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spdustin

4,683 karma · joined November 11, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/spdustin; my proof: https://keybase.io/spdustin/sigs/axdS8uwdXgqT3BEcP5d1fe5XZFIrLhmUzVuMo8Tuo74 ]
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spdustin··on Ember-1
Been thinking about the feasibility of training a model using synthetic thinking traces that were reduced to caveman-speak prior to being used for training. Seems like it would be fairly easy to generate plenty of suitably lobotomized synthetic traces with a pair of cheap-ish models. Or even just using good old fashioned NLP to aggressively remove stop words and reduce trace words to lemmas.
spdustin··on Apple Wallet driver's licenses coming to three new states soon
Has anyone utilized this feature outside of an airport?
spdustin··on Apple Wallet driver's licenses coming to three new states soon
The apps for State Farm, Allstate, and Progressive can do this now for Apple Wallet. Google Wallet too, IIRC.
spdustin··on Unreal Agent
I've also explored s/Fractal tool discovery/Skill tree approaches, seems to work pretty well when you stick the equivalent of XREFs in the frontmatter.
spdustin··on Jev Jailbreak Benchmark
Sorry, I closed the tab after the first two Claude-isms.

It's _so_ frustrating.

spdustin··on A20 Pro shatters Geekbench 7 single-core record – beats desktop i9 and Ryzen 9
Me with my M1 Max wondering where I went wrong, heh.
spdustin··on AgentsDock: An IDE designed for agentic AI research
When all you have is a drawer-full of hammers, get yourself a mythical hammer. Clever name.
spdustin··on Homebrew 7.0.0
Excellent update, very speedy on upgrades now. Amazing what a little (safe) concurrency will do.

Homebrew.app, however, has a show-stopper for me. "Failed to decode Homebrew JSON output" on the installed/upgrades panel. I'm guessing the Discover panel would normally indicate which Formulae/Casks are already installed, but because it couldn't parse the JSON output, that feature (if it exists) doesn't work.

I'll file an issue—I know HN isn't your bug tracker :)

Edit: there's an issue there already, and I sorted out the root cause: iTerm2's shell integration. If you're using zsh as your shell, the solution is here [^0] in the second comment.

[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/BrewUI/issues/167/

spdustin··on Logo Programming Language
I have fond memories learning about Logo from Mr. Wizard!
spdustin··on CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of 9/11
Well... were, anyway.
spdustin··on Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies
I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.

(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)

spdustin··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
⇧˖⌘˖. (Shift-Command-Period) will show/hide hidden files in Finder
spdustin··on Reversing MikroTik's Silent Patch: The RouterOS 7.23.4 Fix They Wouldn't Explain
I'm so weary of seeing Claude-isms everywhere. It makes everything so much more of a cognitive burden to read, whether you're reading for leisure or comprehension.
spdustin··on GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
ZDR = Zero Data Retention — they don't store your inputs/outputs.
spdustin··on Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer
This is a lovely way to explore the sights!

My feedback:

1. I wish the time scaling was persistent; I wanted to jump between solar system objects while keeping the accelerated time. A way to persist the scale would be lovely (maybe a slider in the header).

2. Pinning the object selector would be nice, too. It took me a minute to realize I could focus the text input to show the object selector again.

spdustin··on Data Became Code: We Ran Code Inside Fortune 500s
Please write your own posts on publishing sites like Medium. I really wanted to engage with this story, but the Claude-isms were just _so_ off-putting.
spdustin··on Show HN: Interactive 10M particles in WebGL forming a planets, in the browser
I legit spent 30 minutes just playing with this. Beautiful work.
spdustin··on Ox Alpha
Based on its indecisive and far-too-lengthy thinking traces when given complex instructions that span system and user messages, as well as a rudimentary stylometry (POS ratios in thinking traces, mainly) comparison with latest non-stealth models, this is almost certainly a GLM model.
spdustin··on Various LLM Smells
- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon)

- “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon)

- “The thing to internalize:”

- “The smoking gun:”

(really, sentences that start with “The <tag suggesting the next clause is the key point>:” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific)

- “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture)

- “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action)

- “smoke test” (esp. when “sanity check” is more apropos)

- Lists of three clauses/adjectives where the third is really just a combination of the first two

- Referring to the “shape” of things figuratively

- Social media posts that end with “Curious if anyone…”

- Stories or anecdotes using. “Oh. Oh.” (where the second “oh” is italicized)

Edit: Yes, some of those last ones are terms that we often use as devs...but I would argue about the actual frequency of their use. Plus, these tells live on in prose generated by the latest models.

spdustin··on Ask HN: Have top AI research institutions just given up on the idea of safety?
It’s just still so trivial to jailbreak even the latest Anthropic models (via api, and not talking about the silly ENI or Pliny breaks) I don’t understand where the safety teams are doing their work. Is it in the default chat-trained model?
spdustin··on Vanishing from Hyundai’s data network
CarPlay is essentially a conditional pair of video inputs. Any system that supports on-screen rear-view camera and that has a wheel speed sensor can support CarPlay.
spdustin··on Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game
Well done! I’ve built this same sort of thing for my family to play with. My advice for the best results:

1) Structure the choices offered by the LLM; add “choice_type” and add instructions to the LLM on what those choices should do. E.g. action, dialogue, investigation, whatever makes sense for the genre—the LLM can even generate these at story start—then “choice should direct the narrator to focus on an action-oriented moment”, “choice should direct the narrator to focus on a dialogue between two or more characters in the scene”, etc.

2) Use reasoning whenever making tool calls for choices, summarize the reasoning, and include it in narrative summaries provided as part of the context for future narrative requests. For example, the combined summary might be: “In the last narrative I wrote for the user, Harry and Luna were startled by the noise coming from the edge of the forest. Important scene developments: 1) Luna and Harry had been approaching the edge of the forbidden forest for the last three narrative turns, and in the turn I just wrote they arrived at the edge. 2) Harry seemed to be the more courageous of the two in previous narrative turns, but in the most recent one, the user’s choice resulted in Harry becoming more deferential to Luna. 3) In the most recent narrative turn, the noise that had been emanating from the forest was now accompanied by a flickering light. I then suggested paths that would allow for character development through dialogue between Harry and Luna (I gave two options here), a path to move the story forward by having Harry take Luna’s hand before running into the forest, and another path that would slow the pace by having Luna investigate the flickering light accompanying the sound. The user’s choice: ‘Have Luna investigate the flickering light.’

3) Add an RNG weighted by story length or whatever works for you that will result in choices that lead the story to a conclusion. Include that direction in the tool call for generating choices, along with a countdown to the finale choice.

This is a rough mental sketch of what worked the best for me, i purposefully left out implementation or application details, as I don’t know what you’re wanting to do next.

Good luck, looks great!

spdustin··on Show HN: Lookup U.S. import duties and tariffs in seconds
Have to sign up even to see one response? Sorry, man. Good luck, though.
spdustin··on Show HN: FastGraphRAG – Better RAG using good old PageRank
My answer to this in my own pet project is to mask terms found by the NER pipeline from being corrected, replacing them with their entity type as a special token (e.g. [male person] or [commercial entity]). That alone dramatically improved grammar/spelling correction, especially because the grammatical "gist" of those masked words is preserved in the text presented to the LLM for "correction".
spdustin··on Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts: Make managing your homelab a breeze
From the /original/ repo [0]:

Exercise vigilance regarding copycat or coat-tailing sites that seek to exploit the project's popularity for potentially malicious purposes. It is imperative to rely solely on information from https://Helper-Scripts.com/ or https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ for accurate and trustworthy content.

https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox

spdustin··on Can't change security policy or disable SIP with macOS 15 Sequoia
Please don't do this. It's not substantive or helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

spdustin··on Show HN: Repaint – a WebGL based website builder
One note: For truly "responsive" text (and other measures, like padding/margins), I often use relative units of measurement. At the very least, rem/em, but more and more I'm using viewport¹ (including dynamic) and container query² units. I'm not your target market, and I know that owning the renderer makes this request more complex that it would seem, but I thought I'd point it out just in case you think it should be on your radar.

1) https://caniuse.com/viewport-units, https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values/#viewport-relative-lengt... (includes dynamic and inline/block lengths)

2) https://caniuse.com/css-container-query-units, https://www.w3.org/TR/css-contain-3/#container-lengths

spdustin··on Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
Can confirm. My family has (collectively) cashed about $1,000 in settlement claims.
spdustin··on Company Says It Uses Your Phones Mic to Serve Ads for Facebook, Google, etc.
Well, my wife and I have been on a months-long experiment. We have HomePod minis, Macs and iPhones/iPads in the house. They are able to access the internet without restriction (other than using my own DNS resolver for ad/malware blocking purposes.

Our TVs (2020-era Vizio and 2018-era Samsung) are on a separate VLAN for home automation control, and are otherwise blocked from the internet¹. Additionally, they have the various "content intelligence" features disabled...just in case.

We also have a few Nest devices (the 1st gen wired Hello doorbell cam, The Nest/Yale deadbolt, a 2nd gen thermostat, and some Nest Protects) that are normally similarly segmented, though the Hello is allowed to communicate to the necessary domains for video streaming and PubSub notifications.

On August 1, while on a neighborhood walk without any electronic devices, we formulated the plan: every day, we'd find a reason to discuss mulch² in the presence of various devices in our home. What color of mulch we think would look best around various trees. The virtues of recycled rubber as a mulch substitute. The drainage issues it causes. And so on.

We committed to never searching for mulch online (to hide from the ever-present surveillance online), never discussing it with anyone (to avoid social network effects), never buying it (no data broker can hoover up mulch purchases), not dwelling on any social media post about mulch (analytics, man, it's crazy what that bit of metadata can do)...not even hanging around the garden department of local stores (gotta avoid bluetooth/BLE/wifi tracking).

But I DID disable the DNS blocklists (much to our browsing frustration). And while the smart home stuff remained on its own VLAN, I allowed it otherwise unfettered access to the internet during the month of August.

Since the experiment began, we've seen the net sum of zero (0) targeted ads about mulch. No banners, no interstitial social media posts, no phone calls, no flyers in the mailbox. Nothing.

I really don't believe that our devices are eavesdropping on us, but in the interest of science, the experiment continues for another month.³

---

1) Yes, I recognize that Sidewalk/ethernet-over-HDMI/hard-coded DNS/etc is a purported "thing", but I don't believe it's likely. I'm controlling for this during the month of September by re-enabling the filtering mentioned at the start; if our TVs are committed to exfiltrating surveillance data.

2) We've not really been discussing mulch. I'm using that as a proxy here, because all of the internet is a series of tubes that lead to advertising networks. But we did choose a unique topic of conversation that would be relevant to our demographics, geographical location, and season, and meaningful to advertisers.

3) On September 1, I re-enabled all the blocklists and VLAN network filters/blackholes. But we continue to discuss, er, mulch. Like I said, if our stuff really really wants to phone the mothership to have Big Mulch pay us a visit, there are supposed to be ways for them to do that. Right?

___

EDIT: The topic we chose is also something that's not typically discussed in our social network, nor our kids' social networks. I will say that it's related to a profitable market, and we're in the target demographic, but we did our best to identify a market that we didn't have in common with our social groups.

spdustin··on Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world
Or heaved out from freeze-thaw cycles, an excellent sign that it was nowhere near long enough in the first place.
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