acid__'s comments

On: Claude Sonnet 4.6

[acid__]

The 8% and 50% numbers are pretty concerning, but I’d add that was for the “computer use environment” which still seems to be an emerging use case. The coding environment is at a much more reassuring 0.0% (with extended thinking).

Edit: whoops, somehow missed the first half of your comment, yes you are explicitly talking about computer use

On: Gemini 3 Deep Think

[acid__]

> Most (probably >99.9%) players can't do that at the first attempt

Eh, both myself and my partner did this. To be fair, we weren’t going in completely blind, and my partner hit a Legendary joker, but I think you might be slightly overstating the difficulty. I’m still impressed that Gemini did it.

On: Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

[acid__]

I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.

On: Lightstep is shutting down March 1, 2026

[acid__]

After being acquired by ServiceNow in 2021 for $510M and being rebranded to ServiceNow Cloud Observability, Lightstep is now being sunsetted with minimal fanfare.

On: FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

[acid__]

I can, I’ve written a billing system before (unfortunately). There’s a lot of annoying math/edge cases and systems to sync between.

While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.

(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)

(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)

[steveBK123 → acid__]

I mean sure, I get it, but companies like Uber leave edge cases like that out when it hurts them (customers cancelling) but move heaven & earth to remove them when it helps them (I bet its easy to re-join within 24 hours of cancelling?).

On: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

[acid__]

Top multimodal models have about 200-1000 tokens per image, so the math works out.

On: Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor

[acid__]

My experience from working in the security space is that all the tech is pretty un-sexy (with very good sales pitches), and none of it will save you from a nation-state attacker.

[acdha → acid__]

Same. I was hoping to be wrong in my cynicism but…

On: Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor

[acid__]

Be sure to check out the mentioned catalog. [1]

The NSA's capabilities back in 2008 were pretty astonishing: "RAGEMASTER" A $30 device that taps a VGA cable and transmits the contents of your screen to the NSA van sitting outside! Crazy stuff. Makes you wonder what they've built in the last 15 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog

[masklinn → acid__]

Today you’ve got open access USB cable which can stream your shit out on WiFi, no doubt the NSA has worse.

On: RTO doesn't improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

[acid__]

What gives you confidence that this is a bot account and not a frequent reader of HN that is passionate about growing the number of unique topics discussed here? And what’s up with the strong, inflammatory language?

[effingwewt → acid__]

Perhaps because I am a frequent lurker.

I mean you can look the bot's post history yourself, no need to ask me.

And I'm sorry but lol @ 'strong inflammatory language' (it was neither imho) we are supposed to be adults here.

On: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

[acid__]

Wow, only 256 tokens per frame? I guess a picture isn’t worth a thousand words, just ~192.

[gwern → acid__]

Back in 2020, Google was saying 16x16=256 words: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929#google :)

[swyx → acid__]

gpt4v is also pretty low but not as low. 480x640 frame costs 425 tokens, 780x1080 is 1105 tokens