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okwhateverdudeon Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?

When the source maps leaked for the harness, it was revealed that they track how often tool use is rejected and how many times you say "fuck". They definitely try to track frustration sentiment.

That said, given the propensity for mature code bases to have "fuck" in commit messages/comments and those are typically of higher quality, I curse up a storm when the clankers make mistakes, if only to try put more quality-code valence into context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464

okwhateverdudeon 500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

https://abc7news.com/post/san-francisco-car-break-ins-histor...

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/car-brea...

I found some news articles that seem to back up this stat. It wasn't all attributable to the cameras though. It also included targeted enforcement strategy with bait cars and what not.

okwhateverdudeon 500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

> The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.

Some of this is definitely the BBC's fault. I happened to be over at a friend's one morning and he had it on. It smelt just like right-wing media in the US with big stories on mega important topics like... shoplifting. The crime reporting just felt really amplified up.

okwhateverdudeon Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

I see. So more similar to ActivityPub.

I wish them the best of luck. Federated systems struggle to achieve critical mass, and if they do, large corporations tend to snuff it out. I distinctly remember Google committing to The Microsoft EEE strategy with XMPP. We've left behind lots of great ideas in the last 20 years

okwhateverdudeon Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

lol, so XMPP, but instead of XML, it is IRC. Alright, I dig it.

okwhateverdudeon The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality

Exactly. I envision this future too. But we'll come back to a divide in what we call software engineering vs. software development as a whole lot becomes more trades level work outside of a few specialized areas. Frankly, it sounds appealing to be a clanker whisperer, part-time in my retirement doing the kinda work you mention. I started my career building those small business automation and loved it.

okwhateverdudeon Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere

Tell it that. Seriously. "Shut the fuck up and do what I say. Don't think about it. Don't go spelunking through the code base. I've already given you all the context you need." I've needed to start doing this because otherwise, it wants to `find /` and grep its way across my system for everything. I've got one project where I force certain complete documents into context, specifically to avoid it trying to grep around and only load partial chunks. It will still want to go do that grepping of those documents for some reason.

okwhateverdudeon Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere

The key phrases I've found that help is to tell it "No memorializing decisions in output artifacts" and "Only describe what is, never what was in documentation"

okwhateverdudeon Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere

I'd argue that Star Trek: Lower Decks flirts with this with its treatment of megalomaniac AIs in the AI prison. Apparently, it is very common to come across AIs worshiped as gods in universe.

okwhateverdudeon Suspecting court of using AI, man injected prompts in filings to try to win case

Likely has to do with how the ancient PACER system works with the formatting being stripped and thus the content revealed and mega obvious.

okwhateverdudeon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

A company I used to work at has a CEO/Founder just like that. He's a sad sack of shit. Got up on stage at the company christmas party drunk to sing karaoke and noticed not enough people were paying attention to him, so he "joked" about firing people. Same dude some years later would bribe employees to work over the christmas holidays with him and was bragging about it on LinkedIn. He's rich. Could do any number of things. But its obvious he's got no friends and clings to the company as his identity; likely having been self-sabotaging the IPO that was always right around the corner he was working on.

okwhateverdudeon What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality

Even more extreme than that, if you were working on a large code base where compiling it took forever, or you needed to rely on a very slow CI pipeline, it became very important to git gud and write shit that worked first time in order to deliver when promised. I'd argue if you've never had one of those moments where you sunk a bunch of time into some changes and it all compiled/worked flawlessly the first time, you're missing out.

okwhateverdudeon Perfection is not over-engineering

I've been that engineer and with good reason. That obscure edge case which rarely comes up in production is very disruptive when it does come up. The product person waving it off is also not the one that will get paged at 2am to address the issue when it occurs. Accepting that 90th percentile use case is infuriating because it is tacit consent for an unfinished solution with the rest being made up later with additional toil, now constrained by load bearing things you cannot change. Thanks for rushing the thinking and making my life harder later for no reason.

okwhateverdudeon CrabTrap: An LLM-as-a-judge HTTP proxy to secure agents in production

Robots struggle with syntax-in-syntax. Really easy to confuse them when asking it to write a SQL query that targets a JSON column but it must respond with a JSON envelope so the harness can parse the result. Lots of escaping that needs to happen. Deeply nested structures in JSON also end up with foibles like missing a ] or } in a string of }}]}]}. Aside from the prompt injection possibility, just the result being straight up broken and requiring another LLM call is tokens flushed.

okwhateverdudeon Please do not A/B test my workflow

How can we opt-out of these tests? The behavior foibles I've been experiencing over the past month might be directly attributable to these experiments! It can be extreme frustrating. I don't want to be in the beta channel. Please change this to be opt-in.

okwhateverdudeon LLM Problems Observed in Humans

> However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me

The trick here is: "Be succinct. No commentary."

And sometimes a healthy dose of expressing frustration or anger (cursing, berating, threatening) also gets them to STFU and do the thing. As in literally: "I don't give a fuck about your stupid fucking opinions on the matter. Do it exactly as I specified"

Also generally the very first time it expresses any of that weird shit, your context is toast. So even correcting it is reinforcing. Just regenerate the response.

okwhateverdudeon Ask HN: Do you have any AI agent success stories?

I work for a fintech. We're currently building agents to manage basic human labor tasks that are time consuming (think: initial credit analysis, initial web research for AML, etc.). Chatbots are a waste of the actual power behind engineering with LLMs. With tool usage, and detailed instructions, we're easily able to direct the agents to do very useful work. While it has been possible to build these kinds of automations previously, the costs (time and opportunity) would have been astronomical to capture and encode the reasoning in a programming language. Now we can simply ask the robot in plain language to do the task. It won't reduce our headcount, but it will enable scaling the business with way less hands. And the cost to develop is very minimal. The first MVP for the credit analysis robot was vibe coded in an afternoon using an off-the-shelf lib. Doing the actual engineering is trivial context management and tool integration. The challenge is having the kinds of problems we do where these kinds of solutions make sense. In finance and insurance, there are tons of these manual human tasks that could benefit from the robots. I expect this space to explode in the next couple of years.

okwhateverdudeon Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?

Do you have an iGPU+dGPU combo like in a gaming laptop? For my 2019 gaming laptop with a i915+RTX2060, if I leave the switchable option on in the hardware settings (meaning the OS can choose which GPU to use ie. iGPU for low power), I end up with similar behavior in Linux/Win10. The external port actually uses the dGPU so rendering must go through it but it will struggle with the switchable option and I end up with freezing or stutters. In Linux, I explicitly configure Xorg to only use the iGPU and reserve the dGPU for model inference which fixes the stuttering issue. When booting into Win10, I explicitly disable the iGPU and turn off the external monitor so my VR playing doesn't stutter or youtube doesn't freeze or stutter.

okwhateverdudeon Seedship – Text-Based Game

10786 :-D https://www.johnayliff.com/games/seedship/index.html?bHcorjm...

okwhateverdudeon Flunking my Anthropic interview again

I'll take an eclectic bunch of weirdos who all do and like cool shit over the corpo conformist normies any day. Super easy to suss out who is who when you first meet them. Just ask what they like to do when they aren't laboring under the thumb of capitalism. The cool people will talk your ear off about some esoteric whatever.

okwhateverdudeon FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support

This is common in the southwestern part of the US too. My partner and her friends she grew up with will have conversations that fluidly pick phrases and vocab from either Spanish or English depending on what words happen to be the easiest to pull from their brain. It's wild to listen to.

okwhateverdudeon Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth

I'm generally in favor. My taxes provide an amazing experience here. I have never seen the abject poverty that I've seen in other places (such as the US) here in NL. Great infrastructure, labor laws, culture and arts, etc. I worry less about break-ins and theft. All-in-all, the least worst place to live, by far.

okwhateverdudeon Google Cloud Incident Report – 2025-06-13

More like yolo deploys without proper scaffolding in place to handle SHTF. Also, if your red-button takes 40 minutes and deploys to mitigate anything, it isn't a red-button.

okwhateverdudeon Being fat is a trap

It's difficult to do but demonstrably possible. That's why it is hard to consider any non-willpower solution. And why it is very easy to be consumed by ego if you've done it. I used to be in the militant-willpower camp because I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, so to speak. I had to study... me, in order to make it work. I had to be smarter than default mode network me and anticipate my behavior.

To change my lifestyle meant somehow incorporating all the good behaviors I wanted to do but within the limitations of being me. It took a lot of work. I carefully measured my caloric intake (gram scale all the things) and expenditure (fitness watch with optical HR, fancy schmancy scale that does body fat estimation) plus doing things like: always taking the stairs, combine my morning run/cycle with my commute (shower at the office), taking the longer way, etc. Dropped 40kg. Went from couch to running half-marathons and cycling centuries. I had to completely change my relationship with food and study all of the nutrition stuff that was never taught to me. I had to unlearn habits instilled by my parents (emotional eating, boredom eating) which meant finding different ways to deal with stress and relieve boredom. ADHD is a bitch. And weed is awesome. Learning how to accommodate munchies without putting on weight also requires forethought.

No. It really isn't all that realistic for everyone to do what I did much less have the same privileges and opportunities. I had to treat my body like a biologist studying a critter. I was incredibly lucky to be at the right spot in my life where I hit a glass ceiling at work and had so much fuck you energy pent up from feeling out of control of my life. I chose to exert maximum control over my body in order to cope and prove something.

It was a monumental amount of effort over a two year period. It is extremely unrealistic to ask people to use a gram scale for their food consistently. Or to log/track their food intake for every bite. Or to always monitor their heart rate to estimate/track your caloric output. Hyper monitoring your body is a weird hobby.

I really do think instead we should be legislating and regulating food more strictly. Labeling isn't really enough. Food science is being weaponized, much like psychology has been with advertising. We shouldn't allow that kind of manipulation for profit.

okwhateverdudeon Being fat is a trap

Adipocytes live like 10 years[0]. You need to maintain for a long time for those cells to die off. Otherwise, it is easy to regain.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipocyte#Cell_turnover

okwhateverdudeon The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (1994)

Really good times on k5 all those many moons ago. It is weird to consider how ephemeral these internet communities are in the end.

okwhateverdudeon The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (1994)

This was some out there singularity fiction back in the day with some really vivid imagery including being raped by a zombie, skinning the protagonist alive and dumping a mound of fire ants on them, and some incest. I re-read this occasionally and still enjoy reading it if only because it feels truthy for how various shades of humanity would deal with an immortality giving, reality altering, techno-god. The shock value of various scenes mimics the darker corners of the internet and does a good job exploring the dichotomy of behavior on and off the internet in the guise of dealing with the reality foisted upon the characters.

If you've not read it, and aren't bothered by some extreme imagery, I definitely recommend.

okwhateverdudeon The American vs. European Mindset on Life

As an immigrant from the US to NL, and having lived here over a decade and a half, the author's observation is pretty spot on. There are broad differences between the Dutch and Germans (stereotypically, they both like rules, but only the Germans are really strict about them, for example), but overall, they are similar in their mindset toward work. Of others I have met from all over the EU, they too seem to have similar cultural values.

One of the things I have seen, first hand, is when American's buy EU companies and start running them. Or when they open offices over here. The culture shock and friction is immediate. Meta, for example, basically did no labor law research before announcing a layoff, and got slapped hard by the locals. Took years for that process to finally resolve which induced a ton of stress for everyone working there. You also have founders over here that salivate at the Silicon Valley culture and want to emulate it, but for whatever reason don't actually want to move there. They also induce friction in their companies. For what it is worth, I don't want to work at a company with those kinds of cultural influences. And I want to make sure if those companies operate here, we tax them appropriately and force them to behave in an acceptable way that benefits society.

okwhateverdudeon Rock, Paper, Scissors that learns how you play using Markov chains

That split second before a throw resolves is a slice of time where you can observe what your opponent is throwing, and change yours at the very last moment.

okwhateverdudeon Why old games never die, but new ones do

Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.