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solsane

55 karma · joined June 4, 2020

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solsane··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Claude said they don’t want their models used for mass surveillance or autonomous killing (?). USA frontier AI models have been used extensively in the Iran conflict and beyond
solsane··on GPT-5.6 Luna vs. GPT-6 Astra: Is a $1.20 Model Good Enough for Code Review?
In my experience with the Claude Github integration, I found it to be pretty helpful. It’s had a pretty good success rate of catching bugs before they get to master, and for simple ones I can ask it to fix itself.

> you should have 2+ developers looking at most PRs

It’d be nice, but usually not the case in my experience. More eyes is better. AI review should not replace human review, it should supplement it. I find myself spending more time doing end-user testing instead of looking at code vs before.

solsane··on Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker
Just to be clear one glance and I can tell issinfo.net also used claude code
solsane··on MacBook Neo
My 2c: I meet people all the time using the same Macbooks for 5+ years. While I'm attracted to modularity, SoCs have undeniable advantages (I'm assuming other commenters will cover this). I bought the fanless MB Air because I imagine this thing could probably go for a decade without any repair, outside the battery. I'd say this longevity is worthy of praise.

For contrast, I used a Surface Book throughout college and within weeks of the warranty expiring I ran into serious issues with the battery, then the charging port, display backlight, fan. I loved it to death so I kept it on life support and changed my usage patterns until I gave up on it. And yes, my next device was a used Thinkpad, and I was able to fix most issues I ran into. But I'd

I am NOT a fan of the measures Apple takes to monopolize the maintenance and repair of their devices.

solsane··on How to wrangle non-deterministic AI outputs into conventional software? (2025)
Well, you could say that about computers in general. I'm assuming you're referring to temperature (or something similar) which can be set to always pick the most probable token. Floats aside, this should be deterministic. But practically I don't think that changes much since adjusting the input slightly can lead to very different output. Also back in the day the temperature helped it avoid cyclic loops
solsane··on In leaked recording, Nvidia CEO says its insane managers aren't using AI enough
Title is a bit off, for those who care about the distinction.

> Nvidia has some managers who are telling their people to use less AI

solsane··on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
Scaling laws are irrefutable. There is no doubt that computers will be able to learn more than any humans, after all we're not outgrowing our skulls. The last mile is just tweaking how we define optimality and providing integration points. Everyone investing in this knows this at some level.

What's happening now is already pretty incredible given the understanding that we're basically still at the 'chat bot' stage for most people. The idea of agency is still very, very recent, but it's understandable that most people (particularly non SDs) are not impressed.

It's easy to look at the present and be cynical. If it is only able to solve your problem 95% of the time, you still can't trust it. I think the bets are really about how far we are from 99%, even for random stuff. The fact that a chatbot that was never explicitly trained to, just by predicting next probable tokens is wild. The pace of improvement in the past 5 years has been dizzying.

I'm not out here trying to put a dollar amount on it. But certainly, there is going to be a lot of money to be made. Of course it's a front for money and power. But like... isn't that the point of a corporation?

solsane··on Measuring political bias in Claude
The term centrist to me implies an alignment with both parties, which I see as very different from objectivity which is inherently apolitical.
solsane··on SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search
I’d echo the caution that others have expressed in regards to automated ‘AI slop’ detection algorithms.
solsane··on I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]
I find that the pods are less effective, even without following those steps. (Disclaimer: I use gel)
solsane··on Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain
In my experience, AI summarization is a pretty lame application. I don’t really need a block of potentially wrong, rephrased text. I’ve got a feeling that the same applies to healthcare.
solsane··on Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
> $1.84 billion in value

Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s all a large scale grift money incinerator where the only winner is Valve.

+ whatever pleasure you derive from it, ig. I can understand loot box addiction, but paying $20,000 for valve character dress up? Not even like a Peter Griffin player model or something, but a slightly different looking knife? Madness

Persp: tf2 enjoyer

solsane··on Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
Well, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.
solsane··on EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars
In that case, I’ll to cash in on this for my next car! I figured the degradation problem was much worse. My frame of reference is lithium laptop/phone batteries which definitely aren’t doing so hot 5 years in.
solsane··on Making Every Windows 11 PC an AI PC
By all means I’m pro AI - but I feel like Microsoft has no idea what they’re doing with Copilot. I have to use the windows shitstack for work and I was open to trying some of this stuff out. Truly a hammer looking for nails scenario. Sounds like they’re focused on being able to interact with Windows solely with text / voice… because someone asked for that, I guess.

Findings summarized:

They added a chat window with a half-rate model and access to OneDrive and sharepoint. Obviously useful integrations like setting up meetings based on a thread or creating tasks are not present.

I don’t care about email summaries or drafts. I talk with developers and our emails are precise.

Github copilot: The shared naming is confusing. There’s not even a shared UI language between the two. I use it because I don’t have Claude code at work. They’ve added some little things like pulling errors from the terminal but it’s mostly just a chat window. Meh.

Also if I edit the file outside the editor (maybe stash some changes with git) before approving edits things get broken and the LLM will start adding in old changes and it becomes part of the context and it’s kind of a mess.

Copilot (browser): -separate ‘work’ and ‘web’ mode for some reason. As far as I can tell it can see my web page in ‘web’ mode but I lose my OneDrive and sharepoint junk. Minimal utility. ChatGPT is better.

Outlook/teams: It’s totally inconsistent and missing integrations. Long email thread? Let’s use Copilot to avoid having to draft a meeting invite with everyone on the thread! There’s a context menu option to do this!

Oh, ok. They removed that in the past week.

Oh ok. It has no context of what I have open. I have to describe the email I’m currently in to their sidebar. This is already not worth my time.

Hmm. It made zero attempt to schedule a time where everyone is available.

This goes on, and I wanted to try because scheduling with our big wigs is a pain. No dice.

Post meeting. We’ve got takeaways. Convert these to MS Todo tasks? No dice! No integration. Want to find teams messages or schedule from teams? Also no.

Excel: neat for making formulas. But sometimes I want to do LLM classification or structured response on a tabular level. That’s the next thing. Also includes a useless chat window.

Powerpoint: also useless. Strangely, I can’t use another powerpoint as a reference for a powerpoint. I want to create clipart. Make a theme. They have ‘make a slide with copilot’ that I actually like, if I could use what it generates as a theme and apply it for all slides.

Generating a slide deck based on a bunch of input is actually pretty cool - but the generic ‘synergy business’ lingo and clip art it uses is so cringe.

solsane··on Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
I do not feel the same way. This looks easy to use and useful. I don’t think every problem needs to be a ‘deep problem’. There’s so many practical steps to get to

> People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.

At a glance, this seems to be a practical approach to building up a personalized prompting stack based on the things I commonly do.

I’m excited about it.

solsane··on Firefox feature gets special mention in TIME's Best Inventions of 2025
Oh. That’s why that keeps popping up.
solsane··on Which table format do LLMs understand best?
Did it make tool calls e.g. write code to read them?
solsane··on Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
Perspective: Former college robotics team member a while ago (2022) (IEEE SoutheastCon)

I definitely see niches for both. Even if you've got some experience an Arduino uno or mega is just an atMEGA with good software support and IO headers.

We'd usually use an RPI and Arduino - connect our 'out of the box' modules to the pi, pi to arduino via uart serial, and wire arduino to the meat and potatoes. The RPI's IO was generally not as good in terms of latency but also if the wrong wire gets crossed suddenly we'd have a dead Pi but the Arduino would shrug it off.

solsane··on 10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life
Glad to see that Saitama is active on Hacker News!
solsane··on New Quasi-Moon Discovered Orbiting Earth, but It's Been Around for Decades
Thank you!
solsane··on Factory Raises $50M Series B
In terms of what model I use it’s going to be latest and greatest out of whatever my org gives me enterprise access to.

I’d probably try the factory ‘droid’ first, but if it fails to solve a problem and swapping to another one means it solves it, I’ll probably never use the factory one again.

I’d consider this pretty normal as we’re moving closer to ‘this is actually a mature stack that devs use for work’. Very few people in my company actually take interest in their development tooling and use whatever came pre-configured. (our stack is not sexy)

(Let me know if I’m incorrectly conflating the ‘droid’ concept with foundation models)

solsane··on CompileBench: Can AI Compile 22-year-old Code?
I’ve always thought that most devs would be elated by the idea of automatio^n!
solsane··on The race to find GPS alternatives
Yes. Jamming is just introducing noise that drowns out our signal. E.g. reduces the signal to noise ratio.
solsane··on Visiting Us
It’s still the primary backend language. We moved away from VB, not MUMPS.
solsane··on Homomorphic encryption in iOS 18
To be fair, it sounds like it's both. Local, AI powered 'neural hashing' + SHE
solsane··on The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) Deserves More Attention on HN
I don’t really have any background on this so calling this legislation ‘draconian’, jumping directly into opinion pieces and court proceedings without giving any context isn’t really compelling to me

I ChatGPT’d an intro on this, and asked who would be for/against it. At face value, it sounds like it’s gathering personally identifying info about business owners.

I’m not really sure about the intent/context behind this. Shell companies, tax fraud, are some topics that come to mind? Would love to hear if anyone else has more background.

solsane··on Ask HN: Is C++ a bad idea for new projects?
Do you just want to pick it up as a learning opportunity, or are you trying to accomplish a goal? There’s probably ‘better’ (by better, I mean ‘easier’, in this context) langs (Python + numpy comes to mind) if your goal is to bang some ndarrays together and do ML-type stuff.

There’s gonna be a bit more headache at each step of the process (finding the right libraries, building your code, and learning the language) that might come easily to someone who uses it professionally or used it extensively in college.

That being said, I think learning C/C++ has value in A) the areas you mentioned where it’s used extensively (e.g. kernel, embedded, or HPC dev) and it’s a good lang to know if just to understand how computers work a bit better. This is purely ‘extra credit’ though IMO if you’re already a productive developer.

solsane··on I am using AI to drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers
It is a hat. Chugging a bottle of liquor has way more harm potential.
solsane··on McDonald's and other big brands warn that low-income consumers starting to crack
McDonalds has gotten so expensive. a mcdouble that was literally $1.50-$2 2-3 years ago is at least $4 now. Unless you game coupons you’re spending a similar amount to dine in restaurants in my experience.
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