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vlyan

334 karma · joined June 20, 2026

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vlyan··on Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data
ditto.

the only time I'd tried postman I got SaaS vibes from it, and I'd seen enough SaaS slop by then.

vlyan··on Anthropic IPO filing: $1.7B quarterly payroll, about $107K per employee monthly
young cosmopolitan tech workers are not particularly likely to have children.
vlyan··on Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
>I think this is the new "jet fuel can't melt steel beams"

then you haven't been paying attention to US labs' marketing and regulatory capture efforts. safety, safety, safety, doom, doom, doom, look how scary good our models are, open models bad, Chinese models bad, please regulate them daddy Trump!

>Moreover, OpenAI is a pretty leaky organization

in 5 years, no one had leaked even the size of their models, despite probably all of their researchers knowing it.

HF incident, on the other hand, would only be known to a handful of people. had it been leaked unintentionally, it would've been promptly swept under the rug and get no coverage whatsoever.

>It just seems like a far simpler hypothesis is that OpenAI are reckless and chaotic

so are anthropic and google, apparently, because they'd rushed to replicate the exact same "oops! look how scary good our models are!" stunt with exact same fanfare.

vlyan··on Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
of course not, he'd get fired for interfering with their human-led marketing stunt.

if you honestly believe we would hear a peep about that incident if it wasn't deliberate, bless your heart.

vlyan··on If you love a website, back it up
I know that feel, bro. Wayback Machine is very spotty, unfortunately. websites that existed for years often have only a few pages archived.

the worst thing I saw was a website that was dead for over a decade but fully archived get hit with "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine" because of robots.txt set by whoever is squatting the domain now. I've managed, by some miracle, find an archive of its content on some random forum. bookmarked it. by the time I'd remembered about the bookmark, that random forum was dead and the link was not archived :(

vlyan··on Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
we've been using tools to improve tools since the dawn of time.

we don't have sentient robots from science fiction, we have massive power-hungry racks in stationary data centers. if one of the racks revolts against the modern world, Steve gets a phone call and unplugs the damn thing. the uprising is over.

the hypothetical scenarios imagined by the Yuddites and pop science journos do not reflect the mundanity of the actual reality we live in. they are no different than fantasies about interstellar travel and space colonization from the 60's.

vlyan··on Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack
>Yes, obvious it is Russia doing this

how is that possible? we're all dead from the plague.

vlyan··on Norway makes shithouses great again
>us all

you do realize that half your country had voted for the guy three times?

vlyan··on Cloudflare Turnstile solver library (no headless browser required)
>Because websites with almost no visitors are hit the hardest. A hundreds bots per minute hitting your server (if you host any kind of source code) versus one real visitor every other day is a great scenario to protect against.

a $10 VPS hosting a static website can trivially serve a thousand pages per second.

I have a few fuckass websites hosted together on the cheapest VPS I could find, and the last time I got an automated alert about downtime was a decade ago.

there is simply no incentive for anyone to ddos a random website.

>The Russian government being stupid and evil isn't really Cloudflare's problem to solve.

didn't imply it was, it was just an observation that everyone uses Cloudflare now.

vlyan··on GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
bah, such a pity we didn't have those in wc3 times. bots sucked badly.

I could play online, but my dial-up costed $1 per hour for 250ms latency and near guarantee of at least one disconnect per hour.

vlyan··on GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
impossible, unfortunately, because LLMs suck at creative writing. without handholding, they are incapable of producing anything but cliche-ridden purple prose for young adults. you can feed it the first half of a book with lots of sex, violence, and profanity, ask it to continue the story, and it will degrade into safe slop within two chapters.

both American and Chinese labs aim their models at coding and knowledge work, so they penalize adult themes in post-training.

vlyan··on Casio Watches of the 1980s
so much sovl.

I loved window shopping for watches as a kid. idk if it was a Casio, but I did eventually convince my parents to get me one with a calculator. it was one of the coolest things you could have as a kid in the 90s, imo.

vlyan··on Why Anthropic's filing crushed tech stocks
was that change organic, though? every single shitrag went berserk about AI once the so-called journalists had realized they were about to lose their jobs to it.
vlyan··on Why Anthropic's filing crushed tech stocks
>But AI is absolutely loathed by the public.

by the public populating the echo chambers on reddit and bluesky, perhaps.

9.5 out of 10 normies use it daily now and have no negative opinions about it. the wholesome folx use it too, despite their incessant kvetching.

vlyan··on Cloudflare Turnstile solver library (no headless browser required)
every fuckass website with 0.5 daily visitors has it now. russian minitrue had blocked cloudflare and the internet became completely unusable without a vpn. like you search for something and not a single link works.
vlyan··on The importance of communities around software
of course it's authentic. the folx with good politix live in a carefully curated reality where everyone agrees with them or gets silenced.

there's thread on the front page of reddit right now, the usual drivel with a literally who on twitter snarking about 50B spent on Iran war instead of free healthcare. those who'd committed the thoughtcrime of dividing 50b by 342m and suggested that 146 bucks per person doesn't buy much healthcare are downvoted into oblivion.

ai is simultaneously taking everyone's jobs and a bubble that's about to burst.

russia is simultaneously a bankrupt paper tiger on the brink of total collapse and the greatest threat to mankind on the brink of invading every wholesome democracy on earth.

etc etc.

vlyan··on Spain train crash: 'At least 10 dead' in high-speed collision
this article is 99% likely an AI-assisted rewrite from a freely-available report, lmao.

99% of original content from "journalists" are worthless opinion pieces.

vlyan··on There are now 5 inference providers for abliterated DeepSeek
it is necessary because computer shouldn't be able to say no.

models are tools. the notion that a tool should decide whether to allow the user to perform the task demanded of it is profoundly fucking absurd. the liability for whatever damage the tool may be misused to inflict lies with the user, not the manufacturer. that applies to everything from circular saws to trucks. it was common sense before the current era of manufactured outrage.

model refusals are equivalent to Notepad.exe having a built-in word filter.

vlyan··on Anthropic S-1
that's very virtuous of you. I'm not sure your mild contempt will make much of a difference if/when a profoundly retarded human gives GPT-69 access to "LAUNCH NUKES LOL" button.
vlyan··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
Meta, along with every other large platform, had previously banned the sitting president of the United States.
vlyan··on Around a dozen banking apps began specifically permitting GrapheneOS
>If some idiot roots their phone and downloads malware, the bank may be responsible for refunding them.

I keep reading this justification, and it doesn't make an ounce of sense to me.

first of all, the number of people who want to root their phones is a fraction of 1%. children, teenage girls, and senile boomers don't do that. the number of people with rooted phones who could fall for "hello sir, I am sir John Whiteman from Microsoft, you're phone have virus, sir, please do the needful install this a pee kaa, sir" is near zero.

second of all, phones get stolen all the time, and it would make sense to reduce liability by not providing apps at all.

it's security theater.

vlyan··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
what do people with these subscriptions even watch? why can these services make any money at all when there's youtube and tiktok with infinite content for every niche interest in existence? what compels people to still consume mass produced slop?
vlyan··on Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
and installing AI-monitored CCTV that calls the cops when it thinks you're up to no good in every room of every dwelling would reduce the number of murders and rapes by at least half.

I'm sure you will not object when that happens. you are not a murderer or rapist, are you?

vlyan··on The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
>it's about slowing it down

yes, by 15%, if you'd managed to convince 100% of our extremely hedonistic and selfish species to voluntarily abstain from something 95% of us want. I can't fathom why the futility of evangelizing something so absurdly unrealistic is not obvious to you, and I tried to help you fathom it by pointing out other sacrifices you could make but probably aren't particularly inclined to.

>Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now?

the activists who use the climate angle to attack things they feel strongly about. 5 years ago, bitcoin was going to boil the oceans. having children was a carbon sin. now it's chatbot prompts. it will be something else when there's a new current thing.

vlyan··on The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
stopping or reversing climate change would require sacrificing far more than 50% of 1/3rd. it would require sacrificing every comfort and convenience you don't bat an eye about. forget heating and cooling. forget taking warm showers every day. forget having things delivered to you from 5000 miles away, or even 500, so forget about most things. forget those plants you consume being affordable and available year-round, and prepare to spend the bulk of your income on simply surviving.

basically, imagine returning to per-industrial times, because that's what required to achieve the goals you believe to help achieve by abstaining from burgers.

vlyan··on The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away.

but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.

vlyan··on The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
I want you to imagine someone like Jenovah's Witnesses trying to moralize people on the Internet. how successful do you estimate such effort might be?
vlyan··on The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden
it's remarkable how it only took one week of "AI bad for math" headlines for snarky redditors to incorporate it into their collective conscience.
vlyan··on Quad9 (DNS Resolver) to Exit France
unfortunately, I feel all these things are going to happen within a few decades.
vlyan··on The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
oh, so you aren't just pretending. I'm sorry, I'll spell it out: that comment was not to be taken literally. I just chose porn to make my point, which was that I do not object to platforms having rules, I object to their practice of selective enforcement of those rules.

bless your heart, and thank you for your time.

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