<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jchw</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jchw</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:08:51 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jchw" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's easy to dismiss "taste" when you either have none or just fail to appreciate it, but nothing gives you an appreciation for the importance of taste like LLMs. There is no benchmark for taste, so while many things improve taste does not. Bad taste is, in fact, a huge component of what makes AI slop so sloppy.<p>But human coders can have bad taste too. There is code where there is nothing obviously objectively wrong, yet the choices feel like they were made by someone who just doesn't value or put emphasis on the right things, yet spends a lot of effort on trivialities. It comes in many forms.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:34:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344740</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you said this in 2025 I would've 100% understood, but to be honest getting AI models to do a pretty good job on day-to-day ticket work has become so boring that we don't even bother using the top tier models and higher effort slots for that anymore. I personally wind up tweaking the results a lot and recursively having fresh agents review the diff, but that's just because I'm picky; in a lot of cases the first diff is actually pretty damn decent.<p>Compared to what I am doing at home experimentally, I feel like day-to-day work is absolutely nothing. Not only am I also working with existing codebases in my experimental prototyping, but I am also doing things vastly more complex with vastly harder constraints.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:48:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341746</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Although I am not exactly sure what you mean, I am not really claiming it is doing anything I couldn't do - but yes, it does so with much less effort. For example, I can have it set up probes and tracing on Linux that I personally would have to consult documentation to do. It might not even have to consult the documentation due to having the information on-tap, but even if it does, it's nothing that would cause it any fatigue, it's just going to keep moving forward in a loop until it is satisfied that it meets the criteria. I could've done all of this alone - I really could have. I just would not have. Being able to do something 10 times faster or with 10 times less effort is, in some senses, sometimes more impactful than being able to do entirely new things you couldn't do before.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:41:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340568</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340568</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340568</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, I actually <i>do</i> run xhigh as my default. However, for the first time in my experience of trying and using LLMs, with Sol.. sometimes I feel confident enough to set the effort level to "Low". I just had Sol prototype some AWS stuff on low earlier. Great result, did exactly what I wanted.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:33:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340504</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340504</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340504</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any model to do, and it does great. For the more advanced stuff, it definitely needs the effort bumped. But even with the effort bumped, the token usage really doesn't seem to skyrocket too badly until at least you hit xhigh and max, which really only seem to be necessary if you are doing genuine crazy stuff, so it's not that bad. I did similar stuff with Fable. In fact, I went directly from an Anthropic subscription with Fable to an OpenAI subscription with Sol, more or less, and it really felt pretty seamless. If anything, I was thrilled to realize how much I actually preferred Codex CLI, to the point where I started using it at work too.<p>Fable seems to be generally more impressive at outputting one-shot web apps. I'm not really saying that to try to downplay what Fable <i>can</i> do, it's just that if I compare the two, this is one of the few definitely noticeable areas that you can easily demonstrate. Obviously, one-shotting programs is much better as a demonstration of a model's capabilities than it is practically useful (not that it is <i>useless</i>, but hopefully my point is understood).<p>However, whatever Fable truly is better at, one thing I really like about GPT 5.6 Sol is even harder to quantify: taste. GPT 5.6 Sol outputs are still LLM outputs and they contain many things that people would probably consider "Claude-isms" for better or worse, but overall I really prefer the GPT 5.6 Sol output. I find it to be generally more tasteful. Hard to quantify, but when talking to people I've had enough people seemingly agree with me to convince me that it really is true.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:56:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340198</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340198</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340198</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can only get a very limited uBlock Origin facsimile, not the real thing. A lot of browsers have a uBlock Lite. It's missing a lot of useful features IMO.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:05:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309289</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309289</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309289</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not that I'm aware of. I'm on my phone right now but any KMS driver that supports KMS and dma-bufs should work.<p>The basic idea is to enumerate the CRTCs to get the relevant framebuffer plane resources and then use dma-buf exports to pass them to an encoder. Reality can be a bit more complex due to the existence of overlay planes but that's the idea.<p><a href="https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine/blob/master/src/platform/linux/kmsgrab.cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine/blob/master/src/platf...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:01:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309264</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309264</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309264</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Anthropic Risk August 2026 [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Based on the literal hundreds of billions we are pouring in, AI still has a long way to go to prove it is worth what we are putting in. Anyone who thinks it doesn't is delusional. I don't really give a shit if that makes some people on HN angry to assert, I don't really like people here anyways.<p>I'm not betting on whether it will or won't. I'm absolutely 100% suggesting it hasn't happened and isn't guaranteed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:45:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309174</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Anthropic Risk August 2026 [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Okay now let's try that again with the whole industry...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:54:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49305601</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49305601</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49305601</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Anthropic Risk August 2026 [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Now let's re-evaluate that based on how much it costs in both R&D and at runtime. This new technology has a lot of work to do to justify itself.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:11:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304651</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304651</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304651</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Usually the way to be able to even get the login screen is to use DRM/KMS based capture and use uinput for device emulation. It doesn't strictly need root but it does need privileges a user wouldn't have, like access to the DRM card nodes and uinput device. Sunshine does it this way.<p>It entirely sidesteps the problem of X vs Wayland, although this does mean the unattended physical seat can be physically taken over while you are remote.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:16:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304012</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304012</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304012</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>YouTube does something that makes me irate: it saves the abusive autoplay settings <i>only</i> locally per device. There is no way to set it in your account, so every time I log back in I have to disable autoplaying thumbnails and autoplay next video. Every. Single. Time.<p>I think a lot of people get progressively worn down by things like this, but for me I actually get angrier each time it happens. It's probably good I no longer work at Google because I would probably feel genuinely enticed to find whoever is most responsible for this and engage in psychological warfare.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:15:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300806</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300806</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300806</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd recommend using Libredirect if you're on a Firefox-based mobile browser. It can configure redirects to alternate "frontends" that will serve you much more agreeable HTML (though because we live in hell, it will usually still involve antibotting out of sheer necessity. But I accept this.)<p>For Reddit, my choice for now is safereddit. If I need to view a Reddit link on mobile and old Reddit is blocked as it sometimes is, I just swap the domain to safereddit.com.<p>For Twitter, my choice has been xcancel for ages. I have no idea how that manages to stay up in spite of Twitter's hostility but it is a Nitter instance that seems to just work.<p>You can also run these frontends yourself, too, but I assume it requires accounts.<p>(edit: Also I hope it goes without saying that I don't really have any specific trust that my activity is necessarily more "private" with these frontends, although honestly if I was forced to bet I would have to bet that they are much more respectful to my privacy than Twitter or Reddit are. I just use them for functionality.)<p>Good luck fellow traveler. If there was more to do in real life, I'd probably had thrown my phone into the ocean by now. I'm about halfway there in spite of the lack of many appealing third spaces.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:40:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300276</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300276</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300276</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Should load much slower.<p>Also, where is the unrelated autoplaying video that will unmute if you actually click it, that follows your scrolling and only becomes smaller when you dismiss it? Plus, it should probably have text that cuts off letting you know you can have access for just $10/month.<p>Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?<p>edit: Oh shoot! I forgot, too. This modal needs to also ensure there is absolutely no way to scroll. If you could scroll you might be able to accidentally get to the address bar of your browser to fix the URL to xcancel or even close the page, which isn't using the app as you are intended to do.<p>Also, it doesn't attempt to hijack the back button to give me stuff I clearly wanted to see before I leave the page.<p>A lot of work left to do here before it's a "real" website. Although, it has about as much substance as the average website so far, so good work on that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:20:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299956</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299956</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299956</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://aloutfi.com/writing/load-bearing-smoking-gun" rel="nofollow">https://aloutfi.com/writing/load-bearing-smoking-gun</a><p>I still pretty much stand by what I said; if my comments are ringing alarm bells then you're not really picking up on the right signals.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:55:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297064</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297064</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49297064</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well for one thing I also trust most people I respect to not suddenly have someone else speaking on their behalf in their voice with no disclosure in most contexts where it would not be normal, yet that seems to have happened here. So while I personally do still trust and even respect the author, I can't help but empathize with someone who is suddenly a bit more skeptical.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:54:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289614</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289614</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289614</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This blows my mind just as badly and I see it reasonably often: I talk <i>nothing</i> like <i>any</i> AI model that has ever been, it isn't even <i>close</i>. I'm going to be bold and say that even without checking, more analytical approaches like stylometry would prove me right with little doubt. To mistake my writing for being "AI-esque", you would pretty much have to be entirely blind to the stylistic aspects of the text and fall back on even more superficial details like how verbose it is.<p>Go ahead and throw the comment into your favorite unreliable AI detector. Even though I suspect they're mostly garbage, my writing is just so far away from what AI models do that it doesn't even matter.<p>edit: I caved into temptation and checked. Big fat zero on GPTZero.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:49:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289541</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Like, who cares?<p>You are literally asking this to people who clearly care...<p>> In today's present, I wouldn't bother writing the article myself neither besides giving the instructions and auditing the output.<p>Then why exactly are you even bothering to reply to me instead of having Claude do it and auditing the output? If HN didn't have a rule against it, would you even bother replying yourself?<p>But really, there's a fair bit more to unpack here than just that. Why <i>wouldn't</i> you bother? Is writing a README.md about some project you worked on <i>really</i> that hard? Even with heavy LLM assistance, I'd wager to guess this project, which clearly involved working on real hardware, was more than just prompting. So clearly there was human effort other than prompting. And I do respect that, but <i>I want people who write things to respect my time</i>. I'm not asking them to disclose every tool they use, I'm asking them to not waste our time with crappy irritating Claude writeups. Whether it's explictly specified or not, <i>we know</i>.<p>Frankly I struggle to believe that people don't really mind if someone else speaks for them in their own voice, just because they're too fucking lazy to speak for themselves anymore. We've had competent GenAI for like a <i>year or two</i>, at this rate people are going to forget their potty training in another few months.<p>> Substance is what matters<p>Substance matters, which is not great for LLMs, because they put out text that has far more fluff than substance. What, however, is far worse for LLMs, is the fact that kick and scream and cry all you want, but: style and presentation matters, too.<p>It is absolutely true that if you just dropped a very brief blurb that all AMD CPUs from a certain generation can be pwned it would have a decent chance to hit the HN frontpage just out of sheer interestingness. That is not because the style and presentation doesn't matter, it's just that the substance is significant in spite of the bad presentation and style.<p>And absolutely, we can easily forgive someone for simply not being very good at the presentation and style part, certainly I'm not really an expert at it. But this author has released plenty of great hits before, so I damn well know they can. It's a serious disappointment to see them downgrade to irritating, grating Claude garbage output.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:13:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288992</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288992</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"What if you're wrong?"<p>I'd just like to address this real quick because some people seem to think this is just a "hunch" that has some probability of being false; there is absolutely nothing more certain on planet Earth than the LLM involvement in this writing. It is difficult to come up with things that are certain enough to compare this to to convey the lack of doubt that exists.<p>I am not going to make fun of you for not being able to tell, although I do find it surprising that people seem to struggle in both directions with telling AI and human writing apart (are our brains really that different?) - I just want it to be clear that some of us can pick up Claudisms within just a couple of sentences with no effort. A Claude-generated sentence, in isolation, may not ring any alarm bells. A few of them in a row, however, that's a load-bearing smoking gun right there.<p>We can certainly argue to what extent undisclosed LLM involvement is an issue or not, though frankly I don't like reading LLM writeups so I would greatly prefer if people would stop using LLMs for public facing documents. But, it is at least worth making this much clear: we can tell.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:21:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288288</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288288</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288288</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jchw in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nah, it's not just that, literally all the stuff they've posted this year is obvious LLM writing, none of the stuff from previous years is. To get <i>this</i> close to LLM writing style without actually using an LLM, you would pretty much have to be purposefully trying.<p>But I have a new favorite way of demonstrating this:<p><a href="https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Axoreaxeaxeax+load-bearing&type=code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Axoreaxeaxeax+load-bearin...</a><p>Guess how many of these are from before 2025.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:43:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287724</link><dc:creator>jchw</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287724</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287724</guid></item></channel></rss>