bscphil

The thing I'd be worried about when doing this is spending $1000+ on a TV, then realizing it has some sort of pre-downloaded ads that it shows on the main screen ("sign up for your free six months of HBO Max!") or otherwise has a nag prompt that appears to tell you to connect to WiFi. I think that would be basically intolerable.

I think the places the average person starts out with AI do look like this. Most people are not paying a $20 a month Anthropic subscription just to try it out. They're using free chat apps, reading the garbage llm summary Google puts at the top of every search page, dealing with the low quality tools foisted on them in their email app or word processor.

Have all these gotten a lot better in the last year? Sure! But there's still a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in quality between whatever garbage tier of GPT-6 Luna you can use for free on `duck.ai` (just for one example) and Opus 5.5. Or even GLM 5.3 Flash. It's a way bigger difference than the improvement in ~free models has made up for in the last year, even though those improvements have been substantial.

I think a certain sort of person, if they do try to use something better along with a coding harness, as also immediately inclined to read along with the reasoning traces - and understandably gets freaked out by the nonsense it contains. That's a mistake, I think; not just because models behaving "reasonably" doesn't depend on the rationality of their reasoning traces, but also because I think if you transcribed my brain activity into a serial stream of text, I'm not convinced it would be more coherent.

Heard of them, but I think it's fair to say their home page doesn't inspire a ton of confidence?

Mullvad doesn't let you forward ports.

The only reply to this criticizes the hedging, but I think it's actually true and it does make it harder to tell if you're vulnerable to this. And on top of that, quite a few systems have brotli installed by necessity. On Debian 12, for example, I have the following dependency chain on a VPS I run:

grub-pc -> grub-common -> libfreetype6 -> libbrotli1

which is really nasty.

Right, I have to think P(AGI by century's end | LLMs turn out to be an AGI dead end) is still at least 50%.

(tongue mostly in cheek) sounds like I should be renting out these platforms and selling inference on them to OpenRouter

My experience has been that the "cost per task" estimate wildly underestimates the cost of top models on most real work, because the tasks (as I understand it) tend to be isolated bits of problem solving or code generation, which rewards writing code that works the first time and not generating too many reasoning tokens. Sol is great for both. However, a lot of real work involves tracking down bugs, working through tests, examining many parts of a codebase, refactoring... even with subagents and good tool use this tends to bloat context before the problem gets solved. Deepseek's absurdly low cache price really shines in these instances, but even GLM 5.3 Flash easily beats the top models on price in real world usage. Maybe that's different if you factor in subscriptions.

Yep, any time you're asked to set up a passkey it feels like Russian Roulette with future access to that account. A year or so ago, a site I relied on started enforcing biometric passkey enrollment. Without thinking about it I logged into the site on my phone and enrolled there, but unfortunately (a) that meant it didn't get registered as an "other device" in the internal system, and (b) the site didn't work correctly on mobile devices (legacy system). So logging in on a desktop would then demand that I activate the passkey, but of course the passkey was on the phone. No way to access it, and the site didn't offer me the QR code / bluetooth method. I don't remember exactly why, but it just didn't work - probably had something to do with it not liking Firefox on Linux or something.

And to add insult to injury, it wasn't even a single factor login the way passkey advocates promise. The site still demanded a normal password to log in! It was actually 3 factor authentication; something I know (the password), something I have (the passkey), something I am (the biometric).

This wasn't some random website that didn't matter made by nobodies. It was a US government website for managing grant money.

I was trialing MiMo-V2.6-Pro recently due to its high benchmark scores, and it argued that substring matching the names of audio codecs in a search field was a mistake because "a user searching for 'aac' would get unwanted results for 'alac'." Which isn't exactly counting letters per se, but there are still weird issues with understanding words as strings rather than as tokens.

> A surprising number of people in the state would not consider 1 mile 'walkable'.

In a surprising number of American cities, 1 mile is not walkable, simply because no one thought to put in a sidewalk or have adequate protection for pedestrians. That goes double for places like Lansing, where the sidewalks that are there are often icy during the winter.

Oh cool, someone talking about the really weird bug that I've never seen reported elsewhere. Seems like an issue where certain versions of Unity (to name one engine) doesn't like it when your actual game controller is the second joystick it detects. Not really Keychron's fault or Linux's fault, just a weird engine quirk.

Anyway, if someone finds this by searching, at least on Arch it's as simple as adding a custom hwdb entry at /etc/udev/hwdb.d/61-input-id-local.hwdb:

  id-input:modalias:input:b0003v3434p0283*
   ID_INPUT_JOYSTICK=

and then run systemd-hwdb update.

The modalias value is found at /sys/class/input/<yourdevice>/device/modalias

Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?