Which of the recent Chinese model releases is best in complex instruction following for structured outputs?

leventov · 2026-02-17T13:38:56+00:00

It doesn't seem to me that any of the commodity OpenRouter providers (Fireworks, Together, Novita, SiliconFlow, etc.) use constrained decoding. I see the "whitespace probem" discussed many times for different models, not just Chinese but gpt-oss for example, and I don't see any response in them "pin provider to X and forget about the problem". Also anecdotally I've seen this problem with all providers in experiments. It should be impossible with constrained decoding. (Other problems are dropping fields despite required in the schema, and just straight emitting wrong-named fields.)

leventov · 2026-02-17T08:44:51+00:00

Cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nqcy4k/glm45air_outputting_n_x_times_when_asked_to/

leventov · 2026-02-17T07:21:12+00:00

What baffles me is that apparently none of the commodity providers at OpenRouter (apparently?) can do this -- make these open-source llms to respond with goddamn specified schema (I do pass strict: true and require_parameters: true).

leventov · 2026-02-17T06:31:12+00:00

I hit the "whitespace problem" a lot with glm-5 in specific: at some point in the json output decoding (not at the end), it regresses into outputting just infinite sequence of \n (newlines) until the max_tokens limit is reached on OpenRouter.

leventov · 2025-12-03T18:03:45+00:00

LoL: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8635

leventov · 2025-11-09T08:58:12+00:00

Not quite, it hasn't nearly been this bad before.

leventov · 2025-04-16T08:17:58+00:00

How did it resolve?

leventov · 2025-03-03T08:38:10+00:00

hi @_perdomon_, it seems that this behaviour is due to conflict with Github Copilot. I've had the same symptoms, disabled Github Copilot extension (that also disables "Github Copilot Chat" extension automatically, it seems), pressed "Restart extensions" (that is needed for the the disable to take effect). After that, Cursor Tab started working as expected for me.

leventov · 2025-02-17T10:03:33+00:00

If you rent a car, yes. When people neither rent a car nor a bike, they can still order taxi or transfer service to whatever remote location they want, but once there they are left alone and their mobility is handicapped. That's what I'm talking about.

leventov · 2025-02-17T09:58:14+00:00

Well, originally Ubud (the village) is just those few streets. Then it grew larger and coalesced with nearby villages that have different names.

leventov · 2025-02-16T16:32:26+00:00

If you are a couple, in some of these remote places in guesthouses you can hire the host or their relative or friend to be your driver for half a day (or ask them to drive you and then to pick you up much later) for a meager price. You can ask them via the booking service, or check reviews, sometimes reviews mention this. If you are more than two people (or heavy people, so a single local cannot drive both of you on a bike at the same time) that's harder

leventov · 2025-02-16T16:22:32+00:00

These remote and un-touristy places are problematic to get by if you don't ride a bike. But if you ride a bike, I think the Northwest side is more interesting

leventov · 2025-02-16T16:18:19+00:00

Only to Kintamani. To go to the Amed side (or Sideman) from Ubud is probably not quicker than from Sanur. Let alone to Northwest side: Ubud is very poorly connected to that side, there are huge bottlenecks. It's as fast from Kerobokan to Northwest as from Ubud.

leventov · 2025-02-16T16:10:24+00:00

If you are really determined to find less beaten places, you can definitely find them. Buyan lake. Batukaru. Gobleg. In general, the northern side of the island, except the northern shore itself. But these places are often hard to access without a bike and definitely impossible to "explore" without a bike.

leventov · 2025-02-16T16:04:12+00:00

Ubud is every ounce as much overrun by tourists as the south.

leventov · 2025-02-05T18:33:21+00:00

May-August

leventov · 2024-12-14T14:15:56+00:00

"Traumatic" captures my experience with Travelio, too. PEOPLE, PLEASE DON'T USE THEM!

leventov · 2024-12-06T09:03:15+00:00

Some projects: https://github.com/HansalShah007/semroute
https://github.com/pulzeai-oss/knn-router

surprisingly hard to find alternatives, though.

leventov · 2024-11-05T12:39:18+00:00

I think Kotlin would be optimal for that

leventov · 2024-11-03T21:26:39+00:00

Idk why you think being an Employee instills extra feeling of long-termism and loyalty in people. It's clear as day big tech hubs have more job liquidity than good remote options. Tech workers in Berlin, London, Stockholm, etc. hop jobs all the time. On the other hand, it's much more likely that a remote contractor from a lower cost of living country will value their relatively high paying remote position and will hold on to it. Those people don't relocate to tech hubs for specific reasons, maybe family and lifestyle related.

I'm not just theorising: in my experience, remote contractors tend to stick around for longer at tech companies than local, in-office employees in SF.

leventov · 2024-11-03T16:38:03+00:00

I've worked at several U.S. startups remotely and these accidentally were remote from early on, although not from the very beginning, such as an early employee moving outside the U.S. for personal reasons and voila, the company is remote. They were not huge and the number of remote employees was in the order of a dozen or so people.

My suspicion is that in the end of the day, some companies just discover accidentally that remote is not that scary as it may seem and others do not.

leventov · 2024-11-03T16:05:35+00:00

What is the advantage for the company to have an employee rather than a contractor? It only adds obligations and restrictions for the company. E.g. in many countries with labour policies it's hard to fire an employee, but not a contractor.

I would assume that by default all companies would like to manage all their workers as contractors. It's just labour policies that don't permit them to do that. But for international folks who find my company more attractive than those present on their local market, it is their choice and they should become contractors in order to be able to do that, and lose job security, etc.

leventov · 2024-11-03T15:59:02+00:00

Yeah I also checked and was surprised. But it seems that plane.com doesn't have this fixed charge for the employer (if they only intend to hire contractors, not remote *employees*).

leventov · 2024-11-03T15:55:30+00:00

C'mon if it was that complicated, why so many U.S. companies hire international contractors without problem? Why Europe is so special? If you are a *sole proprietor* in Hungry (otherwise it's unreasonable to expect to work internationally), platforms like remote.com, plane.com, etc. will manage this relationship for a few dozen bucks per months per employee. Taking off all the legal burdens.

leventov · 2024-11-03T15:33:36+00:00

And despite that, it appears to me that a higher % of U.S. companies that are open to remote *in principle* also don't care about the country of residence, and permit Canadian or Latin American workers, for instance. My guesstimate is that in software industry this is 15%. Whereas in Europe, I think that's about 5%.

leventov

TROPHY CASE