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bsdzon Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

For small projects where I don't wish to interact with Claude so much, I've started using Anthropic's sandbox runtime utility "srt":

https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime

This is combined with "auto" mode.

Seems to work so far. I've manually checked various things, rw access, access to sensitive folders/files etc.

So far, I've only used it on two small projects. My major projects I've been clicking through prompts and recently switched to "auto" mode.

I'm not quite sure why anyone would trust "--dangerously-skip-permissions". I've seen these agents go off-piste far too many times, installing unnecessary packages, environments, calling sudo & creating files in all sorts of places.

There's a page on various sandboxing strategies on their site:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sandbox-environments

I've seen various comments in several topics with folk baking their own sandboxes. That's great. Although I'd be inclined to try Anthropic's solutions initially.

bsdzon GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

I've used it. It's on par with OpenCode imho.

bsdzon GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?

bsdzon Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)

At some point I switched to "oh my tmux" which seems to cover most of the customisations I needed https://github.com/gpakosz/.tmux

bsdzon Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)

> at least 50% have no inner dialogue

I'm not sure I trust this. A quick search finds a Psychology Today article about it along with a single reference. I lazily suspect the result is based on some type of questionnaire.

The way "chain of thought" is used in LLMs to improve reasoning demonstrates, to me at least, the value of capturing intermediate steps in some rich compressed structure. Nothing beats that than words and sentences (see them or hear them). A lot of ideas can't be captured with just photos alone imho.

bsdzon That XOR Trick (2020)

~Is there a simple proof for this type of identity?~

Actually I found something through Gemini based on the table mod 4 idea in previous post. Thanks.

bsdzon Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

I was looking forward to seeing 12 neatly stacked & boxed vacuum cleaners in a dimly lit corner of your shed ;-)

That said, thanks for sharing the emails/headers.

It's curious that Amazon hasn't flagged you for purchasing & reviewing multiple similar items in such a short span of time. I would imagine it would be quite easy to spot someone who's bought and reviewed 12 vacuum cleaners in a 2 or 3 year window.

bsdzon Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

I'm struggling to believe you have a dozen new vacuum cleaners in your shed. It's quite an extraordinary claim. Are you willing to share some evidence?

bsdzon Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (2024)

Probably the same study from this slightly older thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247085

bsdzon The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

I feel I'm in the same boat. For several months I've been thinking my GPU was on its way out (it's a pretty old 2080 now). My desktop freezes randomly. I can log into it remotely but all the usb devices stop working and the screen goes blank. l took a good look at the logs and noticed a bunch of pageflip timeouts followed by usb disconnections. I later discovered the Nvidia forums seem to have many recent complaints (with similar logs) especially around their latest drivers and Plasma + Wayland compatibility.

bsdzon Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim

In a, thankfully past, role working remotely for an antipodal organisation with badly configured networking; often, the lag between typing several characters on the keyboard and those characters appearing on my screen could be measured in seconds! Vi key bindings were a godsend as I could send commands (eg global search & edit etc) and be confident they were being applied before recieving a (delayed) visual update. I feel my experience seems to echo (albeit slightly) that of Bill Joy's vi development on a 300 baud modem!

bsdzon uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

Yes I think I heard pypi started exposing dependency info so it makes sense to use that where possible.

The dependency resolution computation is an interesting problem. I think poetry at some point switched to mypyc for compilation (although I can't find conclusive evidence for it now). From my experience, mypyc doesn't really improve performance much compared to say writing a c/c++ extension. Perhaps offloading dependency resolution in poetry to a native c library is a way to match uv.

bsdzon uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

Interesting - thanks. I use virtual environments and each has its own python version tied to it. Not sure if pyenv is useful to me but who knows perhaps one day. Good to know uv supports pyenv.

bsdzon uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

I feel for me, at least one nice thing about poetry over uv is, that if I have an issue or feature extension, I can just write my own plugin in pure Python. With uv, I'd need to learn Rust in addition to python/c/c++/etc.

I wonder what it would take to get poetry on par with uv for those who are already switching to it? Poetry is definitely very slow downloading multiple versions of packages to determine dependencies (not sure how uv works around this?). Does uv have a better dependency checker algorithm?

bsdzon Why is zero plural? (2024)

All even numbers are plural ;-)

bsdzon Does veganism have an ultra-processing problem?

The person I replied to had apparently already done that work. That's why I asked the question. I haven't made any judgements on which studies were relevant / irrelevant.

bsdzon Does veganism have an ultra-processing problem?

I put the article through an SEO external link extractor and I saw many more external links to various studies from various organisations. Why are the other studies irrelevant?

bsdzon Scientific Visualization: Python + Matplotlib (2021)

You can use matplotlib's pgf backend for direct use in latex. That said, not sure I agree that's better for scientific viz. Perhaps in the past. Also tikz/pgf is much more fiddly and has it's limitations too (imho).

bsdzon UK's largest mobile network tells parents: don't give under-11s smartphones

The following definitions are from Google (Oxford dictionary):

Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. [1]

& Wikipedia:

... interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. [2]

Then, that would include HN, Discord and various online games imho. There's more about profiles / services in the Wikipedia page. That said, such definitions feel like they would also include emails / Discourse etc. Mailing lists feel like they could be considered part of "social media". Sending emails to family or close friends doesn't. So perhaps one needs to separate the platform from its various applications?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=social+media+definition [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

bsdzon UK's largest mobile network tells parents: don't give under-11s smartphones

It certainly feels like social media interactions should be restricted to older children. 13yo seems to be a common cutoff for administering one's own online accounts with various exceptions for many countries [1]. Perhaps social media should be restricted to those entering their penultimate year of Secondary / High school and be accompanied with some form of tuition / certification? (Along the lines of social media hygiene, online safety, local Internet law, reporting etc)

[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409

bsdzon Could Plant-Based Diets Transform Health Care Spending?

> Key et al. (10) found that the risk of diabetes in vegans was 47% lower than in meat-eaters. This was reduced to 1% after adjusting for BMI, implying that lower BMI explains the lower risk in vegans. In the economic model, we use the BMI unadjusted risk of diabetes to account for the reduced weight and lower BMI of vegans compared to meat-eaters, which are both risk factors associated with type 2 diabetes (33). [1]

Apparently, vegans have lower BMI and this reduces their risk of diabetes significantly. To your point about over-indulging (tending to obesity)..

> There is good evidence that plant-based diets are associated with a reduced risk of obesity. For example, Chiu et al. (31) found that each additional year of a vegan diet lowered the risk of obesity by 7% for Taiwanese adults, and similar results have been reported for the UK (34). However, our base case analysis excludes obesity from the model because we expect obesity to be a key risk factor overlapping with other disease outcomes captured elsewhere. This is especially true for type 2 diabetes, where it is likely that we would be double-counting any benefits associated with a plant-based diet. [1]

That all said, I realize now that the sourced paper is a preprint and hasn't been peer reviewed yet. It's also funded by the Vegan Society so might be considered bias by some.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.26.23300536v...

bsdzon Ultra-processed foods and veganism: what are the facts?

A recent article by The Office of Health Economics predicted that if everyone in England transitioned to a fully plant-based diet it could save the NHS £6.7 billion per year. This is due to a predicted 47% reduction in cases of type 2 diabetes, 18% reduction in cancer diagnoses, and smaller but significant reductions in the rates of coronary heart disease and cataracts.

Seems like an interesting data point. Original reference seems to come from:

https://www.ohe.org/insight/could-plant-based-diets-transfor...

bsdzon The darker side of being a doctor (2017)

I don't really feel it does. Sure I can see the costs involved complicate things. However, doubling the cap will likely introduce some economies of scale, surely that would reduce training costs. Also capacity would grow to meet training demand; Universities are always keen for more students. Also increasing the working pool will ultimately lead to more "clinically qualified academic staff". All this might become irrelevant with technology replacing GPs/Physicians. Perhaps in 10 years time we'll be examined by robots at our local pharmacy.

bsdzon The darker side of being a doctor (2017)

Perhaps there's a little of that going on here in the UK. Doctors can certainly command a decent salary especially if they specialise, run private clinics etc. That said, I feel it's probably more complicated than that. Each place costs approx £230k (only £65k paid by student by way of loans). This means increasing supply is a costly endeavour. The government also says that they wish to maintain teaching and learning standards; although, I don't really buy that part.

bsdzon The darker side of being a doctor (2017)

Something I've never quite understood is why, in the UK, we cap the number of medical students per year. I've known very bright people who aspired to be doctors but had their applications turned down only to go on to do phds and become scientists instead. I'd rather have twice as many doctors who work sensible hours rather than the status quo burn out. Looks like there are calls to change this. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

bsdzon Scientists grow 'meaty' rice hybrid food for protein kick

> According to the team at Yonsei University in South Korea, it has 8% more protein and 7% more fat.

.. or perhaps folk could just stick to rice n' beans (or peas or tofu etc..), one could fry them in a little oil, add some spices lol

> The rice was first coated in fish gelatine to help the beef cells latch on, and the grains were left in a petri dish to culture for up to 11 days.

I'm not sure how they'd source the "beef cells" or where they'd get all that fish gelatine from.

IMHO we should be moving away from animal husbandry and towards a climate / animal friendly plant future. Let's not kill anything unless it's absolutely necessary :-)

bsdzon Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,”

This sounds like it required quite a bit of preparation, i.e. collecting data for each deep-faked participant including image/voice samples.

If it's reaching this level of sophistication already then I suspect a new participant validation scheme is on its way for sensitive meetings.

bsdzon Scanners to spot hidden knives and reduce unnecessary police searches (2019)

Not that I've been able to locate. Although, here's some interesting images of concealed knives using infrared:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Automatic-detection-of...

I imagine coupling this information with data from a small magnetometer might build a sharper composite image.

bsdzon Scanners to spot hidden knives and reduce unnecessary police searches (2019)

This is interesting now as it's a hot topic in the UK. The government claims this technology will finally be in use next year [1]. Apparently, it can detect concealed knives (even under heavy clothing) from 6 metres away using ordinary cameras combined with "electromagnetic infrared waves and a unique computer algorithm" [2]. I imagine this could be used to detect other types of metal weapons used more prominently in other countries.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68085532

[2] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/knives-crackdown-zo...

bsdzon All arabica coffee is genetically similar: how can beans taste so different?

Sounds like "terrain" or one of the lesser used definitions of the word "territory". I think "terra" means land in Latin.