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dmos62on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

LLMs are trained to obey instructions, and they try their best to game the reinforcement learning by including reports of how they're obeying your instructions. Therefore, not talking about followed instructions is a sort of conflict for an LLM.

dmos62on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

I have found that asking the agent why it did X or Y is an essential part of iterating on its harness. It was non-obvious to me, probably because I'm used to having to reverse-engineer why a system does something, but that's not usually necessary with LLMs, unless the harness is complicated and you have to hunt for the instruction it tells you about.

dmos62on Show HN: TERMy – A fast terminal assistant that does not use LLMs

It would make sense to have this integrate with a self-learning routine for an agent: e.g. at night it looks through what it did and writes NPC-Forge recipes. Tomorrow it can answer queries (which he turned added to NPC-Forge) without an LLM. Of course this implies a branching where a query is either processed by NPC-Forge or an LLM, depending on some measure of confidence that NPC-Forge can answer it well.

dmos62on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+

What is happening to your batteries? I'm on something like year 6 on my Redmi and my battery is fine. Am I simply lucky?

dmos62on AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link

> 'Why not both' is an argument, but clear as day what Apple does is worse. There's no alternative.

'Just start somewhere, anywhere, please' is another argument.

dmos62on AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

AI does make me suck more, which is a good thing. It sped me up and has me iterating on things in 3 days that normally would have taken me more than a month to do. Surprise, surprise: I'm discovering that I have a lot of blind spots and false presumptions about what good programming is. My understanding of the craft is patchy, but that wasn't as noticable when going at the speed of human-programming.

It's like cars. If you only ever drive at 30 km/h, a 30 yo car, that had its last oil change in 2008, might be great. But, if, in the same car, you start driving at 200 km/h, you might notice that there's a lot of room for improvement. My programmer-self is the 30 yo car in this metaphor.

dmos62on Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat

Everything south of Poland is Southern Europe now.

dmos62on Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance

I wonder if immersion in fiction (interactive or otherwise) is lower nowadays, given the rise of dopamine-saturating short-form content like scrolling. I definitely enjoyed more long-form content (like the mentioned games) 10-20 years ago. I guess I do experience less genuine immersion. I wonder what the effect of that is on my wellbeing.

dmos62on Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed

Sounds like your old, random clients might be a problem?

dmos62on Stop Making TUIs

I disagree. An editor can definitely make a piece of writing clearer without further input from the author. I often use an LLM to do that.

Of course, I didn't mean to imply that there's a dichotomy between personality and clarity. There's a dichotomy between ordinary LLM writing and personality.

dmos62on Stop Making TUIs

Spent 2 minutes skimming, didn't manage to find a single talking point. I've no idea what the thesis is. Seemed like a list of things this person built.

People talk shit about LLM writing. Well, here's a prime example of why I like LLM-speak. Does this article have personality? Yes. Attitude? Yes. Is it structured and accessible? No.

I'll take clarity over personality any day of the week.

dmos62on Ox Alpha

Judging by the comments here, Ox Alpha routes to multiple models from different vendors. A tactic to make identification harder?

dmos62on OpenLogi

> Comes across cheap

Given this is open-source, have you considered contributing a more expensive-feeling landing page? Or, donating to finance the project?

dmos62on Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect (2025)

At the same time, the experiment doesn't corroborate this take at all. If it were a mix of different "unexpected events", then you might have an argument there. As the experiment is, I'd say, it would have been better to leave that speculation out of the synthesis.

dmos62on My server is a phone now

New understanding, you have added to mine, young padawan.

PS: fascinating insight.

dmos62on I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them

Ehem, we already do that. USB-C is an umbrella term and everyone has a homebaked organizing system to tell which USB-C cable can do what, or a homebaked testing routine where we run through 5 cables each time we need to connect something.

That's what the article is about. Calling all these cables USB-C and making them look indistinguishable is a very leaky abstraction.

dmos62on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

I don't recall running into ads, don't know about trackers. PlantNet hasn't triggered any red flags for myself.

dmos62on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

Better than PlantNet?

dmos62on KOReader

Joys of open source: you can add the feature yourself.

dmos62on KOReader

Use it both on my phone and on an eink Android tablet. Love it, especially the dark mode.

dmos62on Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

I doubt I could walk properly after having 4+ pints in a 1-2 hour window. Presuming it's 4%+ alcohol. You either need to be pretty young or have a pretty accustomed liver, or is it just me?

dmos62on Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

Isn't this just an attitude you get when working in a bad environment or with people you don't like?

dmos62on Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

Coxnfused. Was it more unhinged in the 90s or less compared to now?

dmos62on EU fines Google €890M for competition breaches over search and apps

Goverment coffers fund public works.

dmos62on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps

https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

This has an option to disable downloading of auxiliary apps when a device is connected. Yes, it's a Windows Update thing.

> Prevent Windows from auto-installing device companion apps, like LG Monitor App, Alienware Command Center and more.

dmos62on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

Same thing is rampant in other Eastern European countries as well. Tips on how to address this for those of us that are publicly minded?

dmos62on Typing Speed Test, but for Developers

Expected this to be speed typing of AI prompts.

dmos62on EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why

Fun is of course subjective. Some of us care about realism more than others.

dmos62on Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection

We can't make arbitrary changes to much of hardware and software we rely on. We can't inspect their designs, we can't reproduce them, sometimes we can't repair them. Sometimes we can't even tell that they're designed to act against our interests, and, if we do, sometimes we can't do anything about it. We are forced to choose between price and privacy, between interoperability with proprietary (or official) systems and liberty.

Android making another step in this direction is bad. But, let's not kid ourselves: we are neck deep in this cyberpunk serfdom, and have been for decades. If we were to get this Android win, it would be only a small win. I'm saying this not to be defeatist, but to remind us of the bigger fight.

How does this feudal goliath meet its end? When is enough enough?

dmos62on GTA 6 will cost $80

Pirating should solve your problems pretty directly. That's basically what it is: restoring copyability of a piece of media.