Hacker News: thomassmith65

New comment by thomassmith65 in "The humiliation of finding secret Israeli bases in Iraq"

thomassmith65 — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:30:43 +0000

  The principal U.S. demand being placed on Iraq is to reduce Iranian influence in the country, which especially takes the form of pro-Iranian militias.

https://iranintl.com/en/202601167778

'Iranian influence' sounds relatively benign, but while the US has been fighting Iran, Iraqi militias reportedly have been entering Iran to help the IRGC man checkpoints, etc.

Everything You Need to Know About Black Cocoa Powder (2022)

thomassmith65 — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:03:17 +0000

Article URL: https://saltandbaker.com/black-cocoa-powder-guide/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181617

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thomassmith65 in "US Government openly schemes to indict Raúl Castro as prelude to invading Cuba"

thomassmith65 — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:41:22 +0000

From the point of view of the American government, Cuba did do harm to America. Eg:

https://thisdayofhistory.com/2025/08/05/august-6-1960-cuba-s...

To many people, America accusing Cuba of theft is hypocrisy. I don't have a strong opinion either way; I think a party can be guilty of 'theft' only to the extent that there's consensus on who owns what.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

thomassmith65 — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:41:57 +0000

Hooray! No more camera bump :)

New comment by thomassmith65 in "The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced"

thomassmith65 — Sat, 02 May 2026 08:22:16 +0000

Anybody who remembers the last century knows that any Democrat left of Clinton would have resulted in a President Bob Dole. And at least the Clinton administration tried to give Americans Hillarycare.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced"

thomassmith65 — Sat, 02 May 2026 08:17:47 +0000

  In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true.

Today is different, but people are worse informed. Every online place that an average person visits is a hotbed of fantasy.

That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.

Why Footbinding Persisted in China for a Millennium (2015)

thomassmith65 — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:39:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-footbinding-persisted-china-millennium-180953971/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982476

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

thomassmith65 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:13:28 +0000

For some reason, I always assumed the British narration was Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), but now that you quote it, I realize it can't be Calloway. Interesting! The narrator must be someone we never meet.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color"

thomassmith65 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:37:16 +0000

Cheers. I don't bicker with random internet people.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Ukraine's drone commander has Russian oil, troops and morale in his sights"

thomassmith65 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:27:08 +0000

It's laughable to accuse Europeans of having an 'imperialist mindset' in relation to Ukraine. It's not they who now are gambling with a third World War, it was the Russians who gambled on it when they began seizing territory.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

thomassmith65 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:33:39 +0000

The American cut of the movie has an intro narrated by Joseph Cotton, who played Holly Martins. The wording might differ (since the movie is clearly Holly's first time in Vienna)

New comment by thomassmith65 in "The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color"

thomassmith65 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:32:16 +0000

Polack jokes, too. Very classy /s

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Steve Reich reshaped the boundaries of musical time (2025)"

thomassmith65 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:17:19 +0000

I posted this link partly because there is no better background music to code to than Steve Reich... though how many years remain before humans stop programming, I don't know.

Steve Reich reshaped the boundaries of musical time (2025)

thomassmith65 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:13:06 +0000

Article URL: https://kolapse.com/en/contenido/90817-how-steve-reich-reshaped-the-boundaries-of-musical-time

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47905089

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Stop Posting About Claude Getting Worse, You're Embarrassing Yourselves"

thomassmith65 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:05:41 +0000

Anthropic's recent post https://anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem seems at odds with this blog post. Am I misinterpreting it, or does it indeed say they configured Claude to do less 'thinking' in order to address a performance issue?

New comment by thomassmith65 in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

thomassmith65 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:48:56 +0000

Fair enough. If the comments in question were still editable, I would be happy to replace 'gaslighting' with 'being a bit slippery' or something less controversial.

No worries about 'sounding preachy'; it's a good thing people want to uphold the sobriety that makes HN special.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

thomassmith65 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:51:23 +0000

I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic.

That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models". This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardless of whether it is realistic to expect - is for Anthropic to buy even more compute than Anthropic already does, so that the models remain equally smart even if the service demand increases.

New comment by thomassmith65 in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

thomassmith65 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:31:10 +0000

And still are gaslighting:

  We take reports about degradation very seriously. We never intentionally degrade our models [...] On March 4, we changed Claude Code's default reasoning effort from high to medium

Anthropic is the best company of its kind, but that is badly worded PR.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – Now Available (2009)

thomassmith65 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:57:19 +0000

Article URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=781964

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844349

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by thomassmith65 in "Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly 'quadruple tap'"

thomassmith65 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:54:18 +0000

It pains me to criticize the UN, since they're the best the world has, but if the UN were more judicious on the conflict, it would help. Eg:

https://independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ban-kimoon-...