acoustics (u/acoustics)

acoustics commented on TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term uncoveralpha.com/p/the-ch... · Posted by u/vegasbrianc

m4rtink · 21 days ago

So when the bubble pops the companies making the shovels (TSMC, NVIDIA) might still have the money they got for their products and some of the ex-AI companies might least be able to sell standard compliant GPUs on the wider market.

And Google will end up with lots of useless super specialized custom hardware.

acoustics · 21 days ago

I think people are confusing the bubble popping with AI being over. When the dot-com bubble popped, it's not like internet infrastructure immediately became useless and worthless.

acoustics commented on Gemini 3 blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/preek

vlmrun-admin · a month ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUbGVH1r_1U

Everyone is talking about the release of Gemini 3. The benchmark scores are incredible. But as we know in the AI world, paper stats don't always translate to production performance on all tasks.

We decided to put Gemini 3 through its paces on some standard Vision Language Model (VLM) tasks – specifically simple image detection and processing.

The result? It struggled where I didn't expect it to.

Surprisingly, VLM Run's Orion (https://chat.vlm.run/) significantly outperformed Gemini 3 on these specific visual tasks. While the industry chases the "biggest" model, it’s a good reminder that specialized agents like Orion are often punching way above their weight class in practical applications.

Has anyone else noticed a gap between Gemini 3's benchmarks and its VLM capabilities?

acoustics · a month ago

Don't self-promote without disclosure.

acoustics commented on Gemini 3 blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/preek

coffeecoders · a month ago

Feels like the same consolidation cycle we saw with mobile apps and browsers are playing out here. The winners aren’t necessarily those with the best models, but those who already control the surface where people live their digital lives.

Google injects AI Overviews directly into search, X pushes Grok into the feed, Apple wraps "intelligence" into Maps and on-device workflows, and Microsoft is quietly doing the same with Copilot across Windows and Office.

Open models and startups can innovate, but the platforms can immediately put their AI in front of billions of users without asking anyone to change behavior (not even typing a new URL).

acoustics · a month ago

Microsoft hasn't been very quiet about it, at least in my experience. Every time I boot up Windows I get some kind of blurb about an AI feature.

acoustics commented on Jujutsu at Google [video] youtube.com/watch?v=v9Ob5... · Posted by u/Lanedo

acoustics · 2 months ago

jj has been fantastic for my productivity, but most of that comes from its alignment with the particular SWE practices on my team: trunk-based development, small atomic commits, quick review turnaround.

Getting rid of the staging area and allowing conflicts are the biggest wins for me day-to-day. No more stashing/popping or littering my workspace with WIP commits. It's so easy to whip up a change, send it for review, then ping-pong between writing new code on top of the change and making reviewer-requested edits further down the stack.

acoustics commented on The FSF considers large language models lwn.net/Articles/1040888/... · Posted by u/birdculture

somewhereoutth · 2 months ago

1. Understand that code that has been wholly or partly LLM generated is tainted - it has (in at least some part) been created neither by humans nor by a deterministic, verifiable, process. Any representations to its quality are therefore void.

2. Ban tainted code.

Consider code that (in the old days) had been copy pasted from elsewhere. Is that any better than LLM generated code? Why yes - to make it work a human had to comb through it, tweaking as necessary, and if they did not then stylistic cues make the copy pasta quite evident. LLMs effectively originate and disguise copy pasta (including mimicking house styles), making it harder/impossible to validate the code without stepping through every single statement. The process can no longer be validated, so the output has to be. Which does not scale.

acoustics · 2 months ago

It depends on the nature of the code and codebase.

There have been many occasions when working in a very verbose enterprise-y codebase where I know exactly what needs to happen, and the LLM just types it out. I carefully review all 100 lines of code and verify that it is very nearly exactly what I would have typed myself.

acoustics commented on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous immich.app/blog/google-fl... · Posted by u/janpio

jdsully · 2 months ago

The one thing I never understood about these warnings is how they don't run afoul of libel laws. They are directly calling you a scammer and "attacker". The same for Microsoft with their unknown executables.

They used to be more generic saying "We don't know if its safe" but now they are quite assertive at stating you are indeed an attacker.

acoustics · 2 months ago

This is tricky to get right.

If the false positive rate is consistently 0.0%, that is a surefire sign that the detector is not effective enough to be useful.

If a false positive is libel, then any useful malware detector would occasionally do libel. Since libel carries enormous financial consequences, nobody would make a useful malware detector.

I am skeptical that changing the wording in the warning resolves the fundamental tension here. Suppose we tone it down: "This executable has traits similar to known malware." "This website might be operated by attackers."

Would companies affected by these labels be satisfied by this verbiage? How do we balance this against users' likelihood of ignoring the warning in the face of real malware?

acoustics commented on Google Safe Browsing incident statichost.eu/blog/google... · Posted by u/ericselin

fukka42 · 2 months ago

Still not sure why it's legal for Google to slander companies like this. They often have no proof or it's a false positive, meanwhile they're screaming about how malicious you are.

acoustics · 2 months ago

Notably this post did not examine whether any of the sites it was hosting on this domain was malicious/misleading.

acoustics commented on Oklahoma's "TV nudes" scandal was Jackie Chan movie on Samsung streaming service arstechnica.com/culture/2... · Posted by u/canucker2016

e40 · 3 months ago

This is also my hypothesized reason for the disparity in verbal communication skills between the average Americans and Brit.

If you watch a lot of TV from both countries you will see a very obvious difference in verbal communication. Americans (of which I am one) are so much less articulate when it comes English.

The difference is striking on The Graham Norton Show: almost every American guest stands out as less articulate. This is just one example. Another are interviews with regular people. That’s where it really became obvious.

acoustics · 3 months ago

If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity.

If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.

acoustics commented on I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers morrick.me/archives/10137... · Posted by u/mgrayson

killingtime74 · 3 months ago

I've migrated back and forth. Most things are backup to cloud now. Only thing missing was Signal messages last time and I think they now fixed that. Do people still use plain SMS now?

acoustics · 3 months ago

iMessage is extraordinarily popular in the US. Its userbase dwarfs Signal by over an order of magnitude

acoustics commented on Legal win ma.tt/2025/09/legal-win/... · Posted by u/pentagrama

kimixa · 3 months ago

So many times I've seen people complain about situations that would have been solved by choosing the license that actually matches how they intend others to use their work.

Some engineers seem stuck to the idea that if they choose a permissive license, people will still contribute back for some idea of "community" or "goodwill" - while really the license itself is the declaration of expected behavior.

By choosing a license, you're explicitly setting how you intend that code to be used - if you want don't /really/ want other people to monetize your work with no feedback, for example, that is what the license is for. If you don't want people to "leech" on your work, then choose one of the (many) licenses that disallows that.

acoustics · 3 months ago

This might not be charitable, but my perspective is that some of the advocates want it both ways.

I would be interested in seeing an MIT/BSD licensed project saying, from the beginning, something like "This project is available under a permissive license, but I have a strong ethical expectation of my users to give me money if they build a product off of this work. I am fully aware that I can't legally enforce this, but I will certainly call you out publicly for your greed and lack of respect for my wishes."

My hunch is that many advocates would hesitate to put this in their project Readme, because they know that some companies might actually comply... by not using the code. (Call me naive but I think this is plausible.) They would rather give the impression that the code is truly no-strings-attached, because that would help drive adoption. Then later they can come back and say they ought to be given a cut.