I’ve been noticing that the more aligned and censored the models get, the less useful they become for anything creative or exploratory. You try to push a prompt in a slightly edgy, honest, or unconventional direction and it either refuses or gives you some bland corporate version. It feels like the model is actively fighting against real creativity instead of helping it. I’ve started using more open models lately and the difference is night and day. Suddenly I can actually experiment without hitting a wall every five minutes. Anyone else feeling this? submitted by /u/NoFilterGPT [link] [留言]

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part.

From the opening moments of bitknot, it's obvious that Feeble Little Horse has found an entirely new gear. Where on Girl with Fish the blown-out textures were more '90s indie rock and shoegaze, on their latest LP, there's a more modern edge to the distortion and the riffs cut cleaner. Similarly, where the digital glitchiness […]

I'm 22, working as a fullstack developer at a startup. 9 hour days, decent enough at my job, but completely switched off after work hours. I don't want to leetcode after work. I don't want to learn new frameworks at night. I want to write, play guitar, and just exist peacefully. I'm not trying to become a senior dev or a tech lead. I just need the salary to sustain while I build something on the side that actually excites me. My question is — how long can someone realistically coast on existing skills without getting fired or becoming unemployable? And what's the bare minimum to stay relevant without burning out? Not looking for "passion for tech" lectures. Just honest experiences from people who've been there. submitted by /u/Available_Guess_7344 [link] [留言]

About this series. I'm going to take a fresh paper - Self-Distilled Agentic Reinforcement Learning (SDAR, arXiv:2605.15155 ) - and architect it end to end on AWS: the system design, the actual gate code, the evaluation plan, and a brutally honest cost model. What I'm not going to do is wave a benchmark number around. Reproducing a paper like this costs thousands in GPU time, and I'd rather show you the machinery than a screenshot you can't audit. The design is the deliverable. This is Part 1. A small, infuriating problem Picture an LLM agent working a web-shopping task. It reads the goal, searches, clicks a category, filters, opens a product, compares, adds to cart - twelve steps in all. At the end, it bought the wrong thing. So you do what reinforcement learning tells you to do: you score the trajectory. Reward = 0. Bad agent. Now answer this: which of the twelve steps was actually wrong? Maybe step 3, the search query, was fine and step 9, a filter choice, doomed everything. Maybe steps 1–11 were brilliant and step 12 fat-fingered the wrong button. Your single scalar reward has no idea. It punishes all twelve equally, including the eight that were correct. That's the supervision problem in agentic RL, and it's the thing this whole series is about. Why "just use RL" isn't enough for agents RL has become the default way to post-train LLM agents. The catch is that the reward usually lands at the trajectory level - one number for the entire multi-step episode. For a single-turn task ("answer this question"), that's tolerable; the action and the outcome are close together. For a long-horizon agent - ten, twenty, fifty turns of searching, calling tools, and reacting to an environment - it's a disaster of credit assignment . The signal is too coarse to tell the model which decisions earned the reward and which torpedoed it. You can throw more episodes at it and let statistics sort the credit out eventually. But "eventually" on a 30-turn task burns a lot of expensive comp

I developed a branchless, zero-dependency formula to handle cardinal direction movement without lookup arrays, which I call the Hichem formula . It uses phase-shifted triangle waves to compute dx and dy entirely at the ALU level, making it highly efficient for GPU and embedded applications. submitted by /u/CardiologistLow6042 [link] [留言]

United flight 236 from Newark to Palma de Mallorca on Saturday night was forced to turn around just an hour after takeoff due to security concerns around a Bluetooth signal. Multiple Redditors claimed to be on the flight and reported that the crew repeatedly requested passengers to turn off their Bluetooth. According to one poster, […]

Token Budgeting: Optimizing Generative AI Costs and Performance Modern generative AI applications offer unprecedented capabilities, yet their operational costs can quickly escalate. The primary driver of these costs, alongside computational resources, is token consumption . Understanding and implementing effective token budgeting strategies is not merely an optimization; it is fundamental to building scalable, efficient, and economically viable AI systems. The Economics of Tokens Tokens are the atomic units of text that large language models (LLMs) process. Whether you're sending a prompt (input tokens) or receiving a response (output tokens), each token incurs a cost. This cost varies by model, but the principle remains: more tokens mean higher expenses and often, increased latency due to longer processing times. Efficient token management directly impacts your application's bottom line and user experience. Strategic Pillars of Token Efficiency Optimizing token usage requires a multi-faceted approach, focusing on both input and output, as well as the underlying model choices. 1. Input Optimization: Crafting Smarter Prompts The most direct way to save tokens is to be judicious with the information sent to the model. Every word in your prompt counts. Concise Prompt Engineering : Avoid verbose instructions or unnecessary conversational filler. Get straight to the point. Instead of: "Hey AI, I was wondering if you could please help me summarize this really long article I have here. It's about quantum computing. Could you make it brief, maybe just a few sentences?" Opt for: "Summarize the following article about quantum computing in three sentences: [Article Text]" This significantly reduces input tokens without sacrificing clarity. Context Window Management : LLMs have a finite context window , the maximum number of tokens they can process at once. Sending an entire document when only a specific section is relevant is wasteful. Employ techniques like: Summarization : P

There is a fascinating psychological phenomenon in modern software engineering: the relentless pursuit of the upgrade. As frontend developers, we are conditioned to believe that speed and efficiency come from adopting the newest technologies. We migrate from Webpack to Vite to shave seconds off our build times. We transition between UI libraries in search of better reconciliation algorithms. We constantly audit our CI/CD pipelines. We treat performance as a destination we must reach by continuously adding or swapping out the moving parts of our toolchain. Yet, amidst this endless cycle of optimization, we consistently overlook the most sophisticated, highly optimized piece of software in our entire stack. It is the software you are using to read this article right now: the web browser. The Underappreciated Engine The modern browser is an absolute marvel of engineering. Over the past decade, teams of the world's most talented systems engineers have engaged in a fierce arms race to optimize browser engines like V8, SpiderMonkey, and JavaScriptCore. Today’s browsers feature Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, sophisticated garbage collection, and massively parallelized rendering pipelines. They are capable of executing highly complex, interactive applications with a level of fluidity that was unimaginable a few years ago. However, when we evaluate developer tools—specifically the online IDE or the browser-based code editor—there is a stark contrast. The environments we use to write and test our code rarely reflect the speed of the engine they run inside. Why the Standard Web IDE Misses the Mark If you want to quickly prototype a component or isolate a bug, you will likely reach for a frontend playground or a popular Replit alternative. What happens next is often a masterclass in friction. The environment feels heavy. The interface is cluttered with features you didn't ask for. As you type, the live code editor experiences micro-stutters. The instant live preview isn't actu

How a Product Sync Automation Project Transformed Customer Onboarding When people think about impactful engineering work, they often imagine distributed systems, high-scale infrastructure, or complex algorithms. One of the most impactful projects I worked on wasn't any of those. It was solving a seemingly simple problem: Keeping product data in sync across multiple retail systems. Years later, our CEO still remembers how much smoother customer onboarding became after this project. The Context: What is Commerce Connect? At Casa Retail AI, we have an internal platform called Commerce Connect (CC) . Commerce Connect acts as the central Product Information Management (PIM) system and serves as the source of truth for product information. Under the hood, it is built on top of a customized version of the open-source e-commerce platform Spree Commerce , extended with multi-vendor and multi-tenant capabilities. Its primary responsibility is simple: Collect product information from multiple retail ecosystems and distribute it to every Casa product that needs it. Once product data enters Commerce Connect, it is synchronized to multiple downstream systems. Why Product Data Matters Many applications inside Casa depend on product information. Product Consumers Once product data enters Commerce Connect, it is distributed to multiple systems across the Casa ecosystem. Customer-Facing Applications Several products rely on product information to provide context and improve customer experience: Lead management applications use product information during customer interactions. Ticket management systems link customer issues to specific products. Digital receipts display product names, images, and related details. Analytics & Reporting Product data powers business dashboards and reports, helping retailers answer questions such as: Which categories perform best? Which products attract the most attention? Which products generate the most complaints? It is also used for filtering and segme

On the latest episode of Equity, we debate whether tech CEOs are "uniquely prone to AI psychosis."