cpeterso

What tools or AGENTS.md prompts do you find effective for humanizing LLM output? Default GPT output is acceptable, but Claude is unbearable.

The “Simplified Technical English” fad was pretty effective, but now I just specify:

  - Use short sentences and active voice.
  - NEVER use the phrases "load-bearing", "seam", "unlock", "real", or “learnings”.

Early Rust had a ‘pure’ function annotation, too, but it was removed as unnecessary as the borrow checker evolved and became central to Rust’s safety story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940624

Maybe new models training on the previous generation’s synthetic output is compounding the effect? LLM Ouroboros.

I find Claude’s writing unbearable. That ChatGPT offers personalization options (Base style, warmth, enthusiasm) and Claude doesn’t suggests Anthropic doesn’t recognize this as a problem. Plus, people sharing ChatGPT writing won’t all have the same voice.

Google published a short video this week about how they used Gemini 4 Argon to migrate a Fortran code base to Rust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biOWEPYyS5c

[delayed]

You’re right. I looked it up: getting the number of files in a directory in FAT and FAT32 file systems is O(n). I had assumed the count would be recorded in an inode-like structure but instead the file system must scan a directory table to count the non-null entries.

> Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Raymond’s selectRandomFromIterator algorithm requires iterating over all the files. It seems like querying the file system for the number of files in a directory should be an O(1) operation. Then you just select random number N between [1, number of files] and iterate to the Nth file.

Why does Raymond assume counting the files is an O(n) operation?

Joel Spolsky's "Fire And Motion" blog post (2002) describes the challenge of tech churn well: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.

Modularity abstraction = drawing boxes around the messy parts

Modeling abstraction = drawing lines between the boxes

Mozilla's Firefox AGENTS.md begins with:

  Limit the amount of comments you put in the code to a strict minimum. You should almost never add comments, except sometimes on non-trivial code, function definitions if the arguments aren't self-explanatory, and class definitions and their members.

  Do not remove existing comments unless they are directly related to what you are changing.

https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/AGENTS.md

Firefox on iOS is blocking third-party ads, not first-party ads.

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

In a recent interview on Conan O'Brien's podcast, Gillian Anderson said X-Files creator Chris Carter wrote his scripts visually so they didn't have any widows (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page):

Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

Send fair to me: someone’s got to test Mouse Keys! :)

I worked on Microsoft’s Windows QA team long ago. My team used to have “No-mouse Tuesdays”: you were supposed to do all your normal work but only using the keyboard.

I've found myself rewriting my own words to avoid Claudisms (because they can be cringe and I don't want people to think I'm copy/pasting Claude output at them).

> if AI were to rent a server and copy its own weights, nothing would stop it from doing so again and again.

That's a scary possibility. Anyone could create an AI worm today with open weight models. Rent a VM. Give it some Bitcoins to anonymously rent new VMs without sharing the contact information with the human. The new VMs then propagate and fund themselves with online betting and day trading. The VMs could report their progress with the human using anonymous encrypted messages on IRC or social media.

And Mozilla's blog post about shipping JPEG XL:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/08/intent-to-ship-jpeg-xl/

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421758

And Chromium intent to Ship: JPEG XL decoding support (image/jxl) in blink

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/-gDoj...