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MarkMarine

2,969 karma · joined June 2, 2015

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MarkMarine··on Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
I would argue they need 1 product owner for the app surface so I can’t see their org structure so clearly. Those jagged edges and users hitting blocks depending on what section of the app they were in are design failures, I know how a computer works and when using the Claude app it wasn’t always clear to me what the right combo of things to press to get my desired outcomes.
MarkMarine··on Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
For me it’s still jagged, but chatgpt never had the weird “cowork” abstraction with the Linux machine.

I don’t talk to non-technical users that use the chatGPT app for work so I’m not sure if that’s been a positive change for them, but I would imagine if that was put in place for Claude it would be better for them. Chat is instant answers, different model, faster; work is more detailed, thinks more, has access to all the tools. This is what I see the users doing, but there is a third mode they use (deep research, exhaustively find me the right answer to a crucial question) that is underserved right now.

All of this is moot to me as a dev, I use terminal, herdr, pi… so I don’t see the jagged edges myself. But regular users do

MarkMarine··on Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
Claude has a jagged UX if you support non-devs. The surfaces before today in the desktop app were: Chat, cowork, Claude code.

Inside Claude code you’ve got cloud environments and local.

Let’s say as a normal desktop user you wanted to just automate something normal in your work, going to a website (maybe some internal app at your company) getting some data. Depending on what surface you used this will either not work, not work well (cowork), or work quite well but possibly be blocked because of bot controls (local Claude code) or again not work (cloud Claude code)

It was nuts. You can clearly tell these were different teams and products mashed into the same app. Super confusing for non technical users. Hopefully it’s a little better today

MarkMarine··on Playa Phone
there are a lot of gas generators powering people's camps.
MarkMarine··on RAG Is Simpler Than You Think
This depends on your users and doc corpus. On finance docs and with users that use jargon and acronyms heavily, BM25 can fail on trivial queries... you end up encoding a masters in economics into the query re-writing logic.

Double hard if you're dealing with private market finance customers with their own ideas on what "common" terms mean. I tried to replace the embedding/ingestion pipeline multiple times and nothing I tried was better over a large amount of documents. Performance sucked, the agent was re-writing and re-trying queries over and over until it found what it wanted, and vector search with a little work up front was worlds better (though it was expensive)

MarkMarine··on A controversial Alzheimer's surgery is said to reverse symptoms
I remember hearing the doctor who (I think) discovered these drainage channels being interviewed, it’s super interesting:

https://youtu.be/yAqwXoUS7sE?si=Gs-EGJ_Xtkh9TG7R

If this is correct, it’s a new discovery that these channels exist at all

MarkMarine··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
No one runs into machine gun fire to bring democracy to someone else I can assure you of that.
MarkMarine··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
Can’t speak for others but the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
MarkMarine··on LinkedIn Feed Blocker
I’ll never understand why LinkedIn is making these product choices. They have a legitimate moat, I and basically every other tech worker is exclusively on LinkedIn. They devalue their product by chasing engagement in service of ads, while allowing things like juicebox to scrape and steal their most valuable asset.

This is short term, make it to next quarter thinking. You couldn’t pay me to use their AI product, they should focus on making that actually work, get the slop out of the feed, and be professional and distinct from TikTok, Facebook, instagram etc.

MarkMarine··on Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
Flex tier is just as cheap but you don't need to deal with batching or waiting. I see it completing in about ~3x-10x the latency of normal calls, so in seconds. You can always route back to regular if you're getting 429'd on flex too.

Flex is also easier to get caching to work, there is a little futzing around with OAI's implicit caching but if you do the upfront work you can get haiku quality responses with caching in close to realtime for 1/7th the cost and you don't need to design a polling loop to check for batch completions

MarkMarine··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Haven't worked in AWS but as a customer of AWS, GCP, and Azure there is a quite a difference between running workloads that are doing long-running computations on AWS (on demand is so rock solid that loosing a box is a rarity, I run on spot and still complete almost all of my runs) and running on Azure's "on-demand" style offering feels like spot (or worse) on AWS.
MarkMarine··on John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
Great news, the fine is so small doesn’t matter, but curing the wrong does. My hope is this standard will apply to modern cars as well, repair manuals and the software tools to interact with the cars are also heavily restricted by the manufacturers.
MarkMarine··on Identity verification on Claude
If you haven’t talked to Anthropic support yet you’re in for a surprise. I’m an engineer at a company with an enterprise contract, Anthropic people in our slack and it took me a month to get a response on my support request, I just decided it wasn’t worth it and bought a second phone number rather than wait.
MarkMarine··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Performance. A safe Swiss Army knife function that did most of this would be slow because of the internal branching you’d need to be safe, and because there is developer intent in the selection of these functions. I’d rather have the choice and clear dev intent when I see the function used when reading code.
MarkMarine··on A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
I don’t see it that way. Some see the invisible hand of the market but I just don’t, the involvement in politics… the purposeful shaping of public opinion that is against the public interest, capital has an interest and it’s making its interest felt.

I’m pretty sure the burning fossil fuel and mowing down rainforest isn’t in the long term interest, I’m also sure that if I’m dumb enough to see this the people in control are as well. So I admit I can’t see the end state, but I’m sure the machine is being fed somehow

MarkMarine··on A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown
The whole framing you’re using is wrong. If you can do climate modeling and math at the planet scale, you don’t need to be convinced you have read the research and you knew 30 years ago.

If you’re skeptical of scientific authority and lack those skills… as well as the critical thinking required to read the research and distill your own conclusions, there is basically no way to convince you. You can’t find objective truth yourself and you don’t trust the resources that can.

Doesn’t matter anyway, you as an ant in a large colony barely matter, no one needs to convince you. Capital needs to understand it’s in its interest to fix the problem and it will be fixed. Until that, get an A/C and contribute to the problem.

MarkMarine··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
My go to for these (was a tractor mechanic early in life) is to start with a big flat blade screwdriver and knock it completely through the side of the filter to the other side with a hammer, then use that to break the filter loose. I’ve near had one go sideways with that method, you get it through both outside sheet metal and the inner perforated metal that is usually stronger and welded to the threads
MarkMarine··on GitHub is having issues now
Definitely got attention during the prod outage at my work. I’m going to find another alternative, I’m sick of this terrible uptime.
MarkMarine··on GitHub Merge Queue Silently Reverted Code
This type of pedantry doesn’t add to the discussion. You’re correcting someone’s spelling on the internet, it’s pointless except to make you feel superior, adds nothing. Make a salient point, bring something to the discussion please. Sorry I hurt your feelings bud.
MarkMarine··on GitHub Merge Queue Silently Reverted Code
4 people spent hours putting our repo back together at my company after this. GH has been unreliable and now they are breaking the core tenant of what I expect from this service.
MarkMarine··on Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links
One of the main problems I have with the models coding is the feedback loop is way down the chain from generation, it's out at the commit boundary for python when your hooks are running, maybe at the point where the model wants to push a PR. The REPL lets that happen during generation, and the other safety measures help immensely. Immutable data, STM, all of the features in Clojure that gave devs super powers now do the same for a model.
MarkMarine··on Claude Opus 4.7
Anthropic was chirping about Chinese model companies distilling Claude with the thinking traces, and then the thinking traces started to disappear. Looks like the output product and our understanding has been negatively affected but that pales in comparison with protecting the IP of the model I guess.
MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
As an aviator, that right there counts as an emergency landing. A hard one.

They limped it back home, they didn’t ditch a very sensitive airframe over enemy territory, I’d call that a win and the pilot deserves a medal for that.

MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
Add Huey crew chiefs to this list
MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
I don't have a good answer for you. I expected the upper and middle officer corps to conduct themselves with honor and they aren't.

I'm going to bet that pilots aren't briefed to hit a school, they get a target package that says this is a legit target, an IRGC command post or something. There are multiple layers of detachment between the person picking coordinates, entering them into a JDAM, and the pilot releasing that weapon so who is ultimately responsible (and this is by design, everyone can tell themselves a story right now to sleep at night.)

But you do know what you hit, in the version of the military that I was in there would have been a detailed investigation into the chain of failures that led to striking a school with children in it. I'm sure it weighs heavily on the every person involved in that decision. Cold comfort for the parents of those kids, but something like that leaves a life long scar on the people responsible.

MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
I know you're not.

I've found that most of our population has almost no connection to the people that actually fight wars, and therefore have no idea what they think. With the exception of a few criminals, none of us desire to commit war crimes. None of us want to send rounds into civilian infrastructure, seeing regular people struggle to get food, fuel, and water in Iraq did not make me feel powerful and it was obvious it did not advance our goals on the ground.

The jingoistic commentary people hear from politicians and former military podcasters that don't fight anymore is repugnant, and this backsliding in the (at least attempt at) honorable execution of war is not going to bode well for our country. It's probably trite when we're double tapping girl's schools, but I want to think that purposely striking civilian infrastructure, universities, hospitals, water resources... this was all something "we" didn't do.

This is actively devaluing the meaning of being a Marine. Maybe this already happened in Mai Lai, maybe this was further chipped away by Abu Ghraib, maybe letting Eddie Gallagher off... etc etc. But this feels different in a way I've never felt before.

MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
I didn’t downvote you, but a terse “well actually it’s prisoner of war” doesn’t really add to the conversation. Imagine doing that in person, you’d annoy everyone around you. If you explained why it’s distinct and what that might mean for downed crew I think it wouldn’t have been down voted
MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
It’s a “well, actually” and counter to the HN guidelines
MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
Every war since Korea, we’re very used to this.
MarkMarine··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
No, we actually train to be tortured and held if caught, but everyone knows the risks before you take off. Captured marines or soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re clear eyed about it.
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