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2026-q4...

> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division

You said "I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report"

When the report says:

> Xbox content and services revenue increased 13% (up 12% in constant currency)

In fact, there's no 11% figure anywhere in the report, so I have to assume this is what you're referring to since MS didn't break out Xbox hardware anywhere in it.

This is laughably shoddy work, please don't waste my time.

square_usual··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f...

Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division).

The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.

square_usual··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
> and the thing that is continuing to scale well or pretty well is inference

No, the models are just more intelligent. GPT 5.6 Sol can do more in fewer output tokens than any model from late 2025. Test-time compute isn't the only lever the labs have for scaling. This is among the two major things Ed has gotten laughably wrong in his technical predictions (that TTC was the last resort to make models better, and that synthetic data wouldn't help)

square_usual··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase

He's said variants of both of these things before! That's the point OP makes too, people say "He doesn't say that" or "But what about this" when he's said a million, sometimes contradictory things.

square_usual··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
In the first paragraph:

> While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper

And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says:

> It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right

Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY.

Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.

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