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They certainly do mention this:

> Broccoli cultivated under them grew more slowly, requiring an additional 25 days for harvest, but produced roughly the same yield. Meanwhile, these magenta sunscreens improved the microclimate below, reducing the “vapor pressure deficit”—a measure of when plants need to halt photosynthesis to avoid excessive water loss. This may have improved the plants’ efficiency in converting sunlight into plant biomass, which increased by 2.8- to 4.5-fold compared to unshaded plants.

> The shaded plants’ levels of macronutrients such as calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus were either higher than or similar to unshaded plants, while levels of some micronutrients such as iron, copper, and zinc were slightly lower.


I think you're missing the point made above: the paper compares apples to apples (broccoli with and without shade) for good reason, but the ability to cool the microclimate may enable crop substitution that has better output/value in areas where it is normally too hot for that crop.

This isn't something that's particularly obvious unless its pointed out, poly tunnels work on two fronts:

1) extend the growing season/climate control

2) scatter direct light into bright ambient light meaning that plants aren't scorched.

"leafy" plants like pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers etc "wilt" when in direct sun. they go floppy to stop evaporation. THis means they don't grow as fast. If you even out that light so its not directly heating the living shit out of the leaves, they grow faster, because they have less time in stress.


This is a case where we basically did test it on everything! Because the emulation community maintains conformance tests with over 3k of golden instructions. (And this is why Opus was able to so effectively build it; it found the tests)

Yeah, but that still doesn’t mean there aren’t theoretical bugs. Testing every input would effectively mean testing every stimulus, which is combinatorially impossible. You might still have subtle timing bugs, bugs with very uncommon instruction sequences etc.

But my point was exactly that the (extremely vastly) smaller subset of tests that you performed is more than enough to proclaim a CPU to be “working”.


This has the nice side benefit of letting the 1gb of weights compress down to ~3mb (since it’s mostly empty)

A couple thoughts on the process here…

First off, Opus 5.5 built working weights and code with only two prompts:

1. Read this article and any relevant source code: https://divagr.com/blog/qwenputer. Then explore if you could emulate the chip and ram in a Nintendo Entertainment System (as people do today with FPGAs in MISTRs) using this technique. If so, what size model would you have to build and if you could use smaller faster ones, could you get it to be at the standard clockspeed.

It returned charts well illustrating any model would be _slow_. But it's still fun, so the second prompt was:

2. I think we should build it! Just for fun. It's okay if it's not fast. We want to be able to have the weights, and a cli to run them that we can point at a ROM.

Now while this was an _epic_ run by Opus (5.5 is a crazy capable model), this is a surprisingly well-structured challenge.

There is a long-lived and incredible community of classic gaming emulation work online for it to reference. And that community has created…conformance tests! Opus found them and built against one, that has >3k golden instructions: https://github.com/christopherpow/nes-test-roms/blob/master/...

Also, there is the original Qwenputer repo that Opus used to drive the weight writing. That was essential.

But this is a great example of what these models can do with proper reference materials, great specs, conformance tests, and clear direction.


> There is a long-lived and incredible community of classic gaming emulation work online for it to reference. And that community has created…conformance tests! Opus found them and built against one, that has >3k golden instructions

I'm doing something similar but not for an emulator, using tests other projects in a similar space use to validate things.

I also know a friend that feeds Claude Gherkin formatted test criteria, and apparently that yields insanely good Claude output.


  Claude Gherkin
Any good recommended reading?

They are talking about Cucumber, a behavior driven development platform. Gherkin is a syntax for writing test cases:

https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/

Very neat, seems quite appropriate for the way people currently work with LLMs.


Gherkin! The only way to do behavior-driven development!

When you wanted to have a layer of brittle regex expressions to have to maintain and debug in your testing setup!

When you wanted to write tests that look like plain language, but have none of its flexibility!

When you wanted to have massive friction when refactoring your tests!

/s


And then once you get over the knee-jerk reaction the twitter community been teaching you, you might look at the actual syntax and the way the language conceptualizes stuff, and might actually learn something new and useful :) Or, at least have something constructive to say, even if it's negative or whatever, instead of just wasting space.

You're making an assumption here. I don't read Twitter, I have no idea what reaction that community has and I don't care.

My insight on Cucumber comes entirely from years of experience, through several organizations using or considering using it. Several times I was successful in stopping its planned use.

I thought the negative comments would come through the sarcasm, but point taken that it's not constructive.

I think Cucumber (Gherkin) and any natural-language attempts are rooted in a core delusion that product managers or non-technical people will write these test cases. I've never seen product managers writing or even reading these cases. They are not written at the functional specification or an SRD level, because that level is too high and too imprecise to capture the realities of testing behavior.

The natural language of Gherkin is parsed by a set of rigid regular expressions, which do not support the full richness of the English language, and subtle changes like adding or dropping an article or lightly altering the word order will render those steps unparsable. So it's not natural language, it's a programming language with all the syntactical strictness of one, but highly sugared and natural-looking.

You can write behavioral tests at the same exact level as Gherkin in any reasonably-expressive language, likely whatever language your code is written in. You can choose to have fixtures, and high-level structure and you can banish low-level detail from your test cases. Code can do all that, and MAINTIAN EASY refactorability. Code has natural ways in which it can create new layers of abstraction over repetitive ideas, at whatever level is convenient.

But with Gherkin, you're faced with "now I have to write new steps that call the implementing code of the old steps or figure out if I can call the old steps directly and have them still work in a sequence". It is no longer a matter of using your "Extract Method" or copy-pasting some lines into a method with parameters.

Because Gherkin introduces so much more friction/resistance to refactoring, those feature files are much less likely to be refactored. Thus, the copy/pasting of blocks of steps will continue and the tests will start losing that higher level expressiveness that was the justification for using Cucumber.

Testing behavior is a good idea. Writing your tests at a very high level, where you can understand the whole scenario at a glance, and give it data tables to consume, and follow that Given/Then structure, is all possible with code.


Your comment is crazy helpful and insightful. I appreciate you.

I'd just ask Claude about writing test specs in Gherkin. I'm going to try this Monday.

I said last year to people that I swear BDD is going to make a comeback. Hasn’t yet, but I still reckon it might!

Truly amazing. Quite thought provoking how it was helped by having high quality oracles. Eg. Qwenputer & good NES reference materials.

I guess humans need their oracles too: teachers, encyclopaedias, degrees, phds.

Bravo, awesome project, really creative!


Doesn't work for all cartridges (I didn't run Opus that long, but it could keep going). Works with Super Mario.

But to answer your question, it's in the readme: https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer#how-it-was-checked


The whispers around this pattern have started to increase. I would love for someone to run a proper experiment.

Have been waiting for this to manifest for years: https://www.dbreunig.com/2023/05/17/prompt-injection-seeding...


I'm the weirdo who is clinging onto GLM 5.2. 5.3 seems to have picked up the bad writing from Opus 5.


GLM 5.2 was the first open model that I was happy to use as my main. It's a fantastic model. 5.3 cost a lot more per task, was slower and didn't get that much better results for me, so I tried 5.3 Flash for a bit, it was ok, but didn't feel as magical as 5.2 and I have now landed on DeepSeek 4.1 Flash as my main.


It's not just you-- the claudisms in 5.3 are pathetic and drive me crazy, I was very sad to see it go in that direction and consider it a big step down in that respect.

BUT OTOH the performance of 5.3-flash are impossible to argue with-- it has the same pathetic claude behavior full of "Honest" and "lever" and "load bearing" tripe... but it's scortchingly fast on hardware that is pretty slow running 5.2/5.3.

As a result I use 5.3-flash a lot, in spite of feeling kind of gross about its language. I don't enjoy using it the way I enjoyed GLM-5.2, but its pretty effective.


I don't think that's likely, given the close release dates of both? I wonder if 5.3 just choked on too much RL slop, independently of Opus 5.


> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations

How does he know?


Wrote about this awhile ago, and it hasn’t changed:

> Time and time again, when talking to people who rely on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other general AI tools, I hear them say, “AI is incredible. It handles nearly everything I throw at them.”

> “What does it fumble with?” I’ll ask.

> “Well, it still gets things wrong when it comes to my line of work.”

https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/04/08/on-ai-observational-comi...


It's the kind of overstated unjustified claim an LLM would make.


I thought of the "does he know" meme when I saw this.


I think these same people believe everything they see on TV, unless the thing on TV is something they already knew about.


Gell-Mann Amnesia. Recognises the failings in their own field of discourse, assumes all true about anything else, same source.


I got an early tip on this and used it to build a brand mood board and it crushed previous attempts with Claude. Highly recommend.


Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge makes a strong case we _do_ have proof that Musk is actively gathering and throwing fuel on the fire: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/929129/s...

> But the thing is, Molo doesn’t actually have to be good at this job, because the point of this trial isn’t to win — though I’m sure Musk wouldn’t mind a win. The point is to punish Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI. Musk has done that pretty thoroughly — reinforcing in the public’s mind that Altman is a liar and a snake. This morning, I read an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal that assorted Republican AGs and the House Oversight committee wanted to look into Sam Altman’s investments. References to the trial are peppered throughout the article.


Oh sure, the trial is maybe 5% a Hail Mary and 95% about distracting and disrupting OpenAI. I read "behind this" to mean more-clandestine moves, e.g. planting stories, conducting and leaking oppo, amplifying negative media on X, et cetera.


It does seem like there is a ton of negative PR and sentiment on social media (including HN) about anything Altman and even Dario do. Like, way more than warranted. It looks more and more like a coordinated campaign, a la https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Elon even explicitly threatened the OpenAI guys that they would be "the most hated" people on earth, and given what we've seen him do with Twitter, I strongly suspect there indeed is a submarine with Elon at the periscope.

Altman may be getting the brunt of the AI backlash, but the impact of AI is still extremely preliminary, and it will happen regardless of anything he does. As you mentioned, it doesn't help that these guys are telling the world AI will disrupt all the jobs but... at this point, I think they're just being honest.

As shifty as Altman is, I wonder how he gets more hate than Elon, who has objectively done way more concrete damage to the world.


Everyone knows a lot of the scumbag things Elon has done/does so it's not really worth talking about until he does something novel, people are still shedding light on the scumbag things the Sam has done so naturally it's being discussed more frequently as people share what they just learnt.

It would be fair to argue that in a just world Elon would suffer more consequences for being more of a scumbag than Sam but we all know justice doesn't apply to the rich in the US (occasionally this seems untrue but only because other rich people are pissed off at the rich person and they want them tarred and feathered).


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