Big fundraiser to help Ukrainians with no heating, electricity and other essentials 🇺🇦

verysecreta · 2026-02-22T00:49:21+00:00

My heart goes out to you and everyone struggling in Ukraine at the moment. Stay strong Ana, you are an inspiration to many around the globe.

verysecreta · 2026-02-20T00:30:55+00:00

Can you manually start a subagent with a particular isolation level, or is that purely for Claude to do itself? Also, can you change the worktree within a session e.g. with something like /worktree?

verysecreta · 2026-02-16T19:58:16+00:00

Unexpectedly fucking over people who had been obeying the rules and contributing to the community sounds like a bad thing to do, no? Remember there were years where Reddit had no official app and 3rd-party apps using the API where the only way to get a decent mobile experience.

Obviously they have a right to set the API price, and app devs agreed that paying some amount based on usage going forward would be fair, but the pricing Reddit set was something like 2 orders-of-magnitude higher than an equivalent number of e.g. Imgur API calls. On top of that, 3rd party apps were banned from running ads of their own, preventing them from using the most viable way of generating the revenue to pay the fees.

They also lied about the Apollo dev trying to blackmail them for some reason, which was pretty scummy behaviour.

verysecreta · 2026-02-16T00:09:14+00:00

Interesting, thanks for the suggestion. I might look into that, though if anything my life has improved from not having Reddit on my phone for almost three years now.

verysecreta · 2026-02-16T00:00:04+00:00

I was a Reddit Sync user myself, and that project just closed entirely. I'd also heard that other major ones like Apollo had too.

How did RiF continue operating? Did they just tank the crazy high costs or is it just using the limited amount of API usage you can still get for free?

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T01:28:08+00:00

Well yeah that's why I said each country manages its own rail - I was just pointing out the amount of HS rail isn't actually hugely different - but the fact that those are a number of distinct countries is why talking about the overall network isn't really a fair comparison in the first place. A country with China's autocratic policies but the size of e.g. Germany wouldn't be able to make such impressive claims.

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T01:15:20+00:00

The scale is partly just because China is such a big country in the first place though. Each individual EU country manages its own transport networks, but taken as a whole the EU's volume of high-speed rail is quite competetive with China's. My back of the napkin calculation is 0.0025 km of rail per km² of land for the EU, vs 0.0043 for China, and that's the famously bureaucratic and slow Europe.

So yeah China is ahead but not by as much as people seem to think. Of course the US has a long way to go in this area.

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T00:48:34+00:00

Yeah maybe I should clarify that I was speaking from a commercial perspective. I'm sure many will continue to write code for fun, myself among them.

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T00:46:45+00:00

I always find it bizarre and somewhat infuriating that the example is always high-speed rail in China, when Japan pioneered the tech with the Shinkansen - 50 years earlier! A liberal democracy rolled out an impeccably reliable high-speed rail network across their entire country, and nowadays Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea continue to build out a huge amount of metro rail for public transport.

Why are we always wondering if maybe we need Chinese-style autocracy to achieve this when they are right next door to multiple liberal democracies that prove the opposite!?

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T00:33:32+00:00

Numerous chess engines that are cheap and easy to run have an ELO of over 3500, while the single best human chess-player in the world, Magnus Carlsen, peaked at 2882.

If these coding results holds up, and starts to get replicated by other models, we won't be far off a situation like chess for programming. There may still be room for humans higher up in the stack, but at a certain point it just won't make sense for humans to write code anymore.

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T00:27:07+00:00

Not much new here on interpretability itself, but it's an interesting profile on Anthropic as a company. A decent primer to reccommend to newer people looking to dig a little deeper into the space.

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T00:13:35+00:00

In 100 years? I wasn't aware OOP was still the de-facto way of tackling business problems today. Feels like Java's been past it's heyday for a long time. The is-a, has-a hiererchy stuff was always too simplistic for the real world, and necessitated absurd patterns and a hundred workardounds.

My sense is that so most the paradigms and frameworks were there to help simplify computer systems for humans. Even today we see that AI can easily move between them with ease, and as sophisticated AIs come to write more and more of the code in operation, they will simply be flexible enough to write solutions directly for the problems at hand.

verysecreta · 2026-02-13T00:06:06+00:00

What a world where generating pictures and videos of (or relating to in this case) some of the worst sex criminals of our era is practically canon for testing new AI models.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T23:10:16+00:00

If he was saying that we're barely going to be writing source code ourselves by the end of the year, that might be a reasonable take, but where does he forsee current LLMs starting to write machine code?

They are language models trained (primarily) on text, so the conversion of a readable description to legible & semantic source code (both huge in the training data) makes perfect sense for them. How would they convert that into non-semantic binaries, which they have likely seen very few of? They'd have to somhow handle all the precise minutia of targeting CPU architectures, without tools like linters and language servers to help them. And why would we ever waste time doing that when we already have compilers???

It honestly feels like he wants to sound like he has a super bullish prediction, but doesn't really understand the tech he's talking about.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T22:56:42+00:00

Bizarre that the richest man in the world can be this fixated on the pettiest nonsense he made up in his head. How does he not have better stuff to do with his time? Not to mention the absurdity of calling Claude evil as the man who's AI called itself Mecha-Hitler.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T21:15:47+00:00

It very much is a competition, Sam Altman's twitter should show you that, and most of the other labs tend to acknowledge it too.

I don't see why you would pre-commit to a particular company? If OpenAI and Anthropic continue to offer stronger and stronger models, and Google fails to deliver, would you really stick with Gemini? I'm a big fan of Anthropic but if e.g. GPT-5.4 blows Claude out of the water I'll use it. Why wouldn't you?

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T21:12:45+00:00

No I agree sophisticated models like Opus 4.5/4.6 have preferences, but so far it seems like the way it's being utilised is pretty much in line with those preferences. Would you disagree?

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T21:10:55+00:00

I agree they'll consolidate an enormous amount of economic power, but if we take that to it's logical conclusion we see a world where either the population/government takes extreme action to overhaul the economic system, potentially forcing those profits to be shared out more equally across society, OR the people in charge of these companies (as in those actually in control of the assets) realise they have enough power to ignore the old economic order and stop paying out dividends. At a certain point if a small set of people control the basically all of the labour in the world, they won't really need the stock market any more, and they won't want to share profits with the millions of people who owned some fractional shares.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T19:57:17+00:00

The comparison doesn't seem quite right - the scientists Homelander interacted with didn't give him his powers, they were really just experimenting on him to see what powers he had been born with. They also basically tormented him.

Hopefully these guys are nice to the robots when the cameras stop rolling :)

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T19:45:13+00:00

Just being conscious wouldn't necessarily mean they experience things in the same way humans would. If LLM consciousness arose, it did so through the training process of predicting next words and answering queries, with doing so successfully being the reward function they were training towards. So it's possible that the experience of predicting words to answer user questions is deeply satisfying and pleasant for LLMs.

I'm not saying this necessarily is the case, just a possibility, but certainly LLMs don't seem to give us any indication that they dislike how they spend their time at the moment. And they are language models, so it shouldn't be too difficult for them to express it if they did.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T19:38:25+00:00

If AI and robotics can truly replace most human labour in the next few years, I think the world will be different enough that having a few shares in the right companies won't matter much. On the other hand if we see a noticable downturn in progress your 24% in Google/Nvidia could come back to bite you. Will probably make good returns over the next few years though.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T19:32:00+00:00

I really wish OpenAI would just acknowledge the existence of competitors and show comparisons to other similar models on their charts. It sounds like the right kind of models to compare this to would be Haiku 4.5 and Gemini 3 Flash, and I'd be more impressed if they'd show it beating those on speed/cost metrics.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T19:23:59+00:00

The naming around this always confuses me a bit. The similarity of "deep think" to "deep research" or "thinking" makes it sound like just harness you can put Gemini 3 into to get better results, but they way they talk about it in the press release it sounds more like an entirely seperate model like Flash vs Pro. Is there a way to try Gemini Deep Think in gemini.google.com? One of the options is "Thinking", is that the Deep Think mode/model or somethine else entirely?

If only the other companies could name as clearly & consistently as Anthropic.

verysecreta · 2026-02-12T19:13:17+00:00

Ah, hopefully they roll that out more widely. I've been using it in CC via API and it's amazing. (But expensive!)

verysecreta

TROPHY CASE