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bavell

1,672 karma · joined March 21, 2016

Solopreneur, full-stack web dev with a healthy helping of devops, happy k8s user, Arch enthusiast (btw), amateur guitarist.

Great men I admire: - Jimi Hendrix - Claude Shannon - Carl Sagan

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bavell··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
Perhaps "friction"? Agreed that it's hard to pin down, and comfort / convenience doesn't quite capture it.
bavell··on Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons
How long did it take these companies to even notice? Why wasn't exploiting bugs in the agent sandboxes anticipated?

Human failures all around, though it's easier to just blame the models.

bavell··on Government Rails Site Hit Hours After CVE Patch
Android Firefox here, top nav takes up 1/3rd of the viewport
bavell··on Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?
It's a bit of a nothingburger IMO, but charitably you could think of it as a rest API + bundled agent instructions.
bavell··on Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
I use Arch exclusively and haven't had any of the issues you describe.

That said, I do occasionally deal with quirks due to the rolling distro nature of Arch. The benefits far outweigh the occasional upgrade pain IMO though.

bavell··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
What was/is it like working with Hooded Horse? How did you get that going? I'm a big fan of the games they publish :)

Good luck on your game & launch!

bavell··on Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace
I find it difficult to always have one or more long-horizon tasks 'queued up' and ready to run... I find myself usually bottlenecked on design, review, or something similar that requires me being in the driver's seat. It's possible I could queue up a bunch of tasks, letting the LLM run off in multiple directions, but then I'd be less able to steer and course correct.

Just my experience though, I'm still figuring things out. Perhaps some subsets of tasks would be more ideal for these long-horizon workloads - exploration, multiple competing implementations, etc...

bavell··on A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)
I find no comfort in it. Merely pointing out that 'some' is hand-wavy and perhaps technically true but meaningless to the discussion.
bavell··on A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence
Precisely
bavell··on Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)
Good read and matches my experience pretty well, but I'd humbly suggest the author look up the definition of 'vertical' and 'horizontal' and swap their terminology + fix their videos :)
bavell··on A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)
'Some' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there...
bavell··on Ask HN: Did Fable disappear from your Claude usage and requires credits now?
Wouldn't be surprised if they issued credits or extended the deadline again as an apology.

  > Update - We are aware of an issue preventing users from selecting Claude Fable 5 within Claude.ai, Claude Code, and other surfaces, and are working to resolve this issue.
https://status.claude.com/
bavell··on Ask HN: Did Fable disappear from your Claude usage and requires credits now?
Same here. Weirdly,

> The promotion starts July 1, 2026 and ends July 19, 2026 at 11:59:59 PM PT.

from: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15424964-claude-fable...

bavell··on AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules
> "... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created."

The plantiff is Stephen Thaler: https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html

bavell··on Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access
Fable was only available for a few days, not seven.
bavell··on Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning
Yep, 9:30p here and it's 82F/80% humidity. Still pretty mild compared to the deep summer months (Jul/Aug)!
bavell··on Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
Not my experience at all when I played around a year ago. There were plenty of noob-specific / noob-friendly lobbies with a mix of helpful players and fellow casuals.
bavell··on U.S. science is in chaos
My rock collection causes concepts to enter my brain, but I don't think I'd say they're communicating with me, nor I with them.
bavell··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
Another option - we keep the wild west unverified web, dotted with islands of verified/vetted spaces.
bavell··on Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity
This was a helpful visualization: https://youtu.be/U_sI9agWmEw?si=MItDfnTx1-oT_qX_
bavell··on I'm Tired of Talking to AI
> after I realize what's happening, I tend to take a little longer for each reply so they figure out it's faster to just do the research on their own most times.

Agreed, and I do the same. They still get a courteous reply, but they also feel a little "pain" when they don't get a timely answer - an effective teacher.

bavell··on Claude AI recovers an 11 yrs old BTC wallet holding 400k USD
> MtGox

Whew, that brings me back!

I still think about the Bitcoin my buddy paid me for his half of a pizza ~15 years ago... worth 6 figures now haha.

bavell··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)
Great to hear, will submit my application soon :)
bavell··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue.

5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows.

Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back.

I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

bavell··on Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
HN bio checks out.

Kids are an investment, not a sunk cost.

bavell··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now.

On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.

Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.

Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?

bavell··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace.

Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!

bavell··on How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way
Didn't the guy flee the country after posting bail? Doesn't exactly scream "innocent".
bavell··on The Prompt API
Perhaps you could generate a few tokens before the entire model is downloaded, but since every token takes a potentially different "path" through an MoE model, you'd still need to wait for the entire download before getting deeper than a handful of tokens... which is not really a UX improvement imo.
bavell··on Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)
Going on 10 years now for me, tried Helm a bit and yep - all I've really needed was a package.json deploy script with sed to bump the image version.
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