Hacker News: wood_spirit

New comment by wood_spirit in "Clean up Claude 5's token vomit with a separate LLM"

wood_spirit — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:14:53 +0000

Meta to this is anyone remember those days - ages ago now, probably months at least! - when Anthropic’s moral stance against the administration (combined with general consensus they had by far the best model) was making them the underdog champion that got a swell of support on HN? Recently the temp on HN seems to be that they’ve jumped the shark? Their brand doesn’t ooze ethics any more and their models disappoint?

New comment by wood_spirit in "A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare"

wood_spirit — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:57:21 +0000

Generally at altitude the wind goes from west to east. During the Cold War the US would launch spy balloons to overfly Russia whilst the wind was blowing against the Russians reciprocating. This is generally true in the current Ukraine war too.

Some interesting links:

https://www.hisutton.com/US-Navy-CIA-Submarine-Launched-Spy-...

https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Navy-High-Altitude-Spy-Ball...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iD6XaaO9bEo

New comment by wood_spirit in "Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite"

wood_spirit — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:34:29 +0000

Perhaps sometimes they saw it hit and went to find it? But the night is long and people should be indoors asleep near the fire and meteorites fall all around the clock anyway?

So perhaps they mostly just picked weird rocks up off the ground, as the Inuit did? When you spend time outside with the herds you probably notice unusual wrongs.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

wood_spirit — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:16:32 +0000

I thought there wasn’t exit polls in this particular by-election?

New comment by wood_spirit in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

wood_spirit — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:15:35 +0000

Brexit hardly caused unity. It split the country almost exactly down the middle. And nobody on either side seems happy with the result.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

wood_spirit — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:33:02 +0000

Britain has a first-past-the-post election system so the candidate with the most votes wins in each constituency.

As Farage didn’t get an absolute majority last time, and as a majority of voters didn’t even vote last time, I was extrapolating that Count Binface had a real chance. Not just as a protest vote, but a magnet for everyone not supporting Farage as well as everyone wanting a laugh (in a British boaty-mcboatface way).

Perhaps a serious clean-up-politics neutral candidate would have done better, like Martin Bell - a very well known war correspondent - who stood on an anti corruption ticket against the scandal riddled Conservative Neil Hamilton in Tatton in 1997.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Denmark: EVs Make Up 97% of New Private Car Sales in July"

wood_spirit — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:20:52 +0000

It is interesting that the big selling brands are Skoda (VW group) and VW itself, then a resurgent Tesla in third place. These are companies that are claiming hardship from Chinese EV imports and VW is planning to lay off 100K employees.

New comment by wood_spirit in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

wood_spirit — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:25:33 +0000

Both can be - and seem to be - true.

New comment by wood_spirit in "For most US drivers, EVs offer emissions benefits and cost savings"

wood_spirit — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:20:56 +0000

Likely your kids cars will drive themselves?

New comment by wood_spirit in "For most US drivers, EVs offer emissions benefits and cost savings"

wood_spirit — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:56:14 +0000

My experience - in the Nordics, but this is transferable - is they are also much nicer to own and drive. I don’t know anyone who went electric and then went back. The generation who went electric a few years ago is now on their second or third electric car. The makes and models in favour is changing (cue tangent on Tesla brand death in Europe) but the power source choice is not. So as more people get one, I expect their market share to just climb and climb.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Qwen 3.8"

wood_spirit — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:28:35 +0000

As soon as the competition is bankrupted they no longer need to release for free? It’s like how big players enter markets by launching at a loss to destroy competitors?

New comment by wood_spirit in "DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs"

wood_spirit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:15:59 +0000

Rather than DSLs I’ve found careful force tools results force the same kind of discipline in a more straightforward way to implement. So it’s normal to ask the llm to answer only yes or no and they are pretty good at following that instruction but it doesn’t scale so well. Whereas if the shape of the force tool call gives them more richness without giving them freedom to go off piste it scales to more nuanced results whilst also being trivial to parse.

New comment by wood_spirit in "Microsoft has released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes"

wood_spirit — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 06:32:52 +0000

For a lot of people it’s not the job that is rewarding it the role having a job gives them in life and home life. Financially contributing to the household through earning it through work is a meaningful and rewarding thing that can define the near total of how good you feel about yourself thing even if you don’t like the job?

New comment by wood_spirit in "Ancient Roman Board Game"

wood_spirit — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:34:48 +0000

Another ancient board game to be decoded is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur. This is from 2600BC so is older to Christ than Christ is to us.

The videos on the game (and all his other videos) with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British museum, are spellbinding. He has the looks, manners and enthusiasm of an eccentric museum curator from central casting!

New comment by wood_spirit in "Wordgard: In-browser rich-text editor from the creator of ProseMirror"

wood_spirit — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:47:50 +0000

This looks staggeringly brilliant.

I was searching for something like this recently but ended up rolling my own using a block-based OT to local server and diff sync to remote ones.

I’m reading the system guide and nodding along. It’s super validating to see the similarities and contrasts.

New comment by wood_spirit in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

wood_spirit — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:06:17 +0000

Countries can be repugnant in different ways, but the trust in their word is completely orthogonal.

Can a country trust a trade deal with the US? Whereas when has China ever not honoured a trade deal?

New comment by wood_spirit in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

wood_spirit — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:01:52 +0000

This is not about whether being a customer of the us or china is morally worse. It’s about trust. Does any country trust America at its word any more?

New comment by wood_spirit in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

wood_spirit — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:45:13 +0000

I am a careful follower of politics and don’t think I’m ignorant. And on every point you made I could rebut with an example of America doing likewise.

On your last point abour “causing instability on the internet”, for example, I could point out we are in a discussion about America wanting to restrict LLMs into haves and have nots and if that isn’t destabilising the internet by preventing non-American companies from defending themselves or paying American companies to defend themselves against them protection racket wise then what is?

New comment by wood_spirit in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

wood_spirit — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:27:23 +0000

As the US jerks from being BDFL to bullying zero summer, it’s not surprising that the abstract fears of china seem manageable compared to the new pressing fears of the US.

Why as a European be more afraid of a country that whilst you wouldn’t want to live in and which has supported Russia is quiet and selling you cheap stuff vs a country who used to be a friend who is now wanting you to grovel for a bad deal and is also supporting Russia?

New comment by wood_spirit in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

wood_spirit — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:10:27 +0000

Expect the US to sanction non-US-controlled models and put sanctions on individuals, companies and countries that use them? They already do this with other things like oil.