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nomilk

8,507 karma · joined January 30, 2016

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nomilk··on Phones should have a 'guest lock' feature
yeah, handing your unlocked phone to a flight attendant during boarding or an immigration official while entering a country has become commonplace too.
nomilk··on We ran 8 models against 21 tasks to see which were best at writing Rails code
https://xcancel.com/rails/status/2087951277573488825
nomilk··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
I wasn't aware of this. Seems Google is lagging the big 3 (Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI) when it comes to frontier models for programming and hard problem solving.

I guess Google's betting on consumers being price-elastic (preferring to tradeoff intelligence for significant cost savings)

nomilk··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
How does it compare to Opus 5.0 and Fable 5 for coding? E.g. in Cursor or OpenCode?
nomilk··on Grok 4.6
I suspect answering the full question is always preferred, at least for me (I tend to waffle and may ask 2-3 questions in a single voice prompt, and it annoyed me when grok voice recently stopped answering all of them, and instead seemed to select max one to answer with no mention of the others).

Regarding length, I developed the habit of aggressively interrupting, which made voice mode basically perfect. Interrupting had to be learned because it felt very unnatural at first.

Conversely, a skill I'm currently learning is how to ask Grok to 'talk more about X' or 'can you explain that more' (I didn't need to do this prior to 2 weeks ago so I still haven't gotten good at it)

nomilk··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
I had a security incident the other day and Grok was the only model that would help. Claude and GPT refused on ethical grounds and only gave general advice. In an emergency, I'd only trust Grok. However, that's the only time I used Grok for coding (since Opus 4.8 it would take a lot to get me to switch away from Anthropic)
nomilk··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
How does Grok 4.5 compare to Opus >= 4.8 though?

I'm willing to pay 2x for a 10% smarter model. Intelligence matters that much (because 10% smarter probably saves, on average, several hours of human time).

nomilk··on Grok 4.6
> it's being short with me, I thought it was upset lol

Same!

nomilk··on Grok 4.6
I'm thinking of switching to Grok on Cursor (purely for $$ reasons). But Opus >= 4.8 has been fantastic; it's hard to leave, even just to dabble with other models.
nomilk··on Grok 4.6
Tangental, but has anyone else noticed grok's voice mode got stupid and terse ~2 weeks ago? I've absolutely loved grok's voice mode since it came out (incredibly useful for brainstorming on walks and helping conceptualise and get the verbiage for expressing ideas) but it seems so have lost about 40 IQ points recently, and if the question is multi-part, it often answers just one part with no elaboration or explanation of the other parts or interactions between parts. No clue why.
nomilk··on Grok Bot by SpaceXAI
[flagged].. huh?
nomilk··on Claude making verbose code comments – ignoring instructions to stop
I've noticed anthropic models going overboard on code comments recently (e.g. perhaps the last week or two?). I've noticed it poignantly in my own use of opus 5.0 and opus 4.8. It seems to add 3-6 lines of comments above most method definitions, even where it's totally unnecessary (e.g. where the comment is stating the bleeding obvious).
nomilk··on Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
> Does Cursor allow you to blacklist certain commands as well? I know OpenCode has this

No, Cursor only has an allowlist; no blacklist

nomilk··on Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
> Data suggests that manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.

Claude's 'auto mode' feels like a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

Cursor handles this much better IMO. When the agent wants to run a command, Cursor lets you choose between 'allow once' and 'add command to allowlist'. The latter lets the agent run that command (grep, ls, pwd etc) any number of times for that project, which means you get a lot of these manual reviews when you start a new project but rarely (if ever) thereafter.

nomilk··on "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers
> talking to users ... good code ... we should aim for both

tl;dr nothing has changed.

nomilk··on Iceberg Collapses and Flips over in Ilulissat, Greenland (July 25, 2026) [video]
Surprised the bottom of the iceberg crumbled so easily (like sand) at 4m 16s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UufMqwyO7pY&t=4m16s

I'd have assumed it would be colder and more compacted (being toward the bottom and further under water), and therefore harder.

nomilk··on Nikita Bier stepping down from Head of Product on X (previous Twitter)
Interesting the top comment is

> Maybe all the ludicrous suspensions will get overturned.

My account (~10 years old, quite unique/quirky posts/comments) was recently shadow banned for 'inauthentic behaviour' (I use VPNs but can't think of any other thing that would make my use of the site appear 'inauthentic', and my posts/comments are too quirky to be considered bot behaviour).

nomilk··on Official ModRetro M64 Deep Dive: Console, Controller, Games [video]
I know nothing of hardware yet have been in a trance watching the first 10 min. The little light that illuminates the front of the cartridge made me smile. Gratuitous yet disciplined UX like that is a sign the rest of the product is good.
nomilk··on Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room
From a certain angle it looks like an eyeball https://imgur.com/a/Dam3XT0
nomilk··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
> the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation. In one example, the model chained together multiple attack vectors, including using stolen credentials

How did it get the stolen credentials!?

nomilk··on 30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format
This is a beautiful way to present extremely high quality information. I sometimes lament the unpleasant friction involved in finding and reading academic papers (the overly formal style is a necessary evil, but the irritating paywalls, followed by inevitable searches for '%{title} filetype:pdf' feel like unnecessary ones).
nomilk··on Leaking YouTube creators' private videos
The article suggests a seemingly easy fix:

> The fix is pretty straightforward: treat comment content as untrusted data, not as potential instructions. Comments should be passed to the model with clear role boundaries that prevent them from being interpreted as system-level directives.

> Any AI feature that ingests user-generated content and acts on it needs to enforce this separation. Otherwise, the AI becomes a vector for every piece of content it reads.

So why isn't YT doing the extreme obvious?

nomilk··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
> August 3, 2014

That's important. Because now days it's trivial for LLMs to translate ORM to SQL and vice-versa with ~100% accuracy. I haven't written any raw SQL (only Active Record) in about two years, and the odd time I blunder with AR and create an n+1 I find out about it via error tracking (e.g. Sentry) a few minutes later and fix it. No biggie.

There's also an additional layer of protection in that using AI on the codebase can spot SQL blunders incidentally (i.e. you ask about X, and the AI does X but also says "Not asked, but flagging for your attention: problem with SQL on line 256 etc.."

nomilk··on Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning
And that was after running around a semi-arid playground playing 'tips' or touch footy during recess and lunch!
nomilk··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
But a single app can request to know the presence of up to 50 apps, right?

And a data broker/aggregator can purchase such data from many (e.g. thousands) of apps and aggregate it, then sell it.

nomilk··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
My understanding is it's common practice. E.g. How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/data-broker-inference-p...
nomilk··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
I've never made an iOS app and don't have plans to. But my assumption is ~every >= medium-sized iOS app would be monetised by selling data to aggregators.
nomilk··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
Loupe itself can see if you have tinder/bumble/hinge installed (verify for yourself: install tinder, then install loupe, don't give it any permissions, and it can tell if you have tinder installed or not). So the answer is: buy the data from any app your partner has installed! Or more easily, a data aggregator which will have already combined data from hundreds/thousands of apps.

So your partner only needs to have had 1 single app from the list that sells user data to a data aggregator for this to work. They do not need to have installed some special app.

Here's a random Slate article about apps getting your data and selling it to aggregators/brokers, who sell it to third-parties (you, or I, could be one of those third parties).

> How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder.

https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/data-broker-inference-p...

nomilk··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
They don't, utilise the fact that every single iPhone app has access to what other apps are installed! - purchase that info from literally any iPhone app or aggregator that has it for that user. Curious how much this would cost to purhcase - a working credit card goes for $5-10 on the black market so 'apps installed on X's iphone' might be, like, 10c?
nomilk··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
Okay it's weird but the first thing that came to mind. Logic: if I can think of a monetisable, nefarious application in 10 seconds, then it stands to reason that very many nefarious applications would be possible with more time/effort.
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