Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 3 Posts
  • 169 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • To be fair, that’s what an AI video generator thinks an FPS is. That’s not the same thing as AI-assisted coding. Though it’s still hilarious! “Press F to pay respects” 🤣

    For reference, using AI to automate your QA isn’t a bad idea. There’s a bunch of ways to handle such things but one of the more interesting ones is to pit AIs against each other. Not in the game, but in their reports… You tell AI to perform some action and generate a report about it while telling another AI to be extremely skeptical about the first AI’s reports and to reject anything that doesn’t meet some minimum standard.

    That’s what they’re doing over at Anthropic (internally) with Claude Code QA tasks and it’s super fascinating! Heard them talk about that setup on a podcast recently and it kinda blew my mind… They have more than just two “Claudes” pitted against each other too: In the example they talked about, they had four: One generating PRs, another reviewing/running tests, another one checking the work of the testing Claude, and finally a Claude setup to perform critical security reviews of the final PRs.






  • For reference, every AI image model uses ImageNET (as far as I know) which is just a big database of publicly accessible URLs and metadata (classification info like, “bird” <coordinates in the image>).

    The “big AI” companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI/Microsoft have access to additional image data sets that are 100% proprietary. But what’s interesting is that the image models that are constructed from just ImageNET (and other open sources) are better! They’re superior in just about every way!

    Compare what you get from say, ChatGPT (DALL-E 3) with a FLUX model you can download from civit.ai… you’ll get such superior results it’s like night and day! Not only that, but you have an enormous plethora of LoRAs to choose from to get exactly the type of image you want.

    What we’re missing is the same sort of open data sets for LLMs. Universities have access to some stuff but even that is licensed.


  • Listen, if someone gets physical access to a device in your home that’s connected to your wifi all bets are off. Having a password to gain access via adb is irrelevant. The attack scenario you describe is absurd: If someone’s in a celebrity’s home they’re not going to go after the robot vacuum when the thermostat, tablets, computers, TV, router, access point, etc are right there.

    If they’re physically in the home, they’ve already been compromised. The fact that the owner of a device can open it up and gain root is irrelevant.

    Furthermore, since they have root they can add a password themselves! Something they can’t do with a lot of other things in their home that they supposedly “own” but don’t have that power (but I’m 100% certain have vulnerabilities).





  • A pet project… A web novel publishing platform. It’s very fancy: Uses yjs (CRDTs) for collaborative editing, GSAP for special effects (that authors can use in their novels), and it’s built on Vue 3 (with Vueuse and PrimeVue) and Python 3.13 on the backend using FastAPI.

    The editor TipTap with a handful of custom extensions that the AI helped me write. I used AI for two reasons: I don’t know TipTap all that well and I really want to see what AI code assist tools are capable of.

    I’ve evaluated Claud Code (Sonnet 4.5), gpt5, gpt5-codex, gpt5-mini, Gemini 2.5 (it’s such shit; don’t even bother), qwen3-coder:480b, glm-4.6, gpt-oss:120b, and gpt-oss:20b (running locally on my 4060 Ti 16GB). My findings thus far:

    • Claude Code: Fantastic and fast. It makes mistakes but it can correct its own mistakes really fast if you tell it that it made a mistake. When it cleans up after itself like that it does a pretty good job too.
    • gpt5-codex (medium) is OK. Marginally better than gpt5 when it comes to frontend stuff (vite + Typescript + oh-god-what-else-now haha). All the gpt5 (including mini) are fantastic with Python. All the gpt5 models just love to hallucinate and randomly delete huge swaths of code for no f’ing reason. It’ll randomly change your variables around too so you really have to keep an eye on it. It’s hard to describe the types of abominations it’ll create if you let it but here’s an example: In a bash script I had something like SOMEVAR="$BASE_PATH/etc/somepath/somefile" and it changed it to SOMEVAR="/etc/somepath/somefile" for no fucking reason. That change had nothing at all to do with the prompt! So when I say, “You have to be careful” I mean it!
    • gpt-oss:120b (running via Ollama cloud): Absolutely fantastic. So fast! Also, I haven’t found it to make random hallucinations/total bullshit changes the way gpt5 does.
    • gpt-oss:20b: Surprisingly good! Also, faster than you’d think it’d be—even when giving it a huge refactor. This model has lead me to believe that the future of AI-assisted coding is local. It’s like 90% of the way there. A few generations of PC hardware/GPUs and we won’t need the cloud anymore.
    • glm-4.6 and qwen3-coder:480b-cloud: About the same as gpt5-mini. Not as fast as gpt-oss:120b so why bother? They’re all about the same (for my use cases).

    For reference, ALL the models are great with Python. For whatever reason, that language is king when it comes to AI code assist.



  • I’m having the opposite experience: It’s been super fun! It can be frustrating though when the AI can’t figure things out but overall I’ve found it quite pleasant when using Claude Code (and ollama gpt-oss:120b for when I run out of credits haha). The codex extension and the entire range of OpenAI gpt5 models don’t provide the same level of “wow, that just worked!” Or “wow, this code is actually well-documented and readable.”

    Seriously: If you haven’t tried Claude Code (in VS Code via that extension of the same name), you’re missing out. It’s really a full generation or two ahead of the other coding assistant models. It’s that good.

    Spend $20 and give it a try. Then join the rest of us bitching that $20 doesn’t give you enough credits and the gap between $20/month and $100/month is too large 😁






  • WTF? Have you ever been in a data center? They don’t release anything. They just… Sit. And blink lights while server fans blow and cooling systems whir, pumping water throughout.

    The cooling systems they use aren’t that different from any office building. They’re just bigger, beefier versions. They don’t use anything super special. The Pfas they’re talking about in this article are the same old shit that’s used in any industrial air conditioner.

    For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a data center uses 10 times more cooling as an equivalently sized office building. I don’t know about you, but everywhere that I’ve seen data centers, there’s loads and loads of office buildings nearby. Far more than say 10 for every data center.

    My point is this: If you’re going to be bitching about pfas and cooling systems, why focus on data centers (or AI, specifically) when there’s all these damned office buildings? Instead, why don’t we talk about work from home policies which would be an actual way to reduce pfas use.

    This article… Ugh. It’s like bitching that electric car batteries can catch fire, pretending that regular cars don’t have a much, much higher likelihood of catching fire and there’s several orders of magnitude more of them.

    Are Pfas a problem? Yes. Are data centers anywhere near the top 1000 targets for non-trivially reducing their use? No.

    Aside: This is just like the articles bitching about data center water use… Data centers recycle their water! They have a great big intake when they’re done being built but then they’re done. They only need trivial amounts of water after that.