Hacker News: mattstir

New comment by mattstir in "Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking"

mattstir — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:08:22 +0000

What's your use-case for automating phone calls?

New comment by mattstir in "Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing"

mattstir — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:02:27 +0000

It's interesting to see Firefox attempt to create slightly more privacy-focused cloud inference infra (assuming you can trust that they adhere to their own policies and don't have bugs, and that their partners adhere to their contractual obligations and don't have bugs). Unfortunately that's still a lot of trust that's pretty much impossible for the end-user to verify, but at least it's something? Arguably it's better than the alternative of directly trusting AI companies that have shown absolutely no regard for other laws like copyright, but the marketing of this as ultra-private still leaves a bad taste. I wish this announcement clarified the cloud aspects directly instead of needing to browse through two layers of links to find how it actually works on a privacy notice.

New comment by mattstir in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

mattstir — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:31:40 +0000

Canada isn't an abused spouse that's supposed to sit around and wait while their partner magically undoes all of its threats and (economic) violence. "Undoing" the tariffs in a few years won't magically fix the intense economic damage they've caused to Canadian citizens. The US government being forced to pay hundreds of millions of the illegal tariff money back to corporations didn't magically bring prices back down. The US has completely ruined its reputation in the eyes of most Canadians to the point where nearly every single person I know refuses to travel to the US and many refuse to purchase US goods.

New comment by mattstir in "It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis"

mattstir — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:53:12 +0000

That's just not possible in many parts of the world.

New comment by mattstir in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

mattstir — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:19:28 +0000

Something something Apple. For what it's worth though, I agree that companies _subsuming_ others to obtain complete vertical market capture has been a very dangerous trend.

New comment by mattstir in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

mattstir — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:00:37 +0000

> which itself is fine, all software is political

I don't mean to get distracted from the topic at hand, but is that really true? If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift because I think it's fun and interesting, is that a political statement? What politics does that involve? If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author?

It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.

New comment by mattstir in "Claude: System Prompts"

mattstir — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:48:40 +0000

I have to imagine with the event occurring after its training cutoff, a question like "who's the president of the United States?" could have confidently returned a now-outdated answer. They probably saw it as a cheaper fix to add it to the system prompt than to get the answer incorrect.

New comment by mattstir in "Zed DeltaDB"

mattstir — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:56:00 +0000

Claude Design absolutely loves creating phrases like "Share the thread, not the PR". The amount of "do the xyz, not the abc" subheadings on docs in my workplace has exploded in the last 6 months, and it gets a bit tiring to see. I think it's a hard-coded alternative to em dashes or something.

New comment by mattstir in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

mattstir — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:47:44 +0000

If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.

New comment by mattstir in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

mattstir — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:39:42 +0000

The prosecution would argue that you ought to have warned officers about the duress pin since this wasn't a robbery scenario.

New comment by mattstir in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"

mattstir — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:06:40 +0000

Unfortunately I don't think modern consumer CPUs are physically capable of addressing enough RAM to even load the model into memory. We'd have to wait for some random person to make an extremely quantized version before we could reach those blazing speeds

New comment by mattstir in "Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary"

mattstir — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:15:38 +0000

That doesn't change the fact that there is a lot of Angular out there. No one's doubting how useful Next.js may or may not be, it's just a matter of fact that plenty of systems were created before it was available and not everyone has the luxury of rewriting their entire product.

New comment by mattstir in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

mattstir — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:42:03 +0000

I think that those two statements are somewhat contradictory of one another. But in any case, I'm curious about your decision to still use Claude for some questions. Do you find the Chinese models have less worldly knowledge, and if so in what categories? Genuinely curious, I haven't had a chance to try them out very much.

New comment by mattstir in "Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners"

mattstir — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:37:02 +0000

What an odd takeaway from this. The commenter attempting to point out blatant inconsistencies in the winning submission means they should have been bullied more as a child? Could you elaborate on how you came to that conclusion?

New comment by mattstir in "Hy3"

mattstir — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:19:02 +0000

This is admittedly an aside from the content of the post itself, but... why do so many mobile sites insist on preventing zooming in and seem to share the same incredibly buggy image zooming? It's quite frustrating.

New comment by mattstir in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

mattstir — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:29:02 +0000

Couldn't even get himself to say "thanks" for receiving $120,000 from the guy by the way, could only manage "that was cool"

New comment by mattstir in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

mattstir — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:58:11 +0000

The number of critical CVEs every year related to memory safety seems to point to the contrary. The amount of "just one more static analysizer and we'll never have any bugs!" in the C++ community is honestly disturbing, alongside the obvious elitism and absurdity of statements like 20 years of knowledge == no bugs ever.

New comment by mattstir in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

mattstir — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:36:07 +0000

Depending on the app, you could also get away with limited messaging such as a wheel of predefined callouts in a team game.

New comment by mattstir in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

mattstir — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:33:20 +0000

> or on the fly using stable diffusion

Steganography fundamentally requires you to be able to know where the data is, which requires you to have the original image to compare against. The only other strategy I'm aware of is setting known pixel positions to exact data, which is very easy for basic tools to spot and decode. Or to add the data to non-visual data blocks if the image format supports those, which is also quite easy to spot.

New comment by mattstir in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

mattstir — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:19:46 +0000

Although it would be much more exciting to have some world conspiracy, try to consider what that would mean. That conspiracy's so powerful it can singularly decide votes across a union of dozens of countries, and yet still feels the need to enact a law to invoke that power in the first place.

No, this is a much more benign form of government overreach, one born out of a normal desire to suppress citizens, and perhaps a healthy amount of regulatory capture by large corporations.