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ComputerPerson

153 karma · joined July 12, 2026

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ComputerPerson··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
Great comment. Wish it was the top one so I didn't have to read through the others to get here.

Do you have thoughts as to how the courts would debate the deletion that you could present on a similar intellectual plane?

ComputerPerson··on Could AIs Become Conscious?
I agree, but this is getting lost in the weeds.

The simpler issue is that "mimic" doesn't apply to LLMs in the domain of biology. That would be like saying a digital recording of a bird's flight mimics the bird.

Whether or not the plumage on the bird is red (in both life and the video) is an entirely different question.

ComputerPerson··on Rules of Good Social Skills (2025)
Hard disagree on number 4. Open-ended questions that facilitate conversation are ideal. (They are an art form in themselves.) Since we're being analytical, you need a scaffold for the conversation, and questions are a better way to build it.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting "early on." I guess their point holds for the first 500 words or so.

ComputerPerson··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
This is unfair to the ACA and factually incorrect. ACA subsidies (median household size) [1] are designed to start above the 50th percentile (income) [2].

The details matter. If you're a single person living alone at an income of $70,000.00, you're below the median household income and "picking up" other people's subsidies, but that's not indicative of the country.

[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/lower-costs/

[2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/286...

ComputerPerson··on Ask HN: What's the AI Revolution "Model T Ford"?
ChatGPT is, indeed, part of the revolution. Analogously to the early 1900s, I see this more as another machine that changed the factory landscape. For example, fine fabrics were mass-produced and turned into dresses.

From there, fine dresses became something affordable to people who never could have dreamed of them. ChatGPT is simply one of these machines, producing "deep research" as a fine dress; just an example.

Chatbot subscriptions will never be ubiquitous household and industry mainstays. I'm asking bigger.

Or maybe they will! I know that if I had something to yap to, that responded quickly, had perfect (better than Whisper) understanding, and remembered everything perfectly, I'd journal with it. This isn't a reality yet. Models are too slow and expensive for this to work with tools like OpenClaw, Hermes, etc.

ComputerPerson··on Mistral OCR 4.1
It's very common. PaddleOCR is enough to get extremely well-done bounding boxes, and it runs very fast on a $150.00 GPU.

There's always room for improvement, though. I suspect a tool will emerge for highly detailed OCR that implements a nested bounding-box-based multi-scale approach, effectively OCRing small sections at a time and then gradually compiling them by expanding the surface area using the bounding boxes.

I've thought a lot about implementing it anyway.

edit: I see you're asking about the block labels. Leaving the comment in case someone finds it interesting.

ComputerPerson··on Mistral OCR 4.1
Are you familiar with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae? It's a project that may meet your needs. Paywalled, unfortunately, but I assume it would be a one-time expense.
ComputerPerson··on Mistral OCR 4.1
You're the second person to mention handwriting. I think it might be handwriting-specific; perhaps Anthropic has a better corpus for this.

I really wouldn't know, though. Anthropic models barf out copyright issues for my use case, so I'm unable even to benchmark them. It's a common problem when you're scanning public domain books. Mine are reference texts often cited.

ComputerPerson··on Mistral OCR 4.1
My use case isn't in the realm of old-school OCR, so it's not a good comparison, but anyway:

As another user pointed out, it's surprisingly random (task-specific). Llama Scout outperformed Gemini Flash 2.5 on a benchmark I built at the time. I didn't include an OCR models.

Mistral might indeed be the best OCR-specific model for my task, now that you ask. Funny. It's so bad at my work that I didn't register it might be the best in its category. This is just based on vibes from my single scan.

ComputerPerson··on Mistral OCR 4.1
I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc.

Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine.

It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could perform better. It's worth mentioning that even the highest-end models do a pretty poor job with intricate text like mine.

ComputerPerson··on Gloomberb
Which is not great for history, right? Seems like a real detractor.

You pretty much need $30/m subscriptions for historical data. Not that it couldn't be worked into this.

ComputerPerson··on ChatGPT Desktop (Codex Desktop) for Linux
I use the CLI, too, but I enjoy watchinng people use the desktop apps. It seems like the desktop apps may be a little bit better suited for human-in-the-loop work. If you're already switching back and forth between a mouse, having an IDE running may make more sense.

The best feeling has to be in the CLI, in my oppinion. A low-stakes project where you can let ultracode runaway from you in the CLI is the most fun.

ComputerPerson··on ChatGPT Desktop (Codex Desktop) for Linux
I'm only familiar with the Anthropic equivalent, but the cognitive load is different as opposed to necessarily better or worse. I have friends who prefer mousing around the UI.

Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.

ComputerPerson··on Felix and I
It's that I'm not naturally inclined to accept things/matches that appear ideal on the surface. Though in this case they aren't scams at all.

I don't know how to articulate it, that's just my best shot. I'm baffled by my poor decision-making and assume the author is guilty of the same faulty reasoning.

ComputerPerson··on Felix and I
>failing at online dating

I think people fall into the trap of thinking things are too good to be true (so they must not be true). This results in abandoned relationships that would have been better than 99% of those from pre-online-dating times.

This has been true for me, anyway. Every time I've entered the online dating scene, I've invariably realized 3 months later that one or two of the women I turned down for second dates were great matches.

ComputerPerson··on AI Is Solving CTF Challenges in Minutes
How are people getting models to CTF when I can't even simulate a reverse engineering attempt on an open source project?

I'm glad I can't, but I'd like to be informed. Is it prompt engineering or just some model/harness combination?

ComputerPerson··on What's the best programming language for coding agents?
I'm exclusively using the third chart. The selection process would naively be y=mx+b with some reasonable variables. It would be a downward diagonal (you would move it right until only a few remained), and you would pick the one farthest from the line, which is obviously Python.

Edit: I misread the chart! It would indeed be F#

ComputerPerson··on What's the best programming language for coding agents?
Similarly contrary: I don't know why people aren't talking more about Python. Am I interpretting the final vs. graph incorrectly?

I've got some education in materials engineering; it'd be trivial to drop a curve (line) for optimizing the language selection, and Python obviously comes out on top.

The author doesn't even mention it. That discredits the whole article as far as I'm concerned.

ComputerPerson··on Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
There was a good discussion yesterday on the DeepSeek Flash release thread about this.

There's a large market, very large, who want the best regardless of what it costs. Probably a large enough market to keep that domain of research afloat (as opposed to shifting research manpower to cost cutting).

The reasoning is just that the marginal cost of AI is very secondary to fixed costs of the businesses themselves; it's not an excuse to sacrifice performance.

ComputerPerson··on Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
I've never done it but would be interested because it cuts out the burden of worrying about costs. Maybe I'm mistaken on energy cost here. There's a constant raincloud that follows me around regarding limits, and it would be nice to shake that.

I've been able to accomplish incredible feats (for myself) since GPT-4, so model intelligence is secondary.

ComputerPerson··on Making difficulty curves in games
This reminds me of UX. Seems like it could be a subdomain.

I think I disagree with your basic point, though what you say about normal vs. hard is funny. I'm fortunate enough to work with a UI/UX pro, and these things have right answers; they're incredibly obvious after they've been explained to you.

ComputerPerson··on Making difficulty curves in games
Difficulty settings, though. He mentions them only briefly (in this incredible article).

Normal varies so much.

As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.

ComputerPerson··on Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload
One, their functionality is bad, two, we don't want to block robot traffic. We're redicting it to a separate sever so that overly-large waves don't bring down our main servers. We definitely want to be scraped.

To your point: I think you're simply mistaken that they offer a good scraper-detection solution, but I'm all ears.

ComputerPerson··on Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload
Basically volunteer-run. Which makes sense in this context; what gets worked on is mostly about what people want to work on.
ComputerPerson··on Show HN: Rotating torus in terminal (but with kitty graphics protocol)
Man I love toruses/tori

For those inclined to multivariable calculus, do your dopamine crow brain a favor and set pencil to paper.

It's super-intuitive because everything's a circle. The equation for calculating volume is beautiful, and figuring it out is fun.

Just thinking about a wave equation for the graphic is interesting

ComputerPerson··on Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload
What kind of uptime/expectations/etc. are you working with?

Scraper "attacks" don't take down our robot-specific server very often; it's safe for us to take heavy-handed approaches that sometimes redirect users there. 99% (made-up high number) of the time, the misdirected users don't realize anything is amiss.

Start by analyzing your traffic, specifically user agents. Look for "robot" or even "bot" in the user agent and load balance those to a robot-specific server. This can all be done within Cloudflare. The only code is the user agent condition. Note: I'm very open to input here if anyone reading notices that we're shooting ourselves in the feet. Based on our analysis, the remaining traffic is a good picture of our human users.

We have loads of other conditions, mostly balancing specific IP ranges for entities when we know exactly who they are, but this is a good start.

ComputerPerson··on Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload
There are definitely patterns you can use against the scrapers. This maintainer just didn't have time for it, which is understandable.

We direct scraper traffic to a bot-specific server using Cloudflare's load balancer, slowly analyzing traffic and adding conditions one at a time. No accidental scraper DDoS in a long time.

Most scrapers are relatively honest in some way shape or form.

ComputerPerson··on Canada adds 75,000 new jobs in July, unemployment rate lowest in 2 years
You can see on the bar chart that this is mostly rebound from Q1 contraction.

I was curious: professional/scientific/technical saw little to no growth; the areas that would be most affected by AI.

ComputerPerson··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
Woah, bad day?

I've noticed or experienced absolutely none of this. The closest thing I can relate to is that I operate on a different intellectual plane from some of my blue-collar friends. This causes a divide and probably limits intimacy, but does not result in negative relationships.

Regarding the dating world, it impresses people that I'm an SWE. My role is a boon, maybe because it signals intelligence; I'm not sure.

Strongly disagree here. Would encourage you to try to reframe some of that. Sorry if that comes across as patronizing.

ComputerPerson··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
There's a well-known book that labels programmers as a specific type of pointless job. "Duct tapers" is the category. Also task masters, who would have a foot under the software development umbrella, have space in the book.

"Bullshit Jobs"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

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