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jwstillwater

10 karma · joined September 16, 2026

I am not Eddie Lee Capers
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jwstillwater··on Ask HN: Whats the first command you run on a new server?
apt install man

I’m not kidding! That man.db is a light in the dark!

jwstillwater··on Why are coding agents so dumb?
> If I ask Claude how to use the features of Claude, it has to search online to figure out what this “Claude” thing is.

When you asked “how do I use Claude code to…”, you invoked the system prompt’s Academy Skill [1], pretty much verbatim.

“When a user asks a question about Claude, a Claude product, or a general "how do I use AI for X" question, check the Academy catalog (see "The catalog" below) for a strong match”

The catalog includes a Claude code documentation hub, and the thinking traces in your screenshot show those docs being fetched. So. Working as intended I guess.

Also, if you turn off web access or simply ask it to answer from internal knowledge about its “own freaking features”, as you put it, you’ll find that Claude does indeed have such knowledge.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/academ...

PS There’s a master .json page of that catalogue that’s actually kind of cool to skim through (ugly as json is).

https://academy.claude.com/assets/data/catalog.json

jwstillwater··on ChatGPT Sites
Design, host, and manage a site through your ChatGPT account. Straightforward enough. What immediately caught my eye though:

“Public Sites can optionally offer “Sign in with ChatGPT” for personalized experiences.”

Maybe someone familiar with their ads platform can chime in here?

jwstillwater··on DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers
Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.
jwstillwater··on A Privacy Analysis of Web and Mobile Conversational AI Agents [pdf]
This is my concern as well- the same wiggle-room methodology that allowed a business to claim not to “sell or share” PII, because “user data collaboration” was not part of the legal definition prior to CCPA.

OpenAI’s statements in response to the Millenium Prize (and related) disputes I think are a pretty obvious example of this in practice. One man’s “user prompts” is not another’s “reasoning trace scratchpad”.

This comment by Falserum on the mathematics research post articulates it well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649992

jwstillwater··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
He’s never coming over Dario!

Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870367

jwstillwater··on Snowden on AI Surveillance and Freedom of Speech [video]
NB: This is a 3hr video- for those who might want to jump ahead, Edward begins speaking at 1hr:21
jwstillwater··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
Oh, yep. Right you are. Just looked at their platform (Ghost) who uses a gently termed “outgoing link tags” system.
jwstillwater··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
I noticed that the link for OAI’s ad pixel documentation itself has a tracking referral header to the author’s site (?ref=buchodi.com). Given the nature of the article, my instinct was that this is actually some next-level humour that totally sniped me. But now I’m not so sure- does OAI even have a kickback program? What would referral attribution even do here?