Hacker News: awithrow

New comment by awithrow in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

awithrow — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:09:02 +0000

I really want this to be true but for me its not close. Maybe its better on the new 13 but its still night and day between my mac book and my FW 16 that's about a year old. My macbook works for days without a charge. My FW last maybe 6-8 hours on battery.

Don't get me wrong. I do really enjoy my FW but the mac hardware is still number one for me. I'd really love is an ARM based FW. Though if I could wave a magic wand it would be mac hardware running pure linux with no caveats. I really love seeing what Asahi is building

New comment by awithrow in "A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days"

awithrow — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:11:26 +0000

A ticking time bomb? What an overly dramatic way to talk about a bug that requires a reboot. Its not even a hard crash.

New comment by awithrow in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

awithrow — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:21:16 +0000

Correct, it's really anthropomorphizing what gets generated. It's another form of the "you're absolutely right" framing. The interesting thing is sometimes it won't do that. It'll continue to insist that some point or another is still a valid interpretation. I'm some ways it all feels like a complicated way of reading tea leaves

New comment by awithrow in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

awithrow — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:18:59 +0000

Yes exactly! It's very frustrating. My guess is it drives engagement. But some model that tells me what I want to hear all the time is useless.

New comment by awithrow in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

awithrow — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:33:55 +0000

what is Kimi white?

New comment by awithrow in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

awithrow — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:32:32 +0000

'admit' is anthropomorphizing the behavior, sure. The point is that sometimes the model's response will tighten, flag things that were overly supportive or what not. Sometimes it wont, it'll state that previous positions are still supported and continue to press it. Its not like either response is 'correct' but it can alter the rest of the responses in ways that are useful.

New comment by awithrow in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

awithrow — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:02:49 +0000

oh i do as well. I think of the LLM as another tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for interactions. There is something different about having a rubber duck as a service though.

New comment by awithrow in "AI chatbots are "Yes-Men" that reinforce bad relationship decisions, study finds"

awithrow — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:34:31 +0000

oh that's great. thanks for the link!

New comment by awithrow in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

awithrow — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:09:32 +0000

It feels like I'm fighting uphill battle when it comes to bouncing ideas off of a model. I'll set things up in the context with instructions similar to. "Help me refine my ideas, challenge, push back, and don't just be agreeable." It works for a bit but eventually the conversation creeps back into complacency and syncophancy. I'll check it too by asking "are you just placating me?" the funny thing is that often it'll admit that, yes, it wasn't being very critical, and then procede to over correct and become a complete contrarian. and not in a way that's useful either. very frustrating. I've found that Opus 4.6 is worse about this than 4.5. 4.5 does a better job IMO of following instructions and not drifting into the mode where it acts like everything i say is a grand revelation from up high.

New comment by awithrow in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

awithrow — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:52:15 +0000

You're talking to a bot. There has been a wild influx of these accounts that just add filler comments like this.

New comment by awithrow in "Anthropic ditches its core safety promise"

awithrow — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:34:51 +0000

discussed heavily here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963

New comment by awithrow in "A psychedelic medicine performs well against depression"

awithrow — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:29:20 +0000

Yeah, talking about grams without taking about what kind of mushroom is very out of date IMO. 2.5g could be anything from a light sensation to over the top potent. Just look at the results of the latest Denver Psychedelic Cup to get a sense of range.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG4IrghoIg/inPxQbZk0XtnQU_lB92...

New comment by awithrow in "Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)"

awithrow — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:37:36 +0000

I think 1st season Ted Lasso works. The contrast between his optimism and everyone else's cynicism made i good. Though I agree with you about the show after the first season. Everyone else becoming wholesome broke the spell and I found it unwatchable and saccharine sweet.

New comment by awithrow in "Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)"

awithrow — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:33:41 +0000

Its the opposite of a cult classic. Its hugely popular across platforms. Halloween this year was full of kids in costumes of the various characters. It a hit. A cult classic is something that finds a small but intense following over a course of years or decades.

New comment by awithrow in "Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User"

awithrow — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:12:38 +0000

I'll bite. I use NixOS as a daily driver and IMO makes the underlying FS type even less important. If my main drive goes I can bootstrap a new one by cloning my repo and running some commands. For my data, I just have some rsyc scripts that sling the bits to various locations.

I suppose if I really wanted to I could put the data on different partitions and disks and use the native fs tools but it's a level of detail that doesn't seem to matter that much relative to what I currently have. I could see thinking about FS details much more for a dedicated storage server

Fs level backups for an OS sounds more relevant when the OS setup is not reproducable and would be a pain to recreate.

New comment by awithrow in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

awithrow — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:19:41 +0000

If you're going to flame it you might as well point out something concrete you don't like about it.

New comment by awithrow in "The mushroom making people hallucinate tiny humans"

awithrow — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:12:13 +0000

Here is a paper about an authors experience searching for these mushrooms in Yunnan. Fun stuff

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226076639_Xiao_Ren_...

New comment by awithrow in "Reverse engineering Lyft Bikes for fun (and profit?)"

awithrow — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:03:21 +0000

its a reference to the movie Office Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2-1wcJYrWA

New comment by awithrow in "I finally got my sway layout to autostart the way I like it"

awithrow — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:11:34 +0000

Agreed, it's a bit sparse but setting it up was a lot of fun. Made me realize just how much work goes on behind the scenes for something like gnome to tie everything together.

On the plus side, I've gotten a much better understanding of all the moving pieces under the hood. It's also been a good excuse to migrate to some new tools which spark more joy than the old ones

New comment by awithrow in "Show HN: I created a tool to design and create foamcore inserts for boardgames"

awithrow — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:10:37 +0000

It'd be great to have some preset box sizes for some common games and maybe some pre-done layouts. Now that I'm thinking about it, some game elements would be handy to build around, ie a deck of cards or similar.