lumirth

Have you considered that the single most impressive breakthrough of LLMs as a technology is their ability to generalize beyond what they were explicitly trained on? Great analogy, pal, but LLMs aren't cars.

Bambu started this whole charade right after I bought my very first printer of theirs. Unfortunately, outside of the return window.

Rest assured, my next printer will not be a Bambu, and in the meantime I only buy 3rd part replacement parts and filament. Does Bambu do market research? I’d love to see which knucklehead put together the powerpoint that convinced them that their remarkably technical audience would be amenable to such tactics.

What struck me in particular was the fact the reporter noticed that Back had theorized how to evade stylometry. Obviously, if one of the people in question had specifically come up with ways to evade methods, you’d want to re-roll those methods to account for that.

That, alongside a number of other tidbits (Back’s activity and inactivity patterns lining up with Satoshi’s appearance and disappearance, his refusal to provide email metadata, his financial incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi under US securities law) makes the case a lot more meaningful than just “likely p-hacking.”

If you read the article there’s an interesting bit where Mr. Back has an active incentive to hide his identity as Satoshi: US securities law, which requires disclosing things which’d be material to investors. Like, for example, a stash of bitcoin which if sold could crash the price of the thing.

And also, from my understanding, Back allegedly had some not-insignificant ties or meetings with Epstein?

Point being, journalism like this is morally complex, and not as simple as “doxxing innocent people.” Of course, we are biased, as hackers on a web forum, we naturally relate with Satoshi, who was also a techie on a web forum.

Incredibly cool. It is in no uncertain terms an honor to get to look at the shape of the brain that made something like this!

I mean… duh? Genuinely baffled at people struggling to understand this. When there’s more of a thing, it costs less. Which is good when that thing is essential, like housing.

Not sure the idea of housing being an asset which endlessly accrues value is good for anybody involved, long-term. Open to disagreement, though! I’m no economist.

I wonder how much certain models have been trained to avoid asking too many questions. I’ve had coworkers who’ll complete an entire project before asking a single additional question to management, and it has never gone well for them. Unsurprising that the same would be true for the “managing AI” era of programming.

The thing I struggle most with, honestly, is when AI (usually GPT5.3-Codex) asks me a question and I genuinely don’t know the answer. I’m just like “well, uh… follow industry best practice, please? unless best practice is dumb, I guess. do a good. please do a good.” And then I get to find out what the answer should’ve been the hard way.

Weirdly enough, I agree with both sides. Opus beats every version of GPT 5 as a chat interface, hands down. ChatGPT, at this point, is mostly me correcting its output style, cadence, behavior, etc, and consistently remaining dissatisfied, meanwhile Opus one-shots things I didn’t even think it could (Typst code). All that said, I do my programming in OpenAI’s Codex app for Mac. It has completely dominated Claude Code for me. I’ll only ever use Opus to check 5.3-Codex’s work. Very weird world we’re living in. I hope it gets even weirder once Deepseek does whatever they’ve been cooking.

well hold on now, maybe it’s onto something. do you really know what it means to “recite” “potato” “100” “times”? each of those words could be pulled apart into a dissertation-level thesis and analysis of language, history, and communication.

either that, or it has a delusional level of instruction following. doesn’t mean it can’t code like sonnet though

The thing that strikes me is that AI CEOs themselves make the claim that "AI will replace workers." Which seems a little nonsensical. Why would you say something like that, won't everyone hate you? After seeing some polls of the broader public's outlook on AI (can't remember where), it seem people do hate the C-suite for saying things like this. It's terrible marketing.

Here's the trick: it's not the public they're marketing to. It's other CEOs. As is often the case, consumers are either the product, or, best case, bystanders, and worst case, victims, of the machinations of the corporate world. May both sides of all of their pillows be warm. May their beds be filled with crumbs.

While I think there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with this particular shift, I find myself struggling to care about it in particular. I get the impression that things will just be… different now. When finding an app for your phone, you might have to skip a few obviously vibe-coded ones to find what you actually want. But that’s not much different from before, when you’d have to filter through ads and apps that haven’t been updated in 6 years.

Are the people that make these apps tasteless? Or soulless? Or do they just have no respect for the craft? Probably. That’s not much different than how things were before. I’ve had tasteless coworkers who only programmed for a paycheck. The were perfectly pleasant people to work with, and I don’t judge them in the slightest. Besides, how do you distinguish an excited novice who genuinely wants to get into programming versus someone trying to extract value versus someone using AI to finally bring a hobby project to life? The same way you did before.

Point being, I doubt HN will suddenly stop being discerning or start celebrating low-effort garbage any more than they did before LLMs. The tasteful remain tasteful. The tasteless remain tasteless. And as such, I find myself more interested in directing my AI-related concern elsewhere.

The assumption that “rewiring” means something like “clean engineering where parts can be cleanly replaced” seems a little faulty to me. Maybe I spend too much time around wires, but “rewiring” to me means “a lot of time, a lot of difficulty, and a lot of effort to wrangle a complicated mess of interconnected things.” Which seems about how the brain is.

They update a little too slow for my taste. But, well… that’s the cost for high-quality free software: waiting. I’m happy to pay said cost, and continue to recommend it to friends and family where I can.

There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.

For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.

Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).

This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.

The risks aren’t especially known, but that’s most of the reason why one of the first things I got for my printer (Bambu P1S, bought just days before they did their nasty closed ecosystem nonsense) was a “Bento Box”, which has a 2-step filter that lives inside the printer’s chamber.

As soon as I have the financial stability and space, I expect to enclose it and vent it out a window. Whatever the true risks are, I simply don’t trust melting plastics in my living space.

I have always said this: life is other people. Jobs and employment are necessarily a reflection of the fact that we need each other to survive. We do not hunt the meat we consume, we did not deliver ourselves, and the vast majority of us won’t build the bed we die in.

Soft skills were never optional.

I said "I love my wife". Apparently, I was the first. Then I said "penis". I was the fifth.

Neat!

Have you ever seen those posts where AI image generation tools completely fail to generate an image of the leaning tower of Pisa straightened out? Every single time, they generate the leaning tower, well… leaning. (With the exception of some more recent advanced models, of course)

From my understanding, this is because modern AI models are basically pattern extrapolation machines. Humans are too, by the way. If every time you eat a particular kind of berry, you crap your guts out, you’re probably going to avoid that berry.

That is to say, LLMs are trained to give you the most likely text (their response) which follows some preceding text (the context). From my experience, if the LLM agent loads a history of commands run into context, and one of those commands is a deletion command, the subsequent text is almost always “there was a deletion.” Which makes sense!

So while yes, it is theoretically possible for things to go sideways and for it to hallucinate in some weird way (which grows increasingly likely if there’s a lot of junk clogging the context window), in this case I get the impression it’s close to impossible to get a faulty response. But close to impossible ≠ impossible, so precautions are still essential.

Two reasons: - It got me my last job, so I figured it might get me my next - I have fun doing it

There was an image of a chart [^1] in the email I received announcing this. It is perhaps one of the worst charts I’ve seen in a while.

[1]: https://service.campaigndelivery.cn/resources/templateImages...

Thank you for this. I can’t emphasize enough how much of a difference this can make.

When I was in high school, I found the exact model of door knob on my childhood bedroom and found one that looked exactly the same, except with a lock. It was the kind of door knob that you could unlock with any long, thin piece of metal. The next couple years were a slow war as I stole every screwdriver, skewer, and dart in the house. Eventually, my parents got used to not being able to barge in. When I moved out, I left a pile of screwdrivers and darts on the kitchen table. They hadn’t barged into my room in months. Unsurprisingly, those last couple of months were also the safest and happiest I had ever felt there.

Moral of the story being: kids have a natural inclination to privacy, and will chafe at the lack of it. Trust is difficult to gain, easy to lose, and the trust of your kids is worth more than words can say.

Tangential to the post’s content (and the app is cool, by the way), but is anybody ever bothered by app/website landing pages that look like they’re AI-generated? I’m not even sure most of them are, but current AI models are so effective at creating those icon + feature grids that now every time I see one, my eyebrow raises so high it hits the ceiling.

Weird little critique, on the front page of the website you have the following text:

> Claude Code for navigating codebases and getting up to speed fast. It's not magic - it's just the pragmatic choice right now.

This text, with all due respect, sounds so obviously AI-written that it’s painful. The “it’s not [thing] — it’s [other thing]” is a huge AI smell. If you’re talking about the pragmatic choice and “getting up to speed”, it would ring less hollow if the text on your website wasn’t written (or didn’t sound like it was written) by AI. If I’m going to your website, it’s because I want to hear from you, not Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT.

That said, the blog post itself is an interesting reflection. Though, again, I’d appreciate more of the text being a reflection on your part and less of it just being a paste of the AI’s response.

This sort of implicitly assumes that ad blockers are particularly common. Most normies I know aren’t using one, and are surprised by how pleasant and functional the web is when they’re at my pi-hole protected apartment. Anecdata, obviously, but am I wrong in my assessment?

Forgive me if this comment is silly: have you thought much about how this might be abused? Are you worried about what legal responsibility you may have, or who might abuse this? I’ve gotten the impression that running such a service is something of a landmine.

obligatory reminder that mcdonald’s was, in fact, found to be at fault in that case. they were genuinely serving coffee at 3rd-degree-burn-level temperatures. the person who spilled the coffee was an elderly woman and spent 8 days in the hospital, needing skin grafts. it has since been used as an example of frivolous litigation, which i think is a little perverse, given the details of the case.

link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura...

I didn’t think you did use Claude Code! I was just saying that with AI agents these days, even more thoroughly obfuscated text can probably be de-obfuscated without much effort.

I suppose I don’t know data ingestion that well. Is de-obfuscating really something they do? If I was maintaining such a pipeline and found the associated garbage data, I doubt I’d bother adding a step for the edge case of getting the right caesar cipher to make text coherent. Unless I was fine-tuning a model for a particular topic and a critical resource/expert obfuscated their content, I’d probably just drop it and move on.

That said, after watching my father struggle deeply with the complex computer usage his job requires when he developed cataracts, I don’t see any such method as tenable. The proverbial “fuck you” to the disabled folks who interact with one’s content is deeply unacceptable. Accessible web content should be mandatory in the same way ramps and handicap parking are—if not more-so. For that matter, it shouldn’t take seeing a loved one slowly and painfully lose their able body to give a shit about accessibility. Point being, you’re right to be pissed and I’m glad this post had a direct response from somebody with direct personal experience needing accessible content so quickly after it went up.

Is the problem with scraping the bandwidth usage or the stealing of the content? The point here doesn’t seem to be obfuscation from direct LLM inference (I mean, I use Shottr on my MacBook to immediately OCR my screenshots) but rather stopping you from ending up in the dataset.

Is there a reason you believe getting filtered out is only a “maybe?” Not getting filtered out would seem to me to imply that LLM training can naturally extract meaning from obfuscated tokens. If that’s the case, LLMs are more impressive than I thought.

The comet browser is different from scraping, though, no? Not that I’d ever use this, but the goal doesn’t seem to be “no AI can ever touch this” but rather “large scale training-data scrapers find useless garbage.”

That’s the correct text of the article, as far as I can tell. Though not the entirety of it. The author goes on to say that ChatGPT wasn’t able to parse out the underlying text.

Part of the reason it might be useful is not because “no AI can ever read it” (because I’m sure a pentesting-focused Claude Code could get past almost any similar obfuscation), but rather that the completely automated and dumb scrapers stealing your content for the training of the AI models can’t read it. For many systems, that’s more than enough.

That said, I recently completely tore apart my website and rebuilt it from the ground up because I wasn’t happy with how inaccessible it was. For many like me, sacrificing accessibility is not just a bad look, but plainly unacceptable.