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EliasWatson

150 karma · joined March 11, 2021

contact@eliaswatson.dev

https://github.com/EliasWatson

HackerSmacker profile: https://www.hackersmacker.org/user/EliasWatson?hs=Tquh8JAC2vIzbmXgoH

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EliasWatson··on ImpactGate: A merge gate that scores the structural decay AI adds
What languages does this support? I'm guessing it's Python only, but it would be nice if that was mentioned somewhere.
EliasWatson··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
It's not that it's not good enough. It's that the cheap models are already good enough. I want a daily driver but they are trying to sell me a Ferrari. It's cool, but I have no use for it.

The term you are looking for is probably "moving the goalposts"

EliasWatson··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
To be honest, these frontier model releases have become boring for me. Opus 4.8 was already good enough for most of my use cases. I don't have any projects right now that I would use Fable for instead of Opus. So when I see announcements like this I just think "that's cool I guess" and then go back to using weaker/cheaper models.

What's far more exciting right now is models like DeepSeek V4 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash. They have achieved good-enough-intelligence at extremely low prices and fast speeds. I don't have a use for Fable-level intelligence, but I do have uses for Opus-4.8-level intelligence that I can use as much as I want without worrying about the bill.

EliasWatson··on Enabling two settings tripled our scores on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark
They had to point out the obvious because ARC-AGI-3 wasn't designed with that in mind for some reason.
EliasWatson··on Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary
I had Claude run a benchmark on scriptc vs node: https://github.com/EliasWatson/Primes/tree/typescript-script...

Looking at the byte-array results (best case): scriptc is about 7.5x slower than Node 24, even after Claude tried making some scriptc-specific optimizations. But the executable starts up 12x faster (1.5 ms vs 18.6 ms), uses 72x less memory (2.5 MiB vs 181 MiB), and is a single 370 KB executable with no runtime dependencies.

EliasWatson··on Agent swarms and the new model economics
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/prompt-caching#on-a-claude-s...

"On a Claude subscription, Claude Code requests the one-hour TTL automatically. Usage is included in your plan rather than billed per token, so the longer TTL costs you nothing extra and only affects how long your cache stays warm. If you’ve gone over your plan’s usage limit and Claude Code is drawing on usage credits, you are billed for that usage, so Claude Code automatically drops the TTL to five minutes."

EliasWatson··on Kimi Work
Yea, they had so much demand for Kimi K3 that they hit the limits of their compute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969291
EliasWatson··on Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal
ADHD can sometimes be a superpower
EliasWatson··on Lossless GIF recompression via exhaustive search
For exhaustive searches, a library like or-tools or clingo can speed things up a lot. But first you have to figure out how to express your problem declaratively.
EliasWatson··on jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
A couple things off the top of my head:

- You aren't forced to resolve rebase/merge conflicts immediately. You can switch branches halfway through resolving conflicts and then come back later and pick up where you left off. You can also just ignore the conflicts and continue editing files on the conflicted branch and then resolve the conflicts later.

- Manipulating commits is super easy (especially with jjui). I reorder commits all the time and move them between branches. Of course you can also squash and split commits, but that's already easy in git. Back when I was using git, I would rarely touch previous commits other than the occasional squash or rename. But now I frequently manipulate the commit history of my branch to make it more readable and organized.

- jj acts as a VCS for your VCS. It has an operation log that is a history of the state of the git repository. So anything that would be destructive in git (e.g. rebase, pull, squash, etc) can be undone.

- Unnamed branches is the feature that has changed my workflow the most. It's hard to explain, so I probably won't do it justice. Basically you stop thinking about things in terms of branches and instead just see it as a graph of commits. While I'm experimenting/exploring how to implement or refactor something, I can create "sub-branches" and switch between them. Similar to stashes, but each "stash" is just a normal branch that can have multiple commits. If I want to test something but I have current changes, I just `jj new`. And if I want to go back, I just make a new commit off of the previous one. And all these commits stick around, so I can go back to something I tried before. Hopefully this made some sense.

Also note that jj is fully compatible with git. I use it at work and all my coworkers use git. So it feels more like a git client than a git replacement.

EliasWatson··on jj – the CLI for Jujutsu
jj is very flexible when it comes to workflow. One thing to note is that commits don't have to have messages. What I tend to do is to run `jj new` frequently while I work on something and leave all of them without messages. Then when I'm ready to make my actual commit, I squash the temporary commits together and then add a message. If my changes are separable, I can split the commits before squashing. This workflow acts as a kind of undo history. I can easily go back to what I had 5 minutes ago and try a different approach, but then also jump back to my original changes if I want. It makes experimentation much easier compared to git.
EliasWatson··on Tinybox – A powerful computer for deep learning
The DGX Spark is probably the best bang for your buck at $4k. It's slower than my 4090 but 128gb of GPU-usable memory is hard to find anywhere else at that price. It being an ARM processor does make it harder to install random AI projects off of GitHub because many niche Python packages don't provide ARM builds (Claude Code usually can figure out how to get things running). But all the popular local AI tools work fine out of the box and PyTorch works great.
EliasWatson··on How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
The issue is that you usually aren't buying the ebook. You are buying a license to access that ebook and they can revoke that license at any time. Maybe you're okay with that, but many people want to permanently have access to the things they purchased.
EliasWatson··on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down
Yes, I agree that Monero is likely a better option. I am also a big fan of Nano because of its instant transactions and zero transaction fees. However it has the same privacy problem as Bitcoin. It would be interesting to see a hybrid of Nano and Monero.
EliasWatson··on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down
This is the kind of problem that Bitcoin was designed to solve.
EliasWatson··on Show HN: Built a desktop app to organize photos locally with duplicate detection
A similar tool is Hydrus Network (and it's FOSS): https://github.com/hydrusnetwork/hydrus
EliasWatson··on Can Large Language Models Play Text Games Well?
I've been working on something just like that off and on for a couple months. It's a MUD where all the NPCs are controlled by LLMs that interact with the world with the same commands that players use. I got it to the point where the NPCs can navigate the world, interact with each other, and even create things. But they often get on rabbit trails and forget their original task, so I need to build a memory system and something like the task list in Claude Code. My goal is to have a fully simulated town that the player can interact with.
EliasWatson··on Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview
I wonder how the latest version of Grok 3 would stack up to Gemini 2.5 Pro on the web dev arena leaderboard. They are still just showing the original early access model for some reason, despite there being API access to the latest model. I've been using Grok 3 with Aider Chat and have been very impressed with it. I get $150 of free API credits every month by allowing them to train on my data, which I'm fine with since I'm just working on personal side projects. Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 might be a little better than Grok 3, but I can't justify the cost when Grok doesn't cost me a penny to use.
EliasWatson··on Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
Google results have gotten so terrible over the years. I switched to Kagi long ago and haven't looked back. Whenever I use Google on another computer, I'm shocked by how awful the results are compared to Kagi.

As for AI search, I do find it extremely useful when I don't know the right words to search for. The LLM will instantly figure out what I'm trying to say.

EliasWatson··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
I'm working on something similar. I'm building a MUD with an LLM playing the role of GM. Currently it just controls NPCs, but I eventually want it to be able to modify the game rules in real time. My end goal is a world that hundreds of players can play in simultaneously, but has the freedom and flexibility of a TTRPG (while still remaining balanced and fair).
EliasWatson··on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code
I asked it for a self-portrait as a joke and the result is actually pretty impressive.

Prompt: "Draw a SVG self-portrait"

https://claude.site/artifacts/b10ef00f-87f6-4ce7-bc32-80b3ee...

For comparison, this is Sonnet 3.5's attempt: https://claude.site/artifacts/b3a93ba6-9e16-4293-8ad7-398a5e...

EliasWatson··on Microsoft is finally removing the FAT32 partition size limit in Windows 11
He picked the limit in 1995. It's not his fault that Microsoft never updated it as storage sizes grew over the years.
EliasWatson··on My first superoptimizer
It would be interesting to modify this for optimizing BrainF programs. It has a very simple instruction set and there are lots of example programs available.

To avoid generating useless things like "++--", you could have the optimizer generate instructions that are translated to BrainF operations. So instead of ">>>--", the optimizer would generate "Move +3; Add -2".

EliasWatson··on Deus Ex – Alpha Terrain
I think you could produce the same effect without worrying about overdraw/sorting and without translucent materials:

1. Render the terrain to a separate buffer

2. Copy the terrain's depth buffer to the main depth buffer

3. Render all non-terrain objects normally

4. Smoothly blend the terrain buffer into the main buffer based on depth

This sounds similar to the method used in BotW, but allows for depth culling since the terrain is rendered first. I'm not familiar enough with Unreal Engine shaders to attempt making it there, but I made a demo in ShaderToy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ct3SDN

EliasWatson··on Show HN: A highly opinionated, fully functional Obsidian vault
I disagree personally, but I don't use Obsidian like most people. The majority of my notes just have a couple sentences. I mainly make notes about new project ideas, cool things I find online (eg. a note for each new programming language I discover), and cheatsheets (eg. a bash scripting cheatsheet).

I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.

EliasWatson··on Z-Library Was a Lifeline for Students on Shoestring Budgets
Wasn't Z-Library just a more user-friendly interface for Library Genesis?
EliasWatson··on Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork
It's a reliable way to send links to almost any device with a camera.
EliasWatson··on Put it on the crazy pile: Ideas and creativity
I use Obsidian for this exact purpose. Anytime I have an idea, I open up Obsidian, hit ctrl+n for a new note, give it a title, tag it with '#idea', and write whatever I think is nessecary to understand it in the future. Since each idea is a separate file, I won't be tempted to worry about ordering. Obsidian also lets me link related ideas together and it's easy to find an idea again in the future and add some notes to it.

Like the author, I've found that writing down my ideas greatly increases the amount/frequency of new ideas I have. I went from having a decent new idea maybe once a week to now having multiple decent new ideas a day. The problem now is focusing on one idea at a time without getting distracted by all the shiny new ideas.

EliasWatson··on Don't Write a Programming Language
I disagree with the author's view that any project that isn't used by other people is a waste of time. Does that mean that all homework projects in college are a waste of time? Or that beginner programmers should skip writing simple programs and jump straight into writing a sellable product? Of course not. The point of those projects is to learn, not to make anything that will change the world. If a project is enjoyable to you and you learn something useful from it, then it is not a waste of time.
EliasWatson··on The Pinouts Book
There are a couple t-shirts available. Click on the shop in the top right.
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