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Gian-Carlo Pascutto

@gcp.sjeng.org
86 followers 164 following 178 posts

I used to be an open-source developer like you, but then I took a promotion to the knee and now I just whine on the internet. Certified by Reddit to have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to computer chess.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 13/08/2026
One of my engineers pointed out a race condition in Claude written code. Claude's reaction: "His reading is correct" /uninstall @anthropic.com
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 15/05/2026
Headed to /r/bun for the drama. Was not disappointed.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 27/01/2026
HN thread: "The state of Linux music players in 2026" Cmd-F "foobar2000" Was not disappointed.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 09/11/2025
It sure is a change from having to keep redefining intelligence because computers started doing things that we used to claim required intelligence.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 30/10/2025
Release notes List of merged PRs ... 90. asdf in #5940 ... It's only a key project in a company valued at 1 trillion dollars, folks.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 29/10/2025
"This dir has a neural network trainer. We increased our dataset size 7x. Adjust the default number of training epochs (1000) to keep training the same duration and adjust the reporting interval accordingly." SOTA models figure out you want 150 epochs, not 143. Only GPT-5 solves the reporting part.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 25/08/2025
My article about how we won the 2023 and 2024 World Computer Chess Championships is now out. It includes some previously unpublished details about the design and implementation of Stoofvlees II and should be a fun read if you're interested in computer chess. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 21/08/2025
I have an open position on my team. Looking for experience with native application development on Windows/Win32 and good C++ skills. Knowledge of macOS/Linux development a plus, as is experience with Rust. Remote work possible in a lot of EU countries + US & Canada. www.mozilla.org/en-US/career...
mozilla.org
Mozilla Careers — Staff Software Engineer, Desktop Integration — Open Positions
Mozilla is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Desktop Integration in Remote UK, Strategy, Operations, Data & Ads, Security, Security, Strategy, Operations, Data & Ads,…
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 21/08/2025
I was expected the answer to "why is Codex so much slower than Claude Code" to be something related to their models, and maybe it is, but it surely is not helping that Codex runs all the tool calls under x86 emulation.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 19/08/2025
DeepSeek V3.1 scores 71.6% on aider polyglot, a slight improvement over DeepSeek R1 0528 while being more than 5 times faster. Cost: 0.60 USD for the entire benchmark.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 03/06/2025
lichess.org/lag "Lichess developers cannot ... make light go faster."
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 22/05/2025
www.neowin.net/news/microso... Firefox already implemented this security feature over 7 years ago: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi...
neowin.net
Microsoft finally making Google Chrome as good as Edge by blocking Admin rights
Microsoft is improving Google's Chrome in one aspect to make it as good as Edge is. The company is working on blocking Admin rights.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 22/05/2025
We noticed a CPU bug on Raptor Lake because the bounds checking in our Rust zlib implementation was hitting "impossible" bounds checks: github.com/trifectatech... The Oodle devs noticed similar issues in their decompressors and managed to root cause it: fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/05/21/o...
github.com
index out of bounds: the len is 512 but the index is 567 · Issue #306 · trifectatechfoundation/zlib-rs
After enabling zlib-rs/libz-rs-sys 0.4.1 in Firefox nightly, we've started receiving crash reports for out of bound accesses in State::d_code: https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/report/index/113ebfb1-...
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 09/05/2025
OH: "Here we see the seething neckbeard in its natural environment" (Warhammer World Championships thread in /r/belgium)
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 08/05/2025
File -> Open is just not something you can expect to work on a modern Linux desktop. github.com/microsoft/vs...
github.com
System dialog boxes don't show in Plasma · Issue #231310 · microsoft/vscode
Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes VS Code Version: 1.94.2 (installed from Snap) OS Version: Ubuntu 24.04.1 Steps to Reproduce: Perform any action that usually shows a "na...
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Reposted by Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Steve Klabnik @steveklabnik.com · 05/05/2025
linux folks: just use your distro's package manager! me this morning: 1. <package> is 6 versions out of date, doesn't work 2. add upstream package server 3. oops! was built in a way that doesn't fucking work 4. download their script to do something to add it anyway 5. okay cool it works. i guess.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 06/05/2025
Different tests generate the exact opposite conclusion, e.g. github.com/lechmazur/co... "Reasoning appears to help. For example, DeepSeek R1 performs better than DeepSeek-V3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Exp 01-21 performs better than Gemini 2.0 Flash."
github.com
GitHub - lechmazur/confabulations: Hallucinations (Confabulations) Document-Based Benchmark for RAG. Includes human-verified questions and answers.
Hallucinations (Confabulations) Document-Based Benchmark for RAG. Includes human-verified questions and answers. - lechmazur/confabulations
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 02/05/2025
OH: "we have colleagues who are younger than this file"
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 13/04/2025
In Ubuntu 24.04 "perf top" now requires selecting which PMU type to monitor (P and E core types), and will then only list that one. This is an extremely crippling regression for me. Any idea how to get rid of it? Is this a regression in the kernel itself?
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 03/04/2025
Ubuntu 24.04 wrecked my LVM+LUKS install upon upgrading from 22.04. After a few days of fighting with it, key tricks were to add "initramfs" flags for all LVM drives to the crypttab and finally "keyscript=decrypt_keyctl" to avoid having the reenter the password. All of this just worked in 22.04 🤷
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 27/03/2025
"The amount of electricity required to train DeepSeek-V3 would power the Bitcoin network for all of 5 minutes." Random claim on an evil site but I'm totally willing to believe this.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 25/03/2025
National news reporting on the Hegseth gaffe: "US adversaries now know which chat service to attack...Signal may encrypt messages but it is not secure" Time for my daily dose of Gell-Mann amnesia.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 20/03/2025
Because of being tied to Electron, and thus to Chrome, Visual Studio Code on Linux has two modes: you can choose between "missing window borders" github.com/microsoft/vs... or "context menus don't work" (github.com/microsoft/vs... but really issues.chromium.org/issues/33037...).
github.com
[GNOME Linux] No window decoration (shadow) if a window title bar style is custom · Issue #225073 · microsoft/vscode
Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes VS Code Version: 1.92.0 OS Version: Fedora 40 (GNOME 46) Steps to Reproduce: Set window.titleBarStyle options to custom in the settings ...
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 13/03/2025
"However, C++ bindings have different semantics than value assignment ... only destructed at the end of the enclosing scope, even though the mapping wasn't bound to an identifier." bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi... Because of course C++ didn't have enough footguns yet.
bugzilla.mozilla.org
1951925 - 7.27 - 3.55% Base Content Heap Unclassified / Base Content Resident Unique Memory + 1 more (Windows) regression on Wed March 5 2025
RESOLVED (afranchuk) in Core - IPC. Last updated 2025-03-13.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 13/03/2025
"The exact format of the id string is left unspecified." aka you must return exactly the same thing as Chrome does.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 13/03/2025
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-... "Rust may present a steeper learning curve than C in some ways" I wonder how true that actually is for writing/enhancing a production-level core util.
discourse.ubuntu.com
Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu
Last month I published Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years, which outlines four key themes for how I intend to evolve Ubuntu in the coming years. In this post, I’ll focus on “Modernisation”. Ther...
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 26/02/2025
web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linu... This is really nice. The old way definitely had issues like limiting a single Firefox process to about 32GB of RAM. And yeah, most of us wouldn't want the browser to take 32GB of RAM, but if you *need* that for some purpose, then it's a silly limitation to have.
web.git.kernel.org
mm: madvise: implement lightweight guard page mechanism - kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 25/02/2025
"Allow edits from maintainers" is a really nice small feature and we're jealous at not having it.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 21/02/2025
23 years after the initial release, and 12 years after it has been deprecated, Apple adds support for patent free audio codec.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 21/02/2025
Reading the EU plans for Ukraine and am involuntarily reminded of Dutchbat & Srebrenica. Small peacekeeping force "safeguarded" by air support from another country. "The non-Dutch in charge of air support refused to give aid as requested" "US general: Gay Dutch soldiers caused Srebrenica massacre"
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 15/02/2025
Cleaning out the local computer history museum, which is to say, my attic. Some of this stuff is so old, it still came with an actual manual. How the hell was 2004 already 21 years ago?!
A box with boxes of old software and hardware, including Rocksmith and Adobe Audition 1.5, and a big manual for Adobe Audition.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/02/2025
API hallucinations are definitely one of the worst things when dealing with LLM.
LLM claiming from its supposed knowledge from early 2025 that a python-chess 2.x exists.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/02/2025
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLama-70B scores only 8.4% in the Aider polyglot benchmark: github.com/Aider-AI/aid..., significantly worse than for example Qwen2.5-Coder-32B. Real DeepSeek-R1 scores 56.9%. The distilled models that "you can run at home" are nothing like the real thing, not even close.
github.com
add deepseek r1 70b polyglot benchmark results by Soren8 · Pull Request #3194 · Aider-AI/aider
aider is AI pair programming in your terminal. Contribute to Aider-AI/aider development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 10/02/2025
For something like astral uv (the Python package manager), what do we prefer? a) sudo snap install astral-uv b) curl -LsSf astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh c) pip install uv Pros/cons of each method?
astral.sh
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 07/02/2025
I tried to buy a GPLed program today. Buy link fails with a PayPal error. Turning off Adblocker, Tracking Protection and spending like half an hour trying stuff and looking at the devtools networking tab didn't help.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 30/01/2025
Bug 1944784 - Minidump DumperError only contains the letter 'E', 'F', 'N' or 'W' bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi...
bugzilla.mozilla.org
1944784 - Minidump DumperError only contains the letter 'E', 'F', 'N' or 'W'
ASSIGNED (gsvelto) in Toolkit - Crash Reporting. Last updated 2025-01-30.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 28/01/2025
DeepSeek was nice while it lasted. In other, totally unrelated news, I have 64GB RAM arriving today and will be having fun aligning RAM stick timings.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 27/01/2025
Upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04. See all my terminals disappear if an application OOMs. Read github.com/systemd/syst.... Rage at Linux/systemd ecosystem.
github.com
systemd built-in OOM killer (*not* systemd-oomd) kills all processes in user session/scope unit upon kernel OOM and doesn't respect OOMPolicy= · Issue #25376 · systemd/systemd
systemd version the issue has been seen with 252.1-1-arch Used distribution Arch Linux Linux kernel version used 6.0.7-arch1-1 CPU architectures issue was seen on x86_64 Component systemd Expected ...
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 24/01/2025
The NVIDIA GTX 750 is 10 years old. It's the first NVIDIA GPU I got in a decade and what lead to the whole Leela ➡️ Leela Zero project. I paid 50 EUR for it, second hand. NVIDIA is now suggesting they could, perhaps, wind down support in the future. How's AMD's ROCm support for the Radeon R9 280?
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 18/01/2025
The reactions to this blunder remind me of the people who looked at computer blunders and concluded "computers can't play chess", e.g. timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/honor... It's not because the computer makes a blunder that an 1800 Elo player would avoid, that the computer is <1800 Elo.
timkr.home.xs4all.nl
Recently in TIME Magazine, in a summary titled "A history of interactivity", Kasparov's 1997 defeat by Deep Blue was named alongside events like the Gutenberg Bible, the first photograph, the first sound movie, and the invention of the World Wide Web.     In the chess world, we should know better.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 18/01/2025
github.com/lechmazur/co... LLMs are getting better at refusing to answer if they don't know the answer. Latest Claude Sonnet is 4 times less likely to make things up, and about 2.5 times more likely to say it doesn't know something. The sad part? The free GPT is *the* most likely to make stuff up.
github.com
GitHub - lechmazur/confabulations: Hallucinations (Confabulations) Document-Based Benchmark for RAG
Hallucinations (Confabulations) Document-Based Benchmark for RAG - lechmazur/confabulations
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 16/01/2025
"I don't want to scare anyone, but this bug only occurs on a full moon." bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi...
bugzilla.mozilla.org
1928445 - Crash in [@ js::frontend::RewritingParseNodeVisitor<T>::visit]
NEW (nobody) in Core - JavaScript Engine. Last updated 2025-01-14.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 05/01/2025
"About 20% of leopard mortality is attributable to lions" I guess that's what being "King of the Jungle" means. Except they live in the savannah, uh, ...
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 05/01/2025
Rust quiz! Find the bug: impl Hash for Node { fn hash<H: Hasher>(&self, state: &mut H) { self.flag.hash(state); for e in &self.edges { e.key.hash(state); // Hash child structure recursively e.child.borrow().hash(state); } } }
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 04/01/2025
The popular AHash doesn't actually support 64-bit ARM properly in stable: github.com/tkaitchuck/a...
github.com
AES not enabled on AArch64 · Issue #235 · tkaitchuck/aHash
README says the library should automatically enable AES on AArch64 aHash/README.md Line 60 in 7d5c661 * `nightly-arm-aes`: To use AES instructions on 32-bit ARM, which requires nightly. This is not...
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 04/01/2025
The textbooks I learned basic algorithms from were old enough that I've never been exposed to Lomuto partitioning, apparently. It appears to have been propagated far and wide enough that Wikipedia talks about it at length in the QuickSort explanation.
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 02/01/2025
Google Photos only lets you share with your partner if you take pictures with their own app, or edit them with it: www.androidpolice.com/google-photo... What's the point? Up-selling more AI photo editing subscriptions with Google One? Feels like a blatant monopoly abuse more than anything.
androidpolice.com
Google Photos quietly downgrades partner sharing with this weird limitation
You might want to avoid using third-party camera apps if you use Google Photos partner sharing
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 23/12/2024
The first adversarial attacks against Go AI's that I saw basically were exploits of a buggy passing heuristic in KataGo. The new attacks though, are quite something different: goattack.far.ai Does not surprise me that ViT doesn't fix it, as it starts with local patches. (Not saying a full T would)
goattack.far.ai
Adversarial policies in Go
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 23/12/2024
semianalysis.com/2024/12/22/m... Nice benchmarking of the real performance you get with NVIDIA and AMD's training stacks...and the maturity of them.
semianalysis.com
MI300X vs H100 vs H200 Benchmark Part 1: Training – CUDA Moat Still Alive
Intro SemiAnalysis has been on a five-month long quest to settle the reality of MI300X. In theory, the MI300X should be at a huge advantage over Nvidia’s H100 and H200 in terms of specifications an…
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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 22/12/2024
The 2015 World Champion in Scrabble prepared for the tournament by playing 24h blitz chess marathons to wear himself out and then trying to keep his Scrabble play at its top level: youtu.be/p0i1MgZFAyI?...
youtu.be
The Stunning Rise of Scrabble's Strongest Nation
YouTube video by Will Anderson
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