Hacker News: speff

New comment by speff in "Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates"

speff — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:32:07 +0000

I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.

Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.

New comment by speff in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

speff — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:50:57 +0000

"It takes a ton of pressure to make a diamond". I read that in a game when I was a kid and took it as a guiding principle in my life.

Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.

New comment by speff in "Flux 3"

speff — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:39:25 +0000

You may like this old comment by dang who did this type of analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 (2020)

New comment by speff in "China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes"

speff — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:49:12 +0000

I'd imagine because of the talk from the then-incoming administration talking about how he'll go after their families unless his personal ongoing charges were dropped [0]. I would do the exact same thing if a vindictive POS was about to gain power.

[0]: "Trump threatens to prosecute Bidens if he’s re-elected unless he gets immunity" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/30/trump-second...

New comment by speff in "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"

speff — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:40:51 +0000

I'm trying to break anti-cheat protection in order to mod my own (single-player) game and Opus refuses to help. I don't really care if GLM's dumber at this point if Anthopic's going to be a non-option.

At work, layoffs cut too deep and I'm trying to find creative ways to re-discover lost knowledge. Wonder if I'll have to beg them to research our own systems at some point.

It's not limited to naughty queries.

New comment by speff in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

speff — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:05:22 +0000

I suspect a lot of people don't mind/care that the list is expanded to those groups. That's really a big part of the issue. It's better framing, regardless though.

New comment by speff in "What Is a Nomogram and Why Would It Interest Me?"

speff — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:45:22 +0000

That was a bit small on my screen. Found an interactive one here that's scalable - https://www.medcalc.org/en/calc/fagans-nomogram.php

New comment by speff in "NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute"

speff — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:41:31 +0000

Ghidra comes to mind

New comment by speff in "The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI"

speff — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:18:29 +0000

Similar experience here, however my feeling is that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Garbage being made is indicative of a gap in the currently-available tools. User research should shift towards analyzing these prototypes and enhancing existing tools to fill this need.

New comment by speff in "MCP is dead?"

speff — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:05:31 +0000

This was one of the first ideas me and my team had for sharing skills and scripts. The problem is this is a very "why Dropbox and not FTP" answer.

The second you utter the word git, you may have lost 90% of your audience - depending on their background, of course. MCPs are a lot more non-tech friendly

New comment by speff in "MCP is dead?"

speff — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:16:53 +0000

My mental model for MCPs is that it's like a Swagger/OpenAPI spec for LLMs. Point 2 doesn't make much sense in that context as it's describing MCP as a Swagger endpoint that's unstable.

Chrome/Ghidra MCP does have a tendency of crashing, but I'm not sure why this is. Is my way of thinking of MCP incorrect? If it really is a descriptor of how to talk to another tool, then why do they seem fragile at times? I feel like there's a gap in my knowledge somewhere.

New comment by speff in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

speff — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:34:03 +0000

Of course they do. Generally the end result from this is bad - reduced in scope, buggy, and/or unstable. But that's an issue with communication/expectations/management. It'll keep happening either because of politics or the fact that a sub-par deliverable still meets the needs of the overall organization. Until it doesn't.

New comment by speff in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

speff — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:34:35 +0000

It depends on the management. Mine asks that, but others within my company get "this is going to be done by [DATE]".

New comment by speff in "Claude Opus 4.8"

speff — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:05:02 +0000

From what I understand, that's a problem with the way it receives data. The model doesn't see the letters g,o,o,g,l,e to count it. Just like how I can't sense radio waves. If I wanted to find that out, I'd get a tool to detect waves. If the LLM wants to find that out, it can write a script to find it.

New comment by speff in "Using AI to write better code more slowly"

speff — Tue, 26 May 2026 02:31:50 +0000

I suppose it depends how hands-off the tasks are - I max out at 2 parallel sessions working on different parts and it's fairly exhausting once done. I can see the number of parallel work increasing if there's a good dev/test loop. But at $WORK, that's not usually an option.

New comment by speff in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

speff — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:54:01 +0000

AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.

And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.

New comment by speff in "Oura says it gets government demands for user data"

speff — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:18:36 +0000

From what I understand, they can get call records and subscription info w/ administrative subpoenas, but this is the first I've heard of them being able to get location data without a warrant.

Assuming you meant directly from the telcos and not from the data broker loopholes - in which case pretty much anyone should be able to do that. Emails and texts they still need a warrant for.

New comment by speff in "Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude"

speff — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:48:57 +0000

I'm not well versed at reverse engineering binaries or interpreting C/assembly so ghidra MCP has been an absolute gamechanger for helping me write tools. Once my project is complete, I plan to learn how to do the analysis myself manually and have cc guide me along the way.

New comment by speff in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

speff — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:49:05 +0000

Putting some numbers into the discussion census.gov [0] is tracking a sharp decline in net immigration due to both, a decrease in immigration and an increase in emmigration, from the start of 2025 to the present. Trending towards a net negative.

Pew [1] suggests that the changes around the start of 2025 were due increased restrictions on asylum applications under the previous admin and EOs by the current one to restrict new immigration. Given the rough numbers [2] of about 40k asylum grants per year in the early 2020s, I doubt the previous admin's actions are playing much of a role here.

Stating that none of it (immigration acceptance) changed under this administration might technically be true - with respect to the number of countries applying, but misses this point.

[0]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2026/...

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-seek-asylum-in...

New comment by speff in "EEVblog: The 555 Timer is 55 years old [video]"

speff — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:49:11 +0000

Once you get above a couple meg, the oils on your fingers start affecting the resistance. Better hope no-one touches with your 55 year counter