Hacker News: OtherShrezzing

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark"

OtherShrezzing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:35:36 +0000

I’m not suggesting Simon’s pelicans in the dataset are having a meaningful impact. I’m expecting that a company like ScaleAI has a product along the lines of “benchmax dataset: SimonW’s Pelican on Bikes test” which is a private curated series of well-drawn SVGs of animals riding vehicles for training and RL.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark"

OtherShrezzing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:48:08 +0000

Respectfully, the pelicans used to be an unrecognisable mess and now they’re unquestionably pelicans on bicycles, rendered poorly, from every model.

In the same timescale, model capabilities across the board have only meaningfully improved in places where the labs are focusing their training efforts.

Moreover, they have a uniform style, even though your prompt doesn’t ask for one. There's no model going rogue and producing a watercolour of a pelican. They’re all rendered in an approximately uniform style, even though the svg format has a basically unlimited possibility space.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Detecting LLM-Generated Texts with “Classical” Machine Learning"

OtherShrezzing — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:36:27 +0000

In part because model vendors specifically prefer when people think that lots of content is produced by their model. The more Claude-like writing appears on the internet, the more signal there is to investors that people are using Claude for a greater number tasks.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Grok Build is open source"

OtherShrezzing — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:56:15 +0000

Decent summary of it here[0]. The “space” part of “SpaceX” is valued by market analysts and money managers at around 5% of the company’s entire value. Almost all of the rest is “AI stuff”, and Twitter is a rounding error.

That is, if SpaceX went back to being a space-only entity, and dropped the AI stuff, its share price should be expected to fall from $130/share to around $7/share.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Why do people hate the tech industry? (2023)"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:33:55 +0000

> to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?

I think the problem is that the tech industry in large is just here to extract wealth from the many and transfer it to the few. That's why it's focused on scale.

People aren't dumb, and most of the time they can see when they're on the receiving end of an extractive relationship - even if there's lots of PR work going on to hide that reality from them.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Write code like a human will maintain it"

OtherShrezzing — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:06:55 +0000

It's unlikely that AI will get to the point where it makes handwritten coders redundant, and then not immediately be at the point where vibe coders are redundant too. So if you earnestly take the position that handwriting code is a "ngmi" type activity, you also need to take the position that the vibe coder (or agent- assisted-developer/loop-architect, or whatever its nom de guerre is this week) is "ngmi".

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Geosql: A Claude/Codex skill for geospatial data"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:19:09 +0000

>4x improvement on geospatial tasks with map in the loop.

The graph shows a baseline 2% task success rate improving to to 8% task success rate, but the evals section details 100% success rates across the board.

I'm not sure what the effectiveness of this skill is from the readme. Is it 8% success, or 100% success?

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:37:52 +0000

Safari's copy-text-from-image feature manages the entire base64 part of the string, except for the first character (I instead of a T). Weirdly, it gets much worse performance if you try to copy the entire string, including the hashbang part.

I wonder what it's doing under the hood to get such good performance?

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:30:12 +0000

I think this is a case where two people can successfully complete the task manually faster than one attempting to automate it. Get a ruler, read five centimetres of characters to your colleague, have them type it in as you go, then repeat that five centimetres back to you. Correct as you go. Format your string with the same line-breaks as the t-shirt, and remove them at the end, so you can be sure you've got the correct length on each row. Trial-and-error adjust the five-cm distance depending on your success rate as you go along

All in, you should have a non-corrupted string in 10-15 min.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:25:33 +0000

Would they still get the highlighted "PEACE FOR ALL" text throughout the shortened string? It looks like the length, and presence of those characters, was an explicit design choice.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

OtherShrezzing — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:04:33 +0000

It’s difficult to articulate the tedium and monotony of a Starbucks gig. There’s so little intellectual stimulation available in that setting. If you managed to learn more from your fast food than your humanities degree, then I think that’s on you for not paying attention at college (perhaps because you were exhausted from your job?).

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

OtherShrezzing — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:16:23 +0000

I don’t think any engineers who cost $150/hr are having their productivity moved by 20% depending on a $10/hr gap between models on or near the frontier.

Most of the gains right now come from tooling and process and any big post 2025 language model. The specific model isn’t that important right now.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Fintech Engineering Handbook"

OtherShrezzing — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:49:40 +0000

No, standard floating point implementations have higher precision for smaller numbers than larger. So for example, in a 32bit float, there are far more numbers between 0-1 than there are between 1,000,000 and 1,000,001. For 32bit floats, you start lowing whole integers with relatively small numbers.

Integers have a consistent precision across the entire number line.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "AI in mathematics is forcing big questions"

OtherShrezzing — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 11:53:54 +0000

Most of the interesting research I’ve ever done started while reading through the intermediate steps in an unrelated paper.

As far as I can tell from colleagues in other domains, it’s the same there. One paper will mention something off-hand and that’ll cause someone else to have a spark of insight, which turns into it’s own valuable research

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

OtherShrezzing — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:42:59 +0000

What’ll happen when Google Deep Mind go to release their next models, developed mostly in London?

Are Google going to end up in a situation where the people working on their models cannot use the models after launch?

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

OtherShrezzing — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:36:12 +0000

> robot maid that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, etc. would be huge. I think a lot of people would pay new-car money for something like that.

Once you take maintenance of a machine with price-parity to a new car into consideration, it’s surely cost competitive to just hire a human to do all those things.

The price needs to fall drastically below new-car territory before it’s competitive with manual human labour.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:23:22 +0000

I think they’ve just picked poor peer examples. Instead of choosing other models near 5.2 on the intelligence scale, they’ve picked some open models from further down the scale.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup"

OtherShrezzing — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:42:53 +0000

>As an AI-native startup founder, your responsibility is to know what's in your codebase, understand any potential exposure vectors, and not ship obvious vulnerabilities to real users who are trusting you with their data.

This is fairly funny coming from the company whose employees report merging in hundreds of PRs per engineer per day, and accidentally leaked their own source code through a security misconfiguration in a package manager they own.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

OtherShrezzing — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:00:04 +0000

I sometimes use the Claude app with text to speech enabled. It’s got a quite distinctive voice/tempo combo when it’s outputting speech.

Whenever I see a typical Claude-tell in writing, my internal reading voice switches automatically from my internal monologue’s voice into Claude’s voice for the rest of the piece.

New comment by OtherShrezzing in "How to earn a billion dollars"

OtherShrezzing — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:03:15 +0000

A debates purpose is surely to reveal if there’s a measurable difference to be reconciled in the first instance. Any actual reconciliation is a nice bonus on top.

So even if the debate reveals that no, there wasn’t a viable reconciliation, the debate was still worthwhile.