Hacker News: tstrimple

New comment by tstrimple in "US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech"

tstrimple — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 05:21:14 +0000

This is the bullshit I find infuriating. Some conservative bloviating about Charlie Kirk and the reaction to his death from internet randos but they completely fucking ignore the vile shit actually elected representatives in their preferred party say.

"Robert Mueller just died. Good, I'm glad he's dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Fucking hypocrites.

New comment by tstrimple in "US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech"

tstrimple — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 04:43:32 +0000

No it wouldn't. The vast majority of shitty things have been done via executive order. Republicans are completely fine with congress being dysfunctional. That serves their goals.

New comment by tstrimple in "US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech"

tstrimple — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 04:39:58 +0000

> You are asking Dems to do something they literally cannot do while minority party. You are asking Dems to do an impossible thing and then complaining they cannot.

It's Murc's law all the way down.

New comment by tstrimple in "Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?"

tstrimple — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 02:25:07 +0000

I've found Claude to be the least sycophantic OOTB. But I've also been running custom system prompts for a while now and have lost touch with what the default behavior looks like. I've had to balance "push back when I'm wrong" and "act like a peer" style instructions which have lead to some pretty annoying one-upmanship style dialogue.

More specifically those instructions alone caused the model to narrow in on tangentially incorrect details while completely ignoring the thrust of my argument. I get where this could cause issues with writing code, but I do a lot more than write code with CC and the conversational voice is important to me.

New comment by tstrimple in "Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?"

tstrimple — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 02:20:23 +0000

Not sure what harness you use, but I've found you can influence LLM "voice" a lot more by replacing system prompts rather than just adding content to a CLAUDE.md file. I see a lot of people complaining about how Claude "talks" but very little talking about how to adjust it.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/modifying-system-p...

The main benefits to modifying the system prompt or output style is that the harness "reminds" the model about those things every turn. So if you've experienced things like Claude Code losing track of instruction from CLAUDE.md in large contexts, it indicates you may need to add the instruction to the system prompt instead which is far more durable.

New comment by tstrimple in "Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?"

tstrimple — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 02:08:05 +0000

"People won't play difficult games anymore because the new Wolverine game gave them a blue line to follow everywhere and removed any need for decisions or exploration."

New comment by tstrimple in "Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful"

tstrimple — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 08:24:54 +0000

I use Claude for this stuff all the time. The difference is I have Claude create repeatable scripts which do the actual things on a schedule. Claude is never invoked in on a schedule, only by me. One example is job board search filtered for roles I'd be interested in. The script itself includes all the things I care about like being remote. Clear salary ranges. Type of work I want to be doing. Claude built a good script to scrape multiple sources and aggregate them into a sqlite database. It filters these out until a number of relevant roles (or amount of time has passed) that the script sends me a message and adds a reminder to my Apple account to check in on new job listings. At that point I'll invoke Claude myself to summarize and prioritize the listings. If there are gaps in what Claude finds vs the script, that's a point where I iterate again on the script. My goal is for the job alerts and filtering to be fully useful even if Claude and all LLM tools disappear tomorrow. And also not give such powerful tools the ability to run on a schedule on vague instructions.

New comment by tstrimple in "Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful"

tstrimple — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 08:18:25 +0000

More often than not these sorts of stories are "I ignored all of Claude's warnings and told it YOLO and I'm totally surprised my production database was deleted!"

New comment by tstrimple in "Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful"

tstrimple — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 08:16:53 +0000

I have literally never seen this and it doesn't make much since because the turns are flagged with metadata. It should be impossible for Claude to confuse your text for its own. I know because I use this metadata all the time. I've built hooks and processes against it.

New comment by tstrimple in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

tstrimple — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:39:37 +0000

Australia's minimum wage is significantly higher than in the US. An adult working as a burger flipper at McDonalds can expect a minimum of $27.81 / hour.

New comment by tstrimple in "PSA: Do not use term "vibe coding""

tstrimple — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 05:46:48 +0000

Nothing about your post indicates you deserve any respect. Slop comment which adds nothing to the conversation. Probably AI.

New comment by tstrimple in "Caffeine-like utility to keep you MacBook awake with its lid closed"

tstrimple — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 03:07:51 +0000

Switching between headphone output and speaker output on my system is also just one line. I have no idea what that line is because I created a toggle-able icon in waybar which is a really simple script that switches between the two outputs and shows me the correct icon. I didn't need a "tool" to do it, but the packaging and UX are far better than popping up a terminal any time I want to do this.

New comment by tstrimple in "Elon Musk Acquires $1B Stake in CNN's Parent Company"

tstrimple — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 02:32:25 +0000

There seems to be some fundamental thing in humans which makes a subset of them follow narcissists like messiahs. MAGA and Elon stans aren’t that far apart.

New comment by tstrimple in "Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?"

tstrimple — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 01:54:38 +0000

No. The conclusion was not totally different. It recommended one of the explained options and recommended one extra hour as a buffer. I feel like this is a distinct reading comprehension issue if you think the final recommendation came out of left field.

New comment by tstrimple in "Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?"

tstrimple — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 01:50:47 +0000

As you’ve described it nothing has changed. Word used to add squiggles and people who didn’t research the meaning blindly accepted the recommendation. Same shit. Different day.

New comment by tstrimple in "We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"

tstrimple — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:23:21 +0000

There's nature and nurture and regardless of where the lines fall, the implication from idiocracy is the morons cannot adequately nurture any positive genetic intellectual variance. If they can't nurture it, it doesn't really become an advantage. I'm fully convinced we've lost numerous genius individuals all capable of changing the world because their entire life was spent in a rice field or similar setting. What would Einstein have achieved if he hadn't had an electrical engineer as a father who helped unlock his fascination with the world? I have no idea.

New comment by tstrimple in "We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"

tstrimple — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:16:00 +0000

> Equilibrium is one of the more ridiculous representations of a hyper controlling state.

All forgiven by me for bringing us the ridiculous gun katas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U02E2sjwlLM

New comment by tstrimple in "We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"

tstrimple — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:10:41 +0000

Not just gay, but trans. Some people don't just take on the opposite gender for a while just to see how it feels. Some become literal furries. Fluffy tail and all. All provided for free on a whim.

New comment by tstrimple in "Why Gen Z teens are in no rush to get their driver's licenses"

tstrimple — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:04:52 +0000

My son had zero interest. Finally ended up getting his license at 18. My middle daughter went through the process to get her learners permit on her own initiative as soon as she was able. Likely a difference in friend groups. He was mostly interacting with his friends online. Some of her friends already have a license so she's seeing the independence of no longer needing to text a parent for every change of location. She also has friends who are working while my son mostly had layabout friends.

New comment by tstrimple in "Why Gen Z teens are in no rush to get their driver's licenses"

tstrimple — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:01:03 +0000

> Once again, Gen Z is destroying the [world destroying product] industry.

It's about damn time. This burden has been on us millennials for too long now.