Entries for September 9, 2026
-
Incredible. And to think that 35b-a3b will top that when it comes out š -
After a few days with Astra, some positive and negative remarks Unfortunately, I can't use it as my daily driver because of the cost. Not surprising, since it's priced similarly as Fable It just eats away at my plan too quickly, and it's not as better or faster to justify me 3-4xing what I pay OpenAI - Better at writing prose, less slop. Overall more concise - Better at math than Sol, comparable to Fable - Sometimes more brainless than Sol. It forgets to execute parts of plans - More ambitious when it comes to refactoring/changing parts of the codebase. Sometimes deletes whole features. But this might just be my prompting/workflows - Not sure if it is better at Fable in UI/web dev. It is probably better in 3d modeling, but I feel like it might be slightly worse than Fable in 2d design, from the last few days of use. But OAI definitely is catching up there, since that was their weakness since Codex came out So it is a good model, but it won't become my daily driver or the average dev, due to the cost It will remain the planner/designer/debugger model for me, for tough cases or parts of the code which needs more diligence -
If you've missed out (like me), a new tiny model MiniCPM5 2B is topping its category, seems to be a nice challenge to LFM 2.5 2.6B I am currently testing and benchmarking it, and have a cool experiment to show later on if it goes well -
Terence Tao is afraid centuries of traditions of open science might be undone But collaboration has disappeared many, many times in the last few centuries One of the recent examples is physics publications during WW2 Whenever there is winner-takes-all competition like in war or capitalism, scientific collaboration disappears Corporate research is also like this. Since 2022, OpenAI and Anthropic have published very few breakthroughs that would otherwise give them a winning edge Compare this to DeepSeek's publications, banger after banger research. They are the exception, but they also did it because they would benefit from publishing, in a vacuum left empty by American companies... -
A lot of you that have not spent time in academia might think that the Navier-Stokes drama is a new AI-induced effect, but I assure you it is not Academia is a feudal institution that values tenure over merit, a lot of the time (not always). Its ugly face can appear whenever there is a big discovery and a name has to be put on the work In academia, reputation is the reward, so no wonder people fight over it. Having your name on the big thing means all the doors opening and easier grants. It's not just academia, it's human nature Here are some historical cases where similar drama happened: - Newton vs Leibniz - calculus - Banting/Macleod/Best - insulin - Gallo vs Montagnier - HIV - Doudna/Charpentier vs Broad - CRISPR - Franklin/Watson/Crick/Wilkins - DNA - Meitner/Hahn - nuclear fission And these are the super famous ones everybody knows about. These kind of petty fights happen at the smallest scale too