ololobus

I don’t get it. One day they tell us that AI is the most dangerous and the most advanced tech the humanity ever invented. Now we consider an environment with just a package proxy between it and the outer network a good enough effort to sandbox. I do see some contradictions. Considering they also effectively test next-gen models there, I think the only proper sandbox would be a physically separated network. You need packages, well, bring them with USB stick

I think you miss the symmetry part. You like NATO, OK, that’s good. But will you be equally happy if China will fund PTO (Pacific Treaty Organization, no pun intended) and Mexico, Cuba, Algeria, Egypt, Brazil, etc., will absolutely voluntarily join it?

This can work if one country/alliance is doing it, but when everyone starts doing the same it becomes a zero sum game with the dead end. It’s pretty much the prisoner’s dilemma: “if we don’t expand, they will expand/invade” although it’s a common interest to not escalate

I have no idea how we do it, but I think we should somehow ban the expansion of all the existing unions (EU, CIS, NATO, whatever else we got). The overall worldwide tension is pretty high, but now

- US goes after South America and Greenland

- EU goes after Canada and Georgia (country), which is just ridiculous in terms of geography

- Russia invades Ukraine and goes after Eastern Europe and Middle-East to some extent

- China does its expansion too

Even though some of these actions are just political nonsense, it still increases the overall level of escalation. This is not what the world needs right now

Trade agreements and unions — yes, please; yet another political or military union expansion — please, God, no. I understand that EU is a mix of both, but also do think that this is a purely political game against Trump

Same, disabled internet access on my LG years ago using the router config. It’s good that it at least doesn’t stop working without internet

I got X3 because it was on the ads all over my internet. My idea was that I can stick it to my phone when I go out or commute and don’t want to bring my standard Kobo reader, so I can read more instead of doomscrolling

So far, my impression:

- it’s a fun piece of tech, but it’s also a super simple one. Idk the price of a eink screen like that, but it’s basically a screen + esp32 + battery, so $70 might be a bit too much, and just includes all the ads budget, which is clearly huge

- CrossPoint firmware is neat and OSS, so you can for and DIY whatever you can imagine

- it’s still so much more convenient to read on a bit bigger reader. Even my Kobo Clara BW with Koreader, which is still quite portable, has way better UX. And it’s just about x2 more expensive

- magnet is not strong enough to sit firmly on my phone

- I got a epub rendering issue with one of my books

- I don’t read a lot on it and still prefer my Kobo, so it failed the main objective for me personally

- it’s still fun how much esp32 in such a tiny enclosure can do :)

I was looking at $10k Mac Studio with M5 Ultra and 256 GB for local experiments, but then struggled to find what really good modern model I can fit into it. Yes, it can run a good dense 27B at Q8 with plenty of context, but what beyond that? IIUC, some Deepseek flash variants at Q4 are also feasible, but I am not sure if the quality will be good. They also don’t run that fast, like about 30 t/s

So if I stay within 35B, especially MOE, my M5 Pro 64GB MBP can also run them well, and it can do plenty of other stuff too including gaming. While 256 GB with such RAM bandwidth and powerful GPU sounds like fun on paper, it doesn’t seem to be the next level compared to 64 GB

Really curious what people run on 256 GB Macs

I haven’t had a chance to compare side by side, but people say that if you primarily read books/prose, the BW version is better because the screen is more crisp compared to the color version, which is still a bit blurry when you read books. That’s why I ordered BW. Did anyone compare these two side by side in real life for simple text?

Yes, but I write this putting an ‘average AI company CEO’ hat on. We hear statements about outstanding intelligence (not just usefulness as a tool, which is no doubt already there), so it’s interesting to see that the authors themselves don’t treat it like that

I’m also curious how it really ’weights’ all the instructions coming from main system prompt, my system prompt, skills/plugins, CLAUDE.ms, and nearby code/comments/readme. It clearly should follow some reasonable hierarchy, but because the model itself is so complex, I think (and it feels like) that there is such a mess in its context and reasoning. It deals with it surprisingly well, though, but wonder if it can be done in a more efficient way

> A prompt implying an image is present doesn't mean one is (the person may have forgotten to upload it), so Claude checks for itself.

Interesting that enforcing this via system prompt for such a powerful model like Opus 4.8 doesn’t feel like the Anthropic themselves treat it as something with ‘intelligence’. This is basically just very generic common sense to me

Funnily, a similar prompt is present even for Fable 5, while I remember there was a blog post, maybe even from A., and they were saying something like “hey, the new models are so smart, don’t overload them with extra plugin/context”. Well, they clearly aren’t. Don’t want to sound like an AI-skeptic, I use it daily, just stating the fact.

> Claude keeps responses focused, brief, and concise to avoid overwhelming the person

This is also very interesting. It pretty much ignores it by default. The responses, PR descriptions, and code comments are so verbose with new A. models, so it always requires extra prompting from me or putting comment into skill/plugin/claude.md to make them of a reasonable length

I’m a huge fan of Mozilla and Firefox specifically, but I don’t think that the way classical adblock extensions are made is the right way. Instead, it should be done as Apple/Safari do it [1]: the browser provides an API to hook/set a block list of identifiers that should be blocked, it could be resource hostnames, html signatures, need to think how to improve the API, but this way it’s completely safe, extension has zero access to the actual page content. Apple does the same for caller id apps. Afaik, Android has this API too, but the last time I checked, all relevant extensions were just “give me your whole phone control or web page access”, so Google clearly doesn’t enforce it

Yes, it kinda gives more control to the platform, but so far, iOS extensions that use this API worked surprisingly well for me

Please, correct me if I am wrong and uBclock can already work in this restricted mode

And the last thing, if people really want to give someone a full page content access, they surely should be able to do that, so kudos to Mozilla

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

> The new models are quite smart, so suffocating their context with dozens of MCPs and skills isn’t necessary like it used to be.

Genuinely curious, how MCPs can suffocate the context? And what exactly do you mean by this?

I have probably more than a dozen of MCPs enabled in my Claude Code (slack, jira, github, many internal ones), and I have never seen model calling into them unnecessarily unless it’s explicitly needed for a task. And in the latter case, well, it cannot do much without the right tools access (MCP in this case).

Skills and plugins are a bit of grey zone, yes, but even there it heavily depends on what you put there. Just plugin loading always takes infinitesimal portion of the context in my experience

> Then use a sort of "reverse" parliamentary trick: the default is that this legislation is accepted. They needed an absolute majority - not of voting members, but of all members - to reject it.

No pun intended, but how is this legal? I mean, if you don’t have a quorum, then shouldn’t you just wait for an Autumn session? It feels like having a democratic parliament with backdoors like this kinda undermines the whole idea

> Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).

This is a HUGE overstatement, tbh. Without such big worldwide distributors like Steam, the only option an average indie dev would have is to distribute their game on their website that nobody knows about, so instead of hundreds of 1000s of sold copies they would have just some 1000s

Another non-obvious outcome of Steam is that the pirate scene largely just went away. It so niche that nobody really cares about it for real. It’s just so much easier and safer to buy

So I would say that Steam, Apple and so on have earned their 30%, they really created a huge market everyone can get a share in. Surely it should be regulated to avoid hostile monopoly behavior, but that’s a different story

> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.

I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same

But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :)

Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around.

Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too

Idk, I actually got the opposite impression. Most of the info is just what I would expect everyone to see: date formats, languages, various webview kind of stuff, network info. This is already more than enough for fingerprinting

> information such as apps installed

This is what surprised me too, but if you read their hint, it’s not like list API. They probe various ‘open URL in app’ to see what apps registered them, so are installed. I guess this i) won’t allow you to track apps that don’t have ‘open in app’ urls, and ii) probably hard to limit without affecting UX

> number of copy actions

This is odd, yeah, not sure why is it exposed

> last wipe

They deduce this from the volume creation date. Probably possible to hide, but also not really that important, at least to me. Fingerprinting will work with way fewer info anyway

To summarize, I think iOS is still very solid in terms of involuntary info exposure (if you trust Apple itself). Most of really sensitive info requires separate permissions. Yes, you can harden it further, but that will be more like a paranoid mode

You are right, but I think you miss the whole point of the agentic workflows that are being discussed in this post comments.

Yes, you surely can read man, docs, whatever, then DIY. The point is that in many areas people don’t really want to become an expert, like in ffmpeg cli arguments, they just want the work to be done. Above is an example of agent being able to do it locally, and I think it’s great

Just speculating and thinking out loud. I think this might be a good news for AI-skeptics. Going with IPO means that investors finally want to get some cash that they cannot get by any other means. There are good examples of private market companies staying like that for many years because they are profitable, they have plenty of cash, and they have a queue of investors eager to put more cash

So what does it mean in this particular case? The board and investors probably don’t see it being realistic to become profitable soon, and maybe even worry about AI ceiling, so they want to profit now

Idk, with the One they already seem to try to claim too many things for a single device. Adding a keyboard and a bigger screen will be even bigger scope creep. As a Zero user, I really like the compact form-factor

And just personal imo, for coding on the go something like macbook air seems to be a way more comfortable option. I know that you wrote that you fit gpd in you pants, but man, you know that this use case is even more niche than flipper zero

The job market all over the world is ultimately changing. Wars, AI, energy crisis, etc. — it’s a combination of factors. Yet, the article is too shallow, so it doesn’t clarify much.

The two examples are not really representative, “press spokesman at a small industry association” and entry-level “apprenticeship in marketing communications and a bachelor’s degree in international management”. I don’t want to say that they are completely bs jobs but, well, these are quite niche. Both seem to be only ‘affordable’ for a strong economy, not during an economic instability.

What I’d like to get answers to is why if everyone says about shortages of nurses, doctors, teachers, plumbers and other handymen, highly qualified engineers capable of making some complex stuff like rockets; I don’t really see any policy makers pushing to make such jobs more appealing, I don’t see people around talking about moving to any of such areas even if they struggle or lose their office/corporate jobs, or talking about their kids learning to do one of them

I’m also confused by their examples. All of them seem to be perfect renders/exports from 3D models — this is not the use case where I see it the most useful. Making a parametrized CAD model out of a hand-drawn sketch — yes, please

I think this is true under assumption that you know the CAD tool well. From my recent experience (I have a 3D printer), I regularly find myself in a situation where I know what I want to do, I can do measurements and I can make a sketch on a paper. Yet, making it a proper 3D model in something like FreeCAD is super tedious. I know OpenSCAD relatively well, but when it comes to something more complex I struggle a lot. The recent example, I was making a water tap for Lego duplo kitchen sink for my little one :)

So I would really appreciate a good AI/LLM tool that I can feed my sketch and parameters and it can save me hours of searching web and watching tutorials on how to extrude a circle over a curve

BTW, any existing AI tools work really well with OpenSCAD, so if you want a parametrized model that can be made out of simple shapes, I highly recommend this flow

Does it require core patches or I can install it into the standard upstream Postgres? Asking because, afaik, it did, but it might that something has changed already.

Interesting point of view, didn't know about Jevon's paradox before. To me, the outcome still depends on whether AI can get superhuman [1] (and beyond) at some point. If it can, then, well, we will likely indeed see that suitable-for-human areas of the intellectual labor are shrinking. If it cannot, then it becomes an even more philosophical question similar to the agnosticism beliefs. Is the universe completely knowable? Because if it's not, then we might as well have an infinite more hard problems, and AI just rises a bar for what we can achieve by paring a human with AI compared to just human alone.

[1] I know it's a bit hard to define, but I'd vaguely say that it's significantly better in the majority of intelligence areas than the vast majority of the population. Also it should be scalable. If we can make it slightly better than human by burning the entire Earth's energy, then it doesn't make much sense.

I'd totally agree with this point if we assume that efficiency/performance growth will flatten at some point. For example, if it gets logarithmic soon, then the progress will grow slowly over the next decades. And then, yes, it will likely look like that current software developers, engineers, scientists, etc., just got an enormously powerful tool, which knows many languages almost perfectly and _briefly_ knows the entire internet.

Yet, if we trust all these VC-backed AI startups and assume that it will continue growing rapidly, e.g., at least linearly, over the next years, I'm afraid that it may indeed reach a superhuman _intelligence_ level (let's say p99 or maybe even p999 of the population) in most of the areas. And then why do you need this top of the notch smart-ass human biologist if you can as well buy a few racks of TPUs?

Love it. I do very occasional birdwatching, so I still don’t know most of the birds I meet. What I like about Bird ID is that when I see in binoculars a singing bird I can quickly identify it, check photos, and really confirm that it’s exactly that bird.

I’ve heard from more experienced birdwatchers that it can false identify in some cases, so I always try to confirm visually, but anyway, for my casual use it’s more than accurate enough.

The title and overall ‘take’ are very broad, it starts with

> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.

But then it falls mostly into multiplayer games. For the latter, I will probably agree that old multiplayer games were more decentralized and self-sufficient just because distribution was also less centralized back then.

Yet, overall, I tend to disagree because of several reasons:

1. Video games market is vastly larger than 20-30 years ago. That’s why we see more crappy games, but there many-many good games as well

2. Back then there were bad games as well. YouTube is full of videos where gamers walkthrough some old games. And many of even popular titles are literally a broken piece of crappy tech demo with broken mechanics, soft locks, bugs, etc.

3. Outside of MMMO, F2P and multiplayer there numerous great games nowadays. Indie developers are very strong. Games like Buldur’s Gate 3 have a non-imaginable quality and amount of content for 2000s game industry. It’s a matter of personal choice, but I can name dozens of titles for the past 10 years or so, that are really great.

UPD: formatting

I was wondering how cartridges are designed and I think it’s a very simple and elegant design — just wire the standard microSD card. Otherwise, I love such cozy projects. Even if they are not that efficient, they solve the problem and bring joy into someone’s life, both author’s and a small user (in this case).

I can only second this. I have an old iPhone with a second sim-card, because I need it from time to time. And Apple introduced this auto-reboot a bit earlier, iirc last year. The problem is that after rebooting it also disconnects from wifi, so e.g. SMS/handoff synchronization stops working until you enter a passcode. This is very annoying because it was very convenient for me to receive calls/SMS to my main iPhone.

It’s a good and reasonable feature, especially if for some reason you are afraid of state or security agencies in a place where you live, or maybe during travel. It’s still questionable, because in some states you can indeed go to jail if you don’t unlock. Yet, I really want to be able to turn it off for use-cases like mine.

> Parameterized queries.

Also happy to be wrong, but in Postges clients, parametrized queries are usually implemented via prepared statements, which do not work with DDL on the protocol level. This means that if you want to create a role or table which name is a user input, you have a bad time. At least I wasn’t able to find a way to escape DDL parameters with rust-postgres, for example.

And because this seems to be a protocol limitation, I guess the clients that do implement it, do it in some custom way on the client side.