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JLO64

496 karma · joined March 18, 2025

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JLO64··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
> Are you in college?

Nah, I'm in my 20s but already graduated. That said, most of my friends are guys from a church group and are 40+. I take back what I said a bit though. I know two of them who like to read spiritual stuff, but the rest don't read books and do social media or TikTok only.

JLO64··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
A follow-up if you don't mind.

I have a friend who did some time a decade or so ago (I'm uncertain if it was a federal or state prison) and one thing I've noted about him is how much he values books, even stuff like manuals and outdated reference material (we're in a volunteer group and we were cleaning up a room with a bunch of trash). His explanation to me was that in prison there wasn't much to do and so he spent his time reading as much stuff as he could get his hands on.

From your experience, would you say that the average rate of reading amongst inmates is higher than the general population? In person I've hardly met anyone who reads books other than for school assignments.

JLO64··on U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels
As someone who mails a bunch of letters (as a hobby) I'm surprised to hear stamps being used this much nowadays! Just out of curiosity, how often did inmates actually use them to mail letters, or was it predominantly used as a form of currency?
JLO64··on OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'
I see no reason why they can’t target both at the same time. Personally I know two people who never would’ve paid for ChatGPT a year ago but now do so. I think for the average person it’s going to be a slow and difficult conversion process to paying customers.
JLO64··on Show HN: Scry, programmable internet search w/ congestion pricing
I strongly second this, although I must admit it loaded surprisingly fast for me as I'm on a mobile hotspot in the back of a car.
JLO64··on Drawably: Hand-Drawn UI Controls
I don't mind that since it helps with legibility which I find some fonts with a hand drawn aspect to them have.
JLO64··on A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)
Here’s an internet archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221024031807/https://www.wired...
JLO64··on Codex silently begs agents to make arbitrary web requests
Personally I can understand why these instructions were added. Back in the GPT-5 days I tried using that model for a uv/Python project but it consistently ran the wrong commands or used pip despite my instructions within AGENTS.md . This was because whatever uv features/behavior I was using was added after that model’s cut off date. It got so bad that I switched to Claude which had a sooner knowledge cut-off.

That said, in the case that the author brought up here I agree that web searches shouldn’t be performed. I personally don’t like having my main agent search the web (mostly for preserving my context) so I’ve restricted the web search tool to a dedicated web search subagent.

JLO64··on Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses
I deliver packages for Amazon as an independent contractor (via Amazon Flex). While there are plenty of issues I have with it, I have an overall positive sentiment. For those who don’t want to work full time hours (you can schedule yourself in 1-5 hour blocks), immigrants, or are just in a bad spot it’s not a bad option. I’ve worked for food delivery apps as well and I think it’s a better gig compared to those other ones.
JLO64··on Asahi Linux on M3
Here's the blog post from the Asahi devs announcing this: https://asahilinux.org/2026/09/m2-episode-1/
JLO64··on NYC mayor Mamdani imposes 1 year ban on AI for schools through 8th grade
While I don’t have a positive opinion on the current attempts to use AI within education, I do question if a complete moratorium is the best way to go about it right now. Despite whatever the mayor says, students will use AI with or without express permission. Acting as if this isn’t the case might be detrimental towards educators trying to deal with it.
JLO64··on The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
For a docker image of mine I was bundling the full version of LibreOffice as well but I managed to get some space savings by bundling just the no-gui version.
JLO64··on Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?
For my tutoring job one of the things I teach is Scratch but I do so very rarely (most of my lessons are for Python). So far, I’ve had two Scratch students that have stuck out to me:

- Student A started with Scratch, but within 2-3 lessons I convinced his mother to switch him over to Python. He wasn’t my best student, but he was very open to trying things and had a fun time coding. Plus it was really great to see him go from zero to competent within a short period of time. Personally I think it’s 50/50 that he continues coding on his own, but I hope the skills I taught him (not the exact syntax) will stick with in some form or another

- Student J is far more interesting to me as he’s not interested in making games or coding. Rather, he prefers making animations and really likes the Scratch interface. While his animations aren’t the highest quality stuff I’ve come across, I really admire his attitude of making one animation per lesson and trying all kinds of stuff vs sticking to just one thing.

Personally I think scratch is a decent start for teaching kids to code, but I wouldn’t recommend it for that purpose. If you want to teach your kids to code, I think it’s best to start with a “real” language. That said, I think it’s a very good introduction for animation and graphical projects without all the complexity of a game engine.

JLO64··on Warp builds self-improving agents on Claude
I already knew what Warp is (I switched to Ghostty and haven't looked back), but I find it odd that the "The quick pitch" card at the top of this article makes no mention of what the company actually does. Who cares more about their founder/growth/age over that?
JLO64··on Bye, Bye GitHub
I'm in the middle of a Forgejo migration myself for similar reasons. What finally pushed me over the edge was a hour long Actions outage that prevented me from pushing a hot fix for a bug to my webapp. (I relied on GH Actions to build and push an ARM Docker image.) For work that a business depends on, I can't recommend GitHub Actions. It's not just the outages that personally annoyed me, but the fact that I'm paying for it as well. So far I'm loving Forgejo and have no regrets!
JLO64··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
> In a listening session with instructors, we learned that some were considering using AI agents as research assistants instead of hiring undergraduates as UROPs.

If researchers at a well funded institution like MIT are seriously considering replacing hiring undergrads with LLMs, I can just imagine how researchers at schools with less funding are open to it. I never did research as part of my undergrad (something I regret, but I likely wasn’t in the headspace for it back then) but my friends who did view it as a core part of their education and deeply helpful for future opportunities. I really hope schools come up with a policy to help discourage this.

JLO64··on Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
> One small but useful improvement was to give every task an explicit deadline and expose that deadline to the agent.

I’m really curious about trying this myself. Recently I’ve been handing off tasks for agents to complete on their own more and more. While their work is acceptable I’ve found them to not only take a long time to complete it, but they often add too much complexity and tests.

JLO64··on Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
This exactly sums up my long term feelings. Even now I’m annoyed by all the background bloat/tasks that are running on it, and I’d prefer being able to have more control over what runs on it for battery/performance reasons. Additionally, even though I’ve had it for years at this point, I think I’d still be more comfortable if I could use i3 with it.
JLO64··on Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
I actually didn’t buy it! It was a gift from a friend who really likes splurging at Micro Center. If it were my money, I probably would’ve gotten an Air.
JLO64··on Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices.

When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.

JLO64··on Thinking in Python
While the web version of this book looks fine, I only read books on my Kindle (with KOReader). Thankfully all I had to do was clone the source repo (https://github.com/BruceEckel/ThinkingInPython) and run `make epub` to get a nicely formatted file! It is a bit on the larger side at 7.4MB, but beggars can't be choosers... (On second thought, I'm gonna submit a PR to shrink it as it's mostly from the cover image being 6MB!)
JLO64··on DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813
It's worth nothing that recent Claude models seem to have gotten worse at tool calling outside of Claude Code and the SDK: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/7/4/better-models-worse-tools/
JLO64··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
Likely because they had the capacity to spare. Prior to Grok 4.5, I doubt there was much demand for their models.
JLO64··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
It wouldn’t surprise me if Meta does become the #1 American open weights provider, but I doubt it’ll be easy. Thinking Machines has a good amount of talent behind them as I understand it and their Inkling model was decent (admittedly not great though). I think Meta’s biggest problem is going to be internal as there’s be a bunch of headlines posted here on their talent retention issues.
JLO64··on Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent
I feel that more warning is needed for this book. Everything you’ve stated is true, but the book’s first chapter contains some of the most disturbing depictions of stuff I don’t know I can type here on HN. Additionally, the last chapter put a really bad taste in my mouth.

That said, the stuff that deals with AI and its implications on the universe was great and more relevant than ever. The way PI works is pretty similar to how we use subagents to tackle large repos!

JLO64··on Waymo in Dallas
This is somewhat similar to the situation here in LA where they service and very often drive through Westlake/MacArthur-Park which undoubtedly low income. I think it’s for practical reasons though, as they’re not allowed to use the freeways here yet. So for people going from rich areas (Bel-Air/Beverly Hills) to DTLA they need to cross/drive through there anyways.

Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…

JLO64··on Waymo in Dallas
My understanding is that they only operate in areas they’ve had approved and pre-mapped out for them though. Practically I don’t think the scenario you’ve described would ever happen, but I too would like to see it (I suspect they wouldn’t handle it well).

I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!

JLO64··on Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice
You're right, I do have an ortholinear keyboard!

I have an Inland MK-47 I bought on a whim from Microcenter, but it's been absolutely transformational. It did require a fair amount of setup though:

- I swapped out the switched from crummy reds to some lubed Keychron Browns I had.

- I had some custom keycaps made via https://yuzukeycaps.com/ since the ones it came with were abysmal.

- I had to enlarge the cutout for the USB-C port in the case so it could fit cables other than the one it came with.

- The default shortcuts/functions were bad so I had to customize it in QMK.

JLO64··on Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice
My bad, I did mean "ortholinear"!
JLO64··on Keychron announces first open-source firmware for gaming mice
I’ve had positive experiences with Keychron products in the past, but I’ve moved past them as I now prefer orthogonal layouts. That said, I loved their support of QMK on my Q1 Pro and I really hope this ends up on that same level.
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