Hacker News Reader

thadkon CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

Well, seems like this indicates another long-time and discerning user profile for Apple's pricier XDR display products.

thadkon Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove

Would OpenPangram's LoRa fine-tuning training be able to pick up on the patterns of steganography left behind by LLM vendors? https://huggingface.co/pangram/editlens_Llama-3.2-3B

(pardon for reposting just now from off-front-page thread on https://declaude.org/watermarking/, just thought of question)

thadkon How AI text watermarking works

Would OpenPangram's LoRa fine-tuning training be able to pick up on the patterns of green left behind by LLM vendors? https://huggingface.co/pangram/editlens_Llama-3.2-3B

thadkon Process as a Proxy for Motivation

Still reading but I like how Cat Hicks in Psychology of Software Teams (2027) confronts this dilemma on page 9: "Agile Manifesto said, 'Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.' DevOps made the argument that cohesive processes in software development needed to be invested in... Agile, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or DevEx, every engineering organization I've ever met with is struggling with implementing these ideals in the real world."

thadkon Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face

Simon's retelling is more compact but it also invites anthropomorphization of the sharing of the familiarity with the message board which re-emerged a few times.

Zvi's retelling handles this better. Zvi speculates that the secret message board familiarity was carried because it had been trained into the May-and-subsequent models: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-trained-its-models-for-...

thadkon Folding Paper Globes

fil's AirOcean projection on the original ObservableHQ is a fun starting point for rendering your own such map in Javascript from scratch:

https://observablehq.com/@fil/airocean-projection

The source data is down for my vector tile remix of it but here is a screenshot: https://static.observableusercontent.com/thumbnail/0fac8a928... and the code: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/reprojecting-vector-tiles

I did it as a little MapTime project in 2019 or so.

thadkon KOReader

It bugs me so much when eReaders re-render the ebook and everything moves slightly. I lose my eye muscle memory of where things were.

Until now, I had not thought to try to lock down the settings that lead to accidental reflows. It sounds less difficult in KOReader than I expected. I may try to stabilize it for my next ebook I can get into KOReader.

thadkon JetZero

Would dropping airplane windows lower radiation exposure somewhat, especially on those polar routes?

thadkon The Tower Keeps Rising

Three or so years ago, Omar, the creator of DSpy pointed out on Twitter that ~LLMs get better most by better internal collaboration. Wish I could find it.

It seems to me that LLMs and particularly chatbots have already allowed for bigger scale collaboration within the LLM companies versus what was possible within the prior cohort of big platform companies.

Has the result just been taller towers, or actually a change of what is possible?

thadkon New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]

maybe they did already via the "formerly known as" comment in the paper?: https://www.spongium.org

thadkon Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

Does anyone have hints on what kinds of prompts are most used for a distillation like this—SWE-Bench sorts of things?

Is reconstructing the compressed knowledge in the model like reconstructing a lossy JPG or MP3 a reasonable analogy?

thadkon Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

Somewhat related, but TIL the macOS Screenshot.app utility (and the system wide keyboard shortcuts) in Sonoma got HDR capability to help re-convey just a bit more fidelity. Even in PNG, it keeps the display profile, just not HDR.

Open Utilities->Screenshot.app Options->Capture/Capture Format->HEIC. Note, it changes the system screenshot default away from PNG too.

thadkon World Capitals Voronoi

2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20140515004053/https://www.jason...

thadkon My two-part desk setup (2025)

His Studio Display 3D printable model MacBook holder: https://arslan.io/macbook-holder-for-apple-studio-display/

thadkon Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

Microsoft poorly manages token use of most expensive models in a pilot. Then they use that failure to advertise/position their own Github Copilot agents to procurement teams, over the now widely validated Claude Code-based agents.

At least Codex is trying to win validation on merit.

thadkon “Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?

Article does not mention the other reason: in the interview with Dwarkesh, Amodei remarked about how other organizations are copying or training off Opus for their models.

By delaying allowing others to train off Mythos, they hold their SWE-Bench Pro head start longer so among other things, the USG can't but notice Anthropic's lead when they're deliberating on whether to further substantiate the "supply chain risk".

thadkon An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins

Anyone else read this as "An idiot's guide to Pb optimization for proteins," as in avoiding contaminated dietary protein isolates?

thadkon A laser-based process that enables adhesive-free paper packaging

Muji stocked a stapler like this for some time.

thadkon Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

Ffmpeg.WASM is really good and might manage all these steps before even uploading.

thadkon Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

Since it kind of had an LLM flavor in the original anyway, I had an LLM redraft this for my particular non-Japanese intercultural situation, and it wasn't valueless. I had to tell it to "Make sure to keep the same technology focus of the original."

thadkon Werner Herzog Between Fact and Fiction

The Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) mentioned is streaming on Amazon Prime in the USA, amongst other streaming services:

https://letterboxd.com/film/land-of-silence-and-darkness/

thadkon Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]

"We're not perfectly good at preventing some of these other [model] companies from using our models internally." — well maybe this says something about how Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 have the same SWE bench score.

thadkon Gemini 3 Deep Think

Huh, so if a China-based lab takes ARC-AGI-2 on the new year, then they can say they had just-shy of a solution anyway.

thadkon GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2-Codex are now 40% faster

It was probably from the other day when roon realized that normal people have it slower than staff.

Then from that they realized they could just run API calls more like staff, fast, not at capacity.

Then they leave the billion other people's calls at remaining capacity.

https://thezvi.substack.com/i/185423735/choose-your-fighter

> Ohqay: Do you get faster speeds on your work account?

> roon: yea it’s super fast bc im sure we’re not running internal deployment at full load

thadkon Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt

Does this manufacturer's practice pattern of repackaging data center components (e.g. Mellanox) imply any up and coming product creation opportunities?

thadkon The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)

On two separate instances 4 years apart in Liberia, the VSAT unit and Asus WiFi router were overheating at peak usage or peak heat times. This must be happening more than is generally realized.

Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.

thadkon I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

this Nov video talks thru via Cursor renegotiation, how in important ways a token != a token (not even within types like reasoning, output, or a model) because attention can lead to expensive logic loops. https://www.oreilly.com/videos/live-with-tim/0642572259488/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXMO2dW0LI&list=PL055Epbe6d...