Hacker News: dilap

New comment by dilap in "Claude Fable 5"

dilap — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:13:18 +0000

Have you tried iterating on style feedback in AGENTS.md? I've been reasonably successful using this to get it to output code in a terse, non-defensive style that matches my hand-written code.

New comment by dilap in "Apple WWDC 2026 Livestream"

dilap — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:38:42 +0000

Reload should fix (did for me).

New comment by dilap in "Claude Opus 4.8"

dilap — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:40:15 +0000

Doesn't look minified, just very dense, almost like progcomp code. First time I've seen an LLM spit out that style of code, I'm impressed!

New comment by dilap in "AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn"

dilap — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:44:59 +0000

It's just Claudeslop. It's everywhere. An epidemic. If you're familiar it stands out instantly. (Would you let someone else talk for you? In real life? Like open up your mouth and let a TTS system spit out the sounds and pick the words? No? Then you shouldn't do the same thing with writing!)

New comment by dilap in "Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark"

dilap — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:36:11 +0000

Why Codex GPT-5.5 High instead of Extra High, I wonder?

New comment by dilap in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

dilap — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:16:19 +0000

Yeah, it has a tendency to default to "smallest local hack that will work" and code as defensively as possible.

BUT I have had great success using AGENTS.md and becoming better at prompting to get it to not be like this.

Basic approach in AGENTS.md: don't code defensively, yada yada, we have a validation layer at X, no need to check for anything behind that layer. Works well.

An approach I've found helpful when prompting: What would be the best architecture for this change? If you say "do X" it'll tend to just do the hackiest, shortest path thing. If you say, "what's the best way to do X?" it will think more holistically.

That said, who knows, maybe when it's PHP it just really wants to hack ;-)

(Also, yes, you still need to review the code -- it will still do stupid things, so you can't just be pure hands off w/o ending up with quality degredations. The same is true of humans too though in my experience...)

New comment by dilap in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

dilap — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:51:16 +0000

Personally I don't find this to be true anymore! It's not always great and does still will often tend towards unneeded complexity (especially if not pushed a bit), but I often find GPT 5.5 writing code I would have written myself. This was very much not true with earlier models (who make something that worked, but I'd always have to rewrite to make it "good code").

New comment by dilap in "A few words on DS4"

dilap — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:12:37 +0000

way easier to work on a focussed c codebase you own than a mature unwieldy c++ codebase you don't. but it's fine, people will take that work and port to llamacpp and everyone wins.

(the ux of ds4 is fantastic too -- it's dead-easy to get a known-good model, great quant. llamacpp you're much more hacking in the wilderness, w/ many many knobs.)

New comment by dilap in "Codex for almost everything"

dilap — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:30:58 +0000

FWIW, I've found Codex with GPT-5.4 to be better than Opus-4.6; I would say it's at least worth checking out for your use case.

New comment by dilap in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

dilap — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:55:14 +0000

Deepseek R1 was a publically-available, MoE model that was getting a ton of attention before llama4. Llama4 didn't get much attention because it wasn't good.

New comment by dilap in "Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)"

dilap — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:54:58 +0000

i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top of each other is super-common for me, and the fact that they all peak thru each other (like the screenshot in the blog) looking absolutely terrible drives me crazy

New comment by dilap in "Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew"

dilap — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:19:43 +0000

I wish I could remember the details -- I know I got annoyed with things being slow and when I got a new computer decided to go the no-homebrew route. I'm using nix, and it seems fine so far, but I also really don't understand it at all, which is a little concerning. :-)

New comment by dilap in "Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew"

dilap — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:34:12 +0000

Horses for courses, but I've stopped using brew 'cuz it's too slow, so this might bring me back!

Edit: no, it won't...

New comment by dilap in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

dilap — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:20:01 +0000

I thought this was parody until the last sentence.

New comment by dilap in "It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard"

dilap — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:47:11 +0000

I still remember the very first time I saw an emoji -- just an old-school dumb phone, and my friend sent me a message with an emoji, which the phone, amazingly, was able to display. I had no idea such a capability even existed, and wondered for a second if I was dreaming.

New comment by dilap in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

dilap — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:30:14 +0000

Welllll I'm not so sure that phrase is well-suited for your intended meaning, then. (Also, tangentially, I think could argue thinking models w/ the elided thought prelude satisfy "having hidden state where it first forms an opinion.")

New comment by dilap in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

dilap — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:27:01 +0000

Ha, thanks!

New comment by dilap in "Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native"

dilap — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:00:00 +0000

I don't know for a fact, but I'd bet a few digits of cold hard cash it's a SwiftUI rewrite that is to blame. (Any1 in the know want to chime in?)

And yeah, it's terrible. Apple doesn't make good apps anymore.

(This is part of why I think electron does so well -- it's not as good as a really good native app [e.g. Sublime Text], but it's way better than the sort of default whatever you'll get doing native. You get a lot of niceness that's built into the web stack.)

New comment by dilap in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

dilap — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:40:41 +0000

The fundamental nature of the model is that it consumes tokens as input and produces token probabilities as output, but there's nothing inherently "predictive" about it -- that's just perspective hangover from the historical development of how LLMs were trained. It is, fundamentally, I think, a general-purpose thinking machine, operating over the inputs and outputs of tokens.

(With this perspective, I can feel my own brain subtly oferring up a panoply of possible responses in a similar way. I can even turn up the temperature on my own brain, making it more likely to decide to say the less-obvious words in response, by having a drink or two.)

(Similarly, mimicry is in humans too a very good learning technique to get started -- kids learning to speak are little parrots, artists just starting out will often copy existing works, etc. Before going on to develop further into their own style.)

New comment by dilap in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

dilap — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:10:21 +0000

That description is really only fair for base models†. Something like Opus 4.6 has all kinds of other training on top of that which teach it behaviors beyond "predict most probable token," like problem-solving and being a good chatbot.

(†And even then is kind of overly-dismissive and underspecified. The "most probable word" is defined over some training data set. So imagine if you train on e.g. mathematicians solving problems... To do a good job at predicting [w/o overfitting] your model will have to in fact get good at thinking like a mathematician. In general "to be able to predict what is likely to happen next" is probably one pretty good definition of intelligence.)