Feed

Gemma-4-12b-qat just came out but I’ve already also really been impressed with its performance relative to its size. The model architecture itself is really interesting and proposes a bunch of interesting questions like, “if we are constrained by performance and price, what architectural tradeoffs do we need to make?” a question that so far has not really been asked in the mad token gold rush.

Will anything survive in roughly its current form?

Probably. Experience that isn’t solely information: comedy, entertainment, storytelling, fiction, etc. You don’t ask an AI to summarize a stand-up special, and a synopsis of a great novel is not a great novel. Voice, taste, and personality may end up being the only durable moats. But “give me the 5 steps to X”? That’s a tough business that’s about to get a lot tougher.

“Casey can use the system to communicate his own thoughts, not only while we're there in a controlled environment, but whenever he wants. Sometimes, he would do that over 12 straight hours,” said the study’s lead author, Nicholas Card. Card is a postdoctoral scholar in the UC Davis Department of Neurological Surgery. “The system worked well, was reliable and stable, and delivered consistent results. This is one of the strongest demonstrations that BCIs can be practical and useful.”

The main conclusion was that the MTP draft model is worth using. On this machine it took Gemma 4 from 58.2 tokens/second to 72.2 tokens/second, while keeping the setup simple enough to run as a local OpenAI-compatible server.

Standard.Site aims to do something similar for any platform powered by the AT Protocol. The Standard.Site schema provides you with a set of lexicons you use to describe your website and the individual pages and posts on it in a way where they can be parsed by a service that runs on the AT Procolo — an “App View,” in the language of their standard — which would allow users to subscribe, via that service, to your domain. The most obvious use case is allowing users on a platform like Bluesky to subscribe to an RSS-like feed of, say, blog posts, the way they would follow any other account on the service.

A compiler does not feel humiliated when I swear at it, a car does not suffer when I call it a shitbox and a power drill is not oppressed by being handled roughly. An LLM is more complicated than those things, and the interactions you can have with them can be truly uncanny, but a moral status does not appear just because the machine can emit text in the first person.

This change maps to a brewing theory among economists: that one consequence of automation via AI is that humans move to figuring out how to validate the outputs and price the operational risks of AI systems. That increasingly seems to me to be what we’re doing inside the company. The more we add AI automation, the more humans move to some “verification layer” that sits atop it. The verification layer sits atop of a much larger “virtual organization” which consists of increasingly large quantities of AI systems working on behalf of humans.

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter.

That is worse than no diagnosis.

In this sense, prompts are a worse form of technical debt than code. When technical debt blows up, it usually causes errors or a tangible slowdown as you try to understand the code. Prompts will decay silently. Also, even janky code tends to be relatively stable when untouched, but every single model upgrade could turn a functional prompt into a non-functional one.

Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.