Unlurker

>That relationship we have with cats now only gets started about 3.5 or 4,000 years ago, rather than 10,000 years ago. I wouldn't have thought cats were domesticated 10,000 years ago, why is it implied that's a general assumption?

Also, I'm pretty sure cats were domesticated way before 3.5 years ago. I think it was even as far back as, hmm, over 80 years ago.

Because other animals appear to have been domesticated 10ky ago. It's hard to argue a good mouser is not useful to a primitive agrarian society. Which emerged before 4.5ky ago.

Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI (theverge.com)

With so many settings spread across multiple sections, especially in Workspace accounts, it's challenging to keep track of how existing settings are affected by each new addition. I generally review these regularly, yet find surprises now and then. Knowing what setting does what in Gmail is becoming difficult by the day.

The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.

I’m happy with https://soverin.net/ – they’re EU based, reasonably priced, and I only use them with external clients anyway.

I was always afraid to switch from Gmail, knowing the impact it would have. But I switched to Fastmail this year and my experience has been comparatively frictionless. My fear was unfounded.

I've been using mailbox.org for 5 years and like it very much. Cost some 3 EUR per month (actually there's a 50% discount this week). Dead simple email that just works. Their webUI is fine, but I almost exclusively use it on iOS or macOS with the default mail app. They also have some other features (calendar, office suite, video calls) that I don't use. I really like the option to create up to 25 email aliases.

The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over. After that it’s much easier to move provider again.

Another vote for Fastmail. Cannot fault, and honestly a joy to use (if that’s possible checking your email).

Fastmail is the way. These are people for whom email is their job and focus and you get everything that comes with that, including good and responsive customer service.

Poor AI, reading all those ad emails...

Some people worked on this. They don’t train on it directly. They use AI to rewrite the content “privacy-safe” then train on that….

That sounds very "privacy safe" ...

> Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training. Google be like: "trust me bro"

If you are using Google Workspace you decided to trust them a while ago.

User-facing software is full of language like that these days and I find it really frustrating, because it never helps answer the questions attentive people actually have, like will that mean my emails get dumped into the next Gemini training run?

EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance (reclaimthenet.org)

I feel like the only way to do something like this in a remotely not-insane manner with the assumption that there are good reasons where messages must be decrypted would be: * Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE * The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want) * The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want) * A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want) * If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages * The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay) * That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually * If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued * If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions * This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds Obviously this would never get implemented, cause the people of any watchdog org could also be corrupted not to publish the data that they should, there's probably numerous issues with backdooring encryption that you can come up with, and in practice it's way easier to implement government overreach by "Oh god, think of the children!" and move towards mass surveillance.

At this point, it’s clear these sort of measures will go through, if not now but in some foreseeable future. What would be our best bet moving forward? Moving to signal/telegram?

Unfortunely it was to be expected, the mighty ones would not rest until they managed to make it happen.

And all this was done in a highly democratic manner, thanks EU!

It's not just the EU. OpenAI doesn't let you use their latest models via API unless you provide your biometric information. It's all about slowly laying the foundations of a repressive dystopian world.

This is nonsense, stop spreading FUD.

What is untrue? You need to verify your identity with Persona to use GPT-5 or GPT 5.1 or a lot of other models. "By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."

why are specifically the Danish so obsessed with pushing this through? it always seems to come back to them

I was told the proposal the Danes carried forward actually had its roots from Sweden.

Lobbying. EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists. Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen. It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".

> Palantir and Thorn lobbyists So, US interests? Which means the NSA?

No need to look that far. Palantir sells software for analyzing data, like Excel but on a large scale. If "Chat Control" passes, they will need software to analyze the data they collect, which is exactly what Palantir sells. It is just business. I don't know about Thorn but it looks like the same: they sell software that may be of use for implementing "Chat Control".

I don't want to fall in a conspiracy but to me it seems there's an entire sector interested into relaxing E2E cryptography and data access. Even if the NSA was not involved the same data and security companies would have the same incentives imho.

I guess it never hurts to try and find alternate ways of placating the US in order to make them get over their Greenland obession.

I don't care about Greenland one way or another, but I find it funny that the Europeans are so visibly upset about this when the Danish conquered the territory and took it by force themselves and are now crying that an even bigger thief might want to come take it from them.

The UK government laundering unpopular regulations through the EU and then blaming the EU for them even when the UK had proposed and often championed then was definitely a factor in Brexit passing. Somewhat relevantly, the UK already has their own version of this legislation in the Online Safety Act which lead to a bunch of small-medium UK community sites closing and the likes of Imgur, pixiv and 4chan blocking the UK.

I believe 4chan is taking ofcom to court for trying to restrict their first amendment rights rather than blocking the UK, at least I'm still able to access it without a vpn.

> restrict their first amendment rights how is this relevant in the UK

The EU is more of a bureaucracy than a real autocracy. Lots of members with veto powers and the like. There is a lot wrong with the EU (the system). Opaque power structures, backroom deals, corruption. But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.

> Lots of members with veto powers and the like. Similar to the Political Bureau in former communist countries, but still an autocracy. > But I wouldn't call it an autocracy. It has most certainly started to walk and quack a lot like an autocratic duck, it wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago, or not as visible, to say the least, but the pandemic and this recent war in Ukraine have changed that.

Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue. The process is many things but quick it is not

> Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?

They're not complicated for anyone with above room temperature IQ. And they're almost identical to how it works in the member countries anyway And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter

Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of. If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty to these people.

Put your pom-poms down sweetheart, you have no idea what you are cheerleading for. Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure. The Commission have no direct link to the electorate and the your country's (sorry, “state”) Council representatives can hide behind collective consensus.

Why do people get so defensive about obviously flawed processes? This reply reads like a 4chan comment written by a frustrated teenager

This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of people, who even start looking into this stuff by a factor of 1000 or so.

People’s attention span has decreased to a matter of days now, if not hours. Have you seen how quickly front page news in the US is forgotten? The democratic process needs a revamp but it shouldn’t be driven by the general populations attention span.

>> that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.

Is there a website that tracks these? That would be a nice divulgation process.

You are a fool if you think the UK is better. I've moved from the EU to the UK and it is worse in every way when it comes to authoritarian measures. I'm not sure how you can have already forgotten the fact that we have to upload or face or ID to access websites.

The UK is perhaps less competent at it's authoritarianism

I genuinely think the public sector being a bit hopeless is a major check on tyranny in the UK. Ofcom (the communications regulator charged with imposing the censorship laws) literally maintains a public list of non-compliant websites that anyone who doesn't want to give their ID to a shady offshore firm can browse for example.

I’m not sure how you got there unless you were ready for an argument already.

I think you misunderstood his post. It's generally un-British to suggest the UK is better in any regard whatsoever. I've no doubt he thinks the UK is just as bad if not worse but in different ways.

In the UK we've had an authoritarian Conservative government for 14 years, followed by an even more authoritarian Labour government, which we'll have until 2029. In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/#national-parliament-voting-intention Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach. https://www.ft.com/content/886ee83a-02ab-48b6-b557-857a38f30c1d

It is a massive assumption that reform will win the elections.

> In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government Haha you're so funny. If Reform get from, what is it right now, five -- or four, or six, depending on how the wind blows — MPs to 326 MPs, which is enough to secure the majority they think they are getting, then libertarian is not what that government will be. It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian, because pure tabloid authoritarian thuggery is the only possible strategy that could cause a swing larger than any in history, against two parties (labour and liberal democrat) who currently hold 472 seats and represent a sort of centrist blob between them. And this is to say nothing of the challenge they will face finding 326 non-crazy, credible candidates for 326 very different parliamentary elections. And to say nothing of the foreign influence scandal that currently engulfs senior Reform figures or the catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent. Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage? And do you think Farage's reputation is going to somehow be improved by the Nathan Gill situation? I accept they will be the largest minority. But the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily. Maybe they will get to largest minority and then campaign for PR/AV/STV, and maybe finally people will understand something like it is needed. But Farage will be a lot older in that election. (It surprises me to see people who are so keen to believe that a council election wave is necessarily predictive of a national election wave because, what, somehow everything is different now? Why is it different?)

This is because politicians who fill the country with immigrants do so because they don't care in the slightest about the population and it shows in all facets of governance.

Net migration in the UK is falling, and fast. It grew under a party that is ideologically closer to Reform than the government currently in power.

I think he meant that as "I live in the UK where this is already bad, yet the EU still ended up worse.".

This is how I also read it.

That could be a result of the Parliamentary style system. With multiple parties - each sharing a part of the government - proposals and alliances can shift rapidly. It all depends on how big the pie becomes for each to get a slice

Power sharing is very rare in the UK. What is more common is a party with a large majority with lots of infighting between factions of their party

Why are all politicians so shit? Launch these no-good leeches into the sun. Nobody wants this, including they themselves, which is why they specifically exempt themselves from it.

Because nobody sane & level headed wants to participate in the circus that is politics

I wonder if being a certain type of politician could be considered a mental health condition

Exactly this But people like to sensationalize stuff This is less worse than the original proposal Oh and honestly game chat rooms should not be private. (of course personal 1:1 messages should)

> of course personal 1:1 messages should And what my undersensationalized friend do you understand by the word chat?

> Hi Mom, please install this peer to peer dark net chat to talk to me in the future, thanks Oh honey, why don't we just use iMessage instead. Thx bye.

This seems a bit more polished: https://tryquiet.org/ But some friction is to be expected.

I have been successful in getting non-technical people onto Signal. As far as a technical product goes, Signal is kindof shit (among other things: no support for non-Debian-based Linux forcing users to use sketchy third party repos when they are a massive target for backdoors, really shitty UX for backups), but it gets the job done and seems to have robust encryption from what other people say (I am not qualified to evaluate this myself). If a P2P solution that solved the aforementioned Signal issues were to have excellent UX, then that could probably work. Lastly, what counts as "excellent UX" for technical and non-technical people seems to differ. For example, I consider Discord and Slack to be quite intuitive and easy to use, but multiple technical people have expressed to me that they find it to be very confusing and that they prefer other solutions, such as GroupMe in one example. To me, GroupMe shoving the SMS paradigm into something that's fundamentally not SMS is more confusing and poor UX, but to these non-technical people that seems easy. I suspect that Signal's shortcomings that I perceive are an example of this: making UX trade-offs that work great for non-technical people but are less good for technical people. I'm not sure what these specific UX trade-offs are, but I suspect that it's something akin to having a conceptually sound underlying model (like Discord or Slack servers/workspaces and channels), versus having really obvious "CLICK HERE TO NOT FUSS" buttons like GroupMe, while having graceful failures for non-technical users that can't even figure that out (like just pretending to be SMS in GroupMe's case if you can't figure out how to install an app, or don't want to put that effort in, something that many people know how to use).

Tech Titans Amass Multimillion-Dollar War Chests to Fight AI Regulation (wsj.com)

We don’t know what kind of insecure systems we’re dealing with here, and there’s a pervasive problem of incestuous dependencies in a lot of AI tech stacks, which might lead to some instability or security risks. Adversarial attacks against LLMs are just too easy. It makes sense to let states experiment and find out what works and doesn’t, both as a social experiment and technological one.

Archive: https://archive.is/j1XTl I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation? What we should be doing is surfacing well defined points regarding AI regulation and discussing them, instead of fighting proxy wars for opaque groups with infinite money. It feels like we're at the point where nobody is even pretending like people's opinions on this topic are relevant, it's just a matter of pumping enough money and flooding the zone. Personally, I still remain very uncertain about the topic; I don't have well-defined or clearly actionable ideas. But I'd love to hear what regulations or mental models other HN readers are using to navigate and think about this topic. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both mentioned vague ideas of how AI is somehow going to magically result in UBI and a magical communist utopia, but nobody has ever pressed them for details. If they really believe this then they could make some more significant legally binding commitments, right? Notice how nobody ever asks: who is going to own the models, robots, and data centers in this UBI paradise? It feels a lot like Underpants Gnomes: (1) Build AGI, (2) ???, (3) Communist Utopia and UBI.

There are several concrete proposals to regulate AI either proposed or passed. The most recent prominent example of a passed law is California SB53, whose summary you can read here: https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/10/california-sb-53-frontier-ai-law-what-it-does?lang=en

> I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation? There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided: "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs. "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs. So politicians are supposed to create "non bullshit" jobs out of thin air? The job you've done for decades is suddenly bullshit because some shit LLM is hallucinating nice sounding words?

> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs. This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved. The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.

This presupposes the existence of said jobs, which is a whopper of an assumption that conveniently shifts blame onto the most vulnerable. Of course, that's probably the point. This will work even worse than "if everyone goes to college, good jobs will appear for everyone."

> The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same. But why do I have to? Why should your life be dictated by the market and corporations that are pushing these changes? Why do I have to be afraid that my livelihood is at risk because I don't want to adapt to the ever faster changing market? The goal of automation and AI should be to reduce or even eliminate the need for us to work, and not the further reduction of people to their economic value.

> Could you give some specific examples of AI regulations that you think would be good? Sure, I can give you some examples: - deceiving someone into thinking they're talking to a human should be a felony (prison time, no exceptions for corporations) - ban government/law-enforcement use of AI for surveillance, predictive policing or automated sentencing - no closed-source AI allowed in any public institution (schools, hospitals, courts...) - no selling or renting paid AI products to anyone under 16 (free tools only)

> - deceiving someone into thinking they're talking to a human This is gonna be as enforceable as the CANSPAM act. (i.e. you will get a few big cases, but it's nothing compared to the overall situation) How do you proof it in court? Do we need to record all private conversations?

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code (github.com/hexagonal-sun)

Just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like Linux?

Very cool project! I do have to admit - looking far, far into the future - I am a bit scared of a Linux ABI-compatible kernel with an MIT license.

I agree, I know a lot of people aren't huge fans of it but in the long run Linux being GPL2 was a huge factor in its success.

Too late? https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/

You can implement an executor with threading to achieve parallelism, but it's not a fundamental characteristic of Future executors. To reiterate: an executor is just something that runs Futures to completion, and Futures are just things that you can poll for a value. See sibling comments for additional details.

I’m aware; you’re not adding new information. I think you’re handwaving the difficulty of implementing work stealing in the kernel (interrupts and whatnot) + the mechanics of suspending/resuming the calling thread which isn’t as simple within the kernel as it is in userspace. eg you have to save all the register state at a minimum but it has to be integrated into the scheduler because the suspension has to pick a next task to execute and resume the register state for. On top of that you’ve got the added difficulty of doing this with work stealing (if you want good performance) and coordinating other CPUs/migrating threads between CPUs. Now you can use non interruptible sections but you really want to minimize those if you care about performance if I recall correctly. Anyway - as I said. Implementing even a basic executor within the kernel (at least for something more involved than a single CPU machine) is more involved, especially if you care about getting good performance (and threading 100% comes up here as an OS concept so claiming it doesn’t belies a certain amount of unawareness of how kernels work internally and how they handle syscalls).

No. I am adding new information but I think you are stuck on your initial idea. There's no work stealing. Async-await is cooperative multitasking. There is no suspending or resuming a calling thread. There is no saving register state. There is not even a thread. I will re-reiterate: async-await is just a state machine and Futures are just async values you can poll. I'm sure moss has an actual preemptive scheduler for processes, but it's completely unrelated to its internal usage of async-await. See embassy in sibling comments.

Show HN: Glasses to detect smart-glasses that have cameras (github.com/NullPxl)

I could see the guards at the courthouse, wearing these. Cameras are so small, these days, that I don't think it's realistic to be able to detect them. I just go through every day, assuming that I'm on Candid Camera.

It is interesting to see the consensus that nobody is enthusiastic about meta Ray-Bans except Zuckerberg. It's creepy.

The only real usage I've seen is on Instagram reels etc. where people are using them in red light districts like in Amsterdam to film the women.

Putting myself in the shoes of a qa for a second... What is the cheapest way for me to trigger a false positive on such a detection device? And what can we do about it? Rinse and repeat until the cheapest cost exceeds a standard pair of smart glasses.

Before putting yourself in the mind of QA, you have to be 100% sure on what the goals and priorities of the product is supposed to be in the first place. Only a subset of use potential cases will be worried with false positives, but this approach says to drive the cost greater for all potential use cases.

I have been thinking of a device to thwart license plate readers by dumping a ton of IR and/or visible light on the plate before it gets read. Perhaps combined with some reflective coating? Retroreflectors are promising

Repo men use those readers to track cars to be repossessed. And as it happens, it is very successful industry these days.

On this topic, is there any benefit of trying to fool facial recognition systems with these type of accessories and or wearables, would the system not just mark you as suspicious and keep an even better track of you Of course it is a different thing if these are adopted by the masses

Usually those systems are set up to track faces and/or people, and ignore everything else. If you get a low-confidence detection of a face that's much more likely to be a dog or a band t-shirt than somebody tricking your system. So you would typically ignore everything below a threshold, not flag it. You could train a system to detect these kinds of attacks, but that's a lot more sophistication that these types of systems usually have, and would probably be specific to each "attack" (e.g. those glasses with lights would look completely different than the face paint approach) The best defense would be a human watching the raw camera feed, since most of these attacks are very obvious to the human eye. But that's expensive. Maybe you could leverage vision-llms, but those are much more expensive than dedicated face-detection or object classification models. Those typically range from sub-million to maybe a hundred million parameters, while you need billions of parameters for a good vision-llm

Potentially as much as none, because it's UV that does the damage?

At some point it pretty much becomes a microwave. Radiation get absorbed and turned into heat. On a small scale not very helpful or harmful. On a larger scale nice to heat your food with but not your head.

You have no right to record me or my family, pedophile or not. In fact where I live its illegal. If not responding to polite request, closed fist at non-trivial speed aimed directly at your face is the next inevitable step against predators of any kind, non-trivial risk of losing sight due to broken glasses is part of the deal. Your choice.

Relax Rambo

> toot sweet Not sure if intentional but just in case: the usual term is "tout de suite"

It might be in the original French, but it’s been anglicised and adopted as an English language term: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/toot-sweet_adv?tl=true

I love this way English has of swallowing and digesting terms from other languages. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/the-tooter-the-sweeter_phr

Beads – A memory upgrade for your coding agent (github.com/steveyegge)

If there’s any type of memory upgrade for a coding agent I would want, it’s the ability to integrate a RAG into the context. The information being available is not the problem; the agent not realizing that it doesn’t have all the info is , though. If you put it behind an MCP server, it becomes a matter of ensuring the agent will invoke the MCP at the right moment, which is a whole challenge in itself. Are there any coding agents out there that enable you to plug middleware in there? I’ve been thinking about MITM’ing Claude Code for this, but wouldn’t mind exploring alternative options.

What do you mean by a RAG here? I've been having a ton of success just from letting them use their default grep-style search tools. I have a folder called ~/dev/ with several hundred git projects checked out, and I'll tell Claude Code things like "search in ~/dev/ for relevant examples and documentation". (I'd actually classify what I'm doing there as RAG already.)

What I mean is basically looking at the last (few) messages in the context, translating that to a RAG query, query your embeddings database + BM25 lookup if desired, and if you find something relevant inject that right before the last message in the context. It’s pretty common in a lot of agents, but I don’t see a way to do that with Claude Code.

But wouldn't that dedicated branch, pushed to origin, also work for staying synced across multiple machines?

The way I understand this, when the agent runs `bd onboard` at startup, it gets the instructions from beads, which might refer to data files in the beads directory. Keeping them in sync via a separate branch would be an unnecessary overhead. Right?

I don't see it as extra overhead - it just changes the git one-liner they use to push and pull their issue tracking content by a few characters. I like the idea of keeping potentially noisy changes out of my main branch history, since I look at that all the time.