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stefan_

14,738 karma · joined February 19, 2018

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stefan_··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
The American LLMs have been equally distilled from Chinese ones. Not least because the people whose creativity in collecting training data barely extends to pirating Annas Archive probably lack in great Chinese datasets.

Try it yourself: https://imgur.com/ZfxYmaq

stefan_··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
Yeah I mean this hardware isn't hard because its a fricking breadboard.

(Although I spy an SD card slot, a favorite of the "hardware isn't hard" faction that will explode in their face)

stefan_··on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent
Ah, the usual take. Want to sign everything before it can run, but take responsibility for nothing. And when in doubt, well, the computer did it.

When do we start calling out this crap?

stefan_··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
Vibecoded the billing system, raised revenue 9000%. Great for that promo package.
stefan_··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
It's not even that right now.
stefan_··on Grok Build is open source
No, those are directory names not uploaded. Here are the file names skipped:

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build/blob/main/crates/codeg...

It's about not uploading compiled binary stuff, but they want all your environment data all the same.

stefan_··on Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity
Telling American multinationals you will have them pay 0 tax isn't exactly a "tax policy" as such.
stefan_··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
But they gave us double the tokens! Then a limited time more usage! Then even more tokens "off peak" times! Then some new model released but apparently it inherently used 1.69x tokens! Then Fable is here but "it uses much more usage". But only until ~~the US banned it~~ ~~7th July~~ ~~19th July~~ who even knows.

At this point I think Dario is just in his wellness retreat adjusting a revenue/profit dial.

stefan_··on How to hide from killer drones
You are mixing more things. There's lots of ISR drones flying around, from DJIs at 50-150m altitude to bigger fixed wing platforms at 1000-1500m. Their point is to find targets, do BDA and monitor, but not autonomously; it's guys sitting in Discord calls and entering data into BMS.

Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.

stefan_··on How to hide from killer drones
Yes, media see a snapdragon running a YOLO and go off writing "AI apocalypse autonomous killer drones" articles.

See it for yourselves: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2071537561059692956

Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.

stefan_··on How to hide from killer drones
This is an odd article that tries to elevate some random grunt in the field painting their truck white stripes to grand battlefield strategy in the face of autonomous AI killer drones. Neither are the latter real nor is the former actually in widespread use, and it obviously is not effective, not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
stefan_··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
Of course, this is essentially the basis of capitalism. Corporations are just people, folks, spread the knowledge and we all get richer.

The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.

stefan_··on OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router
I think the purpose is to have a simple to hack on reference platform for developers. The problem with commodity hardware is the super short lifecycles (many of them stop selling before theres an OpenWRT port), they are locked down and the manufacturers will frequently make tons of internal revisions.
stefan_··on Shadcn/UI now defaults to Base UI instead of Radix
Just read the post! It's essentially "we switched from Radix to Base UI". Why? "the ecosystem moved on". Nothing says braindead web frontend churn like this post, and them not having written it in the first place is just the cherry on the cake.

They could have just written "we asked Claude to rewrite our project with Base UI because it eclipsed Radix in NPM downloads".

stefan_··on Shadcn/UI now defaults to Base UI instead of Radix
Yeah instead of this slop a simple table explaining the tradeoff would have been far superior.
stefan_··on The Vespa at 80
Yes, all of them are terrible and should have ceased to exist 10 years ago? Now is just the next best time. It won’t save the industry addicted to them of course, China has long gotten rid of them.
stefan_··on FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
I think often of how all it would have taken was a bomb for the 10 or so people that years ago at some browser vendor consortium out of pure self centeredness went „nah lets fragment“. We could have saved many many collective years, electricity and eyeballs simply watching the most basic content.
stefan_··on The 2-Year Apartment Rule
It infuriates me to no end that we are expected to put up with building design and technology from 1900 as a consequence of the obsession with "property values must go up" (notwithstanding the property) and a healthy helping of "regulations are only ever added to, everything old is forever grandfathered".

Like, central ventilation is not magical unobtainable technology. Simple heat recovery even vastly improves heating costs in a way insulation never can.

stefan_··on Why Can't Walnut Creek Build 3 Bedroom Apartments with a Playground?
Well, it's gonna be 2027!

> Maybe this building in 2026 can't assume robots are parking the cars. But we could change the city's rules now and maybe a building a year from now will be able to dedicate less space to parking.

stefan_··on DOJ claims xAI's gas turbines are a matter of 'national and energy security'
Its obviously a permanent fixture. And well, electricity by virtue of having been around for 100+ years as a mass market product has been utterly ossified, saddled with far too onerous regulations and taxes and is being driven by inflexible, uninterested practitioners.

Of course someone will go „its just energy“ and use almost free natural gas. In some places in the US a diesel generator with gas from the pump is likely cheaper too.

stefan_··on SpaceX Is Buying Cursor
Yes, that's why Cursor was very popular when actually reading model output paragraph by paragraph was still the way you used them. That's no longer the case, their use has cratered, and in fact they have been disintermediated by their model vendors, leaving an empty shell.
stefan_··on A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer
You mean organized crime like NSO Group? Sorry, governments all over the world are too busy using them to spy on opposition to care.
stefan_··on Show HN: Dual YOLOv8n UAV Detection on RK3588S at 42 FPS Using NPU
Again with it. You have two cameras, so you can batch 2 already with no latency hit. In fact less latency because the fake multithreading is gone.

(You are not even measuring latency correctly)

stefan_··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
But they have such great AI generated insights on their AI stories:

"Many users praise Zhipu for open-sourcing GLM-5.2 under MIT with a 1M context window as a major step for accessible AI, while others respond with insults and anti-Chinese hostility."

stefan_··on Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models
It's one thing to have 5%, it's another for Jassys utter failure in Amazon AI efforts. They are nowhere, and the former isn't gonna save the latter job.
stefan_··on Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages
I love that even when trying to put malware into Arch Linux AUR, the malware is still distributed through NPM. Legendary platform.
stefan_··on Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end
I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!", and this is it?

> NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character.

> brutally minimal, maximalist chaos, retro-futuristic, organic/natural, luxury/refined, playful/toy-like, editorial/magazine, brutalist/raw, art deco/geometric, soft/pastel, industrial/utilitarian

> React, Vue

Sorry, but this is garbage.

stefan_··on Tesla Full Self Driving uses bicycle lane in official Denmark approval video
This is a lane only for bikes, with no car lane going the same direction. It's like turning onto train tracks (and if you keep going down it, you might well be stuck).
stefan_··on Upcoming breaking changes for npm v12
If you want to build a modern web frontend you will need to use npm. But a lot of those only ever run in the users browser where they can't do any harm. I would never consider the insanity of that ecosystem for backend work.
stefan_··on macOS Container Machines
No, the whole point of machines is their external interfaces? A Linux VM with no interfaces is just a closed box wasting power doing math.

And I think I would caution Apple to consider the lessons of WSL; having shared access to the filesystem is just the bare minimum. Next is networking (and god is this a rabbit hole with WSL), people will want to access their USB devices, X forwarding, GPU passthrough..

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