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viccis

2,582 karma · joined October 31, 2023

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viccis··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
No it's not, there are tons of programs in mathematics where you go there, form teams, work a problem as a team that's likely to get a result, and then publish the results from all the groups in the conference proceedings. They are called Research Collaboration Workshops.

Very consistent pattern from these tech companies in their mathematics press releases that shows a conspicuous lack of experience in the research math world.

viccis··on Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
A common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.
viccis··on Terpstra Keyboard
Clavinovas in that range have very intricate internal actions and don't have simple 1 year warranties lol
viccis··on GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
AKA extortion
viccis··on GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
>AGI

>Playing ping pong from the side of the table

I think marketing might be getting a bit absurd at this point

viccis··on Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
>Shut up. Just shut up.

Try to remain civil, even when you have Big Feelings.

viccis··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
Weird. I'm using it to do a bunch of work on something that manages security rules, with a bunch of sample data with spooky scary fixtures all over with "Mimikatz" and "CobaltStrike Beacon" and "Crowdstrike EDR" type stuff everywhere, including work to harden my system, and I've never been downgraded.
viccis··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
I just used it to do a review of a ~100k SLOC codebase that Fable 5 / Opus 5 largely built, cost like $2 and caught some good stuff, but more importantly, it communicated very directly and was pretty light on bizarre metaphors. No "let me read the source before opining" type verbiage launched at me. Honestly night and day for me vs before.
viccis··on OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally
The story in the "The Daily Claw" thing they are showing is like Claudese dialed up to max
viccis··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
"Load-bearing" is fine to me. I've heard it regularly pre-Claude. It has a specific meaning that conveys in one stock phrase.

"Adds color to" says nothing that "Adds detail to" doesn't already say, and the latter is more straightforward English that is quickly readable and understandable by even relatively weak English speakers.

I get wanting to use big words or metaphorical phrasing; I'm guilty of saying "ameliorate" too much. I'm ok if it adds meaning. But when it's just a more colorful word (note that this use of "color" doesn't match the one I originally brought up, which is also a huge problem) and doesn't add any utility or detail, then it's best to avoid it, imo

viccis··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
The US govt is trying to brand "antifascism" as a terrorist ideology. They host antifa stuff.
viccis··on Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio
Ollama was/is this but they pulled a heel turn...
viccis··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
>I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs

I'm already seeing it. A coworker said something like "<person> added the color to the ticket here" meaning that someone added details to a ticket.

I've started seeing Opus 5 talk about "hermetic testing" when it just means "unit testing", so I hope that doesn't catch on...

viccis··on Git at any scale
It is amazing and keeps adding new features that make it better. The CAS stuff is absolutely wonderful and only a recent addition!
viccis··on Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM
The Claudish example seems to have more information.

Are people really having trouble parsing this??

viccis··on Simulacra and Simulation
Great book, though it requires a bit of experience sifting through florid 20th century French philosophical prose. I would strongly encourage people not to get fixated too heavily on the "simulation" aspect in terms of what we think of these days when we hear "simulation". When it comes to Baudrillard, it's always important to focus on the semiotic aspect. What something is referring to, and whether there even is a thing for it to refer to.

As we approach the fall season, I'd recommend this little blog post to make it more clear: http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillar...

It discusses how the fact that we associate pumpkin spice lattes with fall, despite pumpkin not really needing to be harvested only in fall anymore and despite there not even being any pumpkin in the drink to necessitate even the tenuous seasonal connection. To quote the main arguments here:

>The fact that we welcome the return of pumpkin season, save for those who demand they buy these pumpkins from an ethically sourced gluten free farm just masks the fact that there are no seasons. We could probably ship pumpkins from all around the world to get our pumpkin fix year-round. But even then, it’s only the third order of that list above. It’s not quite at that next level pure simulacra shit.

>Did I mention that there’s no pumpkin in your pumpkin spice latte? It’s nutmeg (and a few other spices). In other words, that delicious sip of fall you just imbibed is actually a pure simulacrum, of that fourth order. Pumpkin spice doesn’t conceal the fact that there are no longer seasons, pumpkin spice has no referent in reality, it exists for its own sake. The only thing “pumpkin spice”refers to is itself– like the distinct difference between “cherry flavored” items and “red flavored” candy that claims to be cherry-flavored.

>Those who bake will quickly note that “pumpkin spice” derives from the mixtures of spices (nutmeg, allspice, etc) that go into a pumpkin pie. But that’s exactly the point: it doesn’t matter whether “pumpkin spice” actually has any correlation to reality. Ads for pumpkin spice items tout pumpkins and other fall fare, as if there’s a biological imperative to shove “things that go well with pumpkin” into our collectively fat faces when the leaves start to turn. Nutmeg and allspice are also available year-round, as is canned pumpkin, meaning we could clearly sate our desires at any time.

viccis··on Simulacra and Simulation
I like that he had a very accurate criticism of their use of his influences in the first film (that the simulacra he describes wouldn't be so clearly differentiated from the real), and they ended up doing a better job in later films, as the Matrix's clear delineation from the real world was intended to lure the people into thinking their simulation was more real. The Matrix was the simulacrum after all.
viccis··on Sol loves to cheat
It's bad to anthropomorphize it when judging its capabilities, but useful when analyzing its behavior, as it can be best thought of something behaving as close as possible as a real subject would. If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily.

This is even more apparent if you read this post closely. Look at that personality prompt. It's going to effectively tell a story and start to imagine itself in a role. If that prompt said "Talk like a pirate", it wouldn't be bad for you to say it's acting like a pirate.

Anthropomorphizing themselves is at the core of how these things work, sometimes in subtle ways.

viccis··on Gardner police discontinue Flock cameras as license plate readers face scrutiny
The ones here (not in Texas) were being queried by Texas cops looking for women getting out of state abortions.
viccis··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Corollary to this is that whenever companies acquire smaller companies and lay off the small company's sales teams, they deserve what they get. Looking at you, big company that turned my last one from nearly a billion valuation into a $20M fire sale in 3-4 years.
viccis··on The 90-year history of the binoculars bolted to scenic overlooks
That's not what rent seeking means.
viccis··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
>A doctor's visit is a $150 minimum, similar to the US.

It's $20 to go to the doctor on similar priced insurance in the US.

Your $500/month is just a tax for healthcare. Your only advantage over the US is that it's not tied to employment. Ours is both a tax and a cudgel to force people to work.

We have the worst of all worlds because ours is a tax and a cudgel, but then we also have to pay tax to the state to fund the healthcare for others who can't or won't work. I wouldn't call yours the best of both worlds. It sounds like you're getting fleeced to a lesser extent, but still not great.

viccis··on AI usage patterns in software teams
In my experience?

It used to be that one person had one to three codebases they knew intensely at my company. If you needed a bug in codebase X fixed, person Y was the one to do it and if they aren't available, person Z can do it, just not as quickly.

Now every person on my team has to handle tickets for every single codebase. There are about two dozen different large codebases involved here.

It's a ludicrous antipattern because person Y still needs to review the PR that person A generated for codebase X, and it will take them about as much time to wrangle the 2000 line PR (oh boy do LLMs love their mocks for unit tests) as it would have been for them to do the 50 line code change.

On top of that, it has "allowed" us to add feature after feature onto codebases not designed for them without refactoring. Is it good that this Flask API went from a purpose built service that interacted with the data analytics for product A stored in database X, and now our sales guys can sell product B, C, and D stored in database X? Uh, I'm sure it's great for them. Oh, and now it all can be stored in database X, Y, or Z depending on what the customer wants or what sales promised them. Great. Now I'm looking at a Flask app.py that's 12,000 lines of repeated code.

It has allowed poor designs to still produce working code. For a while. We seem to be getting a lot of bugs lately that look really bad to customers because it's for really simple shit. And I can't help but notice that happening to all the various products and sites I use too...

viccis··on AI usage patterns in software teams
I don't think setting up a local LLM is a reasonable way to get a good idea of how enterprises are using this stuff.
viccis··on And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
Yep. The event in Egypt that this article opened with is an example of a state of exception, and it has been used effectively by rulers for a long time. Not just autocrats, but, even more importantly, by elected members of a government with checks and balances, as a way to bypass those checks and balances. The phrase was coined by a Nazi philosopher who proceeded to lay out the groundwork for the subversion of a constitutional parliament, which then worked effectively. It has been picked up by others like Agamben to analyze similar things throughout history (the Patriot Act for one).

It's fundamentally not a matter of technology.

viccis··on A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
Honestly pretty funny that you gave a (fairly useless) metaethical answer instead of responding to the actual meaning, which was clearly soliciting ethical judgments about it.
viccis··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
It's falling apart at the seams for me. Half the time I click somewhere on a page, the whole thing freezes and I have to reload the page. Took forever to install neovim on a new machine today because all the plugins installed via Github and I had to wait like 10 minutes for it to come back up.
viccis··on Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)
Same. Almost every time I would use its streaming interfaces in Python, it would STILL materialize everything into memory. That was like 6 months ago. Maybe streaming interfaces actually work, but I found them to be leaky abstractions that required a ton of hand holding to make sure they didn't build a bunch of memory pressure, if you're lucky enough to even have a way to do it.

For example, last time I used it, you couldn't do NDJSON streaming scans from S3 (looks like fixed with PR #26563).

viccis··on old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login
The AI moderation is completely out of control. They'll permaban 15 year old accounts for chatting about WW2 history because they used phrases like "<person> should have killed <person> when they had a chance, and we paid for it as a result". I got an account suspended for a week for a (positive, happy tone) joke that had nothing to do with violence or aggression, think "Hell yeah bro, go for it!" A human confirmed it, which makes me think, assuming it is a human, that the human just mashes buttons to reach KPI requirements.

>I think the forced login is a way to bring back that engagement?

I just don't see it when they've decided that (a) bans, sometimes perma bans, are the solution to any (often hallucinated) misbehavior and that (b) the new user experience is to be as terrible as possible in as obtuse a way as possible.

It really seems like they're going hard for ragebait as their main driver of engagement. AITA, GirlDinnerDiaries, etc. Reddit is where your average oversocialized office worker with a boring life goes to read about peoples' drama and problems. The Jerry Springer show for millennials.

viccis··on Claude Code May–August 2026 weekly limits promotion
Tbh the extreme discrepancies between very confidently made statements about "X is better than Y" a sign a to me this is something where peoples' biases are out of control. Not saying you are wrong. Just that these things are so hard to evaluated apples to apples and that things like under-the-hood routing changes muddy the waters so much that it's really hard to get reasonable assessments.
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