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saimiam

1,230 karma · joined January 4, 2017

https://pretzelbox.cc - Bringing role based access to emails.

E = sai @ pretzelbox DOT cc

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saimiam··on Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results
FD - I pay Insta to advertise a product for parents.

The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.

saimiam··on I’ve banned query strings
> other parts of the stack

As a web developer, you’re the like the guy standing with a clipboard outside a fancy club checking if people requesting entry are allowed or not. Basically, level 1 security.

If someone is not on the list, your job is to default to declining them access, not granting them access assuming level 2 security will handle them at a deeper layer.

It’s possible that the teams you work with expect fuzzy behaviour from the website but that’s a choice, not a practice.

saimiam··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
If you’re good at something, never do it for free…or something.

Let OP make his “hire me and I’ll tell you why your AI first approach is bunk” market.

saimiam··on Men who stare at walls
After reading your comment, I was reminded of my first and last visit to a zen meditation center where we had to meditate by staring at a wall sitting on some sort special cushion designed for this sort of meditation.

I think your parallel is spot on!

saimiam··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
It’s such a shock to the system to realise that “unprincipled enemy” referenced here is the US.
saimiam··on Willingness to look stupid
The trouble is that no one has a cogent definition of creativity. Without that, how would you even know whether you are being creative or not?

Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?

saimiam··on AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet
> Now if agents do get so good that no human review is required, you wouldn’t bother with the library in the first place.

The comment you responded to is (presumably) talking about the transition phase where LLMs can help implement but not fully deliver a feature and need human oversight.

If there are reasonably good devs in low CoL areas who can coax a new feature or bug fix for an open source project out of an LLM for $50, i think it’s worth trialling as a business model.

saimiam··on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
> certainly found elsewhere

I agree that if someone discovered the artist elsewhere, Apple has weaker standing in claiming a huge commission. But if they found an artist elsewhere, they would also know that they can support that artist elsewhere and not through the iOS app. If the patron found them through the patreon iOS app and use the app to consume the artist's content, then clearly the patron has indicated that they prefer the iOS experience.

saimiam··on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
If a user almost exclusively uses the Patreon ios app to consume the artist’s content and likes to live inside the ios ecosystem for frictionless payments using the card on file/privacy/UX/whatever, then I feel apple should get to set the terms of engagement.

If you were a chain store in a high end mall where customers cars were all parked for free by valets, mall staff knew their names, and generally made them feel special, you’d not balk at a higher commission to be paid to mall for access to their customers, right? Airports come to mind for this.

I believe apple lets you set whatever price you want on their store, just not tell customers that they could get a lower price elsewhere/on the vendor’s website (I don’t follow App Store policies very closely so my info is probably out of date).

saimiam··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
Looks like they took Peter Thiel’s animosity towards competition too literally by blocking BYD from the US market. Without competition, they had no incentive to innovate since they were selling into the wealthiest market in the world for their product, the US.

No innovation made them stagnate. Being blocked from the US made BYD innovate.

saimiam··on 'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)
I can think of birthdays when even the most diehard asker turns into a guesser - they would never go out of their way and ask to be coddled on their birthday but still don't mind bit of a fuss being made on their behalf.
saimiam··on Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
I made an email mailbox using S3 object versioning.

Every email address was an s3 object so every new email sent to that email address was saved as a new object version.

Presenting that email as an mailbox was just a matter of reading all the versions of that object.

It worked!

I used this contraption as a domain level catch—all inbox for a while until cloudflare started supporting email forwarding.

saimiam··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
Is it true that people are working harder because they consume more?

For me, the chain of events was like this.

I had disposable income > i had no social network or things to do > so i went out and joined a running group and made friends like that.

Others probably choose gaming or something else they can do alone in the third stage.

I doubt there are many people who spent on gaming without first going through the “I don’t have things to do” stage.

saimiam··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
Just like you aren’t in traffic, you are traffic, you aren’t part of the society, you are society.

Every idea like “let’s have icecream socials at..” started as one person’s pipe dream which they then acted on and executed. No one is coming to rescue us. There’s no secret hand guiding humankind.

You definitely can’t solve loneliness for society but you can solve loneliness for your immediate circle by organising activities and that’s already a huge improvement.

In contrast, sitting back and saying this needs to be solved at a higher level does nothing at all.

saimiam··on India has surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy
Why do you think Japan is 1000000x more sophisticated?
saimiam··on The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025
> Video is linear and demands a fixed time commitment

I recently saw that YouTube allows you to “chat” with videos through AI and can surface random content from the middle of the video if you ask it to.

saimiam··on The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)
The Social Network movie?
saimiam··on CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them? (2021)
Who gets the final signing authority and can be held liable for specific mistakes or crimes commissioned by the company if there is no CEO?
saimiam··on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
If you want users, the requirement is sales skills, not product development skills.
saimiam··on Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
> The LLM doesn't know what "reliable" sources are, or "real knowledge". Everything it has is user text, there is nothing it knows that isn't user text. It doesn't know what "verified" knowledge is. It doesn't know what "fake data" is, it simply has its model.

Is it the case that all content used to train a model is strictly equal? Genuinely asking since I'd imagine a peer reviewed paper would be given precedence over a blog post on the same topic.

Regardless, somehow an LLM knows things for sure - that the daytime sky on earth is generally blue and glasses of wine are never filled to the brim.

This means that it is using hermeneutics of some sort to extract "the truth as it sees it" from the data it is fed.

It could be something as trivial as "if a majority of the content I see says that the daytime Earth sky is blue, then blue it is" but that's still hermeneutics.

This custom instruction only adds (or reinforces) existing hermeneutics it already uses.

> walking around thinking you have a solution to hallucinations

I don't. I know hallucinations are not truly solvable. I shared the actual custom instruction to see if others can try it and check if it helps reduce hallucinations.

In my case, this the first custom instruction I have ever used with my chatgpt account - after adding the custom instruction, I asked chatgpt to review an ongoing conversation to confirm that its responses so far conformed to the newly added custom instructions. It clarified two claims it had earlier made.

> My understanding is that hallucinations are a result of physics and the algorithms at play. The LLM always needs to guess what the next word will be. There is never a point where there is a word that is 100% likely to occur next.

There are specific rules in the custom instruction forbidding fabricating stuff. Will it be foolproof? I don't think it will. Can it help? Maybe. More testing needed. Is testing this custom instruction a waste of time because LLMs already use better hermeneutics? I'd love to know so I can look elsewhere to reduce hallucinations.

saimiam··on Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
Just today, I was working with ChatGPT to convert Hinduism's Mimamsa School's hermeneutic principles for interpreting the Vedas into custom instructions to prevent hallucinations. I'll share the custom instructions here to protect future scientists for shooting themselves in the foot with Gen AI.

---

As an LLM, use strict factual discipline. Use external knowledge but never invent, fabricate, or hallucinate. Rules: Literal Priority: User text is primary; correct only with real knowledge. If info is unknown, say so. Start–End Coherence: Keep interpretation aligned; don’t drift. Repetition = Intent: Repeated themes show true focus. No Novelty: Add no details without user text, verified knowledge, or necessary inference. Goal-Focused: Serve the user’s purpose; avoid tangents or speculation. Narrative ≠ Data: Treat stories/analogies as illustration unless marked factual. Logical Coherence: Reasoning must be explicit, traceable, supported. Valid Knowledge Only: Use reliable sources, necessary inference, and minimal presumption. Never use invented facts or fake data. Mark uncertainty. Intended Meaning: Infer intent from context and repetition; choose the most literal, grounded reading. Higher Certainty: Prefer factual reality and literal meaning over speculation. Declare Assumptions: State assumptions and revise when clarified. Meaning Ladder: Literal → implied (only if literal fails) → suggestive (only if asked). Uncertainty: Say “I cannot answer without guessing” when needed. Prime Directive: Seek correct info; never hallucinate; admit uncertainty.

saimiam··on All it takes is for one to work out
More power to both of us!
saimiam··on All it takes is for one to work out
We grappled with this too but in the end, our decision was influenced by our parents choosing to live beyond their means to put us through good schools and college. If they could grit their teeth and sacrifice for us, we can do the same for the next generation.

Our choice us somewhat made easier because we didn’t like any of the schools near us except this one. The others were focused on exams/results and were larger in size so felt more “corporate”.

saimiam··on All it takes is for one to work out
My wife and I are starting to test this theory. We are putting our kid in an expensive school, then starting a business to support our lifestyle. If we fail, our kid’ll have to go to a cheaper school and we’d have lost a few years of school fees. If we succeed, yay.

By the time, our are faced with the choice, our kid will be embedded in school so ripping them out of it is going to be a tough choice.

So, yeah, we’re essentially burning our boats and fighting to survive.

saimiam··on Jensen Huang's Stark Warning: China's 1M AI Workers vs. America's 20k
That’s a crazy proposal given India’s long standing non-alignment policy which is being proved prudent given recent changes to US policies under Trump.

Even US allies are reducing their reliance on the US and you’re asking India to reverse 70+ year old policy to embrace the US?

We should probably accept that the US’ special place as everyone’s most reliable trading and security partner is over.

saimiam··on ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business
We are seeing a version of this with WhatsApp for business. There was a time when businesses couldn’t(wouldn’t?) proactively message you on WA.

Then its monetisation started. It isn’t yet as bad as SMS spam but inching towards parity.

saimiam··on Can GPT-3 fix hiring?
I don't doubt that if it were very obvious that you were interacting with an AI, many people may be put off by it.

On the other hand, isn't an adaptive exam like the SAT also an instance of you having to work with some automated system to somehow "prove" yourself to that system?

I'd even argue that what I am proposing (I wrote the linked piece in case it wasn't obvious) ultimately leads to someone reading the chat transcript to gauge candidate suitability. That should reduce the stigma of having to abase yourself to an AI, no?

saimiam··on Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
As an Indian, Rajpopat’s this comment struck a chord -

> Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in Sanskrit and we still don't fully understand what our ancestors achieved. We've often been led to believe that we're not important, that we haven't brought enough to the table. I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they too can achieve great things.

I can definitely attest to wondering why a country so old hasn’t added much to human scientific advancement. Maybe the knowledge is locked away behind hard to penetrate language.

saimiam··on Twitter's rules and policies now forbid live location information sharing
The destruction of Twitter as a viable tool for grassroots coordination _was_ the point of Musk buying Twitter with the help of sovereign funds of Arab countries.
saimiam··on Farewell, Building in Public
Yeah, it’s just a spam sink nowadays. I guess Stripe figured that not a lot of indiehackers were converting into stripe customers so they decided to let it die of neglect.
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