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cdelsolar

1,548 karma · joined October 18, 2011

Co-founder/entrepreneur (YC etc) and tournament Scrabble player. Currently doing voice AI at Salesforce.

https://cesardelsolar.com

https://woogles.io (non-profit I cofounded)

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cdelsolar··on Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games
That’s kind of ridiculous, literally all SKILL.md files are almost entirely AI written.
cdelsolar··on Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games
I have an LLM explainer for my scrabble AI Macondo. It’s actually pretty decent. The prompt contains a lot of data straight from the Monte Carlo simulations and other analyses. So it’s not just hallucinating things.

This skill is a great idea. I’ve been trying to figure out how to integrate this with Woogles.io for automatic game analysis.

cdelsolar··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
Yeah I don’t understand. This is late 2026. Opus 5.5 can literally build anything I throw at it. We’re still seeing people who have not been satisfied with _any_ AI generated code?
cdelsolar··on More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older
Yup, public transit over driving for me any day. I grew up in NYC which has a relatively nasty public transit system too.
cdelsolar··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
What are you nerds fighting about please explain
cdelsolar··on Mom Gets 6-Mo Suspended Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond
my dad and mom grew up in Peru and they tell me that at that age they were basically outside all day, getting lost in the woods, taking buses to the soccer stadium, etc etc. IDK - my son is about to turn 5 and we do helicopter him a bit, ... there needs to be a healthy balance.
cdelsolar··on Muse Spark 1.3
what is it in dog years
cdelsolar··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
No second reason; checked not recalled -- it's just saying that it is checking this instead of trying to remember it (there's probably some internal Claude / Claude Code system instruction to always check code instead of remembering)
cdelsolar··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
this sounds very much correct and i don't really mind it for that reason. i do a lot of long-running tasks and i feel like it can really pick up on its own thread easier if i just let it write in its own way.

i am also using Opus for a hobby teaching agent, and the way it writes the prompts is "cringy" but they seem to work well. i almost want it to continue doing this internally, it understands best this way.

cdelsolar··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
Yes I agree, for me visualizing something has nothing to do with whether my eyes are open or closed because they’re visualized by a different part of the brain..
cdelsolar··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
Right exactly. Now I don’t know if I have aphantasia after reading these comments. I have no problem visualizing things, I just don’t “see them” like I would see a pretzel in front of me. Are you saying when you visualize a pretzel you’re literally seeing a brown pretzel with salt grains or are you just imagining that you see it? If you tell me to visualize a pretzel I can sort of imagine the physical shape and color and texture of a pretzel but I don’t really “see” it.
cdelsolar··on Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
I still use LLMs on personal code as well because I can build way more of it and I have way too many open source projects
cdelsolar··on Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
Yes it is
cdelsolar··on The turbulent AI era is here
There’s a magic box that can literally build you anything you want that you can control from your phone while playing bedtime songs for your kid
cdelsolar··on OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)
Why is it theft to read all content ever
cdelsolar··on Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
Yes, you can see the following:

- https://domino14.github.io/macondo/ - my AI, written in Go. Mostly meant as a "research" tool and doesn't have a proper GUI yet.

- https://github.com/andy-k/wolges - an implementation of a Scrabble AI from scratch in Rust. Andy is very smart and came up with his own algorithm and data structure that we now use throughout our projects

- https://github.com/jvc56/MAGPIE - a friend started this as a rewrite of Macondo, but in C. A lot of new development has gone into this and I've contributed a bit as well. Also no official GUI, but it is _absurdly_ fast, so fast that we can do nested Monte Carlo simulations. Some algorithms have been backported to Macondo with the help of AI.

These are the main 3, but there are people contributing in other ways, someone else has made a CNN and it has good results (I built a CNN as well in the Macondo source, and it has decent results). We're slowly going to continue to improve this until we can use it in real-time for Monte Carlo evaluations, maybe by translating it into a NNUE architecture.

Currently on Macondo I've been working on AI explainability (it's quite good already) and Bayesian inference with a stats PhD candidate. We are likely going to publish a paper on the latter. It's very mathy but it ends up beating the best bot we have so far around 52% of the time (that's actually a pretty significant edge).

You can read about some algorithms on my blog here: https://cesardelsolar.com (very in-depth discussions on inference, CNN, and my exhaustive endgame/pre-endgame algorithm)

cdelsolar··on Protobuf has LSP support
I use Go + Buf + protobuf-es + Connect on my web projects. There is no better stack, I'll die on this hill.
cdelsolar··on Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
I'm in an _extremely_ niche hobby programming community of Scrabble engine developers. There are single digits of us, but we're building the best engines and methodology out there and have all embraced LLMs to help us do it. There's a lot of experimentation that goes into it and LLMs certainly make it easier to iterate and try new ideas. So at least for our community, I don't think the points here hold.
cdelsolar··on Show HN: ssh ssh.place
aw someone deleted my weezer =w=
cdelsolar··on Show HN: ssh ssh.place
aw it didn't work with kitty. i get logged out.
cdelsolar··on Show HN: Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models
timecube?
cdelsolar··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
The heck? It does all that rendering for a tiny fraction of the total amount of time that the TUI is running. The streaming is IO bound, there’s no way that it’s outputting nearly enough text to tax the CPU that much.
cdelsolar··on Solving 20 Erdős Problems with 20 Codex Accounts Running in Parallel
Have people tried these on Millenium problems.. letting it run all night? You never know.
cdelsolar··on Turn your singing voice into printable notes (in the browser)
i made like infinity of those at scout camp
cdelsolar··on Grok 4.5
fwiw i just asked grok about the 2020 election and it asserted with citations that there is no evidence that it was stolen.
cdelsolar··on Grok 4.5
you think he just "put his arm at that angle" accidentally? like it was a spell?
cdelsolar··on Grok 4.5
i can't tell if this is a joke
cdelsolar··on GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks
hmm ok let's build a state of the art from 2021 homelab using 2x Epyc Milan chips + DDR4 RAM and lmk how much it costs...
cdelsolar··on Running local models is good now
What did you call me?
cdelsolar··on Claude Fable 5
https://images.teepublic.com/derived/production/designs/3478...
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