Hacker News: jaapz

New comment by jaapz in "1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer"

jaapz — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:28:42 +0000

"Why not" is a perfectly good reason to do things, and we do things like that all the time

New comment by jaapz in "Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids"

jaapz — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:00:38 +0000

In my country (for people with a so called "dynamic pricing" contract) the price of electricity already drops significantly when we have a load of green energy (wind, solar). I guess this is just a side effect of not having a well-balanced grid. But still that's already kind of a CO2-based pricing - although not directly

New comment by jaapz in "A thousand years older than Stonehenge: Archaeologists explore a Czech sanctuary"

jaapz — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:11:19 +0000

lmao that completely unnecessary chatgpt "visualisation" at the end

New comment by jaapz in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

jaapz — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:48:19 +0000

My claude.md has a section about not writing those comments, it has stored this in memory, and still every session I need to remind my good friend to stop writing so many garbage wordsalad comments

Maybe system prompt has priority or something but Opus just really really likes writing bad comments

New comment by jaapz in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

jaapz — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:42:50 +0000

The system prompt is probably produced by a model as well, I would be very surprised if anyone at Anthropic ever opened it with an actual text editor

New comment by jaapz in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

jaapz — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:57:49 +0000

They help explain the blast radius

New comment by jaapz in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

jaapz — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:48:48 +0000

My trick is to pass opus and fable's word salad into a haiku agent, then have it check if what haiku makes of it is still correct, then pass it to me. Whatever haiku outputs is often way more readable

New comment by jaapz in "Lion-man"

jaapz — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:55:18 +0000

I was curious so I looked around a little bit

Apparently the oldest stone tools found that can be attributed to hominids, are around 3 million years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan.

When only counting Homo sapiens, they have found tools that are around 315.000 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Irhoud.

And that's just what we have actually found :)

New comment by jaapz in "AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too"

jaapz — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:29:35 +0000

> Even as someone using AI on the regular I'm starting to hate the "You didn't actually use this exact most expensive model so your point is invalid" argument.

What the author of the article is doing is dismissing a technology so disruptive that it's basically all everyone's talking about in the "tech space" at the moment (I mean look at HN frontpage for the past few months), by trying a relatively mediocre (but still quite good) model for about 10 seconds.

The reality is that frontier models suddenly got very good in the past 3-6 months. It has it's problems, and you need to learn how to use this new tool (as with any tool).

But models can and do generate good code. They also can and do generate absolute garbage (even Fable).

You need a good harness, tools to help the model check it's own output, good context, and a good idea of what you actually want. If you have those 4 things, the chances of generating absolute garbage are pretty slim (but yeah, still there).

New comment by jaapz in "Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care"

jaapz — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:14:30 +0000

It's pretty interesting that you are trying to find a reason for highlighting not working, while it's pretty obvious that many people are using highlighting and it is in fact helping them.

Just that it doesn't work for you, doesn't mean everyone is like you.

New comment by jaapz in "Hacking IKEA Furniture"

jaapz — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:50:46 +0000

I see these "In Europe" claims all over hackernews.

You realize "In Europe" doesn't really exist? When you cross a country border, everything is different again.

New comment by jaapz in "Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root"

jaapz — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:19:07 +0000

> Then they don't actually want to use Arch Linux.

No, they want to use Arch Linux as configured by DHH

New comment by jaapz in "EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

jaapz — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:04:44 +0000

That might be a reason, but probably more relevant is the fact that when you want solar to provide all power for a data center, you need a lot of buffering capacity (batteries). And then you also need a back up for when the sun doesn't shine... Which is probably a gas generator.

Easier to just install a gas generator then

New comment by jaapz in "EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

jaapz — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:02:22 +0000

If that is the original intent, why did that not get added into the law? Explicitly specififying that the exception only applies to emergency backup situations would have solved this, right?

New comment by jaapz in "Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing"

jaapz — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:48:51 +0000

Dunno about the frozen pizza where you live, but where I live they are not much above "cardboard with some cheese on top" (except for some expensive brands).

Sure your homemade pizza improves significantly when you can get your oven very hot and cook it really quick, but homemade pizza from a conventional oven (250C or so), using your own dough and toppings is still miles better than frozen.

New comment by jaapz in "Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing"

jaapz — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:45:42 +0000

Then good luck surviving in our current food system

New comment by jaapz in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

jaapz — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:11:11 +0000

> It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.

That's not inconsistent, that's a deliberate dark pattern that every social media site uses. Let them see the first page, then when they want to engage: force creating an account.

When you just put a "log in to see this page" up front, people will bounce. When you have them engaged a little bit, chances are they are already invested enough to create an account.

New comment by jaapz in "Servus München: Waymo Is Coming to Germany"

jaapz — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:05:28 +0000

Uber is doing fine in Munchen as well, afaik. There are still people who want to pay a premium for them to be picked up where they are and dropped off where they need to be.

New comment by jaapz in "Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive"

jaapz — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:40:59 +0000

Also, for whatever software engineering work I throw at Fable 5, Opus 5 also does fine. Apparently Fable is supposed to do better at long running tasks (in other words - burning more tokens without interacting with the user), but that's not the kind of work I'm doing.

After Fable 5 launched, it was better than Opus 4.8 for sure. Then they rug-pulled Fable from me (EU), and later released Opus 5. Now I only reach for fable when Opus 5 API returns 529 for the millionth time this year.

New comment by jaapz in "Babies born under sugar rationing grew into adults with lower cancer risk"

jaapz — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:31:11 +0000

Yeah the article doesn't mention how they account for all the other changes in people's diet, stress, environment and what not that happens during and after a war...