Hacker News: ImaCake

New comment by ImaCake in "How AI text watermarking works"

ImaCake — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:29:23 +0000

You can access Google's SynthID tool only via Gemini. Which supports your first point!

I think this is trivial to implement for open weights models? The main issue is each open weight provider could choose their own randomisation key and so actually matching the synthID would be finding a needle in a haystack! Intractable at scale and a chore for even one chunk of text.

New comment by ImaCake in "How AI text watermarking works"

ImaCake — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:25:44 +0000

It doesn't look like the providers are going to publish their randomisation key. The google version is accessible only via the gemini prompt which only actually ran the synthID tool 1 out of 2 times I tried it the other day. So at the moment the best approach would be taking the suspicious test and using claude computer use to feed it into each provider's prompt brower window "manually"...

New comment by ImaCake in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

ImaCake — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:14:34 +0000

I had issues on my iphone 13 pro where switching between two apps would lead to one app "forgetting" what screen it was on. Particularly painful on Safari! Hard to know how much of that is memory pressure but its not a problem I have encountered on recent flagship android phones.

New comment by ImaCake in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

ImaCake — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:39:08 +0000

Maybe the curl thing is because they are happy to let you do some light scraping. What they want to avoid is bots directly crawling the page interactively. No one seems to be blocking chatGPT when I promot it to use it's web search skill anyway.

New comment by ImaCake in "Is it all just vapourware?"

ImaCake — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:07:34 +0000

>Where are all the killer new things?

I agree they are over-hyped. Maybe the problem is that all the things LLMs are great for are essentially quality of life improvements. There are a dozen killer apps worth of functionality I get out of LLMs - near instant proofreader, one-shot code bugfixer, excellent cursory research tool, bibtext generator, etc. All of these things extend what I can do a bit but none of them instantly result in me being able to generate category killing apps. They still make stupid mistakes, they don't reduce my workload, but they reduce cognitive load on mundane tasks.

New comment by ImaCake in "Is it all just vapourware?"

ImaCake — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:44:56 +0000

Those websites are janky despite having all the (non AI) solutions available already. They suck for reasons independent of the quality of LLMs. I have not worked inside a megacorp but my understanding is they suck because of what are essentially political roadblocks within the organisation.

New comment by ImaCake in "LLMs reward expertise"

ImaCake — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:38:13 +0000

>Where my angst comes, is worrying that no one will ever get that experience anymore.

I am a fairly inexperienced python developer using LLMs to build software and find that I still learn a lot just from prompting and tinkering. Maybe that's less true once you reach a certain level of competence, but at my intermediate level I am still learning a lot even leaning heavily on LLMs.

New comment by ImaCake in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

ImaCake — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:38:20 +0000

Hell, $20/month is a pretty good deal for something that can proofread a 100 page report, do some light research work, and write some quick and dirty scripts. It doesn't have to replace the entire job of programming to be really damn useful. The pushback against using it even for these simple tasks seems utterly unreasonable to me.

New comment by ImaCake in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

ImaCake — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:14:08 +0000

I find it helpful to think of LLMs as reflections. If you can talk like an expert mathematician at the model it will respond like one. While Terrance's first prompt looks trivial I expect a first year Uni student would be hard pressed to provide something that good.

I guess it is kind of the inverse of the "you are an expert mathematician" prompt engineering of gpt3.5. Since no one ever says that to an expert mathematician when they are doing expert math the model immediately reflects that it is not an expert mathematician.

New comment by ImaCake in "Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode"

ImaCake — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:23:51 +0000

Sorry if my speculation was bad! When I wrote it I meant it as a compliment. Raw LLM output is awful and really needs a human to "translate" the useful content to something worth reading.

New comment by ImaCake in "Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU"

ImaCake — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:21:56 +0000

This isn't a helpful reply, I come here for thoughtful discussion, not knee-jerk reactions.

New comment by ImaCake in "Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode"

ImaCake — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:09:22 +0000

It seems too concise to be AI. My (conscious) heuristic for AI writing is how much context is squeezed into a sentence. LLMs seem to be pretty bad at the kind of elegant compression of meaning humans can do when they have done a lot of writing practice.

If I had to guess, I would say this is the human summarised conversation(s) with a bot.

New comment by ImaCake in "Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU"

ImaCake — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:54:56 +0000

I guess ask the bun people why they translated from zig to rust. I think it was essentially because rust guarantees a set of bugs can't exist so over medium to long term timeframes you end up with less technical debt.

New comment by ImaCake in "GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents"

ImaCake — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:13:24 +0000

Sure, but something that is “sonnet tier” is going to get there faster and with less pain. Well worth the 13 cents!

New comment by ImaCake in "GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents"

ImaCake — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:44:51 +0000

Significantly cheaper than comparable models if you are using openrouter [0]. Just yesterday I spent roughly 13 cents centering some divs using Deepseek in a personal project. It would have been north of $1 to do that with a US frontier model.

0. https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...

New comment by ImaCake in "GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents"

ImaCake — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:40:14 +0000

You should try out the cheaper models first. I find Deepseek v4 models pretty comparable to sonnet 4.6 but at a fraction of the cost. You might find you just don't need to use the American models at all.

New comment by ImaCake in "Can you see three trees?"

ImaCake — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:43:07 +0000

That first map seems to map quite closely to koppen climate zones across the continent. Its hard to say whether the climate is decisive here because climate is a big influencer of urban design. However, its interesting that in Australia its the two Mediterranean climate cities (Perth and Adelaide) which frequently get labelled as worse for tree cover compared to the sub tropical east coast cities.

New comment by ImaCake in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

ImaCake — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:14:49 +0000

If you go to the original link [0] you will see that things are actually pretty stable and okay?

0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/

New comment by ImaCake in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

ImaCake — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:46:05 +0000

It's fun and it looks good regardless of whether its 100% correct (It would certainly take me more than 9 hours of work to do better than this). Making these bespoke tools possible for most people is a big deal.

New comment by ImaCake in "Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies"

ImaCake — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:17:56 +0000

People are not (yet) aware what has been making everyone fat, but ozempic is making it harder to ignore that ultraprocessed foods are the culprit. So hopefully this will change.