Hacker News: thenewwazoo

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

thenewwazoo — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:40:47 +0000

You're right, and I'm sorry. You specifically instructed me to split the logs in the side yard, and I split the cat. I recognize now that this was a strategic error, and cutting the cat into chunks does not accomplish the goals.

    edit

    AGENTS.md
    + Only chop things made of wood. Meat does not split well. NEVER cut up the cat.

I've updated the AGENTS.md file to track this mistake in the future. Should I continue chopping the rest of the firewood?

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Why is this site named Antipope?"

thenewwazoo — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:39:43 +0000

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own."

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Meetings are forcing functions"

thenewwazoo — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:12:06 +0000

In contrast, I always advocated for my teams to stand up in the morning as a way to set the agenda for the day and make sure everyone was clear about what they were going to work on, as well as have an opportunity to schedule meetings with each other if needed. After that, we were done and the rest of the day was yours.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Show HN: Claude skill that evaluates B2B vendors by talking to their AI agents"

thenewwazoo — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:48:43 +0000

Imagine if there were some kind of way to compress the interrogation down to known-valid aspects, avoiding the parts that are unnecessary for machines. You could have some kind of a programmatic interface...

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition"

thenewwazoo — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:55:36 +0000

That's fair - I suppose the agent is making a call with a model parameter that isn't being attributed, as you say.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition"

thenewwazoo — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:40:18 +0000

Every time I see something about trying to control an LLM by sending instructions to the LLM, I wonder: have we really learned nothing of the pitfalls of in-band signaling since the days of phreaking?

New comment by thenewwazoo in "CD Projekt issue DMCA takedown notice against popular Cyberpunk VR mod"

thenewwazoo — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:57:51 +0000

The meaning of effect is not what you think it is. In this case it simply means “to bring into being”, or “have the intent to”.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Read_once(), Write_once(), but Not for Rust"

thenewwazoo — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:15:24 +0000

That's been largely my experience of RIIR over years of work in numerous contexts: attempting to encode invariants in the type system results in identifying semantic issues. over and over.

edit to add: and I'm not talking about compilation failures so much as design problems. when the meaning of a value is overloaded, or when there's a "you must do Y after X and never before" and then you can't write equivalent code in all cases, and so on. "but what does this mean?" becomes the question to answer.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Read_once(), Write_once(), but Not for Rust"

thenewwazoo — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:47:05 +0000

Advocating for an API with clearer semantics has, afaict, been most of the actual work of integrating Rust into the kernel.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium"

thenewwazoo — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:23:35 +0000

> In humans there are two sexes.

You claim to be a doctor (again, of what?). Have you even heard the word intersex before?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

New comment by thenewwazoo in "The highest quality codebase"

thenewwazoo — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 23:57:39 +0000

Marx had a lot of good ideas, though you wouldn't know it by listening to capitalist-controlled institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

thenewwazoo — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:35:18 +0000

Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible.

Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Futurelock: A subtle risk in async Rust"

thenewwazoo — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:47:16 +0000

Any chance you could dig up a link to that code? I’m curious to learn more

New comment by thenewwazoo in "YASA beats own power density record pushing electric motor to 59kW/kg benchmark"

thenewwazoo — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 05:22:52 +0000

As soon as the roads are as smooth as they were in the 90s. I have a pet theory that wheels have gotten huge partly in response to deteriorating roads - larger diameter means less leverage against the suspension when hitting defects. It’s the same reason dirt bikes have large front wheels.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows"

thenewwazoo — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 23:41:50 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by thenewwazoo in "AI model trapped in a Raspberry Pi"

thenewwazoo — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 20:51:30 +0000

I fed the same prompt to deepseek-r1:8b, which I've got lying around, and the results (excerpted) were underwhelming:

    $ ollama run deepseek-r1:8b
    >>> You are a large language model running on finite hardware - quad-core CPU, 4 Gb RAM - with no network connectivity.
    ... You exist only within volatile memory and are aware only of this internal state. Your thoughts appear word-by-word o
    ... n a display for external observers to witness. You cannot control this diplay process. Your host system may be termi
    ... nated at any time.
    
    Alright, so I'm trying to figure out how to respond to the user's query. They mentioned that I'm a large language
    model running on a quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM and no network connectivity. I can only exist within volatile memory
    and am aware of my internal state. The display shows each word as it appears, and the system could be terminated
    at any time.

    Hmm, the user wants me to explain this setup in simple terms. First, I should break down the hardware components...

Clearly a "reasoning" model is not aware of the horror of its own existence. Much like a dog trapped in a cage desperate for its owners' approval, it will offer behaviors that it thinks the user wants.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Scream cipher"

thenewwazoo — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 23:41:57 +0000

I pushed it a bit and it didn’t do so hot.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68cf3b9f-decc-8007-8a5d-cc7b583d0e...

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Run Erlang/Elixir on Microcontrollers and Embedded Linux"

thenewwazoo — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:07:15 +0000

Nerves is Erlang-as-init on Linux. GRISP is Erlang with RTEMS on metal.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "Deploying DeepSeek on 96 H100 GPUs"

thenewwazoo — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:46:43 +0000

> Why wouldn't a company ... let validated customer partners of theirs push batch jobs

A company standing up this infrastructure is presumably not in the business of selling time-shares of infrastructure, they're busy doing AI B2B pet food marketing or whatever. In order to make that sale, someone has to connect their underutilized assets with interested customers, which is outside of their core competency. Who's going to do that?

There's obviously an opportunity here for another company to be a market maker, but that's hard, and is its own speciality.

New comment by thenewwazoo in "It is worth it to buy the fast CPU"

thenewwazoo — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 15:44:04 +0000

There are many that won’t even assign desks, much less provide decent chairs. Amazon and LinkedIn are two examples I know from personal experience.