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ahmedfromtunis

2,971 karma · joined October 1, 2015

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ahmedfromtunis··on Google Playground: Create and play custom games
I’ve been thinking of building a personalized game full of inside jokes as a birthday gift for a friend who moved to the other side of the planet.

This looks like it might be very useful indeed!

ahmedfromtunis··on Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
As a right-handed person, I find this deeply offensive and request all left-handed life be destroyed at once!!

That said, would it be possible to make "right-handed" food that is safe to eat, satisfies the psychological urge to consume food in every sensory measure, but still contributes 0 calories?

ahmedfromtunis··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
> who uses he/him pronouns to describe ColonistOne

The next social schism will be a fun one to watch.

Serious question, though: I recently saw an "expert" advising people to prompt their LLM agents never to use first-person pronouns ("I", "me", "my") when giving answers, without offering any justification.

Is there any *real* and *pragmatic* reason for this recommendation?

ahmedfromtunis··on Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts
Don't listen to the naysayers, please. This is both impressive _and_ useful.

As someone with limited time (the only one with such an issue in this comment section, it seems), I really appreciate having a quick video to get the gist of a link in under two minutes. It helps me decide whether it's worth diving deeper.

Currently, I rely on two main signals when choosing what to read: 1) direct interest in the topic, and 2) upvote/comment counts if the topic is new to me.

The downside is obvious: I risk missing out on hidden gems that I’d love, but that lack those initial signals.

Having summary videos lowers the cost of exploration (at least on my side) and gives me an easy way to broaden my horizon.

ahmedfromtunis··on Show HN: How Stale Is Your AI? Release age and training cutoff for 20 models
I forgot which was it, ChatGPT or Gemini, but one of them insisted on calling Trump "former president" even when discussing decisions he just announced as president. Lol
ahmedfromtunis··on Show HN: How Stale Is Your AI? Release age and training cutoff for 20 models
I built a toy news-summarizing agent with Gemma 4, and it was so frustrating, actually, because of the cut-off date.

The model wasted over half the token budget, each time, on internal debates over the current date.

When generating a World Cup summary, for example, it refused to believe qualification rounds were over and refused to even call the web searching tool to collect the data.

I injected the current datetime at the very beginning of the system prompt, but Gemma refused to believe it!

The m-effer insisted the timestamp was fake and hypothesized it was being evaluated in a synthetic lab test with simulated future dates!

No amount of system prompting could convince it to trust the clock.

That was the most frustrating and bizarre "bug" I ever faced!

ahmedfromtunis··on Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Are you saying that a single data point contains the same amount of information as a dataset of hundreds if not thousands of entries from across the economy?
ahmedfromtunis··on The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021
Any price comparison over time should include inflation.

Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.

Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.

ahmedfromtunis··on A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards
"Did you know that there _is_ actually a reason behind the blank space at the bottom of every business card? To get the full picture, we need to go back way before the smartphone age, when a bizarre device, known as the rolodex, ruled office desks" — some blogger in a parallel universe, probably.
ahmedfromtunis··on Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal
As someone who lived under an authoritarian regime for more than 2 decades: that's not even close to be true.

Even discussing a taboo topic may cost someone their freedom, if not their life.

ahmedfromtunis··on Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal
Dua Lipa opens, in Portugal, a library for books that are banned and censored (elsewhere).
ahmedfromtunis··on A global workspace in language models
I always wondered what the model meant when it writes "I'm now considering the architecture of the service" but outputs nothing of the sorts in its CoT.

Is the model really "thinking" about that stuff or is just mimicking human "manners"? And if so, where the thinking is happening if it is not in the literal chain of *thought*?

I'm not sure J-Space is the answer to that question, but very interesting nevertheless.

ahmedfromtunis··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
The issue is not the amount; it's the currency. Ours is not convertible.

To put it into perspective: even *free* services can be completely inaccessible here if they require payment info for verification purposes.

Acquiring hard currency to spend online is truly a bureaucratic nightmare, and even if you manage it, the annual limit is strictly capped (at around $300).

ahmedfromtunis··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
Thanks, but I don't use e-readers as they are not available here.

I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.

ahmedfromtunis··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits.

If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.

Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)

ahmedfromtunis··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm trying to get myself to watch more movies and this looks like the perfect one for a cosy weekend.

And yes, science it seems is advancing faster than we might be aware of.

ahmedfromtunis··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
Manufacturing requires micromanaging every aspect of the process, requiring special machinery, trained workforce (human or not), inventory management.

Reproduction, once we master its blueprint of course, is much less demanding: just provide the ingredients at approximate proportions and the chemistry will work its magic to provide a similar enough unit to achieve the required task.

ahmedfromtunis··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
You stumble upon a news article from 2226. You read it to see who, between Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, won the AI race.

Instead, your learn about Biotic.

It's now the leading polity in the solar system and its environs. It bought Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in a single day back in 2084.

Humans are no longer desired. Their reproduction is capped to an optimal minimum assuring the survival of the species as a relic.

For productive matters, Biotec preferes to rely on its biomachines. Imagine drones giving birth to offspring when traffic is at a peak. It takes more energy, sure. But no factory, nor workers are needed.

If left alone, machines would multiply out of control, instead of rotting to waste like in the olden days.

ahmedfromtunis··on Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress
With the World Cup starting in the coming days, this can spiral out of control very fast.

Football fans can get infected and spread the virus in their home countries if they get exposed.

ahmedfromtunis··on The placeholder name for the Windows 8 experience was "modern"
> The ListView control? It started out with the more tedious name “modern collection control”, which got shortened to “MoCo.”

A missed opportunity to call it "MoCoCo" which, if you ask me, has more flare and personality to it. What a waste :/

ahmedfromtunis··on Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter
I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages.

Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures.

This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

ahmedfromtunis··on The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader
This is a different kind of ugly.

For previous models, it was the excessive "sportiness" that sometimes made them look like a car from a mecha anime.

Luce's is more of an underwhelmed look, especially with the outstanding interior design it was privileged to have that was (rightfully) overhype over the last few months.

A car with that kind of an interior deserved a much bolder design.

ahmedfromtunis··on Show HN: I made an emergency page for my family
I built life-link almost a year ago for the same purpose: https://github.com/ahmedsaoudi/life_link

I even created a generator so people can configure it with their Telegram/Pushover settings and have it generate a static app easy to host on Netlify or Clouflare Pages/Workers.

ahmedfromtunis··on Hacker News front page as a site
I'd say that that's a feature of modern-ish newspapers with "advanced" layouting techniques from early to mid 20th century.

A news sheet from THE olden days (eg Victorian era), looks more like a wall of text, set as tightly -- an uniformly -- as possibly, which is not surprising considering the limitations imposed by the technology of the day.

As for story selection, I think the collective hivemind of hn-ers would be a worthy substitute for an editor in chief.

ahmedfromtunis··on Ferrari Luce
I lived through similar dynamics (though not at Ferrari, of course).

The management knows that they need something new and out of their comfort zone. Someone (from within or without) suggests an idea that would never been accepted in the olden days.

The management, for the sake of their company, would suppress every instinct they have built over the years, often over-correcting. This inevitably results in some questionable choices seeping in, in the name of openness to new paradigms.

And not every time this goes well.

I'm not saying this is what's happening here. These are world-class engineers and designers, but nobody is immune from a bad decision or two.

ahmedfromtunis··on Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights? (2017)
Is this a common thing? Sleeping without any sort of cover during the hot summer months (notably July and August) is the norm here (North Africa) and never heard of anyone who does it (AC or not).

Is this an American thing? Do people in warmer regions of the country (Texas, Florida, ...) also feel the same?

ahmedfromtunis··on Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
Can't help noticing how the interface and general mechanics of these old OSes were tightly coupled to the hardware. Both the makers and users of that era seemed to relish that vibe. I know I certainly do.

However, that paradigm made computers daunting for anyone who wasn't an enthusiast. While I’m nostalgic for that level of transparency, I recognize that those hurdles stood in the way of mass adoption.

We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact.

THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency.

Modern simplification shouldn't feel like a forced lobotomy of the OS (or any piece of software really). There’s no reason we can't have both: an interface that stays out of the way for the average user, while providing total control for power users.

Whatever happened to progressive disclosure?

ahmedfromtunis··on Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers
What make TikTok, well TikTok, is the frictionless experience.

When I opened the link, I expected to directly be shown the target content. If there's a login screen or any explanation to do, it should either be postponed or integrated into the experience.

ahmedfromtunis··on Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
Thanks a lot for this incredible gem!

By the way, it looks like there's a bug where I can't search for articles when already inside one. To do so, I need to go back to home > articles and then search.

ahmedfromtunis··on Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
No entry on the Great War? Really?!!!

Just kidding, of course. This is incredible and surprisingly nostalgic. Reading some of the entries took me right back to being a kid huddled in my room for hours pouring over an encyclopedia or even the dictionary.

And I still vividly remember the rush of installing Encarta for the first time on the family PC.

I couldn't believe that I, a mere kid, have now access to iconic historical footage and that I can watch anytime I felt like it. I can't describe how amazingly cool that felt at the time! It still gives me a hit of endorphins when I remember it today.

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