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est

9,555 karma · joined November 11, 2008

meh!
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est··on Base84 deserves a place in file names
The default macOS file system is just weird.

It's case-insensitive for storage but case-sensitive on display.

I learned this hard way because some files refuse to download on one of my git repo.

est··on The case against JPEG XL
Perhaps it's just a bad example. I suppose avif can support multiple "scans" of progressive encoding as well.
est··on The case against JPEG XL
I wonder if similar hacks apply to zlib and .png as well.
est··on Remember Hong Kong
Here's how it started

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Poon_Hiu-wing

A guy commited homicide and walks free after 19 months in jail.

est··on Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
I used to search on google.ca exclusively with disabled js and cookie

Until the day it no longer works. Sad.

est··on EVE Online moves to Python 3
Stackless python had such potential, it could be extremely useful in Agent era for long running tasks with durable state.

modern Python went in a somewhat different direction with asyncio, but with tasklet and continuation it could be a much powerful combo.

est··on I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis
Very cool article. I had a similar idea where "fact checking" should be real programs for logic correctness.

But IRL it's too vague. The exploit hunting is a better use case.

est··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
Models are now having much tighter integration with harness.

It's gunna to happen anyway.

We are sailing into the age of vertically integrated intelligence.

est··on AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
I find we are using AI wrong.

AI shouldn't be "helping" with homework. AI should be the homework.

Start with any topic or problem, students should be encouraged interact with AI, and learn stuff using Socratic method.

Teachers should rate the chat session instead.

And iterate the process to high profeciency.

est··on Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
I like the old MSN/GTalk "presence" idea

Type your current status in a bar.

And the thing that aggregates them? Twitter.

People like to peek into what others are doing.

est··on Taffy: A flexible, high-performance, cross-platform UI layout library
I side with your opinion. CSS is bad for UI layout (maybe good enough for text-flows idk)

... opens the SO link

yeah there's no answer to it (even if someone does, it would likely be closed by 5 others)

est··on Why crypto's best infrastructure companies stopped looking like crypto?
seems like AI out of max_tokens
est··on DeepSeek-V4-Pro outperforms Fable 5 after fixing runtime inference control
> but zero proof

The repo gave you guide and benchmark of how to tweak ds4 pro for better performance, with a clickbait title (Fable 5 level), what kind of more proof do you require? More benchmarks? Reports for media outlets? STF model on HF?

est··on A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
This is cool

What about the runtime size? I care this because I intend to run a stripped WASM version of DuckDB in browser.

est··on Understanding is the new bottleneck
I found the linked article "books don't work" from the quiz part highly interesting

https://andymatuschak.org/books/

It explains a lot and works really well.

I tried out in ChatGPT with a simple prompt:

> ...paste link... Give me series of quiz see if I really understood the article well. Ask & answer one by one in turns.

Really fun experience.

est··on Process as a Proxy for Motivation
I am thinking of AI credit resets, it forced me to finish my project because I already spent subscription so better not waste it!

The cycle was a "process".

est··on What sort of maths are LLMs good at?
shameless self-plug:

two hard things in computer science

https://blog.est.im/2026/stderr-04

I think LLMs are reall good at conjecturing based on existing knowledge, but inventing new tools/lemma and new paradigm? Not really.

est··on HTML over WebSockets: real-time SPAs with barely any JavaScript
> incredibly simple WebSocket protocol

Srsly bro? Websocket is simple? Talking about handling state persistency and connection partitions, such a headache.

est··on What's the best programming language for coding agents?
The thing with LLM is they don't automatically pair parenesis/curly braces like we do with editors/IDEs.

The closing } ) ] token has to be generated to match exactly the beginning { ( [ many lines before. You can challenge yourself writing Lisp by hand without cursor moving backwards, and try close correctly by counting ))))))) you'd have a big headache.

A long, nested sub-routine with many () {} will cost LLM's context and makes it underperform, because the attention head have to track the state. On the other hand the indentation level can be infered as a single token[1] and saves reasoning effort.

Note these discussion is about "code generation", not parsing.

1: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer Try input many spaces.

est··on What's the best programming language for coding agents?
Python has a less known advantage because it had no curly braces, so LLMs can focus its attention to logic instead of syntax.

https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-11

est··on ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an author's style
LLMs from years ago weren't aligned to death like these days. It's hard to get rid of "AI smell" than years ago.
est··on Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
Why do browser vendors have such a control over browsers? Can anyone make a dll injection and bring back manifest v2 ?
est··on Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS
I made something similar

Source: https://github.com/est/gitweets

Demo: https://f.est.im/

The site and data is self-contained as a git repo.

A git commit is a post. Blobs are pictures.

Comments are stored in git notes.

est··on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731
> What secret sauce do they have?

Quant company usually squeezing every penny.

est··on DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731
> even small errors compound over time and can lead to catastrophic outcomes

So, death sentence even to frontier models?

est··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
Waiting for intelligence on a stick, plugin an USB, characters in, characters out.

100% local and no leaks.

est··on Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
> older stateful MCP (I’m going to call it “legacy MCP”) required two HTTP requests

What? I never realized it was the case. I was calling my handcrafted MCP server without the header all the time!

est··on Show HN: A Handwritten Blogging Platform
Well I hoped it was some kind of SVG with alt text for copy.

Turns out it's just a webp.

est··on Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era
unfortunately JSON is doomed to fail in "the AI era"

LLMs are surprisingly bad at generating JSON.

est··on Show HN: Gander, an Android file viewer that asks for no permissions at all
This is super cool.

> Requirements: JDK 17+ and the Android SDK (platform 35).

Bummer. I am stuck with Android 14 for the moment.

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