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supermatt

6,078 karma · joined July 31, 2013

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supermatt··on Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
There was an article a few years ago called "Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts" https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03172

From my experience this holds true to this day. It was one of my core observations for similarity to the limitations of human working memory on "Engineering for Bounded Cognition"

supermatt··on I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle
I think the problem is that pangram doesn't actually work on the whole document - it works on chunks of the document.

By analysing a specific piece of prose you probably arent using the same chunk as would otherwise be analysed and can end up with a different result.

supermatt··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
> Same as anyone else who copied pirated IP onto their hard drive

Not really the same. Private citizens have received fines MUCH higher per-work when downloading for just their private consumption.

supermatt··on No liability exemption for Google in Italian YouTube spat, EU court says
I wonder how different the internet would look these days without Section 230.
supermatt··on How RCA Victor sold Sound Service to classrooms in 1939
Probably came through the 2nd chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
supermatt··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
It's not rocket science. If they want to revoke a license, they should buy it back at the price they sold it. Consumer law should dictate there be no permissible alternative, and should apply retroactively.

Personally, I dont like theses digital "purchase" licenses at all. The only "rights" DRM is used for is to restrict those of the consumer - a far cry from the transferable digital rights that big-media touted that resulted in them receiving overreaching protections for copyright in the first place.

Unless they are transferable, all digital licenses should be short term (<= 1mo) and marked clearly as a rental to avoid consumer confusion.

supermatt··on Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode
> Without Ever Opening Xcode

"Next, open Xcode"

supermatt··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
This is the exactly the ableist mentality i mention.

You are gatekeeping based on the medium, not the skill or motivation.

supermatt··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
I am VERY clear that i use assistive AI with my writing. I dont believe it is "sloppyfying" - I believe it makes it much more readable than i would otherwise achieve, not least because I simply wouldn't publish it without.

Your prejudice/ableism in calling it "sloppyfying" is exactly the problem I mention with allowing it to be a flag.

supermatt··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
Some of us use genAI as an accessibility tool. It enables people to write and publish work that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Some people already dismiss genuinely useful content solely based on the use of AI to assist in writing it - i am not sure what flagging would do other than to reinforce that prejudice.

I posted a couple of my articles here, and the one that got traction was generally well received (and also received some constructive feedback from those who acknowledged that is was AI assisted) - but it is evident across HN there is a vocal minority who outright dismiss content solely because it was "AI generated" completely disregarding the content itself. I appreciate this is personal taste, or LLM fatigue, or whatever, but its not really constructive.

If what you want to do is target the slop while not targeting the quality content, then that is what the voting mechanism already does. If people don't like something they can downvote it. Flagging content as AI generated is just a dogwhistle to those who want to downvote AI generated content. If anything, id rather see a rule that stops people commenting on stuff just to dismiss it as "LLM slop".

Its already trivial to avoid detection with fine-tuned humanisers [i] built on non-instruction-tuned models. That makes the flag mostly useless - or worse - a way of penalising any content you disagree with. I'd rather not hide what I am doing and have something that I feel reads well than hide it and sacrifice the message to satisfy a vocal minority.

[i] https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19516

EDIT: downvotes, as expected. hope you see this anyway @dang. Downvotes kind of make my point for me.

supermatt··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
Ive just been having a bit of fun with my homepage https://supermatt.com.

Made a talking head with some idle animation and visemes and some broken crt-like effects. The meat of it is only a few hundred kB - i can probably make it even smaller with making the graphics smaller.

A bit of post processing on some narration for extracting mouth shapes and it seems to work quite nice as a low-footprint retro talking head. Im thinking i'll make it some kind of chatbot interface.

Its very much a WIP, please don't be too critical - i am only sharing because it is fun :)

supermatt··on Fixed three bugs that made Qwen3.5-122B a daily driver on Mac Studio
> The most counter-intuitive bug was that a unique message ID in the system prompt broke the entire KV cache.

How is that counter-intuitive? You changed the key, so it didn't return a value. Thats a KV cache working as intended.

supermatt··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
Yeah, although I think it's going to be weak compared to the Wii again due to the lack of an external reference for the controller. The bowling on Wii feels so much better to play because of this (and also has the fun animations that they decide to drop on switch). No doubt archery is going to be similar - your aim wont be anywhere representative of where the remote is actually pointing, just its angle.

I sold my switch sports a few months after getting it for this reason. We still play Wii sports (and resort) on the Wii-U.

supermatt··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
Yeah, although I think it's going to be weak compared to the Wii again due to the lack of an external reference for the controller. The bowling on Wii feels so much better to play because of this (and also has the fun animations that they decide to drop on switch). No doubt archery is going to be similar - your aim wont be anywhere representative of where the remote is actually pointing, just its angle.
supermatt··on Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps
> Your Claude subscription—which is a cheaper version of the Anthropic API—is restricted to use with the Claude Code CLI/Desktop, Claude CoWork, or @Claude in Slack.

Thats not true at all. You can use the Agent SDK [1], which uses your subscription [2]. I use it via ACP [3] with custom system prompts and tooling. I have found it very powerful and flexible. It has its own agent loop, of course, so maybe thats the limitation using it with opencode?

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

[2] They were talking about giving credits for the SDK usage rather than it using your allowance directly, but that seems to have been put on hold for now. If and when that changes, I will likely jump ship, but I am more than happy with it right now.

[3] there isn't an official ACP wrapper - zed have one but its quite limited. its trivial to build one though, or you can just use the SDK directly and wire it into your interface of choice.

supermatt··on Does code cleanliness affect coding agents? A controlled minimal-pair study
A lot of those tokens are traversal - either searching for code or following call-sites. Basically building enough context to be able to work on the task.

You can reduce a lot of the token use for traversal by giving your agent access to some form of LSP in addition to hierarchical direction with your AGENTS.md (or equivalent) for monorepos - but a spread-out codebase is always going to end up requiring some form of traversal to solve each task.

And that traversal isn't just token use - its repeated round trip latency (LLM (queue time -> prefill -> decode -> output) -> Agent (parsing -> tool call -> tool response) -> back to LLM) for EACH step (well, some can be done in parallel, but in practice its mostly sequential) - slowing down the task considerably.

Locality and structure are key when it comes to efficient use of agents. The context window is always bounded and attention across it is inconsistent.

supermatt··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
I was so disappointed with Switch Sports. It lacked the soul of Wii Sports. Sadly, it seems like Sports Resort is going to be more of the same :(
supermatt··on Engineering for Bounded Cognition
That’s great! But don’t fall into the trap that the graph is the ultimate representation of all. You will get a topology, but you often need more than topologies to understand the whole. Behaviour of the parts themselves is covered in the manifesto, and there is a companion that covers the connecting of the parts: https://shapeofthesystem.com/the-shape-of-the-whole
supermatt··on Engineering for Bounded Cognition
It’s a fair criticism. Maybe I should have both: my source and the tidied version. Kind of like the light/dark mode toggle but for shit/slop!
supermatt··on Engineering for Bounded Cognition
You’re absolutely right! ;) Honestly - there has been so much human-in-the-loop I wouldn't be surprised if the fine-tuning went both ways.
supermatt··on Engineering for Bounded Cognition
Thanks for the honest feedback. I genuinely wish I was a better writer. The posts in particular are all quite formulaic, but the idea is that they just provide a narrative access to the manifesto itself which is where the real meat of the argument is.

I would please urge you to read further into the manifesto itself but would also recommend you start at the foreword so you can understand the reason for the use of AI assistance in my writing.

supermatt··on Engineering for Bounded Cognition
Alleged author here - on my regular account. Thanks for the feedback. I have been quite upfront about the use of AI in the foreword. I have severe inattentive ADHD and have used AI to take my writings and present them in a way in which I feel are much more coherent overall.

The actual criticisms you have about the content however, I'd like to challenge:

The "adding up to one" is just a simplified gloss over softmax. It's very possible it reads poorly, and thats on me - not LLM gibberish.

As for the incoherence - I have to totally disagree. You have merged the 2 things the post keeps apart - capacity and attention over it. That a model can swallow a schema and write code is a competence humans share. We have been doing it for decades. Besides, the claim was never about us sharing capacity (other than stating it is always bounded) - it was about our attention failing in eerily similar ways.

So, AI slop, no. AI assisted, absolutely. It's sad that some judge the "who" more important than the "what" - especially for this kind of writing. But it's fair feedback nonetheless. I'll see what else I can do with assisting my delivery.

supermatt··on Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
the network is the computer
supermatt··on Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding
Conveniently forgetting how they removed the jpeg-xl support from the chrome codebase despite overwhelming developer backlash that they then proceeded to ignore for over a year.

They literally tried to kill it - stating (nonsensical) reasons why it was obsolete and unneeded.

And since now the rest of the world have adopted it despite Google, they have crawled out of their slime pits praising themselves for its development with only a passing mention of cloudinary?

Sickening.

supermatt··on Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
If that is true then you cant claim to be "not touching code anymore".
supermatt··on Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
People bragging that they "dont touch code" and only "argue" with agents are reinventing the slowest possible IDE.

Obviously the agents are great at producing large chunks of code, but they often make minor and sometimes trivial mistakes which need amending.

Typing something like "in src/auth/session/token_manager.ts the refreshTokenExpiry variable should be refresh_token_expiry. update every reference and make sure nothing else changes" and waiting for the LLM to do its thing takes longer than opening the file and doing the rename yourself.

If you are describing microscopic edits in natural language you are not avoiding coding. You are coding through an extremely verbose, lossy interface with higher latency and lower precision.

EDIT: flagged?

supermatt··on 3.4M Solar Panels
> than I suspect they think it is.

Because he wants to tell you about his computer it means he doesn’t know how capable it is?

supermatt··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
> Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on

Fireworks, Sketch, XD, Axure, etc all had these (or most of them) in some form before Figma even existed. Even illustrator, photoshop, etc have had the applicable ones for decades.

supermatt··on Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
They already were on "1 big server" (a single VPS at digital ocean) and moved to another "1 big server" (a managed server at hertzner).

They saved money and lost nothing.

Now, if they so wish, they could use a portion of that to increase redundancy - but that wasn't the point of the article.

supermatt··on Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft
> If you doubt me, take, me up on it.

Given your confidence and the seemingly small amount of time you think it will take, this seems like something you should be proving rather than expecting others to do so.

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