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xpct

684 karma · joined January 5, 2026

Hello, I like programming. I enjoy prompting LLMs less. Anonymous because I don't have much public work to share.
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xpct··on French national assembly votes 0.055€/GB internet tax
Thank you for sharing. I saw some outrage discussions on social media concerning this, and it's unfortunate how far people are willing to spin this to feed their narrative.
xpct··on A tiny world model running games on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W
Is the actor trained on world model's mistakes as well? If so, it should learn to force hallucinations that force it into an easier state.
xpct··on We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry
+1. Would be fun to give Claude tasks and have it do them in the background, maybe sometimes running into it in the world. Judging by the article they struggle to do stuff so it'd probably feel balanced as it wouldn't accomplish much.
xpct··on We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry
Tangential, but RTS is already a simple variant of AI + human. Attack clicking uses a dumb target selection and routing strategy on purpose so you have to micro. Now, if troops moved out of threat range and used smart targeting there'd be a lot less of 'game' in it. I believe some RTS players disliked the SC2 engine because the pathing was 'too intelligent' and they argued that it made surrounds and some other mechanics too easy.

Endgame of AI + human gameplay is delegating everything to the AI. I'm not sure how you would have to design a game where you only delegate parts of macro/micro, and still make the game interesting.

xpct··on Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe: open ASR for 40 languages
I played around with Nemotron 3 recently. It's OK, but makes an error every few sentences, at least on the data I worked with (standard vocab). I'm sure we'll get there, but I was pleasantly surprised by how I can recognize words better than it can.
xpct··on Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models
If that is so, would it be entirely to decrease search space for layout algorithms? I believe there isn't anything in the fabrication process that couldn't model diagonals.

I could see that square packing is more simple, but by shifting elements per row I don't see why it couldn't propagate at odd angles.

xpct··on Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models
Ah, this prompted a few questions from me. Perhaps someone with more hardware background could chime in.

They don't really show it here, but supposedly a Cerebras' chip is sub-divided into a 2D mesh of what they call PEs (cores). So data flow generally flows in two axis, and maintains consistent timings to its 4 neighboring cores. They show the layers flowing from left-to-right being streamed by PEs, but I wonder how true that ends up being: maybe the communications are easier to stream via diagonals, or some other shape that has better topology for data flow.

Then, even from die shots of CPUs and GPUs we often see that cores are tiled as squares, and those don't have the same cross-core connection and streaming requirement. Now, I assume that some parts of what we call a core can be moved around more freely while maintaining whatever power/heating/timing requirements we have, so perhaps it's easier to 'force' a square by moving those loose parts around. But why do we confine those to squares? Is super-core layout just something not worth investing time into, like how interconnects are timed, non-convex tilings, and distances to I/O?

And for streaming architectures like Cerebras, why aren't other types of tilings considered, something like a hexagon grid? This could have 3 inputs / 3 outputs, which could allow more complex data flow (?). Similarly, we could have 8 connections with longer diagonals in a square tiling, etc.

I guess, what are the tradeoffs in place such that so many chip designs seem to reuse square tilings both locally and globally?

xpct··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.
xpct··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I agree.. partly, and my problem is with enjoyment. I did some hand coding today and immediately got in the zone, something I'm still not able to do with LLMs. It most definitely took me probably ~2x longer than it would with an LLM, but it was much more enjoyable owning every decision behind the process, and having a full view of how the system worked.

I think this could be achievable with LLMs if they had a much higher token rate. That way you'd have less downtime and could work on the problem more aggressively. How it's designed to work now, offloading cognitively, doesn't feel very good, even when you 'ship' more.

xpct··on How is music possible
I proudly stand in the 'interesting as long as I don't understand it' camp!
xpct··on How is music possible
Hmm. I wonder if that can say anything about an individual's brain. That is, what type if people like the rhythmicity?
xpct··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
Anti-human sentiment has been rising in some online spaces in the last year. Soon, LLMs will start mimicking that sentiment, the same way they copied our 2000s morality and political opinions.
xpct··on Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
What does that even mean? They would have tried the models, noticed their limitations, and decide it's not AGI. Same as today.
xpct··on DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
I'd say that's not a very meaningful distinction to make.
xpct··on DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order
That sounds like a security issue of raw user data being pasted to LLMs in a root environment? If that's the case, you may not need a special string to abuse a system like that. That's prompt injection.

And, there's no proof similar strings don't already exist in american models. What if "{id}_{url}" works to send it to an arbitrary URL, not a preset XYZ one?

xpct··on Hybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text
I'd be happy to be corrected but my understanding is that it's just a side effect of scale. If we do more computation before we output, it becomes less observable.
xpct··on There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]
> in a language only the machine understands

I wouldn't even grant that. It's a very one-directional problem solving approach where it's unknown to what extent it can build on its own findings.

xpct··on There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]
What? Why are we nullifying so many human factors in one stroke? Humans strive to contribute to their community and to be recognized for it. We aren't machines, we have social and financial needs, and enjoy competition. Math being solved would mean part of humanity losing these parts of their lives.
xpct··on Personal software factories are a waste of time
Can this be at the top? I had no idea such a term existed. And I don't think it should, either.
xpct··on Neural networks are clean
Read through most of this. It does sound like fun detective work, looking at what neurons fire. Some of the concepts get quite complex. I wonder if this can be gamified.
xpct··on '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
My favorite thing about puzzle games is meta, cognition stuff. What mindset can I put myself in, so that I can solve this faster? What should I think about, and how, to reduce complexity of the problem?

I tried the same last summer with Baba Is You and had an absolute blast. Playing through OotSS now, and momentum has been solid for the past ~20 hours. Skipping Stones has been my favorite!

xpct··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
Indeed. I'd like to remind everyone that with LLMs it's increasingly simple to build quite a good profile of someone just from their social media posts.
xpct··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
I wonder what the downstream effects of that will be. I imagine we may see some big lawsuits soon, meant to scare off the RE trend.
xpct··on Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
I don't think this is a statement about competition. This is not a metric anyone has competed on so far, it's being made into a press release.
xpct··on Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era
> It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics

The whole discourse of past few weeks has been mathematicians claiming the opposite.

xpct··on Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
xpct··on I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one
I'd hope it doesn't get solved, because it's one of the few signals I have to the person behind the screen.
xpct··on Fire at Starlink site in Bulgaria after suspected sabotage in Poland
I don't think you should feel entirely safe in warring nations, no matter what you do.
xpct··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
Hmm.. I meant to make my point in isolation from LLMs. I definitely don't feel that way about learning music.

I do kind of understand it when it comes to programming, though. Hobby-like side projects often felt like they had some utility down the line, even if not directly applied. It's fun to show others what you've accomplished, to show off, maybe land a job from being noticed, etc.

xpct··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
I don't know if it's common but I generally don't like to be bad at my hobbies. I like it when I can do things well. I've been learning the piano recently and striving to play more difficult songs is what makes it fun.
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