Hacker News: chris_st

New comment by chris_st in "Lambda Calculus Benchmark for AI"

chris_st — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:53:26 +0000

Well, to be fair, people cheat by remembering what they did last time. I think the idea here is to run the models from a "clean slate" and see how often they succeed/fail.

They are, like people, non-deterministic, so giving them several "fair" trials makes sense to me.

New comment by chris_st in "Google Plans to Invest Up to $40B in Anthropic"

chris_st — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:52:24 +0000

Possibly because they just haven't been able to manufacture enough of them yet to be a viable business to others? They're fighting everyone else for foundry space and time.

New comment by chris_st in "Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities"

chris_st — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:58:57 +0000

But it's pretty cool that LLM bug hunting is pretty cheap... the 1-person projects can do it themselves, don't have to contract out to some huge security company.

New comment by chris_st in "Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities"

chris_st — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:10:31 +0000

Well, maybe not... see Simon Willison's ongoing reporting [0] on all the bug reports for `curl` people are finding with LLMs.

Interesting to see them go from "DON'T GIVE US AI SLOP!" to "Wow, lots of actual bugs found, including [ed: at least one] bug found by two people!"

[0]: https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=curl

New comment by chris_st in "Tailscale's new macOS home"

chris_st — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:46:03 +0000

From the article:

> As we noted at its September beta release, a windowed version of Tailscale’s macOS app doesn’t replace the menu bar app, but runs alongside it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and features more accessible.

New comment by chris_st in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

chris_st — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:43:15 +0000

Seconding Maple Mono - it's very nice.

New comment by chris_st in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

chris_st — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:27:55 +0000

Just out of curiosity, which version of Claude?

New comment by chris_st in "What podcasts are you listening to?"

chris_st — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:24:18 +0000

Good nerd stories, alas it was cancelled, so no new ones:

- Uncharted with Hannah Fry

Some great fiction:

- Achewillow - horror, but not excessively horrible.

- Desert Skies - humor, about folks who work in the first sphere of the afterlife, folks who are recently dead and arrive in Buick Skylarks are equipped with microwaveable burritos and information about the spheres to come.

Fantastic poetry:

- Poetry Unbound

Really fantastic interviews, alas, it's no longer updated:

- Partners by Hriskikesh Hirway

Linguistics and language:

- The Allusionist

Tabletop RPG:

- My First Dungeon

New comment by chris_st in "LM Studio 0.4"

chris_st — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:08:13 +0000

Turns out the apps in /Application/ run as you. Problem (between keyboard and chair :-) solved.

New comment by chris_st in "LM Studio 0.4"

chris_st — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 14:58:05 +0000

Honestly, I don't know! I should write an app and see who it runs as. I did an `ls -l /Applications`, and while every file is owned by `root`, none has the `suid` bit set.

LM Studio doesn't have an installer. Those often have to run as admin, and who knows what they're doing then, so that probably wrongly set my concerns about putting stuff in /Applications/.

I'll dig around the interwebs and see if this is answered elsewhere.

Thanks!

New comment by chris_st in "LM Studio 0.4"

chris_st — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:18:13 +0000

Nope - on macOS, almost all apps are just "drag this to wherever (usually your own personal application folder)" and they work perfectly, since they don't need admin privileges. But this one insists on running from /Applications - the root application directory - and for reason. To install there, you have to be admin. I really don't want apps installed as admin, and possibly then able to get admin privileges. It's just basic security.

There's a thread on their Discord that was reported in February of last year. No fix, no comments.

New comment by chris_st in "LM Studio 0.4"

chris_st — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:58:59 +0000

My complaint is that LM Studio insists on installing as admin on my Mac. For no apparent reason, and they refuse to say why.

New comment by chris_st in "Show HN: Bonsplit – Tabs and splits for native macOS apps"

chris_st — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:53:10 +0000

To set the bar for other websites, to show how it should be done?

Or maybe just "for the love of all that's good"?

New comment by chris_st in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

chris_st — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:24:37 +0000

I've found asking GPT-5.2 High to review Opus 4.5's code to be really productive. They find different things.

New comment by chris_st in "Take One Small Step"

chris_st — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:28:55 +0000

Thanks very much! Glad to hear it was so good for you.

New comment by chris_st in "Take One Small Step"

chris_st — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 02:24:14 +0000

Curious about that book - did it help you? Silly questions, but serious: How much did it help? What, specifically, did you get from it? Asking for a relative who has serious anxiety issues (no, really, it's not me... I have depression, and Burns' "Feeling Good" helped me substantially, specifically by identifying brain-spirals I get into, which lead to depression, and once known can be avoided). I'd love to recommend something good for them. Thanks!

New comment by chris_st in "Show HN: See what readers who loved your favorite book/author also loved to read"

chris_st — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:35:59 +0000

Recommended this to a friend who hates keeping track of "how many" kinds of things, and was dismayed at having to say how many books they've read (which they really don't want to do) and found they couldn't skip that question.

Maybe make it optional?

New comment by chris_st in "Dancing around the rhythm space with Euclid"

chris_st — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:56:37 +0000

Nice! I've done similar things with iPad AUv3 plugins (of which there are way too many!).

Notable ones are:

* Patterning 3 - which, while "just" a drum sequencer, has the ability to automate rotations, etc. in really interesting ways, as well as separate sequences for each part of the kit.

* 4Pockets Euclidean - gives you four different sequences, with adjustable steps, events, rotations, notes to play, velocity, ... for building interesting rhythms.

* Riffer - MIDI random sequence generator

* OODA and ZOA - sequencers with clever morphing and looping abilities

* Battlestation - drum sequencer with random generation, lots of manual adjustments, and then three different synth blocks with random generation.

If you have an iPad already, most AUv3s are generally from free to $30, so somewhat cheaper than going Eurorack :-)

Also, there are things like Drambo that pretty much are Euroracks, and things like Loopy Pro that are not really like anything else (well, LP is kind of like a Boss 505, if the Boss had an arbitrary number of loops, incredible automation, several built-in plugins plus the ability to use pretty much any AUv3 plugin, and the ability to control those plugins...).

It's all kind of an incredible rabbit hole to go down. TONS of fun.

New comment by chris_st in "8-bit Boléro"

chris_st — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 15:56:51 +0000

Thanks, that absolutely made my day!

New comment by chris_st in "We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months"

chris_st — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:38:20 +0000

XKCD calls it the "Lucky 10,000" [0]

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/