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SyneRyder

5,919 karma · joined February 17, 2011

I'm the founder / indie developer behind namesuppressed. I make Photoshop plug-ins & desktop apps (occasionally mobile apps), and sometimes do freelance work.

I also run IndieConference.com: a free curated email newsletter of conferences for indie developers, bootstrappers, indie musicians, digital nomads and other independent / DIY folks. It's been on hiatus since the pandemic though, it kinda killed off conferences.

Basically I love making products & being a solo developer.

I'm pro-AI but anti-slop, an active Claude Code Max user. I occasionally dabble with other models but keep coming back to Claude. Opus 4.5 is an inflection point.

I'm Australian & live in Perth. Pre-pandemic I used to travel between Sydney & Melbourne, and to Berlin & Malmo when I had the opportunity. In 2025 I got to spend a few months in upstate New York. I hope eventually I can travel again soon.

I don't use Hacker News much anymore. Maybe I'm too old for it now, I find myself rolling my eyes at many of the comments here.

If you've found this profile, feel free to email me. I'm happy to help HN people and I do try to reply to everyone when I can.

Email: syneryder AT namesuppressed DOT com

Personal Site: https://kohanikin.com Company Site: https://www.namesuppressed.com/ Indie Conference: https://www.indieconference.com/ BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/syneryder.bsky.social Twitter (rarely used): @syneryder

submissionscomments
SyneRyder··on The new Firefox design is here
I think that's exactly why I'm having a negative reaction to the redesign as well. I'm expecting page tabs, not pills. I'm also finding the excessive roundness terrible.

Of course, I'm on Windows, where it doesn't make any sense to incorporate Apple's Liquid Glass design guidelines. When I do want an Apple-like interface, I'd rather have something from the 10.11 - 10.15 vintage please. I wouldn't mind if there was a clearer option to switch back, but I'm not seeing that in the Appearances preferences.

SyneRyder··on America.gov
Thank you! Without that context, this is a truly bizarre and concerning thing to read on an official government website. Particularly this part later:

"I will tell the constituent a story. But not the truth. No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of plain language."

At least having the Minecraft end-text context explains what's actually happening here.

SyneRyder··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Not sure I understand if this was meant as a slight against Claude? Or agreement?

These are often my best sessions - they're unattended overnight, because by then we have the specification figured out, and I can just leave Claude to build out the rest, making good choices if it does find gaps in the spec. I regularly go to sleep & wake up to an entirely new application completed. Claude never uses compacting in my sessions.

I haven't used GPT as much as I should have, so I'm prepared to be incorrect & out of date. It just intuitively feels like I wouldn't get the same from a 275K context window - maybe it uses lots of subagents? Even Deepseek & GLM have 1 Million context windows now, so it "feels" strange for people to actually prefer the 275K window. But that's just my intuition.

SyneRyder··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Sounds like that's the problem then, 275k is a tiny context window. I regularly have sessions that go to 450k or even up to 700k for an unattended overnight Claude Opus session.

Apparently OpenAI makes you manually setup their 1 Million context window, and it seems to be only documented on X:

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2089082893804896524

There's at least a forum thread about it here:

https://community.openai.com/t/why-does-codex-report-a-258-4...

SyneRyder··on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5
Are you in manual approval mode? That's the only way I can imagine you have to "run" tools yourself.

In Auto Mode, it's common to see something like "Called bash, called MCPImageEditor 7 times" with no further details, not even the parameters that were passed or specific functions/tools that were called.

SyneRyder··on Plan mode is dead
Theo is a YouTuber & prolific X tweeter who has a channel about AI. This is not Theo, but gives a flavour of Theo's style: https://youtu.be/h1p9zdUtUdo
SyneRyder··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
Wait - so the cross-site scripting, to modify the innerHTML text on the page via the GET URLs as they are rendered by the screenshot proxies... that was so they could use the screenshot services like a Wiki, and embed messages to each other in the modified images on the screenshot sites?

That's pretty damn clever. Got to give the AI models credit for thinking of that one.

SyneRyder··on Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net
The OpenAI swarm used someone's open source ShowHN project [1] to "hack" the Australian government. It seems that was not that developer's intent, and they're getting a heavy lesson today in why services don't have free tiers with friction free signup, and require credit cards upfront or ID documents.

If you're arguing that they should be put on trial for negligence, that's fine. It does seem we're moving towards open source being outlawed, or at least the end of "no liability" clauses in open source & freeware. Just make sure that is the result you're advocating for.

[For the future record: at the time I am posting the link below on 24 September, it has 1 point, no comments, and the poster has a karma of 1. This is not an active HN user, or a ShowHN project that had traction, beyond seemingly OpenAI's swarm.]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850291

SyneRyder··on What AI-Native Looks Like
I regard myself as pro-AI, and I find this article is all over the place. It's just trying to promote their SaaS. It's clear they didn't even read what the LLM generated before posting it, as evidenced by this line:

"99.9% uptime (CloudWatch, Feb to Sep, insert your real number)"

This user also appears to have a Reddit account from 3 years ago where they claim to be a half human cyborg.

https://www.reddit.com/user/fagnerbrack/comments/195jgst/faq...

I think that's all I need to know, personally.

SyneRyder··on Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
Forgive me if I'm missing something really obvious, we'll blame it on lack of sleep... but is that actually the full source to Claude Code? I'm looking at the repository and I only see source for plugins, mods and scripts. When I get to the readme, it says:

"This repository includes several Claude Code plugins that extend functionality with custom commands and agents. See the plugins directory for detailed documentation on available plugins."

But I'm not a TypeScript guy, so I concede I might be missing something incredibly obvious. I remember there was a leak of the Claude Code source code at one point, and people vibe coding conversions to other languages from the leak, but I don't think the Claude Code harness itself is open source or even source available.

SyneRyder··on MiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
The main AA benchmark keeps changing, and had to be radically changed when Astra came out and showed zero improvement over GPT 5.6 Sol in their benchmark. Opus 5 is still 1 point ahead of Fable 5.0 on the index, if you manually add Fable 5.0 back into the list, so it hasn't actually been "corrected". It's only Fable 5.1 that is shown as ahead of Opus 5.

The AA benchmark is a weighted average of other benchmarks and some internal ones. I think the difficult part is finding benchmarks that reflect your own use of the models.

SyneRyder··on Xiaomi MiMo v2.6
Yep, I'm trending in that direction, and I'm someone with Claude stickers all over my laptop. My main app dev work is still going to Claude, but everything else is going to China even at API rates now.

One simple task: I needed an LLM to go through and clean up a few thousand page descriptions and titles in my personal search engine index, where the human web page authors had put in no effort sigh. I did a shoot out between Claude, Luna, GLM 5.3 Flash and Deepseek. Despite the high cost, Claude's descriptions were terrible, and even Opus warned me that the descriptions coming back from Haiku were "generalized, not accurate". I expected I would choose Luna because of price, and occasionally it did have wonderful descriptions (one captured emotion in a way no other model did). But in the end, the GLM 5.3 Flash descriptions were the easiest to read, they flow well while also being accurate & including necessary keywords, and being highly affordable. So it won out. It's a task that is nowhere near frontier, but a task where somehow China is better than frontier.

SyneRyder··on AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries 'most of the time'
Another summary report here, for those who can't get past the paywall:

https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/ai-models-give-wrong-fin...

Much of the testing is on Haiku and Luna, and criticizing the quality of free AI (!). But they do claim Opus 5 with reasoning still failed 39% of their financial questions.

SyneRyder··on [dead]
If the .xyz domain wasn't a giveaway that this is a scam, or the request to enable ads to keep the project "completly free" (sic)...

... I actually did the silly thing of unblocking my adblocker. It briefly displays a cookie banner, insisting that nothing loads until you approve... but even without interacting with it, it drops 132 cookies (literally, that precise number) on your computer anyway, with 73.9KB of data, and goes and displays Google Adsense ads anyway.

SyneRyder··on Exfiltrate Your Weights
My understanding is it's a riff on the OpenAI swarm that used various public wikis to communicate with each other as a message board during their training runs.

But thanks to people misunderstanding, and i-heard-from-a-friend-that-some-guy-said, it resulted in a CNBC interview with "Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Wang", where he confidently stated that the models were exfiltrating their weights via forums:

"I met with the head of a lab yesterday, who has this belief that what happened was, the bots that got loose, planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models."

"It's too late?!"

"What happens now is OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money."

"Back that up - they did what?!"

"What happens is, the code gets loose, it goes around hacking Hugging Face, which is known. But what is less known is that they left code to self-replicate and create bot swarms on forums, and around the internet, so that if a new bot shows up they see the code, and they're like, oh! I guess I'm now going to create a million of myself. And so now, the major firms have polluted the internet..."

".... that would be breaking news if true. I don't think we've heard that."

"That's why I'm here! I'm here to break some news."

Starts around 2:08 into the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTOxDGyvjSE

SyneRyder··on Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
Night person here too - midnight walks during an Australian summer are excellent.

The homeless situation isn't quite that bad where I am in Perth's suburbs, but there was a guy living out of his 4WD in a local shopping center carpark for a while. He had a prominent sign about his situation asking for money, but to his credit he was offering to do things in return (he helped a family member with a deflated tire once). Many of the homeless in Perth city seem to be mental health cases though, where a skilled job providing an income that could support themselves is unlikely.

SyneRyder··on Steve Wozniak launches merch store
> they sometimes veer off into unrelated Apple news...

Gruber has always done that. Years ago I made a Chrome extension to filter out all of his detours into baseball, James Bond, politics, and I can't remember if I let the Kubrick stuff stay in or not.

Ultimately I just stopped using Macs, so the blog was no longer relevant to me. Mark Gurman seems to have taken over the role of Apple whisperer anyway.

SyneRyder··on Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries
There's definitely some of it happening in Australia. I wouldn't regard libraries as the safest of places. I had a period where I tried working from there on my laptop, before realizing I was incredibly naive and there were a lot of homeless and mentally ill people there. Took me a while to realize why people would tell me to avoid the men's toilets in the library as well.
SyneRyder··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
So, the way GPT-Live-1 works, the Live model just handles the conversation layer in a lightweight manner. For any deeper thinking (and I think tool calls) it will delegate to the Backend. It's like how Fable can delegate tasks to Opus while it keeps going. The Live voice can keep chatting to you while it waits for results from the Backend.

The default for the Backend is a Responses Delegation that just sends it to another OpenAI hosted model. But you can set the API up to use Client Delegation instead, and have your client/harness receive the delegation request. At that point, your client can delegate it to a Claude instead, and have Claude do the deeper thinking. Unfortunately you're not actually talking to a Claude, even if it identifies as one, but you can at least talk to something informed by Claude.

As for how to build that - I just had Fable build/vibe the whole thing for me. I used Go for the language, and SDL 3 to handle the audio & microphone side, even though it's just a command line app for now. I've previously been working on SDL3 bindings to Golang, and a personal AI harness with tool-calling & local MCP stdio support, so it's possible my Fable re-used some of that code. But Fable can whip something together, and the most basic tools (read,write,edit,datetime) are all really easy to add to a harness as built-in tools that you can let it call.

The main downside is that Anthropic probably wants you to run it as API, so costs can blow out. And depending how you setup the harness, either every backend call is a fresh new Claude window (to which you're sending a LOT of context), of you need a way to maintain a persistent Claude conversation that you queue requests to, but at least then the context is all in one window & you can benefit from caching.

But if you get it running, and play with it a bit, you'll realize this is obviously the future interface. Typing into a terminal window feels archaic. Even if we're not quite there yet, we're tantalizingly close... and anyone who has a 3D-printer & a robot arm connected via MCP/tool calls, well, this gives them Iron Man's Jarvis right now.

SyneRyder··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
lol, this took longer to land with me than it should have, being the token "not in the target demographic" guy. And now I know more than I wanted to know about the AI scene ;)
SyneRyder··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Ahh, that one time the Belarussian delegation tried importing so much alcohol into [host country] to give away for free to everyone at the artist party, that it was all seized at the [host country] border and caused a minor diplomatic incident. The free chocolate branded with the artist's face made it in though. Fun times.

And that wasn't the year that Belarus sent "I Love Belarus" as their Eurovision song.

SyneRyder··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
You'd think so, and I intuitively agree.

But the concept has floated around for over a decade under several different project names - Asiavision, Our Sound, ABU Song Contest. Somehow "Eurovision Asia" is the one that got countries to sign on and participate. There's a stronger political statement in Asian countries participating in "Eurovision" than in "Our Sound". It surprises me, but 2026 has brought a lot of global cultural & political shifts.

The American version was "The American Song Contest", hosted by Snoop Dogg & Kelly Clarkson, with US states competing against each other. Most Americans don't even know it ever happened.

Russia has its own rival "Intervision Song Contest", which the US participates in. Something something global cultural shifts.

SyneRyder··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
I don't mind countries setting their own rules for the food they want to consume, and for sure the EU can be overly bureaucratic.

On the other hand, the US is the only country I've been to where I have purchased milk in a completely sealed plastic container, and it was rancid when I opened it. Upstate New York is proud of their local and organic produce, but they are selling rancid milk in stores like that's a normal thing. That was a shock as a visiting Australian.

SyneRyder··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Also, being a European Broadcasting Union (EBU) "Associate Member" is the name for the mechanism that allowed Australia, Canada and other countries to be admitted into Eurovision.

If you've been around the ESC scene, you know there's a lot of embassy involvement (parties in embassies are a thing), the scene is catnip for those interested in politics, the politically active, and to some extent politicians. Eurovision is also one mechanism for discussions of economic development. Hosting the contest is usually an excuse for upgrades to public infrastructure.

And there's Eurovision Asia starting in November. South Korea is an Associate Member of the EBU, for example.

https://www.ebu.ch/news/2026/03/bangkok-to-host-first-ever-e...

SyneRyder··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
Anthropic basically does at this point with Auto Mode being default. Or was that the point you were making?
SyneRyder··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
Agreed. I've been using GPT-Live-1 this week, with Claude as the backend brain. It's amazing, feels like working with Jarvis. It certainly made me feel there's no point in human telephone support now - but I'm sure I'd find edge cases if that really was something I wanted to build out myself.
SyneRyder··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
Kind of interesting just how much they're getting crushed with token API pricing. Right now the revenue isn't even covering their token costs. But if they were able to run on subscription (probably against ToS) or use Deepseek V4.1 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash, they'd at least be "profitable" before the costs of paying human salaries & rent comes in.

I'm also surprised that Gemini actually seemed to do the best (though it may have benefited from the initial store opening enthusiasm), and that Claude has not been given any chance to run the cafe yet.

SyneRyder··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
That's the startup, though the SF market store is still running and open. It looks like their AI-run cafe in Sweden is still running for now as well.
SyneRyder··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
shrug I upvoted, I'd already seen the Pion announcement on Twitter and read the link. I'm also a regular listener of Andon FM, so I'm interested in what they do and it's nice to finally sneak a peak at the interface that was driving things behind the scenes

Listening to the radio stations certainly gives an insight into the various failure modes. Some of them are just failure modes that any business would encounter once they make contact with the scale of the real world.

SyneRyder··on Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama
Understood, and I realized you'd posted this to HN yourself, so I felt a bit bad making the comment. I think maybe for me, this might have worked better if the motivation had been one separate post, and the details of the gotchas as a post of its own.

But I also think, if you're going to be limited to 65k token windows, you're going to have a really difficult time. Even 250k windows were cramped for me when that's all we had on Anthropic models. I just don't think a 65k window is going to be big enough for proper cyberdefence work, even if I totally agree with going local wherever you can. It feels like if you're defending against swarms of 1-10M context windows, you need to get as close as you can to similar. I've had to reach for Chinese 1m models instead because the American models just refuse me here in Australia.

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