Hacker News: wood_spirit

New comment by wood_spirit in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

wood_spirit — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:05:59 +0000

The real question as xAI has just made Musk a trillionaire is how this, the most recent blow in a fight between the administration and Anthropic, impacts Anthropic’s IPO.

I’ve used Fable a lot. It’s a marginal improvement on Opus. It’s really not scary smart. I don’t want to go back to Opus because Fable was that little bit smarter, but it’s not like anything really changes at work and when we’re bumped back. So I’m really not buying any national security angle other than in the sense the administration can weaponise that to crown the AI race winners.

New comment by wood_spirit in "World Capitals Voronoi"

wood_spirit — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:41:59 +0000

Related post from same site earlier this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385457

New comment by wood_spirit in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

wood_spirit — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:50:27 +0000

Of course we can hope for more, but would you agree it is a good start though?

New comment by wood_spirit in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

wood_spirit — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:19:08 +0000

Same! And there is no obvious close button etc on the overtop blocking modal dialog either. It’s a dark pattern.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Spherical Voronoi Diagram"

wood_spirit — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:03:51 +0000

As soon as I saw the beautiful rendering I wondered if it was using spherical geometry so I asked an AI. It dug and found discussion on d3 from the author about the algorithm :)

https://github.com/d3/d3/issues/1820

New comment by wood_spirit in "Spherical Voronoi Diagram"

wood_spirit — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:44:23 +0000

Beautiful :)

The idea that springs to my mind is to do Delaunay and Voronoi using spherical geometry. I think the article uses flat Euclidean geometry but if we tweak the fifth axiom we could do spherical or hyperbolic?

New comment by wood_spirit in "The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite"

wood_spirit — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:52:59 +0000

If you need (or want the convenience of) a uuid and the time of creation is not secret then use ulids eg uuid v7.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Show HN: Lowfat – pluggable CLI filter that saved 91.8% of my LLM tokens"

wood_spirit — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:02:35 +0000

I have my own llm wrapping harness, which does this and has a few more tricks. For example, it doesn’t have a lot of mcp but it does have search_mcp and load_mcp tools (and search_skills) so the llm can find what it needs when it needs it without bloating the normal baseline context. The LLMs have proved really good at using them. There is also a waypoint tool they can use to record their thinking in the context without it being the final output. Am thinking about a search_expert to find colleagues it can bring into conversations too. And a lot of other stuff.

Pro tip they worked well for me with response truncation: in the truncated output, say that the full text is available in /tmp/whereever.txt - that way, the llm will be able to query and read more using built in tools without reissuing the big tool call.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster"

wood_spirit — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:11:11 +0000

This is like so counter to how it feels on the ground. I genuinely don’t know anyone in Sweden who has cash or wants cash in their pocket anymore.

New comment by wood_spirit in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

wood_spirit — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:08:19 +0000

Reallocating human time is also going to cause problems.

But it’s a great short term business opportunity for AI vendors and it was Anthropic who went all in on being knowledge worker outsourcing in a big way first whilst OpenAI thought they’d replace Google in search.

I think Anthropic had the better business strategy.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S."

wood_spirit — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:30:33 +0000

The US is a country with lower hunting participation than many other western countries and yet an order of magnitude more gun owning households.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Squillions: How money laundering won"

wood_spirit — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:31:09 +0000

Presumably the police computer system is told about the transfers automatically and it has no capacity problems. I know my own country has long had such a system and these days is almost entirely cashless.

New comment by wood_spirit in "The Last Technical Interview"

wood_spirit — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:44:21 +0000

The thing is the internship or code campfire or probation or whatever all need the hiree to stop doing what they were doing. It’s incredibly intrusive. Lots of the best candidates have jobs and families and aren’t going to give up their current job to try out for a company that’s not committing. The whole post is so biased to the hirer.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster"

wood_spirit — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:37 +0000

That is a mean person

New comment by wood_spirit in "Digital identity management in Norway is a success but also a disaster"

wood_spirit — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:56:18 +0000

The article title actually says it is a success as well as a disaster. The title here has been shortened.

And, as the professor in the article explains, it is a “disaster” for a small minority. And those are not he same minority who struggled for the same reasons before, and those difficulties ought be addressed. The system can be improved.

But it’s largely a success for the vast majority too. I don’t personally know of anyone with a negative impression of it. It’s actually something that the average Nordic Baltic person is so used to and happy with that it only comes to mind when we meet people from countries that aren’t organised - and we feel sorry for them!

It’s the same situation with cash. Very few people in a cashless society are wanting to go back to the old ways.

New comment by wood_spirit in "The User Is Visibly Frustrated"

wood_spirit — Tue, 26 May 2026 06:01:14 +0000

I think we’d get just as frustrated with a dumb robot. It’s the dumbness that is the problem.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Experience: We found a baby on the subway – now he's our 26-year-old son"

wood_spirit — Sat, 23 May 2026 10:04:14 +0000

Many of us could easily imagine, once chance puts us in the position of the person who can’t walk past, taking a concerned interest in the outcome and, realising that the baby would go into the care system, stepping up and doing the massive step of talking it upon ourselves to provide that home?

New comment by wood_spirit in "The Spread of Christianity Animated"

wood_spirit — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:01:33 +0000

To put it into perspective, a long time ago a friend made this https://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/

New comment by wood_spirit in "I’ve joined Anthropic"

wood_spirit — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:11:33 +0000

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312

New comment by wood_spirit in "Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Forgot about the processors"

wood_spirit — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:21:30 +0000

So what is the solution? Can Europe start building the next gen fab now already? And if it can technically, and if it can politically, even at great expense, should it?