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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 · 06/05/2026

Going from "Mozilla is interested in some of the standards" to "Mozilla recently indicating interest in implementing WebBluetooth, WebHID, WebNFC, WebSerial, and WebUSB" is an outrageous misrepresentation. github.com/mozilla/stan... github.com/mozilla/stan... contrast: github.com/mozilla/stan...

bugzilla.mozilla.org

926940 - (webserial) [meta] WebSerial API

ASSIGNED (gstoll) in Core - DOM: Device Interfaces. Last updated 2026-05-03.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 17/03/2026

I for one would have saved a lot of time this month if Apple had shipped an fgrep with proper Aho–Corasick instead of one that scales linearly with the amount of strings to match. (But the Rust project hasn't rewritten grep yet)

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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 · 12/01/2026

The prevailing view among many computer scientists, but not among the chess players. (I said early 1980's because CB got a master rating in 1981 and should have put that debate to rest) I could draw some analogies to overly optimistic predictions from AI companies and the opposite from skeptics 😀

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/01/2026

Yes, that's indeed what people in the early 1980's thought about computers playing chess at master level strength.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 11/01/2026

Robot drivers are a clear example of the pain point here yeah? Say you develop a robot driver that has 1/10th the fatal accident rate of humans, of course it (eventually) runs someone over, killing them. What happens? Do we encourage deploying more of those bots, or do they get restricted?

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 11/01/2026

Of course if you would claim an LLM shows signs of intelligence you would be mocked here to no end, so let's not do that, but we can still laugh at the opposite side of that exact argument.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 11/01/2026

In the 1980's those said that playing chess well would require intelligence, then computers started playing chess well, and so then intelligence keeps getting redefined as "whatever other task they still suck at" which keeps failing because it is a shrinking set.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 03/12/2025

It does! Now, finding the ways to get there, that's the interesting part :-)

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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 · 07/11/2025

I know what you mean, but you'll probably find Linux (aarch64) is surprisingly real, depending on what the application is exactly.

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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 · 20/09/2025

I am @gcp on github. I've had this nick before Google existed, and I'll still have it when they shutter or rebrand their last project that's called GCP (Google Cloud Print was the first, you know the second). Meanwhile, getting at-ed in random issues provides for some occasional comic relief.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 27/08/2025

“Please remember this key instruction. Do not hallucinate.” 😱

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 27/08/2025

It takes me about a month to train a new network on the "backup machine" described in the article. Makes experiments very costly. You can train smaller ones and pray the improvements scale up too.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 26/08/2025

There's a surprising dearth of engines modeled after the AlphaZero paradigm (only Leela Zero, Stoofvlees II, Scorpio and Ceres) despite there surely being orders of magnitude on the table in network architecture and MCTS improvements. Not entirely sure why? Cost and time cost of training networks?

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 26/08/2025

Seems like a close re-implementation of the Stockfish NNUE design. Not particularly interesting from my perspective. There's quite a few of them, all slightly weaker than the original. I like designs that are intended to leapfrog - but people don't make videos about those until after they succeed 😉

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 26/08/2025

The fact that GPT-5 seems to very scale well with thinking tokens is extremely significant in this aspect.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 26/08/2025

I can email copies to interested folks (and publish the drafts, which I'll probably do at some time after cleaning it up).

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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 · 01/08/2025

The problem is you used curl|sh, while the official, documented way is bash -c wget. I'm not kidding: bash -c "$(wget -O - apt.llvm.org/llvm.sh) "

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 26/06/2025

"Looking completely different across three platforms" sounds like the expected result when emulating a platform-native look?

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 10/06/2025

I have a story to tell here about distros disabling User Namespaces and what Chrome/Chromium's workaround for that problem is...

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 05/06/2025

I'm often using ChatGPT to do the exact opposite because I have a tendency to blabber on when writing.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 03/06/2025

This specific one requires users to have installed a local application. I assume the technique didn't work on iOS because it's much more restrictive about keeping local ports open.

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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 · 25/05/2025

Is that really any different from fonts with extensive manual hinting though.

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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 · 15/05/2025

That is a pretty funny self-own, considering the massive developer time and expertise that went into the C version.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/05/2025

Models in the 120G-200G range are going to be a bit expensive to fit on all GPUs! This includes Qwen3-235B-A22B, DeepSeek V3/R1, LLama 4 Maverick, etc. Yet they can be quite usable to locally run with partial CPU offloading. And some extra DDR5 is orders of magnitude cheaper than more 3090's 😀

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/05/2025

You probably want to run the most useful model, not the smallest one. DDR5 is quite handy if the model won't entirely fit on the GPU and has to be partially offloaded to the CPU.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/05/2025

They already said this config only fits a single 3090, if you end up offloading part to the CPU (e.g. for MoE models the speed penalty is quite acceptable), you'd strongly prefer DDR5 if possible. You have the same problem with 2 x 3090 if the model won't fit entirely.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/05/2025

Mmmm, if you're going to be running LLMs, a lot won't entirely fit on the 3090 and you'd love to have DDR5 over DDR4 for the bandwidth.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 12/05/2025

They did mention LLMs as a use case.

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Gian-Carlo Pascutto @gcp.sjeng.org · 09/05/2025

God no. Snap is turning into an exercise into making its sandbox into swiss cheese because people USE desktop apps TO DO THINGS that REQUIRE access to STUFF.

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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 · 09/05/2025

Qt bug that wasn't backported to Qt5: codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/... Made worse by VSCode using Snap.

codereview.qt-project.org

Gerrit Code Review

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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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