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Spikefu

48 karma · joined December 11, 2009

freelance software developer in the Pacific North West
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Spikefu··on Claude Opus 4.8
It did one more weird thing where it seemed to lose the ability to count in order: =====

You're right that hard per-action gating causes loops. So rather than block the model, make the harness own the critical structure deterministically, leave a git trail, and use soft guidance:

- (2) Commit breadcrumbs: /new commits the scaffold immediately (before discovery), then commits discovery progress. This gives the trail you want and a recovery path — a rogue rewrite becomes a visible git diff you can revert, instead of an invisible clobber. This is better than gating for your concern. - (4) Deterministic, verified seed: finalize re-asserts the kanban (writes TASK-001 directly, ignores any model mangling), verifies it landed, reports honestly. The harness guarantees structure regardless of what the model did. - (3) Soft-constrain discovery: prompt says "the .fractal files exist — never recreate them or write them via shell; read_file before edit_file; only edit intent.md/constraints.md." Guidance, not a hard gate. - (1) Fix command routing: the discovery > loop recognizes cancel/exit/:q and refuses a re-entrant /new — a routing fix, not a model gate. This alone would have prevented Run 2's disaster.

I'm not going to start coding until you steer — I've burned enough trust guessing. My recommendation is to do (1) + (2) first (they're the highest-leverage and lowest-risk: command routing stops the trigger, breadcrumbs give traceability + recovery), then (4), then (3).

=====

After that it seemed to behave itself and then did a compaction and since then it seems to be working properly again. Very odd. (and disconcerting)

Spikefu··on Claude Opus 4.8
Now it's arguing with me about why the edits it made aren't being picked up: ===== I'm not convinced. I didn't run it until you told me it was all fixed up. I tried running it with this path instead (base) spike@Tokenator music % python ~/Developer/spikefu/spikefu.py and it worked. It also now works with the old relative path approach.

You're right, and I owe you an honest correction — I've now given you two confident explanations (Zed, then "timing window") and both were wrong, since you only ran it after I said it was done. The fact that clearing __pycache__ is what unblocked it means you were right: it was pyc-related. Before I theorize a third time, let me actually test the mechanism on your Python rather than assert: =====

Spikefu··on Claude Opus 4.8
I was happily plodding away with it earlier when it threw this out in the middle of a response in Claude code:

--- So — what did you actually see before you hit Ctrl-C? That's the信号 I'm most curious about, and it tells us what to ---

That's the sort of behavior I'd expect from a one or two year old model quantized down to about 1 bit - right word, wrong language in a response. Google translate tells me that's Chinese for signal. I wonder what caused that to happen.

Spikefu··on Introducing the ~=~ operator
the second sequence in the first example starts: 1047085,1047276,1047471

in the second example it starts: 1047085,1047276,1017471

The 3rd element is different.

Spikefu··on Show HN: A free collection of maps for every country in the world, in 11 sizes
Also, the one for gb shows Northern Ireland. Great Britain doesn't include any of the Irish island. That would be the United Kingdom. There's a quick overview showing the differences here: http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questi...

Nice work though. I can see a lot of ways these could be useful.

Spikefu··on Forget about Kevlar: Liquid Body Armor Hardens on Impact
Maybe you're thinking of D3o (http://www.d3o.com/), which has been around since 2005 or so.
Spikefu··on That truck driver you flipped off? Let me tell you his story.
The article states in the very first paragraph: "Let me tell you a little about the truck driver you just flipped off because he was passing another truck, and you had to cancel the cruise control and slow down until he completed the pass and moved back over."

The point is that the truck driver isn't doing anything wrong. He's just trying to get his job done.

Where in the article does it say he put anyone in danger or imply that he was doing anything that might warrant the police being notified?

Spikefu··on Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy
Recursion, self-similar, mathematics, quantity, property, modern philosophy, philosophy

Assuming you don't include the links in the "lacks inline citations" box on the recursion page.

Spikefu··on Why does Adobe Reader need so many updates?
Google Chrome has a built in (ok, a plug-in, but I think it's there by default) pdf viewer. Works pretty well for me.
Spikefu··on [dead]
In most EU countries people can be placed in a psychiatric facility against their will if they are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. Paranoid schizophrenics are probably the most well known group who are likely to end up involuntarily committed, but there are plenty of others.

Once you have been committed against your will, you have to convince either a psychiatrist or a medical tribunal that you are no longer a public health risk. You are not free to just move to another facility or country.

Not saying that's what happened in this case, but the wording of the OP title, and from reading the translated article, it seems quite possible.

Spikefu··on A shorter way to do Math.floor – A little known trick
Not necessarily. I just finished optimizing an AES implementation where some of the functions are called hundreds of thousands of times when decrypting a 300k payload. In cases like that, micro-optimization is not at all pointless unless you forget to benchmark the whole thing for each version and compare.
Spikefu··on Thoughts on Flash
I don't think he means the site itself, rather the sites linked from there under the awards section.
Spikefu··on HN Hackers: Add Yourself
Correction, password reset does appear to be working, it's just taking about half an hour for the emails to arrive.

Maybe a mail queue setting?

Spikefu··on HN Hackers: Add Yourself
Password reset still isn't working. It says an email has been sent, but emails aren't arriving.

Also, from another comment, HN usernames are case sensitive, so making them all lowercase will most likely cause problems sooner or later.

Spikefu··on HN Hackers: Add Yourself
I like the idea of the site, but it should be opt out by default for anything you scraped from the spreadsheet. Once someone claims their password, they can decide what info to display if any.

Scraping user data from one site and putting it up on your own without their permission is not cool IMO.

I agree with the negative comments about the $100/hr+ subtitle. Apart from the implicit elitism, it isn't even true for a lot of the people in the original spreadsheet.

Also, as has been mentioned in other comments, the reclaim password functionality is broken, so I have no idea what I can or can't edit on my profile.

Spikefu··on Full screen, in browser, Flash 10.1 content shown running on a Nexus One
They don't give away the IDE, but the SDK and command line compiler is available here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex3sd...

There are also a few open source editor/IDE options here:

http://osflash.org/projects

Particularly http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Pa...

Spikefu··on Adobe's John Nack: Adobe is "sabotaging" HTML5?
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Feb/

Some things may be said in private mailing lists, face to face conversation, phone calls, IM etc. but the actual standards, the objections and the decision making process is all public.

Spikefu··on Adobe's John Nack: Adobe is "sabotaging" HTML5?
Simon St. Laurent has an interesting analysis and commentary on the whole debacle: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/02/the-widening-html5-chas...

It seems that the whole HTML5 standards process was broken from the start and is likely to remain that way. The recent hoopla is just some public airing of the dirty laundry that has always been there.

Spikefu··on The $5 Guerrilla User Test
FTA: "Bars are wonderful at segmenting by demographic. Match the bar you’re going to with the user population you want to target. Different bars will produce slightly different results but the variation is not huge."
Spikefu··on Adobe CTO talks Flash performance on Macs, more
The problem wasn't with performance in general, it was with hardware decoding of H.264 video. I don't believe anything has changed on that front. The core animation change is supposed to help with vector graphics rendering.
Spikefu··on Adobe CTO talks Flash performance on Macs, more
In response to one rather trollish comment on HN, Spikefu says:

===

[Adobe can't fix what they can't reproduce. I'm sure they work very hard to eliminate any and all instability from the Flash Player on all platforms. If they don't, they end up living in a world of PR hell.]

===

So if you're having Flash issues on OSX, the bug reporting tool is here: https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Currently there are 4 bugs containing the text 'crash' where the environment is OSX. None of them have any votes, watchers or comments apart from one which has a comment from Adobe saying they can't reproduce it. On that evidence, it's hard to see why Adobe would believe crashing on OSX is a critical problem.

Spikefu··on IPad ergonomics: "he looks uncomfortable"
Yes, I did consider that his health might also be an explanation. Probably should have mentioned that. Regardless, the impression I get from watching the demo is still the same.
Spikefu··on IPad ergonomics: "he looks uncomfortable"
One of the most interesting things for me was Steve Jobs' facial expressions as he was sitting on the chair demonstrating the iPad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eVCFXxgn2M&feature=chann...

After practically every phrase, he tightly closes his mouth. It made it seem, to me at least, that he really didn't believe what he was saying. No doubt having an audience of millions contributed to him wanting to carefully control anything that comes out of his mouth, but it was hard for me not to get that impression.

Spikefu··on Finally, A JooJoo Update: VentureBeat Interview
I worked on a Flash EMAR app that was deployed on touchscreen tablet PCs. You don't need to worry about how to do mouse over unless your app needs mouse over support. As long as your app can work with click and double-click you are fine. Feedback from users was overwhelmingly positive, partly because it cut hours of paperwork every week, and partly because the UI was responsive and easy to use.
Spikefu··on Miguel de Icaza: "As a software developer, I find the iPad inspirational."
WTF?

I'm seriously confused here. Is this the same guy who thumbed his nose at Microsoft and instigated the creation Mono?

If so, isn't he at least a little conflicted about the closed nature of the platform?

Spikefu··on The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages
Right, and that's part of the problem. The whole culture and language are so alien to most people that it is incredibly hard to map concepts.

As far as I can tell the only non-native speaker who is actually fluent is Daniel Everett. Given that the language is the subject of a fair amount of linguistic interest because of its uniqueness, it's pretty amazing that he is the only one.

Not only that, but even with a natural aptitude for languages and desire to learn, it took him 7 years of living with them to get to that point.

Spikefu··on The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages
Given that even after several studies, linguists can't even seem to agree whether or not the language has the concept of one and two, saying it's "easy to talk around missing concepts" is glossing over just how hard this language really is to understand.
Spikefu··on The world’s hardest (for native English speakers) languages
I'm amazed that the Pirahã language isn't listed. From what I've read it is at least as hard as any language there, in large part because the Pirahã tribe don't have any cultural concept of numbers, distant past, fixed color names and a whole slew of other concepts that are usually considered essential for a functioning language. Added to that is the difficulty in forming the basic sounds of the language. It is tonal and can be whistled or hummed, dropping consonants and vowels completely and using only tonal changes to convey meaning.