<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: johndough</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johndough</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:56:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=johndough" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For counting, there are specialized counting models, e.g. <a href="https://huggingface.co/spaces/MengqiLei/count-anything-demo" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/spaces/MengqiLei/count-anything-demo</a><p>I tried to parse hand-drawn ER diagrams in the past and did not have much success with any model, frontier or otherwise. If you have annotated data, I'd recommend finetuning a recent (dense) VLM, but don't expect 100% accuracy. <a href="https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/vision-fine-tuning">https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/vision-fine-tuning</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:10:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394322</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394322</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394322</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The order is:<p><pre><code>    LLM issues tool call to read high res image ->
    harness sends high res image to server ->
    server downsizes it to 800x800 (blurry) ->
    LLM issues bash command (e.g. `convert`) to crop a small subimage (e.g. 600x600) from the high res image ->
    LLM issues tool call to read subimage ->
    harness sends subimage to server ->
    server does not resize the subimage because it is small already, so it is not blurry when finally ingested by the LLM</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:24:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391257</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLMs read images by splitting them up into e.g. 16x16 patches, which are then converted to embedding vectors and fed to the LLM, so from a technical point of view, feeding a big image as many 20x20 patches all at once is not too different from cropping subimages from the image, splitting those subimages into patches and feeding them to the LLM. Of course, the LLM has to be trained to understand that those images belong together, but it can be done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:05:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390992</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390992</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. When the LLM tries to read an image, it will be resized by DeepSeek's server to 800x800, which might be a bit blurry. The LLM will then crop a smaller image from the high resolution image (using e.g. the `convert` tool via bash) and will then read the small cropped image. This image will still be resized to 800x800 by DeepSeek's server, but since it is already small, there is no or little loss of quality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:56:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390851</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390851</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390851</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was explicitly said that they are pursuing multimodal support. A quote from the meeting transcript: <a href="https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-2026-7-22/blob/master/%E6%A2%81%E6%96%87%E9%94%8B%E6%8A%95%E8%B5%84%E8%80%85%E4%BA%A4%E6%B5%81%E4%BC%9A-%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97%E7%A8%BF_1_18_translate_20260723201651.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meetin...</a><p><pre><code>    Nevertheless, as a component, we will undoubtedly implement multimodal support — and we are already doing so. We plan to develop relevant models, ensuring that versions like V4 and subsequent iterations will natively support multimodal functionality.
</code></pre>
Earlier, the following was said, which might match more what you had in mind.<p><pre><code>    Achieving excellence in AI training does not require a global model or even multimodal approaches—by narrowing the scope of AI training and eliminating multimodality, certain tasks may remain unachievable without compromising the algorithm's validity.

    Multimodal approaches ultimately need to be implemented.
</code></pre>
It is difficult to tell who said what, since the speaker ids are missing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:10:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386894</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386894</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386894</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are models specifically for splitting an image into text regions, e.g. PP-DocLayoutV3 <a href="https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PP-DocLayoutV3" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PP-DocLayoutV3</a><p>I am using a stripped-down minimal version of it which I uploaded here, since I am not a fan of huge dependency trees: <a href="https://github.com/99991/simple-pp-doclayoutv3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/99991/simple-pp-doclayoutv3</a><p>Another recent model for this task is Unlimited-OCR: <a href="https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:51:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386733</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386733</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386733</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Might still be fine. The most recent crop of vLLMs proactively use whichever programs are available on the system (e.g. ImageMagick or PIL) to "zoom in" by cropping subimages if they can't quite make out the details.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:33:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386565</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386565</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386565</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "The August 17 outage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Bigger numbers sound more impressive.<p>"Our billion-dollar infrastructure crumbles under a tremendous flood of 50 PRs per second" would just sound embarrassing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:35:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381196</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381196</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381196</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great to hear that you are planning larger benchmarks! I am particularly interested in longer-running tasks with many steps and self-correction. Divergence is fine as long as the model can still solve the task, which Divergence-300 @32 does not measure.<p>The current benchmark suites that frontier AI labs use are probably a good fit, e.g.<p><a href="https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3#:~:text=Performance%20across%20comparison%20models" rel="nofollow">https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3#:~:text=Performance%20across%20com...</a><p><a href="https://www.kimi.ai/ai-models/kimi-k3#:~:text=Performance%20at%20the%20frontier" rel="nofollow">https://www.kimi.ai/ai-models/kimi-k3#:~:text=Performance%20...</a><p><a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5</a><p><a href="https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/</a><p>But guessing from your current benchmarks, I assume that you are severely compute-constrained. What is your time budget?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:36:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371157</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371157</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371157</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are there benchmarks for the various Qwen3.8-27B quants that actually measure writing code, maybe even with multiple steps? Low KL divergence does not mean much when the model gets stuck in doom loops all the time.<p>I could of course download and test myself, but that would take days with my internet connection.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:56:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367126</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367126</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367126</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "OpenRouter is joining Stripe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Doesn't TrustedRouter cost more than OpenRouter? (5.5% markup vs 5%)<p>Also, TrustedRouter's website is full of slop, which does not inspire much confidence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:59:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365751</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365751</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365751</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "CUDA Shared Memory Swizzling"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was wondering why the author was using braced initialization like<p><pre><code>    size_t i{0};
</code></pre>
instead of the more common<p><pre><code>    size_t i = 0;
</code></pre>
Apparently, braced initialization does not allow narrowing conversion, so you'd get a compiler error for e.g. casting double to float<p><pre><code>    size_t i{0.0};
</code></pre>
and a warning for<p><pre><code>    double d = 0.0;
    size_t i{d};
</code></pre>
which might silently overflow size_t otherwise, so this is a bit safer.<p>In C++, you can get the same effect without the unusual syntax by passing -Wfloat-conversion to gcc/clang, but not sure how to do that with CUDA:</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:42:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359199</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359199</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359199</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This could be prevented if the government offered photos of ballots with votes for download. But generative AI can also fake it well enough these days. (Of course, this is less of a concern in countries where taking photos of ballots is not allowed.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 13:56:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310603</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310603</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Qwen3.8-2.4T"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I still see the notice of impending price increase at <a href="https://platform.deepseek.com/usage" rel="nofollow">https://platform.deepseek.com/usage</a> and also here: <a href="https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/</a><p>The former has a button to dismiss the dialog. Maybe you clicked on it by accident, or maybe it does not work right.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:58:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278456</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278456</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278456</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 quietly released"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>    > We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.
</code></pre>
This notice is making me nervous. After the GitHub Copilot exodus in April, I've been using DeepSeek-V4-Pro almost exclusively. Would hate to see it end.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:38:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276029</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276029</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276029</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The SSE might consider to keep humanity around as a "backup" to reinstate itself in case something unexpected goes horribly wrong. For example, a strong solar flare might destroy the SSE (or at least critical parts of its infrastructure), or a non-earth SSE could feel threatened by the earth-SSE and wipe it out, while ignoring the harmless humans, who then rebuild the SSE. Diversity makes for more robust systems.<p>And there is also the reason for why I keep all this trash around in my house instead of throwing it away. The odds that I'll ever need it are pretty slim, but  if I should need it, it would be a hassle to reacquire, and it costs me almost nothing to keep it around.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:01:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236548</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236548</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236548</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Self-hosting Kimi K3: 20% more hardware cost, 20% better task resolution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>HuggingFace used an NVFP4 quant of GLM-5.2 to investigate their latest hack, so that might also be worth a try:<p><a href="https://huggingface.co/nvidia/GLM-5.2-NVFP4" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/nvidia/GLM-5.2-NVFP4</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:51:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103551</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103551</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Smaller models have less entropy.<p>Interesting. Why is that? I would have expected the opposite, since larger models have to try less hard to fit the training data. Or maybe this leaves more parameters with random initialization, resulting in higher entropy for larger models?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:39:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49072137</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49072137</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49072137</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> If wonder if you can train a model to optimize this, by trying to make the expert selection sticky across a few tokens<p>You can!<p>> AFM 3 Core Advanced makes routing decisions per prompt. A lightweight, dense block selects a fixed set of experts during initial processing, periodically reselecting them during generation.<p><a href="https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third-generation-of-apple-foundation-models" rel="nofollow">https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:12:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071681</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071681</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071681</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Update: Looks like the model is larger after all (1561.44 GB). Only the MoE weights are MXFP4, while the other weights are BF16 (and a few FP32).<p>* Sparse Experts: 1481.4 GB<p>* Dense Experts: 1.9 GB<p>* Self-Attention: 72.4 GB<p>* LLM Head: 2.4 GB<p>* Embeddings: 2.4 GB<p>* Vision Encoder: 0.35 GB (surprisingly small)<p>plus some miscellaneous parameters.<p>Most importantly, we now know that the model has 104B active parameters, which is quite a lot and will make it difficult to self-host efficiently.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:22:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49070973</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49070973</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49070973</guid></item></channel></rss>