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sieste

2,818 karma · joined April 1, 2020

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sieste··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Ready Player One, together with my 9yo boy.
sieste··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
For people working with small local models like Qwen 35b what's even more important us that the LLM is good at coding in the language in which the agent harness is written so that it can write skills. I really like pi but had a few instances now where Qwen wasn't able to extend it because it isn't very good at writing typescript. Does that sound familiar to anyone, and did you find any fixes?
sieste··on Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years
The couch to 5k programme is now routinely recommended by GPs in the UK (and elsewhere), a very positive development in health care in my opinion.

https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/get-active/get-running-with...

sieste··on Teaching Kids Forth
> I wanted to avoid teaching syntax. While Python makes sense as pseudocode [...] it is still nearly incomprehensible to new learners [...] I decided I wanted to either teach Forth or Haskell.

Sorry but this reads like a joke. If you find python incomprehensible, Forth and Haskell won't even register as languages.

sieste··on Qwen 3.8
What is a "credit" and how does it translate to tokens for the different models?
sieste··on CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
I treat these nutjob articles as a subgenre of science fiction and when they're somewhat well written find them very entertaining. The author cosplaying investigative journalist, one part of the audience acting as if it's a real discovery and another part playing debunking and outrage, is all part of the performance and it's hilarious. Check out the flat earth movement, it's great entertainment all around!
sieste··on Dirty Little Zine – a tool for making an 8 page printable Zine
The zine enthusiasts in this thread might enjoy this little tool I made to print out and zine-fold Project Gutenberg books: https://github.com/sieste/pocketbook
sieste··on Show HN: Are You in the Weights?
German football goalkeeper here :)
sieste··on Running local models is good now
I'd love for European countries to embrace their priorities around people and environment and train a model on public domain data that can run efficiently on cheap hardware. Redefine benchmarks around these ideals and optimise towards them, rather than trying to enter a race that you can't possibly win and didn't want to run in the first place.
sieste··on Running local models is good now
The "middle powers" (cf Carney) should invest in local models, rather than relying on US and China allowing them to rent their AI models. It takes a single executive order to cut the rest of the world off of American AI tools. "I'm happy to pay whatever to rent frontier models from hyperscalers" makes sense if you're citizen of a superpower, but it's risky, naive, bordering on irresponsible to adopt this mindset otherwise, especially when your business or career depend on the tool.
sieste··on RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8
Imagine how accurate you could be if you could circumvent the coding agent and just type the source code directly into an editor all by yourself o_O Like a write_file skill but for humans!!!
sieste··on RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8
That's almost exactly my setup and I'm very happy with its performance.

I noticed recently that I started to prefer my local Qwen3.6 35B A3B and pi agent over Claude Code.

Both fail at different tasks, and Qwen more so than Claude.

But the way Qwen fails is much more straightforward. In writing tasks Qwens hallucinations and bullshitting are much easier to spot because it doesn't have the sleek vocabulary and wordsmithing skills to disguise its ignorance.

In coding tasks that Qwen can't solve it often just goes into a tool calling doom loop that the pi harness can catch, whereas Claude attempts ever more convoluted and creative things just making more and more mess that takes forever to clean up.

I think part of the story is that the tasks for which I use AI are fairly simple and maybe don't need a frontier model. But I wonder if "proper" developers had similar experience?

sieste··on Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
I have a different approach. Just treat all LLM queries as what they are, instructions to a computer program to generate a desired output. Neither niceties nor insults make a qualitative difference, so you might as well just skip them altogether.

It's a bit as if shell commands added im/politeness arguments that do nothing other than making you feel better about the interaction, like

    git pull --please
or

    ls --forthemillionthtime
I wouldn't use those either.
sieste··on Germany news: Childfree adults to pay more for elder care
This is very cruel towards people who want to have children but can't.
sieste··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
Good point, it's like having an instruction "Never fucking output a token just because it's the one most likely to occur next!!1!"
sieste··on Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war
Maybe a superhuman AI? /s
sieste··on Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data
I was expecting to find a link to a github pages site where I can see the rendered examples, but only found a link to the html sources in examples/out. Am I missing something?
sieste··on A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter
2021 just called and want their comment back.
sieste··on Tennessee is about to make building chatbots a Class A felony
Wow.

> The bill makes it a Class A felony (15-25 years imprisonment) to “knowingly train artificial intelligence” to do ANY of the following:

• Provide emotional support, including through open-ended conversations with a user

• Develop an emotional relationship with, or otherwise act as a companion to, an individual

• Simulate a human being, including in appearance, voice, or other mannerisms

• Act as a sentient human or mirror interactions that a human user might have with another human user, such that an individual would feel that the individual could develop a friendship or other relationship with the artificial intelligence

sieste··on 1D Chess
It took me an embarrassing number of attempts to win.
sieste··on Japanese, French and Omani vessels cross Strait of Hormuz
I think this is the correct lense. He's a malignant narcissist on his way out, with absolutely nobody to stop him.

I'm genuinely worried that he secretly wants to go down in history as the crazy guy who set the oil fields on fire and dropped a nuke on Tehran or something.

sieste··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
I'm not sure it was meant that way, but nice metaphor. For some students "academic death" might really be better than a life of being trapped in a system that they can only navigate by cheating.
sieste··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
You just get a sequence of random moves to go from solved to scrambled, it's quite trivial.

See here if you're interested: stefansiegert.net/cube-timer

Let me know if you adapt it in any way, my son would be delighted to see open source work its magic :)

sieste··on OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
Does an IPO make a government bailout more likely if they go bust?
sieste··on Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student
Even more important than the papers is whether you can raise the money required to fund your lab which produces your prestigious journal papers. And the further you go down the league table the less important the "prestigious" part gets.
sieste··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
yes. claude added a suggested random scramble (if that's what you mean?), also running average of 5/12/100, local storage of past times on first iteration, my son told it to also add a button for +2s penalties and touch screen support.
sieste··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
That may be true. But you also have to give the average parent more credit by assuming they don't want tech companies spying on their children and forcing their toxic platforms on them.

There are well attended parent evenings in our school on that topic.

Thinking about it, we should turn these into vibe coding hackathons where we replace all the ad-ridden little games, learning tools, messengers we don't like with healthy alternatives.

sieste··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
Just goes to show that most programmers have no idea what most programmers are mostly programming. Great that it works for you, but don't assume that this applies to everyone else.
sieste··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
Many parents are extremely interested in quickly building digital tools for their kids (education and entertainment) that they know are free from advertising, social media integration, user monitoring etc.
sieste··on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
Turns out that knowing what a plain text file is will be the criterion that distinguishes users who are digitally free from those locked into proprietary platforms.
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