sieste

What is a "credit" and how does it translate to tokens for the different models?

I treat these nutjob articles as a subgenre of science fiction and when they're somewhat well written find them very entertaining. The author cosplaying investigative journalist, one part of the audience acting as if it's a real discovery and another part playing debunking and outrage, is all part of the performance and it's hilarious. Check out the flat earth movement, it's great entertainment all around!

The zine enthusiasts in this thread might enjoy this little tool I made to print out and zine-fold Project Gutenberg books: https://github.com/sieste/pocketbook

German football goalkeeper here :)

I'd love for European countries to embrace their priorities around people and environment and train a model on public domain data that can run efficiently on cheap hardware. Redefine benchmarks around these ideals and optimise towards them, rather than trying to enter a race that you can't possibly win and didn't want to run in the first place.

The "middle powers" (cf Carney) should invest in local models, rather than relying on US and China allowing them to rent their AI models. It takes a single executive order to cut the rest of the world off of American AI tools. "I'm happy to pay whatever to rent frontier models from hyperscalers" makes sense if you're citizen of a superpower, but it's risky, naive, bordering on irresponsible to adopt this mindset otherwise, especially when your business or career depend on the tool.

Imagine how accurate you could be if you could circumvent the coding agent and just type the source code directly into an editor all by yourself o_O Like a write_file skill but for humans!!!

That's almost exactly my setup and I'm very happy with its performance.

I noticed recently that I started to prefer my local Qwen3.6 35B A3B and pi agent over Claude Code.

Both fail at different tasks, and Qwen more so than Claude.

But the way Qwen fails is much more straightforward. In writing tasks Qwens hallucinations and bullshitting are much easier to spot because it doesn't have the sleek vocabulary and wordsmithing skills to disguise its ignorance.

In coding tasks that Qwen can't solve it often just goes into a tool calling doom loop that the pi harness can catch, whereas Claude attempts ever more convoluted and creative things just making more and more mess that takes forever to clean up.

I think part of the story is that the tasks for which I use AI are fairly simple and maybe don't need a frontier model. But I wonder if "proper" developers had similar experience?

I have a different approach. Just treat all LLM queries as what they are, instructions to a computer program to generate a desired output. Neither niceties nor insults make a qualitative difference, so you might as well just skip them altogether.

It's a bit as if shell commands added im/politeness arguments that do nothing other than making you feel better about the interaction, like

    git pull --please

    ls --forthemillionthtime

This is very cruel towards people who want to have children but can't.

Good point, it's like having an instruction "Never fucking output a token just because it's the one most likely to occur next!!1!"

Maybe a superhuman AI? /s

I was expecting to find a link to a github pages site where I can see the rendered examples, but only found a link to the html sources in examples/out. Am I missing something?

2021 just called and want their comment back.

Wow.

The bill makes it a Class A felony (15-25 years imprisonment) to “knowingly train artificial intelligence” to do ANY of the following:

• Provide emotional support, including through open-ended conversations with a user

• Develop an emotional relationship with, or otherwise act as a companion to, an individual

• Simulate a human being, including in appearance, voice, or other mannerisms

• Act as a sentient human or mirror interactions that a human user might have with another human user, such that an individual would feel that the individual could develop a friendship or other relationship with the artificial intelligence

It took me an embarrassing number of attempts to win.

I think this is the correct lense. He's a malignant narcissist on his way out, with absolutely nobody to stop him.

I'm genuinely worried that he secretly wants to go down in history as the crazy guy who set the oil fields on fire and dropped a nuke on Tehran or something.

I'm not sure it was meant that way, but nice metaphor. For some students "academic death" might really be better than a life of being trapped in a system that they can only navigate by cheating.

You just get a sequence of random moves to go from solved to scrambled, it's quite trivial.

See here if you're interested: stefansiegert.net/cube-timer

Let me know if you adapt it in any way, my son would be delighted to see open source work its magic :)

Does an IPO make a government bailout more likely if they go bust?

Even more important than the papers is whether you can raise the money required to fund your lab which produces your prestigious journal papers. And the further you go down the league table the less important the "prestigious" part gets.

yes. claude added a suggested random scramble (if that's what you mean?), also running average of 5/12/100, local storage of past times on first iteration, my son told it to also add a button for +2s penalties and touch screen support.

That may be true. But you also have to give the average parent more credit by assuming they don't want tech companies spying on their children and forcing their toxic platforms on them.

There are well attended parent evenings in our school on that topic.

Thinking about it, we should turn these into vibe coding hackathons where we replace all the ad-ridden little games, learning tools, messengers we don't like with healthy alternatives.

Just goes to show that most programmers have no idea what most programmers are mostly programming. Great that it works for you, but don't assume that this applies to everyone else.

Many parents are extremely interested in quickly building digital tools for their kids (education and entertainment) that they know are free from advertising, social media integration, user monitoring etc.

Turns out that knowing what a plain text file is will be the criterion that distinguishes users who are digitally free from those locked into proprietary platforms.

"use it from anywhere" was important, and I don't think there's an easier way than a freely hosted static website.

Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.

The art is to decide when shaping the code yourself is worth your time. Not only financially but also experience gain and job satisfaction.

you can use 'true' and 'false' interchangeably.

made me laugh, especially in the context of LLMs.