Of all the news I've heard of recent, this one has flipped my world upside down the most. Gwern dropping his pseudonymity isn't something I thought would happen.
Some people predicted it and related things (like less writing output) after his Dwarkesh interview, especially with his flirtations with moving to SF and ever-increasing frequency of visits.
So good. I've built a plugin for it to allow me download books from my Jellyfin server on my Kindle 3 Keyboard (from 2010!). Was lovely for develop for and the wide compatibility of KOReader has made it a great investment.
I know Racket was reworked to build upon Chez Scheme several years ago. If the HN migration to CL was due to performance reasons, I wonder if sticking it out and waiting for the Chez version of Racket would have paid off.
I’m curious: was Arc running Racket BC or CS? I understand it got a big performance boost after switching to Chez Scheme.
dang: It was running BC. I had high hopes for switching to CS because I'd heard the same thing you had, but when I tried it, HN slowed to a crawl. This stuff is so unpredictable.
I can't remember the details, but I recall that Arc was pinned to an older version of Racket and didn't benefit from improvements to BC and then later to CS.
But ... be aware that the Arc interpreter is much more dynamic than Racket, so in general normal Racket programs are more efficient than Arc programs.
They release real numbers from their practical expereince running on of the biggest ai based agents on the whole planet.
You wrote a snarky comment without content.
Would love to actually have a real discussion about critisism like this (not because i'm affiliated with google at all, but because I like to expand my knowledge through discussions)
1. Is not remotely unbiased.
2. Does not have desirable models, coding harnesses, or data centre capacity for AI (they rent space from SpaceX).
3. Seems to be lagging far behind in all things AI.
4. Has serious problems with internal adoption of AI tools (such as banning most team members from using competitors, but allowing the DeepMind team to use Claude, etc.)
Their opinion from their PR team is not just that credible or valuable.
Of course a company is not unbiased. I don't blindly just take the information of an article, i add it to my signals and evaluate it.
But the dismissivness of a normal / small blog post is weird. You can't just complelty ignore and dismiss one of the biggest companies on the planet who is also one which pushes research of it too (aka deepmind)
2. They do have gemini which I don't use for coding but I use daily for other things, it works well. They have massive data center capacity, that they are now renting space from SpaceX shows how big the demand is.
3. yes weirdly enough but doesn't matter too much, Google at least can just afford the investment in comparision to any other company playing that game. My assumption is that on one side google is just bad in releasing products (antigravity vs. gemini cli vs. unable to buy AI tokens as a normal user etc.) but also that they might just have a broader field were they want to use AI.
Claude/Anthropic can focus on coding a lot to push that frontier while google might focus more on gemini assistent and also for coding and using gemini for GCP etc.
But doesn't matter still, google was fundamental for research into LLMs.
4. No clue how this is a problem relevant to the AI Economy. Deepmind might be more independent from Google itself, Google has an internal AI coding system before the LLM stuff became popular so Google has a clear incentive of keeping the feedback loop internal. Independent of this, google is well known to control their whole ecosystem starting from the mainboard firmware. Im not even aware of any other company on the planet doing it like this.
For me its valuable enough to have a quick look. I would probably not have posted it on HN or voted up.
I'm more surprised about the generic negative sentiments people communicate here instead of having nice discussions with value.
There are things I'd like to say on the web but which I haven't because I fear I could be arrested in some countries I am likely to visit in the future.
Really good. I use it frequently and haven't had any reason to switch to an external offering. It can translate the whole page or just a snippet that you highlight.
I suppose we can't expect any more entries to his blackmail page: https://gwern.net/blackmail
reply