Mark Torres

Claude 4 is the first LLM that has allowed me to actually "vibe code" a decently complicated app in Cursor purely through instructions and markdown files and without having to write a single line of code. Had to intervene a few times in the chat but otherwise really impressive!

qwq QwQ is the reasoning model of the Qwen series.

I can't believe that in 2025, we can run reasoning models locally. I finally got to try Ollama and QwQ and it's really impressive. Next step is to set up Ollama + Cursor. Can't imagine where things will be in 2026 and beyond.

ollama.com/library/qwq
mem.ai/p/bf6ew6HSm1...

I still think people should step back sometimes and just think about how far AI has come in the past 5 years. NLP used to be "fine-tune BERT and hope it works" to "do one-shot inference, on any task, using GPT 4o-mini". Can't take it for granted that SOTA AI is an API call away...

The reasoning trace of OpenAI's o3-mini seems like them trying to strike a balance between "we want to keep our reasoning traces IP" and "we want people to think we're being transparent". Still definitely prefer the depth of DeepSeek's traces, though it's still too early to tell.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to T… Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the Ne…

I just read Stolen Focus and I really recommend it to anyone interested in a holistic systems overview of why it’s so hard to keep your attention on anything.

Who could’ve guessed that the key for success is eating healthy, drinking water, sleeping 7-8 hours, exercising, and reading books 🤣

Self-identifying as some variant of “I’m a critical/free thinker” or “I can think for myself” is almost certainly a signal that one cannot, in fact, think critically for themselves.

Heard this zinger take at a talk:

“Most lay people shouldn’t read scientific papers, even if they think they can, because most people don’t understand that science is an iterative process. There’s no “right answer”, and people do disagree. Even laws are just ideas that we haven’t proven wrong yet.”

Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer. The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.

NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...

Overall really good! Great way to digest research papers, plus I've been running out of new podcast episodes lately so it's nice to be able to make my own custom podcast episodes. Wish I could steer the podcasting behavior a little more and wish that it were longer but I'm liking it so far.

More NotebookLM notes:
- It has a funny pronunciation of "SQL" that I've never heard before (almost like "sekl"?)
- The two podcast hosts are always the same and I can only mildly steer their behavior with system prompts.
- There's weird times where the hosts like to finish each other's sentences?

Google NotebookLM | Note Taking & Research Assistant Powered by AI Use the power of AI for quick summarization and note taking, NotebookLM is your powerful virtual research assistant rooted in information you can trust.

I've been experimenting with NotebookLM to read papers in podcast form and it's been great at it! If I add more than 1-2 papers though, I find that the quality suffers. Plus it caps out at ~20 minutes, can ramble, and its adherence to system prompts is iffy. Great tool though!

The Great Fire of Rome happened when the data centers full of the latest 3,000 nm chips caught fire and there weren’t enough aqueducts to cool them down. Completely unrelated to Nero joining AMD’s board just 6 months before and sitting on Palatine Hill with Lisa Su to watch NVIDIA burn.

Can you imagine the amount of aqueducts they must've had to build to cool down all their data centers? Back then, Nvidia must've been on their 5,000 nm chips, so hopefully the Romans and Greeks called in ahead to reserve the 4,000 nm chips in advance.

I think that's true. I suppose the caveat is that Mookie plays one position for weeks or months at a time, whereas it did seem like you'd know where Zobrist was playing only when the lineup card came out. The Rays seem to like generic IF and OF players instead of by position, especially post-Longo.

I wonder if there's anyone who conclusively out-Zobristed Zobrist himself over the course of multiple seasons. Zorilla was a cog in some good Rays and Cubs teams before being a super-utility player was cool.

I'm not too aware of AI detection research but this was an interesting way to do it. It's trivial to fool normal AI checkers, since plain zero shot fails. But you can build a better AI checker if you include a retrieval step comparing a text to known AI-generated text.

I wonder if filtering spam in the age of LLMs is similar to designing good CAPTCHAs now, where it's hard to create a filter that catches the best LLMs but is also easy enough for the average person. Especially true since it's hard to reliably tell LLM-generated text from human text.

test post 6

another test post

test post 4

test post 4

Open-sourcing Three EXAONE 3.5 Models : Frontier-level Model, Top-tier Performance in Instruction Following and Long Context Capabilities - LG AI Research BLOG

Oh wow, LG just released their own open source* LLM. If their published benchmarks are accurate, the 32B model is at least on par with Qwen2.5 (which is already an incredibly strong model), if not better.

www.lgresearch.ai/blog/view?se...

huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE

* open weights

another test post

I keep getting ads for "OpenAI pays its LLM engineers 750k, here are 7 projects to get YOU an LLM engineering job", what absolute slop.

Engineers also sometimes forget that they're hired to solve problems that happen to use code, so we can't forget what those problems are in the first place.

Oh man, I thought this was just me, my entire app runs entirely on several of these bash scripts LOL

Probably what went through his head after it went down:

I'm not mad at a baseball player getting paid his money, but its wild to me that MLB has teams that can shell out over $700 million for a player and teams that apparently can't build a stadium without taxpayer money.

If he were on-call this past week and more pipelines broke in prod, none of this would've happened smh

I finally learned what Snowflake and Databricks actually do and I now question why I worked for 3 years building essentially an in-house, worse version of what someone with basic SQL knowledge could have done on Snowflake...