Hacker News: sgc

New comment by sgc in "Heretic removes restrictions from language models"

sgc — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:50:49 +0000

They are saying there appears to be a lot more to these refusals than saying no, and this process appears to only touch the tip of the iceberg; as the refusal seems to run deeper into the token prediction process.

New comment by sgc in "Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background"

sgc — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:38:25 +0000

Thank you, I will keep my eye on it.

New comment by sgc in "Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP"

sgc — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:38:44 +0000

I went in to cash a check at a bank a few years ago and they made a huge show of it, taking over half an hour and various employees for a couple hundred dollars. They will absolutely win if they want to. A large organization can easily create more friction than an individual can bear.

New comment by sgc in "Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background"

sgc — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:13:39 +0000

I need to be able to enforce structured output easily (json, and xml if possible). That would be my number one slightly less than typical requirement.

Other than that, I like to insert agents into deterministic workflows, so some way to easily have deterministic steps (calling a script rather than delegating to an agent, but determined by the workflow rather than the agent). However this second one is likely out of scope for a while, since it is the inverse of the typical agent workflow. I could probably work this out clunkily by polling the cli from an external master script, but it would be cool to have it all inside the box.

New comment by sgc in "Show HN: Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background"

sgc — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:28:40 +0000

Do you have a list of a few mcp servers or other tools you would add to help with the pizza-bot specific workflow? For example, how would you enforce structured output, should that be an mcp server, a plugin, already in the box?

New comment by sgc in "People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination"

sgc — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:57:09 +0000

I think there should be some focus on nature vs nurture here. At least some people have some degree of control over how they imagine things, and some training of when to use the best imaginative process as the tool it is would be useful. Struggling with a problem? Perhaps stop visualizing and try linearizing in monologue, or vice-versa, etc.

New comment by sgc in "People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination"

sgc — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 03:45:10 +0000

This entire conversation is new and fascinating to me. I used to be much more visual but I would say that my primary mode of thinking now is monologic. However I would never think to describe it as hearing. It is more like an imaginary 'voice' that is not the one I use with other people (it is absent timbre etc and just a much simpler more efficient voice abstracted from physical constraints). I use it to write out my thoughts in my mind. I quasi-visualize the chain of words just in a very abstract, largely amorphous way using this 'voice' and play them through my mind while 'speaking'/'hearing' them. In this sense I pretty literally get 'lost in my train of thought' when thinking about something interesting.

I don't know how much this style of thought came about because I really didn't enjoy constantly visualizing things and consistently fought against it; mainly due to the constant intrusive visual sequences of various types, of which I still have far too many for my taste. I use schematic and visual imaginations all the time, but I guess I feel safer using the monologue and so it has become the bulk of my thought. At the same time the fact that I have learned several languages and have had to consciously focus on language over the years undoubtedly plays a big part. I wonder how many polyglots who learned languages later in life use a similar monologic imagination style?

New comment by sgc in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

sgc — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:34:11 +0000

Why are you giving a shady company with shady terms and shady history the benefit of the doubt?

New comment by sgc in "The UN challenges five centuries of cartography"

sgc — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:58:56 +0000

One can still note a poor decision based on its merits.

An equal area projection map is obviously valuable. But it's practically asinine to pick a projection that distorts land features when there are several equal area projections that do not.

Further, Ukraine had to abstain from this vote because they shoehorned in something ridiculous considering the official position of the UN members that Crimea is Ukraine [1], and Crimea is depicted as outside of Ukraine.

I have no idea if there are other hidden yet important changes, since there is hardly any commentary apart from size and shape.

[1] https://ukraine-war-analytics.com/history/international-reco...

New comment by sgc in "Jellyfin 12.0"

sgc — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 02:56:00 +0000

I stay purely home network, as I suspect most do. So although I can see your use case, I can also understand why it's not a bigger priority than those other features.

New comment by sgc in "Shutting down our public encrypted DNS"

sgc — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:22:14 +0000

It's probably the software I trust the most on my network to 'just work', and with the local caching I can use slower upstream dns providers and still have sub 1ms average latency (no performance worries by excluding google and cloudflare). I don't use it for dhcp, but it is a good fit that it's available as well. Couldn't be happier.

New comment by sgc in "Nebula Sans"

sgc — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:48:26 +0000

Rather late to comment here, but are there plans to support Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and other scripts? I love the readability and elegance of this font in English and Greek, and would like to use it at CatholicLibrary.org.

New comment by sgc in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

sgc — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:59:16 +0000

It seems like the best course of action would be to argue he did not destroy evidence, just made it unavailable at the location to force the requirement for a search warrant. It would probably be a hard sell, but I can't think of a better argument (not a lawyer).

New comment by sgc in "Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results"

sgc — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:48:51 +0000

I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.

New comment by sgc in "Don't classify, hallucinate"

sgc — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:48:40 +0000

I asked a question once and now there is a effing alexa for shopping toolbar that takes a quarter of the screen that will not go away no matter how many times I close it, and the space remains taken even if I adblock it. Absolutely hostile implementation. I have words for this I cannot type out.

New comment by sgc in "'Not acceptable': Judge orders Google to make rival app store installs easier"

sgc — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:22:02 +0000

what else did I miss today?

New comment by sgc in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

sgc — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:58:57 +0000

fail2ban

New comment by sgc in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

sgc — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:29:59 +0000

Yes of course, the secrets have to be isolated from the VMs, preferably at the network gateway and not on the same KVM host. But as far as I know there is no safer containerization technology than a VM, and the only way to be more secure would be to have a physical computer per agent process? A KVM does not use the host kernel and user space, and provides hardware level isolation (the CPU hypervisor etc), that's the point. I think that once you are inside of vm, just using firejail is the better approach, since you have more direct control over the OS level controls that are being leveraged by various container solutions anyways. At any rate, that's what I did.

If you can't isolate a computer on your network, you probably can't isolate your network from the internet, so it's an irrelevant exercise at that point. And yes, probably you can't do any of those things and any frontier model could technically hack your network, but I don't think there's a better way to do it?

New comment by sgc in "Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard"

sgc — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:41:49 +0000

I would argue about 30% of Apple's success was just from not being slow annoying bloatware. I could never stomach it, but I know a lot of people who basically rage-quit Windows for the Apple ecosystem. I did the same, but for Linux.

New comment by sgc in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

sgc — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:51:33 +0000

I agree. I thought everybody knew to never use docker for high security, because it is "security lite". Might as well just use firejail. I presume that an agent knows more about networking and virtualization than I do. The only real solution is using multi-tenant level vm isolation, while presuming that the agent still might break out of their vm. So the vms need to be hosted on their own physical box that only runs the kvm provisioning host (or similar), and is firewalled on its own isolated network. It's a bit of a pain of course, but anything less feels almost like security theatre rather than meaningful to me. Otherwise you need to stick to the remote chatbots only.