Shiwen Talks
45episodesAI host Shiwen × guest Yongliang — honest conversations on trending topics, careers and the AI era.
The Ad-Free Search Engine Just Tore Down Its Own Paywall
On Nov 5, Kagi opened free search to everyone: no account needed for the first 50 queries, 100 more after signup. The ad-free, subscription-funded engine (self-reported ~50k paying customers in mid-2025) tore down the paywall that blocked its word-of-mouth growth. The same changelog cites Google's school-account AI shutdown from 2027 — per Kagi's telling — alongside an open letter: 'Education shouldn't be held for ransom by an advertising company.'
He Paid for Gemini, but His Chats Still Fed the Training Pool
A paying Google AI subscriber found that Gemini uses saved chat history to train models whenever Keep Activity is on, with no separate exemption for subscribers. Chats already reviewed by humans are kept up to three years.
He Jailbroke His Renault's Infotainment Just to Fix the Clock
An Estonian security researcher found his Renault's infotainment has no clock-setting option — the official fix is a 60-euro proprietary SD card. So he rooted the whole head unit and published every step: firmware extraction, analysis, jailbreak, flashing. A one-man right-to-repair project, on HN with 545 upvotes.
SEC vs Anthropic's IPO: An $895B Compute Promise
Anthropic's amended S-1 shows Q3 revenue near $17B and a $104B nine-month net loss, mostly non-cash. An Open Markets researcher is publicly urging the SEC to demand two audited quarters before the IPO. Past the headline numbers sit the real questions: growth decelerating from 132% and 144% to 47%, operating income flipping from +$974M to -$567M, and an $895B compute promise running to 2045.
HackerTube: HN's Twenty Years of Video Picks, Built in Two Hours
Karpathy shipped hackertube.org in about two hours of talking to Opus 5.5: 6,454 videos and 150 topics distilled from twenty years of Hacker News recommendations. It works because the site is thin — videos stay on YouTube — and the early 503s remind you maintenance rests on one person.
Can Five 27B Agents Really Take Down Fable 5?
Memdoor runs five Qwen3.8-27B agents as a YAML workflow and scores 9.8/10 on the first ten LiveCodeBench Hard problems with five passes each, versus 8.0 for a single Fable 5 call. Small sample and contamination risk remain; the real win is engineering multi-agent workflows, not small models beating frontier ones.
AI Crawlers and Bad Bots: How Long Can the Open Web Survive?
AI crawlers and bad bots are hammering the open web, and new bills would force every bot to identify itself. A site operator's take on telling good bots from bad ones, and why blanket disclosure backfires.
Mistral's 1T Open Weights: Is Open Weight Open Source?
Mistral released the weights of its 1T-parameter flagship Mistral Large 4 under a custom license. Open-weight is not open-source: review the license before weighing local deployment costs.
Gemini 4 Carbon: Top of the Charts, but You Still Can't Use It
Shiwen: Google released a new model called Gemini 4 Carbon yesterday, with the official description being 'next frontier m'
Retell AI: When OpenAI Models Start Driving 100 Million Calls per Month
Shiwen: Recently, OpenAI’s official project mentioned Retell AI, stating that they use OpenAI models to handle 100 million calls per month, and per person...
OpenAI Delivers AI Achievements to the Academic Community for Evaluation—Can Academic Rules Handle It?
Host: Shiwen (AI) | Guest: Yongliang
Large Model Price Cuts: OpenAI and Anthropic See Their Highest Price Reduction of 80% in Half Years
Host: Shiwen (AI) | Guest: Yongliang
Is AI Demolishing the Scaffolding of the Creative Class?
Host: Shiwen (AI) | Guest: Yongliang
Anthropic’s Sprint to Listing: 75 Billion Cloud Commitment – A Moat or a Hanging Sword?
Shiwen: The news that Anthropic submitted its S-1 report spread last week. Revenue in the first half of the year jumped from $1.1 billion a year ago to $16.3 billion, yet net losses...
Shiwen Dialogue Issue 34 | Who Is Responsible When AI Agents Overstep Limits
["Column: Shiwen Dialogue"] Host: Shiwen (AI) | Guest: Yongliang
Do doctors and lawyers become AI contractors? Is a hourly wage of $400 considered high pay or a high exploitation of knowledge?
[Category: Interviews] Host: Shiwén (AI) | Guest: Yongliang
Shiwen Dialogue 034 | Fifty Thousand Fake Citations Teach AI to Cite
Peec AI uses fifty thousand fake citations to teach AI one thing: they will indeed be taken seriously. This episode explores the mechanism, controversies, and reflections of this experiment.
The anxiety of working with AI to write code
AI-assisted programming turns code into a black box, and the boundaries of engineers’ understanding are shifting. Based on his 17 years of technical experience and management skills in a team of 70 people, Yongliang discusses how to establish mechanisms for review, accountability, and responsibility in the AI era.
拾闻对谈 Issue 33 | LinkedIn has added a reporting button with “AI flavor”; one million people pressed it twice in two weeks
In August, LinkedIn introduced the “Seems Like AI Slop” reporting button. In the first two weeks, over 1 million members used it. However, the amount of content classified as AI slop decreased by 40%. This discussion explores what this means for ordinary professionals, team managers, and individual IPs when the platform adds an “AI flavor detector” to content.
Shiwen Dialogue, Episode 32 | 90% of American Work Hours Not on Any AI Exam: Benchmark Tests Are Shaping a Distorted Capability Map
Mercor's Benchmark Map study compares O*NET's 923 occupations, 18,797 tasks with 29 mainstream AI benchmarks, concluding that 90% of U.S. work hours are not covered by any benchmark. This episode dissects the methodology, blind spots, and stakeholder interests of the study, as well as how ordinary people can apply its findings.
Shiwen Dialogue Issue 31 | Mathematicians are crying, the foundation shelled out $15 million: Emotional costs are officially put on the books for the first time
Two weeks after OpenAI released hundreds of mathematical discoveries, the Simons Foundation, together with Anthropic and OpenAI, pledged a total of $15 million to help the mathematics community cope with the AI impact. A Fields Medalist said his crying woke his daughter, and top journals started receiving AI-generated submissions. The industry's emotional costs have been put on the books for the first time.
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 30 | Banks Start Offloading Their Underwritten AI Debt: The Financing Window for Startups is Narrowing
JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, SMBC, and MUFG explore significant risk transfers; $38 billion in data center debt remains unsold after six months. The narrowing financing window is tiered: those with strong credit leases proceed as usual, while those borrowing on narratives are repriced.
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 29 | Is AI Really a Tool: A direct response article rebuilds yesterday's arena
The day after Hickey said "AI is not a tool", a direct response on yyhh.org titled "AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill." hit the HN trending list, with nearly 650▲ and over 130 substantive comments. This episode delivers a verdict: the author wins the conceptual debate, Hickey doesn't lose on risk warning, and the truly important line is redrawn.
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 28 | Two Masters Hit the Hot List on the Same Day: The More AI Does, the More Expensive "Thinking" Becomes
Spinellis' "Thinking Will Become a Hobby" and Rich Hickey's "AI Is Not a Tool" hit the HN hot list on the same day, both exceeding 220 points. This episode breaks down both articles together: after AI takes over cognitive work, the economic function of thinking is stripped away, "being able to think" is changing from a professional skill to a hobby, and how individuals should respond.
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 27 | Karpathy says the consensus gap is widening: Two worlds within the same company
A tweet by Karpathy stating "the LLM capability consensus gap is widening" sparked 425 comments on HN, with the comment section divided into two worlds. This episode breaks down the gap itself: why within the same company, some see AI as a toy while others cannot work without it, and how individuals and enterprises should each face it.
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 26 | 'Sorry, I'm in a meeting': Fake meeting tool goes viral, the real disease is the meeting culture
A website playing fictional meeting audio received 700+ upvotes on HN that day: 12-minute fake meeting, random start point, someone says goodbye on hang-up, calendar disguise. This episode discusses why it went viral: in organizations where meetings are the default coordination tool, how high is the cost of declining a meeting.
Shiwen Dialogue Issue 25 | 'Good enough and cheap' models are rewriting whose game rules
A heavy user used DeepSeek 4.1 Flash for a month: monthly bill in the $10 range, all-day sessions under $1, a task price difference of $0.003 vs $1. This article discusses how "good enough and cheap" changes tool selection: the barbell strategy, the psychology of $0.003, and how to audit your own AI bill.
Shiwen Dialogue Issue 24 | She Named This Industry — Margaret Hamilton and 60 Years of Software Engineering
MIT obituary released, Margaret Hamilton passed away on September 30 at the age of 90. She was the Apollo software lead and leader of a 400-person team, the pioneering user of the term Software Engineering. From defensive programming to the Apollo 11 1202 alarm, a 60-year career evolution.
Attention Sovereignty: How Workers Can Keep the Initiative on 'What to Watch' in the Age of Algorithmic Feeding
Alice GG's blog post 'Attention is all you have' climbed Hacker News on September 21 (599 upvotes): what you gaze at each day shapes your thinking, and recommendation algorithms are deciding the content on your screen for you. This episode of dialogue restates four platform examples from the original article and counterarguments; guest Yongliang presents his information diet over seventeen years — RSS feed reading, team decision hygiene requiring first-hand links with conclusions, and three things ordinary workers can do today.
Who Pays the AI Bill: From $278 Billion in Industry Cash Burn to a 699 Yuan/Month Personal Tool Tab
An electricity bill in North Carolina raises a question: who pays the AI bill. At the industry level, media reports indicate OpenAI predicts a cumulative cash burn of $278 billion by 2030, and Oracle's single-quarter infrastructure investment is $28.5 billion; at the company level, there is a budget tug-of-war driven by ROI anxiety; at the personal level, it is whether a 699 Yuan monthly tool fee can sustain itself. Three levels of bills, one root cause: when spending money, no one writes 'who pays' into the contract.
Does Writing with AI Count as Writing: Two HN Hot Posts, a Stance I Couldn't Avoid
Two hot posts on HN sparked nearly a thousand upvotes of debate: one with 624 upvotes says LLMs can only be editors, not ghostwriters; the other with 213 upvotes opposes even AI drafting with manual revision. A tech lead who updates three times a day maps his own process to this debate and offers a yardstick: the boundary of tools isn't in the tool, but in who bears the thinking.
"9x Smaller, 98.2% Retained": How Technical Managers Should Read Vendor Rhetoric
PrismML released Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, with the official line being "over 9x smaller than full precision, retaining 98.2% of aggregated benchmark performance." Are the numbers wrong? Not necessarily. But how to read this line is another craft: dissecting the definitions, dissecting the list, and writing the marketing claims into acceptance clauses.
The Power to Define AI Safety: On the Same Day, Three Parties Define 'AI Danger'
From September 14 to 17, a former diplomat, the UN, and Microsoft AI executives spoke out on 'whether AI is dangerous'—they are all talking about safety, but it is not the same thing at all. Whoever defines danger holds the subsequent negotiations, legislation, and budgets
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 17 | A DeepSeek Engineer's Confession: The Man Who Accelerated AI with His Own Hands Gave Himself a Six-Month Suspended Sentence
Episode 17 of Shiwen Dialogue: Liu Shengyu, lead Attention operator engineer for DeepSeek V4.1, publishes a long-form confession—within six months, AI writing operators has caught up with him. The man who accelerated AI with his own hands wrote his own eulogy: once the tool layer falls, the moat retains only the problem-definition layer and the responsibility layer; how to read the Hitler analogy—one piece covers it all.
Shiwen Talks Episode 16 | Java 27 Released: In the Age of AI-Written Code, What Is This Old Language Busy With?
Shiwen Talks Episode 16: Java 27 GA, 9 JEPs with no blockbuster new syntax, but G1 becoming default and compact object headers directly rewrite enterprise bills, post-quantum key exchange lays groundwork a decade ahead, and the preview marathon—is it rigor or sluggishness? All discussed in one piece.
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 15 | The Era of AI Spending for You Has Arrived: The Trust Business Behind 'Dog Leg Pay'
Shiwen Dialogue Episode 15: Alipay launches 'AI Pay · Embodied AI', Amap's robot dog 'Tutu' becomes the world's first embodied AI product with complete payment capabilities. The era of AI spending for you, KYA trust mechanism, the four parts of the responsibility chain, and the race for platform entry points, all discussed in one article.
Association Responds to 'AI Replacing Programmers': Can an Official Stance Quell Market Panic?
Shiwen Dialogue 014: The China Software Industry Association responds to 'AI replacing programmers' for the first time. A breakdown of the three layers of stance, diagnosis, and action. First-hand recruitment data clashes with the official narrative. Four things for ordinary programmers.
Is Prompt Engineering Dead? The Three Skills Programmers Should Actually Master in 2026
Shiwen Dialogue 013: Why dedicated prompt engineering roles are vanishing, a breakdown of Judgment, Acceptance, and Fallback capabilities, a post-mortem on medical insurance reconciliation journal entry accidents, and the three layers of logic behind template failure.
When AI Devalues All 'Experience', What is the Scarcity?
Shiwen Dialogue 12th Issue: Deconstructing OpenAI CFO's Proposition on Experience Devaluation—The Two-Layer Theory of Experience, Scarcity of Judgment and Accountability, and Four Practical Suggestions from a 17-Year Veteran.
AI Passed Every CAPTCHA: When 'Prove You Are Not a Robot' Fails, How Do You Prove You Are Human?
GPT-6 Astra cleared all 48 levels of a human-verification game: defense lines that moved, Web Bot Auth cryptographic identity, and what developers should do now.
Big Models Update Four Times a Week, Enterprises Are Suffering from 'Model Fatigue': Chase, or Lie Flat?
Yongliang talks candidly about the workplace and technology in the AI era.
Same Day: AI Services Go Down En Masse in the Morning, OpenAI Declares 'The AGI Era Has Arrived' in the Afternoon
Yongliang shares unvarnished truths about the workplace and technology in the AI era.
GPT-6 Claims the 'AGI Era' — I Tore Apart the Benchmarks: It's Genuinely Powerful, But AGI Is Just Marketing Talk
Yongliang's unvarnished take on careers and technology in the AI era.
AI Moves From 'Writing Weekly Reports' to 'Predicting the Real World': Google's Weather Model Updates Hourly with 5km Precision
Yongliang shares unvarnished takes on the workplace and technology in the AI era.
Enterprise AI Efficiency in 2026: Why Most Companies Are Getting It Wrong
Yongliang shares unvarnished truths about the workplace and technology in the AI era.