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LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions (github.com/mdp)
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I suggest everyone take a look at the list of extensions and their names for some very important context: https://github.com/mdp/linkedin-extension-fingerprinting/blob/main/chrome_extensions_with_names_all.csv I didn't find popular extensions like uBlock or other ad blockers. The list is full of scammy looking data collection and AI tools, though. Some random names from scrolling through the list: - LinkedGPT: ChatGPT for LinkedIn - Apollo Scraper - Extract & Export Apollo B2B Leads - AI Social Media Assistant - LinkedIn Engagement Assistant - LinkedIn Lead Magnet - LinkedIn Extraction Tool - OutreachSheet - Highperformr AI - Phone Number and Email Finder - AI Agent For Jobs These look like the kind of tools scummy recruiters and sales people use to identify targets for mass spamming. I see several AI auto-application tools in there too.
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> This repository documents every extension LinkedIn checks for and provides tools to identify them. I get that the CSV lists the extensions, and the tools are provided in order to show work (mapping IDs to actual software). But how was it determined that LinkedIn checks for extensions with these IDs? And is this relevant for non-Chrome users?
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Technical writeup from a few weeks ago by a vendor that explains how LinkedIn does it, then boasts that their approach is "quieter, harder to notice, and easier to run at scale": https://blog.castle.io/detecting-browser-extensions-for-bot-detection-lessons-from-linkedin-and-castle/
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Skimming the list, looks like most extensions are for scraping or automating LinkedIn usage. Not surprising as there's money to be made with LinkedIn data. Scraping was a problem when I worked there, the abuse teams built some reasonably sophisticated detection & prevention, and it was a constant battle.
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from the code doesn't look like they do anything if they have a match, they just save all the results to a csv for fingerprinting?
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Wont someone think of poor little LinkedIn, a subsidiary of one of the largest data brokers in the world?
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I mean, regardless of who they are or even if you don’t like what LinkedIn does themselves with the data people have given them, the random third parties with the extensions don’t additionally deserve to just grab all that data too, do they?
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Surely they do! The data is in the public internets, aren't they?
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Why frame what you are trying to say like that? Businesses of all sizes deserve the ability to protect their businesses from abuse.
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We enjoy the fruits of an LLM or two from time to time, derived from hoards of ill gotten data. Linkedin has the resourses to attempt to block scraping, but even at the resource scale of LI I doubt the effort is effective.
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The big social media businesses deserve a Teddy Roosevelt character swooping in and busting their trusts, forcing them to play ball with others even if it destroys their moats. Boo hoo! Good riddance. World's tiniest violin. This is a popular position across the aisle. Here's hoping the next guy can't be bought, or at least asks for more than a $400M tacky gold ballroom!
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I think they framed it this way because they don't consider scraping abuse (to be fair, neither do I, as long as it doesn't overload the site). Botting accounts for spam is clear abuse, however, so that's fair game.
Curious question: why would they check for installed extensions on one's browser?
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For a social network, more information about their users = better ad targeting. It likely gets plumbed into models to inform user profiles.
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Look at the actual list. It's primarily questionable AI tools, scrapers, lead generation tools, and other plugins in that vein. I would guess this is for rate limiting and abuse detection.
most automations for sales and marketing use browser extensions... linkedIn wants you using their tools not 3rd party
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Their own tools suck, that’s the issue.
I can confirm.. open up linkedIn.. hit F12 and watch the error count keep going up and up and up Screenshots found here https://x.com/DenisGobo/status/2018334684879438150
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xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/DenisGobo/status/2018334684879438150
My quick reading of the source code suggests that it secretly loads Chrome Web Store URLs for known extensions and checks for the button text "Remove" that indicates you have the extension installed. This is of course diabolical. To my knowledge, Chrome itself does not provide any web accessible API to enumerate installed extensions.
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That’s incorrect, it’s trying to load an asset (hardcoded unique per-extension path) for each extension, there is a huge list of these in the source code: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mdp/linkedin-extension-fingerprinting/refs/heads/main/fingerprint.js
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Looks to me like it's fetching chrome-extension://{extension id}/{known filename} and seeing if it succeeds, not pinging the web store. Should be patched nonetheless though, that's a pretty obscene fingerprinting vector.
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Isn't it enumerating web_accessible_resources? Below static collectFeatures(e, t) there is a mapping of extension IDs to files in the const r (Minified JS, obviously.) Edit: Confirmed. It's not pinging the Chrome Web Store. https://blog.castle.io/detecting-browser-extensions-for-bot-detection-lessons-from-linkedin-and-castle/
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If this is true, it's insane that this would work: - why does CWS respond to cross-site requests? - why is chrome sending the credentials (or equivalent) in these requests? - why is the button enabled server-side and not via JS? Google must be confident in knowing the exact and latest state of your installed extensions enough to store it on their servers, I guess
This is a security vulnerability and should be patched. Sorry, LinkedIn. (Alternatively extension developers can modify their extensions to block these requests!)
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I'm not sure how you'd patch that. Any request that’s made from the current open tab / window is made on behalf of the user. From my point of view, it's impossible for the browser to know, if the request is legit or not.
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An ideal implementation of the same origin policy would make it impossible for a site (through a fetch call or otherwise) to determine whether an extension resource exists/is installed or the site simply lacks permission to access it.
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Is there no browser setting to defend against this attack? If not, there should be, versus relying on extension authors to configure or enable such a setting.
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I imagine that it would require browsers to treat web requests from JS differently from those initiated by the user, specifically pretending the JS-originating requests are by logged-out or "incognito" users (by, I suppose, simply not forwarding any local credentials along, but maybe there's more to it than that). Which would probably wreak havoc with a lot of web apps, at least requiring some kind of same-origin policy. And maybe it messes with OAuth or something. But it does seem at least feasible.
No kidding. I am shocked this works. Does Firefox have a similar weakness?
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[delayed]
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I don't see any evidence of this happening in Firefox. Either it's more difficult or they just didn't bother, either way I'm happy. Edit: Can't find much documentation on exactly how the anti-fingerprinting works, but this page implies that the browser blocks extension detection: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/trackers-and-scripts-firefox-blocks-enhanced-track#w_fingerprinters
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
MenuetOS – a GUI OS that boots from a single floppy disk (menuetos.net)
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I believe I saw MenuetOS for the first time a decade ago. Now it's 26 years old since its first release. I can only be jealous of such stamina and wish it prosperous years ahead. Has it had any commercial success?
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I remember stumbling uppon Menuet when it was still 32 bits only, (probably around 2008?). I tried it, booting from an actual floppy disk at the time. Nowadays, I don't even know where I would find a computer that still has a floppy disk drive. Time flies.
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A similar project discussed a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866544
The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein (scottaaronson.blog)
> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief. Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.
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Same with Summers. He had reputation beyond Epstein contacts.
Turns out Bill is just actually a piece of shit through and through
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These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both. He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing. The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
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You mean his philanthropy work that influences where public money goes, into companies like Monsanto and Cargill which his foundation profits from?
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The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
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Okay, a complete piece of shit with an undigested kernel of sweet corn stuck in it.
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I'd prefer if rich simply paid their taxes and contributions instead of spending money on fighting poor children in Africa.
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That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.
Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE): "great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems, if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . self deception, ( necessary to prevent accidental disclosure of inate algorithms. WE need more hackers , also interested in biological hacking , security, etc." Damn! I once worked with a guy that was exactly like this. Not just writing but his style of speech irl was like that, incoherent loosely bound ideas around one topic. Ironically, the harder he tried to appear smart the more idiotic were the things that spewed out of his mouth. We were working with GPUs, trying to find ways to optimize GPU code, he called the team for an informal meeting and told us dead serious, "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better". :O I don't know if this has a name, I just thought the guy had schizophrenia. So glad I moved on from that place.
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My brain farts are more cohesive, yet I'm never drunk enough while writing them down to use spaces before punctuation or after a bracket.
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i don't think its schizophrenia? i mean working in tech you haven't run into that CTO or vp eng who snowjobs the c-suite with a word salad of hot button technical terms that don't quite add up? hell ive even interviewed developer candidates for positions who are like this.
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>i mean working in tech you haven't run into [...] Yeah, it's on my comment.
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Pseudo-intellectual aka bullshitter. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pseudo-intellectual computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems, . He is confused about software/programming/hacking. Hacking absolutely involves intercepting messages e.g., man in the middle attack. I have no idea what he thinks biological systems is; does he think that bacteria/viruses intercept chemical messages that our brain sends to different organs in our body? if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . Free energy -- yuck -- that is what happens when scientists give a terrible name to "usable work" or "usable energy". Free energy is about the usable work you can get out of a e.g., coal powered steam engine. He is mixing physics/thermodynamics with biology.
When he was alive a lot of people said Epstein was really smart. But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
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I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities." I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.
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> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that. I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.
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I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes. Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me. Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend. Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.
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I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings. So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about". But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.
We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler (anthropic.com)
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It's cool that you can look at the git history to see what it did. Unfortunately, I do not see any of the human written prompts (?). First 10 commits, "git log --all --pretty=format:%s --reverse | head", Initial commit: empty repo structure Lock: initial compiler scaffold task Initial compiler scaffold: full pipeline for x86-64, AArch64, RISC-V Lock: implement array subscript and lvalue assignments Implement array subscript, lvalue assignments, and short-circuit evaluation Add idea: type-aware codegen for correct sized operations Lock: type-aware codegen for correct sized operations Implement type-aware codegen for correct sized operations Lock: implement global variable support Implement global variable support across all three backends
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At this point, I genuinely don't know what to learn next to not become obsolete when another Opus version gets released
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However it was achieved, building a such a complex project like a C compiler on a 20k $ budget in full autonomy is quite impressive. Imho some commenters focus way too much on the (many, and honestly also shared by the blog post too) cons, that they forget to be genuinely impressed by the steps forward.
What Rust-based compiler is it plagiarising from?
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Language doesn't really matter, it's not how things are mapped in the latent space. It only needs to know how to do it in one language.
There are many, here's a simple Google search: https://github.com/jyn514/saltwater https://github.com/ClementTsang/rustcc https://github.com/maekawatoshiki/rucc
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Did you actually look at these? > https://github.com/jyn514/saltwater This is just a frontend. It uses Cranelift as the backend. It's missing some fairly basic language features like bitfields and variadic functions. And if I'm reading the documentation right, it requires all the source code to be in a single file... > https://github.com/ClementTsang/rustcc This will compile basically no real-world code. The only supported data type is "int". > https://github.com/maekawatoshiki/rucc This is just a frontend. It uses LLVM as the backend.
Look at what those compilers are capable of compiling and to which targets, and compare it to what this compiler can do. Those are wonderful, and I have nothing but respect for them, but they aren't going to be compiling the Linux kernel.
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I just did a quick Google search only on GitHub, maybe there are better ones out there on the internet?
Even with 1 TB of weights (probable size of the largest state of the art models), the network is far too small to contain any significant part of the internet as compressed data, unless you really stretch the definition of data compression.
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This sounds very wrong to me. Take the C4 training dataset for example. The uncompressed, uncleaned, size of the dataset is ~6TB, and contains an exhaustive English language scrape of the public internet from 2019. The cleaned (still uncompressed) dataset is significantly less than 1TB. I could go on, but, I think it's already pretty obvious that 1TB is more than enough storage to represent a significant portion of the internet.
We saw partial copies of large or rare documents, and full copies of smaller widely-reproduced documents, not full copies of everything. An e.g. 1 trillion parameter model is not a lossless copy of a ten-petabyte slice of plain text from the internet. The distinction may not have mattered for copyright laws if things had gone down differently, but the gap between "blurry JPEG of the internet" and "learned stuff" is more obviously important when it comes to e.g. "can it make a working compiler?"
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While I mostly agree with you, it worth noting modern llms are trained on 10-20-30T of tokens which is quite comparable to their size (especially given how compressible they are)
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Besides, the fact an LLM may recall parts of certain documents, like I can recall incipits of certain novels, does not mean that when you ask LLM of doing other kind of work, that is not recalling stuff, the LLM will mix such things verbatim. The LLM knows what it is doing in a variety of contexts, and uses the knowledge to produce stuff. The fact that for many people LLMs being able to do things that replace humans is bitter does not mean (and is not true) that this happens mainly using memorization. What coding agents can do today have zero explanation with memorization of verbatim stuff. So it's not a matter of copyright. Certain folks are fighting the wrong battle.
It's a bit disappointing that people are still re-hashing the same "it's in the training data" old thing from 3 years ago. It's not like any LLM could 1for1 regurgitate millions of LoC from any training set... This is not how it works. A pertinent quote from the article (which is a really nice read, I'd recommend reading it fully at least once): > Previous Opus 4 models were barely capable of producing a functional compiler. Opus 4.5 was the first to cross a threshold that allowed it to produce a functional compiler which could pass large test suites, but it was still incapable of compiling any real large projects. My goal with Opus 4.6 was to again test the limits.
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They couldn't do it because they weren't fine-tuned for multi-agent workflows, which basically means they were constrained by their context window. How many agents did they use with previous Opus? 3? You've chosen an argument that works against you, because they actually could do that if they were trained to. Give them the same post-training (recipes/steering) and the same datasets, and voila, they'll be capable of the same thing. What do you think is happening there? Did Anthropic inject magic ponies?
In this case it's not reproducing training data verbatim but it probably is using algorithms and data structures that were learned from existing C compilers. On one hand it's good to reuse existing knowledge but such knowledge won't be available if you ask Claude to develop novel software.
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How often do you need to invent novel algorithms or data structures? Most human written code is just rehashing existing ideas as well.
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They're very good at reiterating, that's true. The issue is that without the people outside of "most humans" there would be no code and no civilization. We'd still be sitting in trees. That is real intelligence.
Do you not see the difference between a toy language and a clean room implementation that can compile Linux, QEMU, Postgres, and sqlite? (No, it doesn't have the assembler and linker.) That's for $20,000.
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people have built compilers for free, with $20000 you can even a couple of devs for a year in low income countries.
I cannot decide if LLMs would be excellent at writing in pure binary (why waste all that context on superfluous variable names and function symbols) or be absolutely awful at writing pure binary (would get hopelessly lost without the huge diversification of tokens).
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We would still need the language to be human readable, but it could be very dense. They could build the ultimate std lib, that goes directly to kernels, so a call like spawn is all the tokens it needs to start a co routine for example.
My AI Adoption Journey (mitchellh.com)
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Thanks for sharing your experiences :) You mentioned "harness engineering". How do you approach building "actual programmed tools" (like screenshot scripts) specifically for an LLM's consumption rather than a human's? Are there specific output formats or constraints you’ve found most effective?
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I recently also reflected on the evolution of my use of ai in programming. Same evolution, other path. If anyone is interested: https://www.asfaload.com/blog/ai_use/
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> Break down sessions into separate clear, actionable tasks. Don't try to "draw the owl" in one mega session. This is the key one I think. At one extreme you can tell an agent "write a for loop that iterates over the variable `numbers` and computes the sum" and they'll do this successfully, but the scope is so small there's not much point in using an LLM. On the other extreme you can tell an agent "make me an app that's Facebook for dogs" and it'll make so many assumptions about the architecture, code and product that there's no chance it produces anything useful beyond a cool prototype to show mom and dad. A lot of successful LLM adoption for code is finding this sweet spot. Overly specific instructions don't make you feel productive, and overly broad instructions you end up redoing too much of the work.
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so many times I catch myself asking a coding agent e.g “please print the output” and it will update the file with “print (output)”. Maybe there’s something about not having to context switch between natural language and code just makes it _feel_ easier sometimes
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This is actually an aspect of using AI tools I really enjoy: Forming an educated intuition about what the tool is good at, and tastefully framing and scoping the tasks I give it to get better results. It cognitively feels very similar to other classic programming activities, like modularization at any level from architecture to code units/functions, thoughtfully choosing how to lay out and chunk things. It's always been one of the things that make programming pleasurable for me, and some of that feeling returns when slicing up tasks for agents.
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Much more pragmatic and less performative than other posts hitting frontpage. Good article.
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Finally, a step-by-step guide for even the skeptics to try to see what spot the LLM tools have in their workflows, without hype or magic like I vibe-coded an entire OS, and you can too! .
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Good article! I especially liked the approach to replicate manual commits with the agent. I did not do that when learning but I suspect I'd have been much better off if I had.
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For the AI skeptics reading this, there is an overwhelming probability that Mitchell is a better developer than you. If he gets value out of these tools you should think about why you can't.
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Don't get it. What's the relation between Mitchell being a "better" developer than most of us (and better is always relative, but that's another story) and getting value out of AI? That's like saying Bezos is a way better businessman than you, so you should really hear his tips about becoming a billionaire. No sense (because what works for him probably doesn't work for you) Tons of respect for Mitchell. I think you are doing him a disservice with these kinds of comments.
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Maybe you disagree with it, but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument: A lot of us dismiss AI because "it can't be trusted to do as good a job as me". The OP is arguing that someone, who can do better than most of us, disagrees with this line of thinking. And if we have respect for his abilities, and recognize them as better than our own, we should perhaps re-assess our own rationale in dismissing the utility of AI assistance. If he can get value out of it, surely we can too if we don't argue ourselves out of giving it a fair shake. The flip side of that argument might be that you have to be a much better programmer than most of us are, to properly extract value out of the AI... maybe it's only useful in the hands of a real expert.
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Underwhelming.
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>Underwhelming Which is why I like this article. It's realistic in terms of describing the value-propositio of LLM-based coding assist tools (aka, AI agents ). The fact that it's underwhelming compared to the hype we see every day is a very, very good sign that it's practical .
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most AI adoption journeys are
Flock CEO calls Deflock a "terrorist organization" [video] (2025) (youtube.com)
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[delayed]
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Mountain View recently turned off their Flock installs after they discovered Flock had enabled data sharing without notice and other agencies were searching through MV data. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-cameras-shared-license-plate-data-without-permission > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request. A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-ballistic > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
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These clean-shaven wide-eyed SV types give me the uncanny valley heebie-jeebies. Everything, from their tone of voice, to their appearance, to (most importantly) the way they phrase things... there's an almost AI-generated quality.
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Probably worth posting some links to the Institute for Justice's "Project on the Fourth Amendment": https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/ This Project includes work to fight technologies such as Flock's in the courts: https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/license-plate-readers/ I've always felt good contributing to IJ and the topic and takes in the posted video are precisely why I do so.
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Anyone aware of people doing something like over here in Europe? And how legal/illegal it might be? I'm talking about putting government-operated security cameras on a map, for the general public to be aware of their locations.
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The TV series Person of Interest [1] becomes more on point as years go by, even though by now it has been 15 years since its S1. One of the scenes [2] from that series where "terrorist" are shown as being in control over ghoulish CEOs like the one from this posted video. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igKb2DhP7Ao
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I “like” how Overton window (??? I hope I use it right) shifted dramatically in USA. - “law and order” is “good”, when _de facto_ most of constitution is not being applied for a year and laws or court orders are applied selectively. Not to say that “law and order” is vastly different depending on the size of your bank account; - “terrorist” now is anything you don’t like, especially if it’s anti establishment. True freedom of speech is now apparently “violence” (and of course this dictatorial (adjacent) government would think that, as it’s biggest danger); - “antifa” is apparently now a boogeyman, though I’d say he used it correctly as he is (apparently) fascist; Also it is forced against people, how population can choose otherwise?
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"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
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has anything ever good come out of silicon valley or the wall street? one greedy capitalist after another and you wonder why the world has turn to a shithole! the inequality between the rich and the poor is reaching the level of ambani vs. mumbai slums.
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Someone just had to come up with the goofy name "antifa" instead of just using "anti fascist".
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Can we update the title to include the name, Garrett Langley? Everyone should know his name.
I know its not popular to say here, but I think Flock is one of the most important start-ups of the last decade in the US. They are already, factually, helping police solve 700k real crimes per year. That is 10% of all reported crime in the USA.
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That's a claim Flock makes. They poison their own well a bit when they then also claim that Deflock are terrorists. One might point out that one claim was made off the cuff while the other is has a white paper detailing why they're making this claim but said white paper has a number of it's own issues. See, unless perhaps you think they're a terrorist news organization: https://www.404media.co/researcher-who-oversaw-flock-surveillance-study-now-has-concerns-about-it/ which quotes one of the consulting academic researchers as saying: >The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
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That figure is straight from Flok's own press release. There were deep deep methological flaws in the calculation of that figure. https://archive.is/7iNyQ - this is an excellent piece breaking down the many many flaws in that figure and quotes the 2 academics involved who later said highlighted the issues. ->"“This 'study' rings a cacophony of alarm bells: the closer you look at it, the more it looks like a marketing scheme than data science,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “Nobody should be repeating the claims until the data can be verified and the conclusions replicated by independent data scientists without a direct tie to the company that stands to benefit."
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>helping police solve 700k real crimes per year. Have to ask for a citation there. Also, what are "real crimes"? Also, aren't these cameras? How are they tackling these 700k suspects?
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Those are statistics given by Flock themselves and are manipulated
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Says who? Flock?
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So crime is down?
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It actually is hugely down nationwide, but flock probably had nothing to do with that or very little
Does anyone have a template for a network audit that one could request of a local police department that would disclose access logs for Flock Safety data?
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A lot of jurisdictions actually require the data to be public! For example, ctrl-f "download csv" on this page for central LA PD: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/central-la-pd- . Not all jurisdictions require this, but if you can guess the URLs (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/<DEPARTMENT ID>) you can find quite a few. You can also do FOIA requests directly to departments, like this one: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/novato-296/flock-alprs-cameras-in-novato-ca-201840/ Good news is that even the images captured by the cameras is FOIA-able! https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-flock-surveillance-images-are-public-records-that-can-be-requested-by-anyone/
"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court." Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2] 1. https://websets.exa.ai/websets/directory/flock-safety-funding 2. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304
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It isn't even just about money. It's more apparent than ever that freedom, democracy, justice, human rights in this country are increasily reserved for those with the right political alignments.
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Felony contempt of business model? Weak. Today, companies sue for terrorist contempt of business model! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy
Flock (YC17)
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I've been online long enough that when I hear "Flock," I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)
Pointing cameras at people? Law and order Pointing cameras at cameras? Terrorist organization
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Who watches the watchmen? Terrorists
Wow... "...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else." "We're not forcing Flock on anyone..." It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves. I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
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Ah yes, and the antifa line. Wonder if these assholes ever stop to think what being anti-antifa actually means.
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It's not uncommon for fascists to call themselves anti-antifa.
> They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else. So they just said "These people are anti-fascist and this is a bad thing" Aren't authoritarians great.
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By your logic, if the NSDAP or the Bolsheviks named themselves "The Party of Peace and Love", you would have written > So they just said "These people are anti-violence and anti-hate and this is a bad thing" (Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity. I think the hotheads across the political spectrum need more nous and less thumos .)
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"Antifa" is understood as violent communist street thugs by most huge swaths of people. You may not think that's accurate, but that's the definition he is calling to mind.
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That's the intent but most people know it's not true. It's right up there with "woke" and "progressive" as generic, shapeless, boogeyman words. No real meaning besides "something bad".
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Only to those of a particular political persuasion. Every group has their own shorthand.
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Pretty sure most who claim the mantle of “Antifa” would welcome that Communist label, and plenty would endorse violence if it’s against the “right” people, so if the shoe fits…
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The air quotes around 'right' are interesting there. Yes, violence against Nazis and Fascists is acceptable. Do you disagree? I thought it was pretty much settled, we did a whole world war about it.
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Self defense is a kind of violence, I guess.
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"A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists, although some social democrats also participate in the antifa movement. The name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German antifa movement." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
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Great at telling everyone else what they are, at least.
>So they just said "These people are anti-fascist and this is a bad thing" A: "Hey guys, I think think this PATRIOT act thing is bad" B: "Wait, you're saying patriots are bad? What are you, some sort of seditious non-patriot?"
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Ah yes, I too conflate bills written by organized lobbyists with a loosely affiliated group that says American shouldn't be ran by Nazi's. The Nazi's running America get very mad about that and ensure to flood the airwaves with how cities in the US are mile wide smoking craters due to people who don't like authoritarians.
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The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you. Your argument pre-supposed that just because Antifa self-describes as antifascist, it inherently is, and that the CEO was expressing an opposition to the concept of antifascism, rather than simply expressing opposition to the specific group. If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
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I don't even know what antifa _is_ anymore, honestly. I only see it used as a boogie man by the right in discourse online. But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
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The point pixl97 was making was that they believed anti-anti-fascist described the Flock CEO. If Flock's reputation spoke for itself, their CEO wouldn't have to play these kind of legal games.
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>Ah yes, I too conflate bills written by organized lobbyists with a loosely affiliated group that says American shouldn't be ran by Nazi's. Somebody doesn't understand analogies, so let me spell it out explicitly for you: Approximately nobody is against "antifa" because they're fighting "fascists". Here's an excerpt from wikipedia: >Antifa activists' actions have since received support and criticism from various organizations and pundits. Some on the political left and some civil rights organizations criticize antifa's willingness to adopt violent tactics, which they describe as counterproductive and dangerous, arguing that these tactics embolden the political right and their allies.[13] Both Democratic and Republican politicians have condemned violence from antifa.[14][15][16][17] Many right-wing politicians and groups have characterized antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, or use antifa as a catch-all term,[18] which they adopt for any left-leaning or liberal protest actions.[19] According to some scholars, antifa is a legitimate response to the rise of the far right.[20][21] Scholars tend to reject an equivalence between antifa and right-wing extremism.[2][22][23] Some research suggests that most antifa action is nonviolent.[24][25][26] Those allegations might not have merit, and it's okay to have a productive discussion over the merits of that, but it's wholly unjustified to round everyone who oppose antifa off to "they're against antifa because they're fascists, because why else would you be against a group that's anti-fascist?". Doing so is making the same mistake as the PATRIOT act above. It's fine to be against the patriot act, or even support it. But it's totally poor reasoning to skip all that logic and go with "you oppose the PATRIOT act so you must be not a patriot".
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Being opposed to antifa because some of the people using the label are violent seems to be painting with an overly broad brush.
Google "Antifa silences speaker," and you'll find literally hundreds of cases of exactly that (I just did to verify).
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I guarantee it's just a bunch of heavily edited clips of people like Tim Pool being told they're idiots by college kids.
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I don't think you understand what "silencing" is. If they were actually silenced, you wouldn't be able to find anything about it online. People who are "silenced" are not "googleable with 100s of examples."
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Which SPECIFIC persons are being silenced and which SPECIFIC topics were they attempting to speak on? It’s a huge diff between someone being ”silenced” for speaking their minds on bike paths versus being ”silenced” for indirectly or even directly promoting a new holocaust. And from your vague responses it is not clear.
A movement is better terminology than an organization, fair. But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.
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Sure, but since anyone can claim the term, what is to stop someone from creating a false flag group on social media to make them look bad?
You can disagree, but "Presumably you meant the opposite of what you said" is condescending nonsense.
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He gave you a charitable interpretation of your absolutely nonsense comment.
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It's the most charitable interpretation. I think HN rules require that you give others the benefit of the doubt and assume that most charitable case.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf] (btboces.org)
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Soviet cartoon (1984) based on the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc
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I read this recently and wanted to post it on August 4. You jumped the gun!
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I upvote anything Bradbury or Teasdale. For anyone interested, here's a short game I made in 2 days for Ludum Dare back in 2019, which was inspired by the original poem and Bradbury's short story. I didn't have enough time to balance the gameplay and add more scenarios, but it's a neat experience and contains one of my favorite personal musical compositions. https://badsoft.co/games/soft-rains/#!/
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Worth noting - the original WW1 poem written by Sara Teasdale with the same name that may have inspired Bradbury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(poem)
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I made a composition for string orchestra and male voice from that poem 10 years ago. It's a very powerful poem. https://soundcloud.com/henrisokka/there-will-come-soft-rains
Thank you for suggesting Ian Mcdonald, have not read any of his. I absolutely rever and adore Bradbury, probably because he has a knack of articulating so well, the emotions and esthetics that we have in common, that I leave unarticulated, more so now that I am no longer a teenager.
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He captured childhood in a way that perhaps no one else has. His children have dignity and purpose and seriousness and are still absolutely full of joy and randomness. William Wordsworth, maybe, revered and portrayed childhood as well as Bradbury.
> take a look at Ian McDonald +1. I loved Desolation Road in particular; a sort of 100 Years of Solitude but on Mars and with more than 2 names for its 3000 characters.
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Yes, that is one of my very favorite books. My life is measured in part by how often I allow myself to read it.
Ardour 9.0 Released (ardour.org)
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I just setup my first little Linux home studio and Ardour is a large part of that. It's a great piece of software with an admittedly high learning curve for a novice like myself, but it's been incredibly fun learning.
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Is this similar to Ableton? Wanted to "create" music as a hobby, but don't really wanna pay for Ableton. I tried once https://lmms.io/ but didn't stick. Never heard of Ardour.
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Ardour is not as focused on "in the box composition" (i.e. making music entirely on your computer) as Live or Bitwig are. It originated as something closer to ProTools or Logic or Digital Performer in the sense that it was focused on recording people doing stuff (blowing,hitting,singing,speaker,scraping etc. etc). However, in recent years, we've added a lot of the stuff you need for "in the box composition" and many people do use it that way. There's (always) more to do, but it's fairly capable in this sort of workflow now too and will continue to improve over time. Ardour has been around for more than 25 years. Please be aware that almost any fully-capable DAW (everything named here except lmms) has a steep, challenging learning curve. Don't jump in thinking it will be easy.
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Similar but not quite. One of the problems that you might face is a lot of tutorials are for Ableton, Logic, Cubase etc. It shouldn't actually matter, but you might find it confusing what you can and cant do if you are following what someone else is doing in another program. It’s like learning C# from a Java course. Once you understand the fundamentals it does not matter what you use within reason. But I’ve used Ardour a long time ago and I don’t see why you couldn’t release music with it. Another alternative is Reaper.
Hi! I have been happily using Ardour as a hobbyist since version 5. At the same time I also started learning Pure Data. I was wondering how difficult it would be to implement a feature similar to "The Grid" from Bitwig. I’m not sure whether this could be done as a simple plugin, or if it would require much deeper integration with Ardour.
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Most likely we would do a closer-than-normal integration of Cardinal .... https://cardinal.kx.studio/ You can already load Cardinal as a plugin and get the full scope of is power(s) (or VCV Rack if you paid for the "pro" version). You just don't get the GUI "integrated" into Ardour, and its tied to a specific track. We might do this via I/O plugins (an existing Ardour feature), which would make the inputs & outputs of Cardinal be just like your hardware. Lots of details to that sort of design, however. There is also PlugData which could theoretically be handled in a similar way. What we will not try to do is to implement Yet Another Software Modular Environment ourselves. Cardinal/Rack (or even PD) are approximately infinitely better than anything we could or would do.
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code (axios.com)
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I've mentioned previously somewhere that the languages we choose to write in will matter less for many arguments. When it comes to insecure C vs Rust, LLMs will eventually level out the playing field. I'm not arguing we all go back to C - but companies that have large codebases in it, the guys screaming "RUST REWRITE" can be quieted and instead of making that large investment, the C codebase may continue. Not saying this is a GOOD thing, but just a thing that may happen.
It's not really worth much when it doesn't work most of the time though: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/18866 https://updog.ai/status/anthropic
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updog? what's updog?
It's a machine that spits out sev:hi vulnerabilities by the dozen and the complaint is the uptime isn't consistent enough?
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If I'm attempting to use it as a service to do continuous checks on things and it fails 50% of the time, I'd say yes, wouldn't you?
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If you had a machine with a lever, and 7 times out of 10 when you pulled that lever nothing happened, and the other 3 times it spat a $5 bill at you, would your immediate next step be: (1) throw the machine away (2) put it aside and call a service rep to come find out what's wrong with it (3) pull the lever incessantly I only have one undergrad psych credit (it's one of my two college credits), but it had something to say about this particular thought experiment.
I don't even understand how that claim makes sense.
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The first three authors, who are asterisked for "equal contribution", appear to work for Anthropic. That would imply an interest in making Anthropic's LLM products valuable. What is the confusion here?
That's good for you, but that means nothing to anybody else.
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> that means nothing to anybody else Someone else here! Ptacek saying anything about security means a lot to this nobody. To the point that I'm now going to take this seriously where before I couldn't see through the fluff.
You still haven't answered why I should care that you, a stranger on the internet, believes some unsubstantiated hearsay?
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ooof, you hate to see it (they got you good)
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Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders The user you're suspicious of is pretty well-known in this community.
I'm interested in whether there's a well-known vulnerability researcher/exploit developer beating the drum that LLMs are overblown for this application. All I see is the opposite thing . A year or so ago I arrived at the conclusion that if I was going to stay in software security, I was going to have to bring myself up to speed with LLMs. At the time I thought that was a distinctive insight, but, no, if anything, I was 6-9 months behind everybody else in my field about it. There's a lot of vuln researchers out there. Someone's gotta be making the case against. Where are they? From what I can see, vulnerability research combines many of the attributes that make problems especially amenable to LLM loop solutions: huge corpus of operationalizable prior art, heavily pattern dependent, simple closed loops, forward progress with dumb stimulus/response tooling, lots of search problems. Of course it works. Why would anybody think otherwise? You can tell you're in trouble on this thread when everybody starts bringing up the curl bug bounty. I don't know if this is surprising news for people who don't keep up with vuln research, but Daniel Stenberg's curl bug bounty has never been where all the action has been at in vuln research. What, a public bug bounty attracted an overwhelming amount of slop? Quelle surprise! Bug bounties have attracted slop for so long before mainstream LLMs existed they might well have been the inspiration for slop itself. Also, a very useful component of a mental model about vulnerability research that a lot of people seem to lack (not just about AI, but in all sorts of other settings): money buys vulnerability research outcomes . Anthropic has eighteen squijillion dollars. Obviously, they have serious vuln researchers. Vuln research outcomes are in the model cards for OpenAI and Anthropic.
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> I was going to have to bring myself up to speed with LLMs What did you do beyond playing around with them? > Of course it works. Why would anybody think otherwise? Sam Altman is a liar. The folks who are pitching AI as an investment were previously flinging SPACs and crypto. Copilot and Siri overpromised and underdelivered. Vibe coders are mostly idiots. The bar for believability in AI is about as high as its frontier's actual achievements.
> You can tell you're in trouble on this thread when everybody starts bringing up the curl bug bounty. I don't know if this is surprising news for people who don't keep up with vuln research, but Daniel Stenberg's curl bug bounty has never been where all the action has been at in vuln research. What, a public bug bounty attracted an overwhelming amount of slop? Quelle surprise! Bug bounties have attracted slop for so long before mainstream LLMs existed they might well have been the inspiration for slop itself. Yeah, that's just media reporting for you. As anyone who ever administered a bug bounty programme on regular sites (h1, bugcrowd, etc) can tell you, there was an absolute deluge of slop for years before LLMs came to the scene. It was just manual slop (by manual I mean running wapiti and c/p the reports to h1).
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[delayed]
Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models (arxiv.org)
It would be interesting if giving them some "therapy" led to durable changes in their "personality" or "voice", if they became better able to navigate conversations in a healthy and productive way.
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Or possibly these tests return true (some psychologically condition) no matter what. It wouldn't be good for business for them to return healthy, would it?
> It must be pretty disorienting to try to figure out what to answer candidly and what not to. Must it? I fail to see why it "must" be... anything. Dumping tokens into a pile of linear algebra doesn't magically create sentience.
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> Dumping tokens into a pile of linear algebra doesn't magically create sentience. More precisely: we don't know which linear algebra in particular magically creates sentience. Whole universe appears to follow laws that can be written as linear algebra. Our brains are sometimes conscious and aware of their own thoughts, other times they're asleep, and we don't know why we sleep .
I bet I could make it go through it in like under 2 mins of playing around with prompts
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Ok, bet.
GPT-5.3-Codex (openai.com)
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I've always been fascinated to see significantly more people talking about using Claude than I see people talking about Codex. I know that's anecdotal, but it just seems Claude is often the default. I'm sure there are key differences in how they handle coding tasks and maybe Claude is even a little better in some areas. However, the note I see the most from Claude users is running out of usage. Coding differences aside, this would be the biggest factor for me using one over the other. After several months on Codex's $20/mo. plan (and some pretty significant usage days), I have only come close to my usage limit once (never fully exceeded it). That (at least to me) seems to be a much bigger deal than coding nuances.
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[delayed]
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Codex is great and I hit the usage once doing multiagent full 5 hour absolute degen session for the nornal workflow alongside never hit it and now x2 useage even and now with the planmode switch back and forth absolute great.
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I want to recompile a Rust project to be f32 instead of f64. Am I better off buying 1 month of Codex, Claude, or Antigravity? I want to have the agent continuesly recompile and fix compile errors on loop until all the bugs from switching to f32 are gone.
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Doesn't matter which one. All of them can do things like this now, given a good enough feedback loop. Which your problem has.
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Interesting that this was released without a prior GPT-5.3 release. I wonder if that means we won't see a GPT-5.3?
As coding agents get "good enough" the next differentiator will be which one can complete a task in fewer tokens.
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Or quicker, or more comprehensively for the same price.
Whats interesting to me is that these gpt-5.3 and opus-4.6 are diverging philosophically and really in the same way that actual engineers and orgs have diverged philosophically With Codex (5.3), the framing is an interactive collaborator: you steer it mid-execution, stay in the loop, course-correct as it works. With Opus 4.6, the emphasis is the opposite: a more autonomous, agentic, thoughtful system that plans deeply, runs longer, and asks less of the human. that feels like a reflection of a real split in how people think llm-based coding should work... some want tight human-in-the-loop control and others want to delegate whole chunks of work and review the result Interested to see if we eventually see models optimize for those two philosophies and 3rd, 4th, 5th philosophies that will emerge in the coming years. Maybe it will be less about benchmarks and more about different ideas of what working-with-ai means
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I'm personally 100% convinced (assuming prices stay reasonable) that the Codex approach is here to stay. Having a human in the loop eliminates all the problems that LLMs have and continously reviewing small'ish chunks of code works really well from my experience. It saves so much time having Codex do all the plumbing so you can focus on the actual "core" part of a feature. LLMs still (and I doubt that changes) can't think and generalize. If I tell Codex to implement 3 features he won't stop and find a general solution that unifies them unless explicitly told to. This makes it kinda pointless for the "full autonomy" approach since effecitly code quality and abstractions completely go down the drain over time. That's fine if it's just prototyping or "throwaway" scripts but for bigger codebases where longevity matters it's a dealbreaker.
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> With Opus 4.6, the emphasis is the opposite: a more autonomous, agentic, thoughtful system that plans deeply, runs longer, and asks less of the human. This feels wrong, I can't comment on Codex, but Claude will prompt you and ask you before changing files, even when I run it in dangerous mode on Zed, I can still review all the diffs and undo them, or you know, tell it what to change. If you're worried about it making too many decisions, you can pre-prompt Claude Code (via .claude/instructions.md) and instruct it to always ask follow up questions regarding architectural decisions. Sometimes I go out of my way to tell Claude DO NOT ASK ME FOR FOLLOW UPS JUST DO THE THING.
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yeah I'm mostly just talking about how they're framing it: "Claude Opus 4.6 is designed for longer-running, agentic work — planning complex tasks more carefully and executing them with less back-and-forth from the user" I guess its also quite interesting that how they are framing these projects are opposite from how people currently perceive them and I guess that may be a conscious choice...
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I get what you mean now, I like that to be fair, sometimes I want Claude to tell me some architectural options, so I ask it so I can think about what my options are, sometimes I rethink my problem if I like Claudes conclusion.
I've also had the exact opposite experience with tone. Claude Code wants to build with me, and Codex wants to go off on its own for a while before returning with opinions.
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Its likely that both are steering towards the middle from their current relative extremes and converging to nearly the same place.
I've been listening to the insane 100x productivity gains you all are getting with AI and "this new crazy model is a real game changer" for a few years now, I think it's about time I asked: Can you guys point me ton a single useful, majority LLM-written, preferably reliable, program that solves a non-trivial problem that hasn't been solved before a bunch of times in publicly available code?
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Well, it took opus 4.5 five messages to solve a trivial git problem for me. It hallucinated nonexistent flags three times. Hallucinating nonexistent flags is certainly a novel solution to my git ineptness. Not to be outdone, chatgpt 5.2 thinking high only needed about 8 iterations to get a mostly-working ffmpeg conversion script for bash. It took another 5 messages to translate it to run in windows, on powershell (models escaping newlines on windows properly will be pretty nuch AGI, as far as I’m concerned).
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> that hasn't been solved before a bunch of times in publicly available code? And this matters because? Most devs are not working on novel never before seen problems.
In the 1930s, when electronic calculators were first introduced, there was a widespread belief that accounting as a career was finished. Instead, the opposite became true. Accounting as a profession grew, becoming far more analytical/strategic than it had been previously. You are correct that these models primarily address problems that have already been solved. However, that has always been the case for the majority of technical challenges. Before LLMs, we would often spend days searching Stack Overflow to find and adapt the right solution. Another way to look at this is through the lens of problem decomposition as well. If a complex problem is a collection of sub-problems, receiving immediate solutions for those components accelerates the path to the final result. For example, I was recently struggling with a UI feature where I wanted cards to follow a fan-like arc. I couldn't quite get the implementation right until I gave it to Gemini. It didn't solve the entire problem for me, but it suggested an approach involving polar coordinates and sine/cosine values. I was able to take that foundational logic turn it into a feature I wanted. Was it a 100x productivity gain? No. But it was easily a 2x gain, because it replaced hours of searching and waiting for a mental breakthrough with immediate direction. There was also a relevant thread on Hacker News recently regarding "vibe coding": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45205232 The developer created a unique game using scroll behavior as the primary input. While the technical aspects of scroll events are certainly "solved" problems, the creative application was novel.
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The story you're describing doesn't seem much better than one could get from googling around and going on stackoverflow
Why even come to this site if you're so anti-innovation? Today with LLMs you can literally spend 5 minutes defining what you want to get, press send, go grab a coffee and come back to a working POC of something, in literally any programming language. This is literally stuff of wonders and magic that redefines how we interface with computers and code. And the only thing you can think of is to ask if it can do something completely novel (that it's so hard to even quantity for humans that we don't have software patents mainly for that reason). And the same model can also answer you if you ask it about maths, making you an itinerary or a recipe for lasagnas. C'mon now.
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There are different kinds of innovation. I want AI that cures cancer and solves climate change. Instead we got AI that lets you plagiarize GPL code, does your homework for you, and roleplay your antisocial horny waifu fantasies.
Can you point me to a human written program an LLM cannot write? And no, just answering with a massively large codebase does not count because this issue is temporary. Some people just hate progress.
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Pretty much any software that people pay for? If LLMs could clone an app, why would anyone still pay good money for the original?
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And some people clearly hate humans.
Even a normal website like landonorris.com. Try copying all those effects with AI. Another example: Red Dead Redemption 2 Another one: Roller coaster tycoon Another one: ShaderToy
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Why do you believe an LLM can't write these, just because they're 3D? If the assets are given (just as with a human game programmer, who has artists provide them the assets), then an LLM can write the code just the same.
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What? People can easily get assets, thats not a even a problem in 2026. Roller coaster tycoon's assets were done by the programmer himself. If its so easy why haven't we seen actually complex pieces of software done in couple of weeks by LLM users? Also try building any complex effects by prompting LLMs, you wont get any far, this is why all of the LLM coded websites look stupidly bland.
For those who cared: GPT-5.3-Codex dominates terminal coding with a roughly 12% lead (Terminal-Bench 2.0), while Opus 4.6 retains the edge in general computer use by 8% (OSWorld). Anyone knows the difference between OSWorld vs OSWorld Verified?
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From Claude 4.6 Thinking: OSWorld is the full 369-task benchmark. OSWorld Verified is a ~200-task subset where humans have confirmed the eval scripts reliably score success/failure — the full set has some noisy grading where correct actions can still get marked wrong. Scores on Verified tend to run higher, so they're not directly comparable.
I am on a max subscription for Claude, and hate the fact that OpenAI have not figured out that $20 => $200 is a big jump. Good luck to them. In terms of model, just last night, Codex 5.2 solved a problem for me which other models were going round and round. Almost same instructions. That said, I still plan to be on $100 Claude (overall value across many tasks, ability to create docs, co-work), and may bump up OpenAI subscription to the next tier should they decide to introduce one. Not going to $200 even with 5.3, unless my company pays for it.
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You should look into Kilo Pass by Kilo Code ( https://kilo.ai/features/kilo-pass ). It's basically a fixed subscription and your credits roll over each month, and you get free extra credits too which are used up first before paid credits. It's similar to paying for Cursor except the credits roll over which is why I'm contemplating moving to it, because I don't want to be locked into any one LLM provider the way Claude Code or Codex make you become.
May AI not write the code for me. May I at least understand what it has "written". AI help is good but don't replace real programmers completely. I'm enough copy pasting code i don't understand. What if one day AI will fall down and there will be no real programmers to write the software. AI for help is good but I don't want AI to write whole files into my project. Then something may broke and I won't know what's broken. I've experienced it many times already. Told the AI to write something for me. The code was not working at all. It was compiling normally but the program was bugged. Or when I was making some bigger project with ChatGPT only, it was mostly working but after a longer time when I was promting more and more things, everything got broken.
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Sorry but companies will not hire you but instead a person who leared how to AI code. Get with the times or lose.
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I'm afraid of all of the modern world especially in technology, I guess if now I would "come back" to all of modern and new things: the commercialized world, AI, corporations, etc...my head would explode. I mean I can't imagine living in such world. I am not sure if everything would be alright eith myself in all this everything,This is just too much...
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It's that Austin Powers clip of the guy slowly getting smooshed by the steam roller.
Honest question: have you tried evolving your code architecture when adding features instead of just "promting more and more things"?
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I've tried that too but it was almost the same, chatgpt kept forgetting many things about the code and project structure. In summary AI can get problematic for me and i get with troubles with it. This is like one of the reasons why I still prefer traditional text editor for writing code like Vim over a "software on steroids" like VS Code and things like that...
I can't tell if this is a serious conversation anymore.
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“Best start believing in science fiction stories. You're in one.” https://x.com/TheZvi/status/2017310187309113781
yeah, to be honest it probably doesn't matter too much. I think the major models are very close in capabilities
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I don’t think this is even remotely true in practice. I honestly I have no idea what benchmarks are benchmarking. I don’t write JavaScript or do anything remotely webdev related. The idea that all models have very close performance across all domains is a moderately insane take. At any given moment the best model for my actual projects and my actual work varies. Quite honestly Opus 4.5 is proof that benchmarks are dumb. When Opus 4.5 released no one was particularly excited. It was better with some slightly large numbers but whatever. It took about a month before everyone realized “holy shit this is a step function improvement in usefulness”. Benchmarks being +15% better on SWE bench didn’t mean a damn thing.
That is where the money is.
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This. I think software development is the best usecase for AI yet. I use it almost daily at work and it's a huge help. Enterprise customers will happily pay even 100$/mo subscriptions and it has a clear value proposition that can be decently verified.
OpenAI is still the only AI company that has structured outputs. Anthropic now supports JSON schema but you can't specify array length.
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Google Gemini definitely has structured output.
ARC AGI 2 has a training set that model providers can choose to train on, so really wouldn't recommend using it as a general measure of coding ability.
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More fundamentally, ARC is for abstract reasoning. Moving blocks around on a grid. While in theory there is some overlap with SWE tasks, what I really care about is competence on the specific task I will ask it to do. That requires a lot of domain knowledge. As an analogy, Terence Tao may be one of the smartest people alive now, but IQ alone isn’t enough to do a job with no domain-specific training.
In my personal experience the GPT models have always been significantly better than the Claude models for agentic coding, I’m baffled why people think Claude has the edge on programming.
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GPT 5.2 codex plans well but fucks off a lot, goes in circles (more than opus 4.5) and really just lacks the breadth of integrated knowledge that makes opus feel so powerful. Opus is the first model I can trust to just do things, and do them right, at least small things. For larger/more complex things I have to keep either model on extremely short leashes. But the difference is enough that I canceled my GPT Pro sub so I could switch to Claude. Maybe 5.3 will change things, but I also cannot continue to ethically support Sam Altman's business.
I think for many/most programmers = 'speed + output' and webdev == "great coding". Not throwing shade anyone's way. I actually do prefer Claude for webdev (even if it does cringe things like generate custom CSS on every page) -- because I hate webdev and Claude designs are always better looking. But the meat of my code is backend and "hard" and for that Codex is always better, not even a competition. In that domain, I want accuracy and not speed. Solution, use both as needed!
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> I actually do prefer Claude for webdev Ah and let me guess all your frontends look like cookie cutter versions of this: https://openclaw.dog/
Ha, Claude Code on a pro plan often can't complete a single message before hitting the 5h limit. Not hit it once so far on Codex.
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This, so frustrating. But CC is so much faster too.
Yeah, these benchmarks are bogus. Every new model overfits to the latest overhyped benchmark. Someone should take this to a logical extreme and train a tiny model that scores better on a specific benchmark.
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All shared machine learning benchmarks are a little bit bogus, for a really “machine learning 101” reason: your test set only yields an unbiased performance metric if you agree to only use it once. But that just isn’t a realistic way to use a shared benchmark. Using them repeatedly is kind of the whole point. But even an imperfect yardstick is better than no yardstick at all. You’ve just got to remember to maintain a healthy level of skepticism is all.
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This has been done: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04871v1
Just curious is this a manual process or you guys have automated these steps?
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I have a `codex-review` skill with a shell script that uses the Codex CLI with a prompt. It tells Claude to use Codex as a review partner and to push back if it disagrees. They will go through 3 or 4 back-and-forth iterations some times before they find consensus. It's not perfect, but it does help because Claude will point out the things Codex found and give it credit.
Define "losing." Europe is prematurely regarded as having lost the AI race. And yet a large portion of Europe live higher quality lives compared to their American counterparts, live longer, and don't have to worry about an elected orange unleashing brutality on them.
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Europe has already lost the tech race - their cloud systems that their entire welfare states rely upon are all hosted on servers hosted by American private companies, which can turn them off with a flick of a switch if and when needed. When the welfare state, enabled by technology, falls apart, it won't take long for European society to fall apart. Except France maybe.
The consumers are getting huge wins. Model costs continue to collapse while capability improves. Competition is fantastic.
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> The consumers are getting huge wins. However, the investors currently subsidizing those wins to below cost may be getting huge losses.
Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority" (techoversight.org)
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By now I reached a point where I don't believe that big tech companies will do anything to improve outcomes for user if it will have a hit on their bottom line, and I'm sure that opposite is true, they will do anything to improve their bottom line even if it hurts the user. So it's fair to say that this relationship can't work in long term. I'm not really on the platforms mentioned except of YouTube, and it's considered to be the lesser offender here but still I can't avoid seeing how bad it got. I remember 2007-2012 the platform was mostly for entertainment, silly cat videos pranks, a low budget documentary here and there. 2012-2015 felt like the period where YouTube became a platform for more useful things, people showing how they are fixing cars, professors uploading their recorded classes, history channels, but on the sidelines people were starting to make money off doing weird things, like unboxing stuff on camera, drop testing phones, etc. If you were told in early 2000's that people will be getting extremely rich by unpackaging products on camera, you would have been called insane, no one would have considered wasting their free time watching things like that. It might be more difficult to convince older folks to engage but younger generation was malleable and was easy to hook, and slowly it became normal. 2015 to present days became a period where it's completely normal to make user to watch the ad disguised as content. People testing/showcasing/unboxing products or even political ideology propaganda presented as discussion in form of a podcast. It's obvious that the quality what is offered on YouTube has gotten worse, but they can counter it with autoplay, infinite scroll, landing page filled with eye grabbing content. The only way to watch things on YouTube and not be effected by this nonsense is to use a different client (freetube, jaybird, newpipe, there are plenty more). You can define of your homepage will look like, weather you want to see shorts or not, infinite feed, suggestion etc.
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This is just normal par-for-the-course business chasing an expanding market. Entertainment companies, in particular, _always_ focus on the youth market. When I was a teenager, record companies were obsessed with what teenagers liked: that's just the nature of the business. Headline is deliberately misleading. The (few) references in here to "addiction" are negative; suggesting ways to reach the youth market _without_ risking addictive behavior.
Awesome song. Gives me chills. Wish I believed in a just God like that.
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you are made either of reason or of faith, but the choice what you are made of you can not make nor with reason nor with faith reason can not choose reason, and faith can not choose faith
Addictive in this case you mean could be out of spite? Like, I don't like this but it's pissing me off and by god I will beat it?
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I found the gameplay loop really fun, but the rest of it was definitely not up to the standard of Doom 2016.
Can you point to any examples of big food companies actually making changes for Michelle Obama's campaign?
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First two results from this new-fangled thing they call a "search engine:" https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768807?resultClick=1 https://www.vox.com/2016/10/3/12866484/michelle-obama-childhood-obesity-lets-move
how would you ban it? I don't want the russian-style ban enforced by ISPs Probably punishing companies who pay YouTube for ads would work
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Much if not all of Europe already has ISP level bans. If they can use those bans against football streaming sites, why not Facebook? And actually I think just banning them from conducting any business, accepting payments/etc, would be mostly sufficient. They could continue to operate at a loss, but it would put American corps at such a disadvantage that domestic social media might be able to compete, and enforcing regulations against domestic companies should be far more feasible.
There were no serious attempts at enforcing the rules.
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If that's so, then is it realistic to expect that to somehow change? These corps have been fined more times than I can count, but it's clearly not working.
In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws. And even if people were willing to solve that one, it would take time to actually build new buildings, and doing that would have to be done first . It's also assuming that we're willing to abandon a technological capacity (not having to personally travel to someone's location to communicate with them) that humans have had since before Moses came down from the mountain, which seems like a fairly silly constraint to impose when there are obviously better alternatives available.
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> In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws. IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops. People also hang out at each others' homes. Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media. You're also acting like we can't meaningfully distinguish between social media and other forms of communication and that we have to be all or nothing about it, which is a bewildering take. Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features. Facebook back when it was posting on friends' walls, no likes, comments, shares, friend/follower counts, or feeds, was fun and mostly harmless. LinkedIn was genuinely useful when the feed was nothing more than professional updates. They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems. Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems: most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.
It might, but would that achieve much? Tobacco has done ok.
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Algorithmicly personalized social media becoming as stigmatized as smoking would be an amazing outcome, and is a great goal for regulators.
Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions (code.claude.com)
I wonder if my $20/mo subscription will last 10 minutes.
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At this point, if you're paying out of pocket you should use Kimi or GLM for it to make sense
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Ah ok, same. I keep wondering about how this would ever accomplish anything.
To the folks comparing this to GasTown: keep in mind that Steve Yegge explicitely pitched agent orchestrators to among others Anthropic months ago: > I went to senior folks at companies like Temporal and Anthropic, telling them they should build an agent orchestrator, that Claude Code is just a building block, and it’s going to be all about AI workflows and “Kubernetes for agents”. I went up onstage at multiple events and described my vision for the orchestrator. I went everywhere, to everyone. (from "Welcome to Gas Town" https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 ) That Anthropic releases Agent Teams now (as rumored a couple of weeks back), after they've already adopted a tiny bit of beads in form of Tasks) means that either they've been building them already back when Steve pitched orchestrators or they've decided that he's been right and it's time to scale the agents. Or they've arrived at the same conclusions independently -- it won't matter in the larger scale of things. I think Steve greately appreciates it existing; if anything, this is a validation of his vision. We'll probably be herding polecats in a couple of months officially.
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It's not like he was the only one who came up with this idea. I built something like that without knowing about GasTown or Beeds. It's just an obvious next step https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator
If it was so obvious and easy, why didn't we have this a year ago ? Models were mature enough back then to make this work
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Orchestration definitely wasn't possible a year ago, the only tool that even produced decent results that far back was Aider, it wasn't fully agentic, and it didn't really shine until Gemini 2.5 03-25. The truth is that people are doing experiments on most of this stuff, and a lot of them are even writing about it, but most of the time you don't see that writing (or the projects that get made) unless someone with an audience already (like Steve Yegge) makes it.
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Roo Code in VSCode was working fine a year ago, even back in November 2024 with Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7
There seems to be a lot of convergent evolution happening in the space. Days before the gas town hype hit, I made a (less baroque, less manic) "agent team" setup: a shell script to kick off a ralph wiggum loop, and CLAUDE-MESSAGE-BUS.md for inter-ralph communication (Thread safety was hacked into this with a .claude.lock file). The main claude instance is instructed to launch as many ralph loops as it wants, in screen sessions. It is told to sleep for a certain amount of time to periodically keep track of their progress. It worked reasonably well, but I don't prefer this way of working... yet. Right now I can't write spec (or meta-spec) files quick enough to saturate the agent loops, and I can't QA their output well enough... mostly a me thing, i guess?
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Not a you thing. Fancy orchestration is mostly a waste, validation is the bottleneck. You can do E2E tests and all sorts of analytic guardrails but you need to make sure the functionality matches intent rather than just being "functional" which is still a slow analog process.
I absolutely cannot trust Claude code to independently work on large tasks. Maybe other people work on software that's not significantly complex, but for me to maintain code quality I need to guide more of the design process. Teams of agents just sounds like adding a lot more review and refactoring that can just be avoided by going slower and thinking carefully about the problem.
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you need a reviewer agent for every step of the process - review the plan generated by the planner, the update made by the task worker subagent, and a final reviewer once all tasks are done. this does eat up tokens _very_ quickly though :(
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You write a generic architecture document on how you want your code base to be organized, when to use pattern x vs pattern y, examples of what that looks like in your code base, and you encode this as a skill. Then, in your prompt you tell it the task you want, then you say, supervise the implementation with a sub agent that follows the architecture skill. Evaluate any proposed changes. There are people who maximize this, and this is how you get things like teams. You make agents for planning, design, qa, product, engineering, review, release management, etc. and you get them to operate and coordinate to produce an outcome. That's what this is supposed to be, encoded as a feature instead of a best practice.
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How does this not use up tokens incredibly fast though? I have a Pro subscription and bang up against the limits pretty regularly.
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It _does_ use up tokens incredibly fast, which is probably why Anthropic is developing this feature. This is mostly for corporations using the API, not individuals on a plan.
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I'd love to see a breakdown of the token consumption of inaccurate/errored/unused task branches for claude code and codex. It seems like a great revenue source for the model providers.
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Aren't you just moving the problem a little bit further? If you can't trust it will implement carefully specified features, why would you believe it would properly review those?
I agree, but I've found that making an "adversarial" model within claude helps with the quality a lot. One agent makes the change, the other picks holes in it, and cycle. In the end, I'm left with less to review. This sounds more like an automation of that idea than just N-times the work.
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Do you do this manually? Or some abstraction above that? skills, some light orchestration, etc?
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I just tell it to do so, but you could even add that as a requirement to CLAUDE.md
It's not sufficient, especially if I am not learning about the problem by being part of the implementation process. The models are still very weak reasoners, writing code faster doesn't accelerate my understanding of the code the model wrote. Even with clear specs I am constantly fighting with it duplicating methods, writing ineffective tests, or implementing unnecessarily complex solutions. AI just isn't a better engineer than me, and that makes it a weak development partner.
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>AI just isn't a better engineer than me, and that makes it a weak development partner. This would also be true of Junior Engineers. Do you find them impossible to work with as well?
> Any self respecting engineer should recognize that these tools and models only serve to lower the value of your labor. Depends on what the aim of your labor is. Is it typing on a keyboard, memorizing (or looking up) whether that function was verb_noun() or noun_verb(), etc? Then, yeah, these tools will lower your value. If your aim is to get things done, and generate value, then no, I don't think these tools will lower your value. This isn't all that different from CNC machining. A CNC machinist can generate a whole lot more value than someone manually jogging X/Y/Z axes on an old manual mill. If you absolutely love spinning handwheels, then it sucks to be you. CNC definitely didn't lower the value of my brother's labor -- there's no way he'd be able to manually machine enough of his product ( https://www.trtvault.com/ ) to support himself and his family. > Using these things will fry your brain's ability to think through hard solutions. CNC hasn't made machinists forget about basic principles, like when to use conventional vs climb milling, speeds and feeds, or whatever. Same thing with AI. Same thing with induction cooktops. Same thing with any tool. Lazy, incompetent people will do lazy, incompetent things with whatever they are given. Yes, an idiot with a power tool is dangerous, as that tool magnifies and accelerates the messes they were already destined to make. But that doesn't make power tools intrinsically bad. > Do you want your competency to be correlated 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford (or be loaned!!)? We are already dependent on electricity. If the power goes out, we work around that as best as we can. If you can't run your power tool, but you absolutely need to make progress on whatever it is you're working on, then you pick up a hand tool. If you're using AI and it stops working for whatever reason, you simply continue without it. I really dislike this anti-AI rhetoric. Not because I want to advocate for AI, but because it distracts from the real issue: if your work is crap, that's on you. Blaming a category of tool as inherently bad (with guaranteed bad results) suggests that there are tools that are inherently good (with guaranteed good results). No. That's absolutely incorrect. It is people who fall on the spectrum of mediocrity-to-greatness, and the tools merely help or hinder them. If someone uses AI and generates a bunch of slop, the focus should be on that person's ineptitude and/or poor judgement. We'd all be a lot better off if we held each other to higher standards, rather than complaining about tools as a way to signal superiority.
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Your brother's livelihood is not safe from AI, nor is any other livelihood. A small slice of lucky, smart, well-placed, protected individuals will benefit from AI, and I presume many unlucky people with substantial disabilities or living in poverty will benefit as well. Technology seems to continue the improve the outcomes at the very top and very bottom, while sacrificing the biggest group in the middle. Many HN Software Engineers here immensely benefitted from Big Tech over the past 15 years -- they were a part of that lucky privileged group winning 300k+ USD salaries plus equity for a long time. AI has completely disrupted this space and drastically decreased the value of their work, and it largely did this by stealing open source code for training data. These Software Engineers are right to feel upset and threatened and oppose these AI tools, since they are their replacement. I believe that is why you see so much AI hate in HN
Claude Opus 4.6 (anthropic.com)
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They launched together ahah
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Important: I didn't see opus 4.6 in claude code. I have native install (which is the recommended instllation). So, I re-run the installation command and, voila, I have it now (v 2.1.32) Installation instructions: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview#get-started-in-30-seconds
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A bit surprised, the first one released wasn't Sonnet 5 after all, since the Google Cloud API had leaked Sonnet 5's model snapshot codename before.
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Looks like a marketing strategy to bill more for Opus than Sonnet
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I think two things are getting conflated in this discussion. First: marginal inference cost vs total business profitability. It’s very plausible (and increasingly likely) that OpenAI/Anthropic are profitable on a per-token marginal basis, especially given how cheap equivalent open-weight inference has become. Third-party providers are effectively price-discovering the floor for inference. Second: model lifecycle economics. Training costs are lumpy, front-loaded, and hard to amortize cleanly. Even if inference margins are positive today, the question is whether those margins are sufficient to pay off the training run before the model is obsoleted by the next release. That’s a very different problem than “are they losing money per request”. Both sides here can be right at the same time: inference can be profitable, while the overall model program is still underwater. Benchmarks and pricing debates don’t really settle that, because they ignore cadence and depreciation. IMO the interesting question isn’t “are they subsidizing inference?” but “how long does a frontier model need to stay competitive for the economics to close?”
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Dario said this in a podcast somewhere. The models themselves have so far been profitable if you look at their lifetime costs and revenue. Annual profitability just isn't a very good lens for AI companies because costs all land in one year and the revenue all comes in the next. Prolific AI haters like Ed Zitron make this mistake all the time.
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I suspect they're marginally profitable on API cost plans. But the max 20x usage plans I am more skeptical of. When we're getting used to $200 or $400 costs per developer to do aggressive AI-assisted coding, what happens when those costs go up 20x? what is now $5k/yr to keep a Codex and a Claude super busy and do efficient engineering suddenly becomes $100k/yr... will the costs come down before then? Is the current "vibe-coding renaissance" sustainable in that regime?
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> We build Claude with Claude. Yes and it shows. Gemini CLI often hangs and enters infinite loops. I bet the engineers at Google use something else internally.
Impressive results, but I keep coming back to a question: are there modes of thinking that fundamentally require something other than what current LLM architectures do? Take critical thinking — genuinely questioning your own assumptions, noticing when a framing is wrong, deciding that the obvious approach to a problem is a dead end. Or creativity — not recombination of known patterns, but the kind of leap where you redefine the problem space itself. These feel like they involve something beyond "predict the next token really well, with a reasoning trace." I'm not saying LLMs will never get there. But I wonder if getting there requires architectural or methodological changes we haven't seen yet, not just scaling what we have.
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You would be surprised about what the 4.5 models can already do in these ways of thinking. I think that one can unlock this power with the right set of prompts. It's impressive, truly. It has already understood so much, we just need to reap the fruits. I'm really looking forward to trying the new version.
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> Or creativity — not recombination of known patterns, but the kind of leap where you redefine the problem space itself. Have you tried actually prompting this? It works. They can give you lots of creative options about how to redefine a problem space, with potential pros and cons of different approaches, and then you can further prompt to investigate them more deeply, combine aspects, etc. So many of the higher-level things people assume LLM's can't do, they can. But they don't do them "by default" because when someone asks for the solution to a particular problem, they're trained to by default just solve the problem the way it's presented. But you can just ask it to behave differently and it will. If you want it to think critically and question all your assumptions, just ask it to . It will. What it can't do is read your mind about what type of response you're looking for. You have to prompt it. And if you want it to be super creative, you have to explicitly guide it in the creative direction you want.
> Besides, what is the human brain if not a machine that generates "tokens" that the body propagates through nerves to produce physical actions? Ah yes, the brain is as simple as predicting the next token, you just cracked what neuroscientists couldn't for years.
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Well it's the prediction part that is complicated. How that works is a mystery. But even our LLMs are for a certain part a mystery.
We don't vary our model quality with time of day or load (beyond negligible non-determinism). It's the same weights all day long with no quantization or other gimmicks. They can get slower under heavy load, though. (I'm from OpenAI.)
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Specifically including routing (i.e. which model you route to based on load/ToD)? PS - I appreciate you coming here and commenting!
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There is no routing with API, or when you choose a specific model in chatGPT.
Interesting. Everyone in my circle said the opposite.
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It probably depends on programming language and expectations.
Maybe that's why Opus 4.5 has degraded so much in the recent days ( https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ ).
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I’ve definitely experienced a subjective regression with Opus 4.5 the last few days. Feels like I was back to the frustrations from a year ago. Keen to see if 4.6 has reversed this.
The bicycle frame is a bit wonky but the pelican itself is great: https://gist.github.com/simonw/a6806ce41b4c721e240a4548ecdbe216?permalink_comment_id=5972110#gistcomment-5972110
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here the animated version https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/3db12520-eaea-4769-82be-7e4cda778aba
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That's hilarious. It's so close!
How would you generate a picture of Noun + Noun in the first place in order to train the LLM with what it would look like? What's happening during that 1 estimated second?
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This is why everyone trains their LLM on another LLM. It's all about the pelicans.
One aspect of this is that apparently most people can't draw a bicycle much better than this: they get the elements of the frame wrong, mess up the geometry, etc.
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I just had an idea for an RLVR startup.
There's a research paper from the University of Liverpool, published in 2006 where researchers asked people to draw bicycles from memory and how people overestimate their understanding of basic things. It was a very fun and short read. It's called "The science of cycology: Failures to understand how everyday objects work" by Rebecca Lawson. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/bf03195929.pdf
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A place I worked at used it as part of an interview question (it wasn't some pass/fail thing to get it 100% correct, and was partly a jumping off point to a different question). This was in a city where nearly everyone uses bicycles as everyday transportation. It was surprising how many supposedly mechanical-focused people who rode a bike everyday, even rode a bike to the interview, would draw a bike that would not work.
the field is advancing so fast it's hard to do real science as their will be a new SOTA by the time you're ready to publish results. i think this is a combination of that and people having a laugh. Would you mind sharing which benchmarks you think are useful measures for multimodal reasoning?
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A benchmark only tests what the benchmark is doing, the goal is to make that task correlate with actually valuable things. Graphic benchmarks is a good example, extremely hard to know what you will get in a game by looking at 3D Mark scores, it varies by a lot. Making a SVG of a single thing doesn’t help much unless that applies to all SVG tasks.
I'll bite. The benchmark is actually pretty good. It shows in an extremely comprehensible way how far LLMs have come. Someone not in the know has a hard time understanding what 65.4% means on "Terminal-Bench 2.0". Comparing some crappy pelicans on bicycles is a lot easier.
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it ceases to be a useful benchmark of general ability when you post it publicly for them to train against
Man I hope so - the context limit is hit really quickly in many of my use cases - and a compaction event inevitably means another round of corrections and fixes to the current task. Though I'm wary about that being a magic bullet fix - already it can be pretty "selective" in what it actually seems to take into account documentation wise as the existing 200k context fills.
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Hello, I check context use percentage, and above ~70% I ask it to generate a prompt for continuation in a new chat session to avoid compaction. It works fine, and saves me from using precious tokens for context compaction. Maybe you should try it.
I can see a case for omitting R&D when talking about profitability, but training makes no sense. Training is what makes the model, omitting it is like omitting the cost of running the production facility of a car manufacturer. If AI companies stop training they will stop producing models, and they will run out of a products to sell.
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The reason for this is that the cost scales with the model and training cadence, not usage and so they will hope that they will be able to scale number of inference tokens sold both by increasing use and/or slowing the training cadence as competitors are also forced to aim for overall profitability. It is essentially a big game of venture capital chicken at present.
If you don't use shitty terminals, it doesn't flicker.
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Blaming the terminal seems a little backwards. Perhaps the application could take responsibility for being compatible with common terminals?
Microsoft's products are also extremely successful they're also total garbage
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Claude is by far the most popular and best assistant currently available for a developer.
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Okay, and Windows is by far the most popular desktop operating system. Discussions are pointless when the parties are talking past each other.
CC has >6000 open issues, despite their bot auto-culling them after 60 days of inactivity. It was ~5800 when I looked just a few days ago so they seem to be accelerating towards some kind of bug singularity.
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Just anecdotally, each release seems to be buggier than the last. To me, their claim that they are vibe coding Claude code isn’t the flex they think it is. I find it harder and harder to trust anthropic for business related use and not just hobby tinkering. Between buggy releases, opaque and often seemingly glitches rate limits and usage limits, and the model quality inconsistency, it’s just not something I’d want to bet a business on.
What’s so simple about it?
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I said relatively simple. It is mostly an API interface with Anthropic models, with tool calling on top of it, very simple input and output.
Also explains why Claude Code is a React app outputting to a Terminal. (Seriously.)
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I did some debugging on this today. The results are... sobering. Memory comparison of AI coding CLIs (single session, idle): | Tool | Footprint | Peak | Language | |-------------|-----------|--------|---------------| | Codex | 15 MB | 15 MB | Rust | | OpenCode | 130 MB | 130 MB | Go | | Claude Code | 360 MB | 746 MB | Node.js/React | That's a 24x to 50x difference for tools that do the same thing: send text to an API. vmmap shows Claude Code reserves 32.8 GB virtual memory just for the V8 heap, has 45% malloc fragmentation, and a peak footprint of 746 MB that never gets released, classic leak pattern. On my 16 GB Mac, a "normal" workload (2 Claude sessions + browser + terminal) pushes me into 9.5 GB swap within hours. My laptop genuinely runs slower with Claude Code than when I'm running local LLMs. I get that shipping fast matters, but building a CLI with React and a full Node.js runtime is an architectural choice with consequences. Codex proves this can be done in 15 MB. Every Claude Code session costs me 360+ MB, and with MCP servers spawning per session, it multiplies fast.
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I believe they use https://bun.com/ Not Node.js
When doing advanced terminal UI, you might at some point have to layout content inside the terminal. At some point, you might need to update the content of those boxes because the state of the underlying app has changed. At that point, refreshing and diffing can make sense. For some, the way React organizes logic to render and update an UI is nice and can be used in other contexts.
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How big is the UI state that it makes sense to bring in React and the related accidental complexity? I’m ready to bet that no TUI have that big of a state.
Only in the same way that the pixels displayed in a browser are not a tree structure that you can diff - the diffing happens at a higher level of abstraction than what's rendered. Diffing and only updating the parts of the TUI which have changed does make sense if you consider the alternative is to rewrite the entire screen every "frame". There are other ways to abstract this, e.g. a library like tqmd for python may well have a significantly more simple abstraction than a tree for storing what it's going to update next for the progress bar widget than claude, but it also provides a much more simple interface. To me it seems more fair game to attack it for being written in JS than for using a particular "rendering" technique to minimise updates sent to the terminal.
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Most UI library store states in tree of components. And if you’re creating a custom widget, they will give you a 2D context for the drawing operations. Using react makes sense in those cases because what you’re diffing is state, then the UI library will render as usual, which will usually be done via compositing. The terminal does not have a render phase (or an update state phase). You either refresh the whole screen (flickering) or control where to update manually (custom engine, may flicker locally). But any updates are sequential (moving the cursor and then sending what to be displayed), not at once like 2D pixel rendering does. So most TUI only updates when there’s an event to do so or at a frequency much lower than 60fps. This is why top and htop have a setting for that. And why other TUI software propose a keybind to refresh and reset their rendering engines.
It’s really not that crazy. React itself is a frontend-agnostic library. People primarily use it for writing websites but web support is actually a layer on top of base react and can be swapped out for whatever. So they’re really just using react as a way to organize their terminal UI into components. For the same reason it’s handy to organize web ui into components.
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And some companies use it to write start menus.
European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams (euractiv.com)
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As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication. Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model. Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time I tried it, in like 2018-2019), but is a lot better now.
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XMPP has been around for way longer, has proven that it actually works, and has a reliable community behind it, with no VC-funded hype.
Someone once said to me, be very careful about negotiating with leverage… when you twist someone’s arm, they’ll say, “I’ll remember that. You may have won this one, but I’m gonna win the next one.” Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost. It’s not clear that patchwork EU government back offices migrating off Teams will hurt US tech, but long term, in aggregate, this is going to be a headache for American tech. EU can’t out innovate US tech, but they can make it harder to dominate their markets.
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I hope you're right! I mean, at the level of personal relationships I fully agree[0]. However, institutions tend to be forgetful. [0]: Someone once said to me something very similar to what you quoted: "Be nice to people. People will remember you. And they will gossip if they don't like you and you have wronged them. It's much easier to ruin your reputation with a single action done to a single person than to build up a good one."
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> Sadly, the US has done this to ourselves… all this arm twisting and strong-manning is coming home to roost. No it's not. This is theater to give the impression that they are "getting the orange buffoon". They'll be back in short order, and even if they aren't, it'll just be an insignificant blip on a financial chart somewhere, not even big enough to warrant someone's attention. They did similar things in Trump's first term, and came back groveling.
* open source * don’t suck (too much) * no planned rug pulls * not infested by US or Chinese spyware Are there any?
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Only Matrix.
When did you try it? Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so.
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This cannot be overstated. It used to be a pile of trash, now it's quite decent (but with lots of room for improvement).
> It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful. I think there are three main reasons it's not perfect yet: 1. Building both a decentralised open standard (Matrix) at the same time as a flagship implementation (Element) is playing on hard mode: everything has to be specified under an open governance process ( https://spec.matrix.org/proposals ) so that the broader ecosystem can benefit from it - while in the early years we could move fast and JFDI, the ecosystem grew much faster than we anticipated and very enthusiastically demanded a better spec process. While Matrix is built extensibly with protocol agility to let you experiment at basically every level of the stack (e.g. right now we're changing the format of user IDs in MSC4243, and the shape of room DAGs in MSC4242) in practice changes take at least ~10x longer to land than in a typical proprietary/centralised product. On the plus side, hopefully the end result ends up being more durable than some proprietary thing, but it's certainly a fun challenge. 2. As Matrix project lead, I took the "Element" use case pretty much for granted from 2019-2022: it felt like Matrix had critical mass and usage was exploding; COVID was highlighting the need for secure comms; it almost felt like we'd done most of the hard bits and finishing building out the app was a given. As a result, I started looking at the N-year horizon instead - spending Element's time working on P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) as a long-term solution to Matrix's metadata footprint and to futureproof Matrix against Chat Control style dystopias... or projects like Third Room ( https://thirdroom.io ) to try to ensure that spatial collaboration apps didn't get centralised and vendorlocked to Meta, or bluesky on Matrix ( https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/ , before Jay & Paul got the gig and did atproto). I maintain that if things had continued on the 2019-2022 trajectory then we would have been able to ship a polished Element and do the various "scifi" long-term projects too. But in practice that didn't happen, and I kinda wish that we'd spent the time focusing on polishing the core Element use case instead. Still, better late than never, in 2023 we did the necessary handbrake turn focusing exclusively on the core Element apps (Element X, Web, Call) and Element Server Suite as an excellent helm-based distro. Hopefully the results speak for themselves now (although Element Web is still being upgraded to use the same engine as Element X). 3. Finally, the thing which went wrong in 2022/2023 was not just the impact of the end of ZIPR, but the horrible realisation that the more successful Matrix got... the more incentive there would be for 3rd parties to commercialise the Apache-licensed code that Element had built (e.g. Synapse) without routing any funds to us as the upstream project. We obviously knew this would happen to some extent - we'd deliberately picked Apache to try to get as much uptake as possible. However, I hadn't realised that the % of projects willing to fund the upstream would reduce as the project got more successful - and the larger the available funds (e.g. governments offering million-dollar deals to deploy Matrix for healthcare, education etc) then you were pretty much guaranteed the % of upstream funding would go to zero. So, we addressed this in 2023 by having to switch Element's work to AGPL, massively shrinking the company, and then doing an open-core distribution in the form of ESS Pro ( https://element.io/server-suite/pro ) which puts scalability (but not performance), HA, and enterprise features like antivirus, onboarding/offboarding, audit, border gateways etc behind the paywall. The rule of thumb is that if a feature empowers the end-user it goes FOSS; if it empowers the enterprise over the end-user it goes Pro. Thankfully the model seems to be working - e.g. EC is using ESS for this deployment. There's a lot more gory detail in last year's FOSDEM main-stage talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk Eitherway, the good news is that we think we've figured out how to make this work, things are going cautiously well, and these days all of Element is laser-focused on making the Element apps & servers as good as we possibly can - while also continuing to also improve Matrix, both because we believe the world needs Matrix more than ever, and because without Matrix Element is just another boring silo'd chat app. The bad news is that it took us a while to figure it all out (and there are still some things still to solve - e.g. abuse on the public Matrix network, finishing Hydra (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Keu8aE8t08 ), finishing the Element Web rework, and cough custom emoji). I'm hopeful we'll get here in the end :)
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God speed and thank you for your work. We need a professional world without the hellish Teams-Slack duopoly.
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Best of luck to you and the team! I really, really hope it's successful :)
The idea of the likes of SAP spinning up a new product quickly and painlessly seems like a joke.
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In defense of SAP, their product really is built to be configurable for every use case under the sun.
CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook (simonwillison.net)
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What is going on? This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
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This administration doesn't seem to see value in soft power.
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I know this isn’t a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss it, but I’ve always thought the World Factbook was a strange thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place. Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm) That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential. It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever. The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral. Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda. During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there. However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
Wikipedia next? I hope not.
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is wikipedia directly owned by the US Government?
Facts are the enemy. I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.
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“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
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Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
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I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.
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FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S. They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10 It could be as simple as budget changes.
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I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia. I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Now that you mention it, I'm pretty convinced this is the reason they took it down. If you can't dispute the facts, get rid of them, I guess.
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that is almost certainly the point
Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C. It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil. It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power. That feels a little horrifying to me.
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But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)
> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
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What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports from people who knew him personally had very low regard for his intellegence, and that is even before taking into account his repeated public blunders.
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> Donald Trump is wickedly smart. wut. this is a joke, right? Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.
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> wut. this is a joke, right? No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists. I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent . And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.
What were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US.
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and a demonstrated willingness to use it -- e.g. Venezuela
> One of their interests is telling the truth to their local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the worst that could happen to them. It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA. ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work around 1962.
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The worst that can happen is congress gets interested in a way that cuts their budget. An audit is one potential step on that path.
The New Collabora Office for Desktop (collaboraonline.com)
At least to me, it seems most regular users would struggle and have their productivity reduced attempting to learn a new word processing UI. Everyone and their extended family has been trained on Microsoft products, with Microsoft UI design. I think this matters for the paying customers of things like Collabora and LibreOffice, as they're using it in a work environment. Not at home.
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> most regular users would...have their productivity reduced...this matters for the paying customers...using it in a work environment If the concern is business productivity, then it might be interesting to read that at least some research indicates (perhaps counterintuitively to some) that classic style is better: "...results indicate that Excel 2003 is significantly superior to Excel 2007 in all the dependent variables...results support the conclusion that the user interface of Excel 2007 did change for the worst in comparison with the user interface of the 2003 version." [0] [0] Morales (2010), A COMPARATIVE USABILITY STUDY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007 AND MICROSOFT OFFICE 2003, https://scholar7-dev.uprm.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/a03ca140-a7a4-4e5a-a37d-3089dd7ac9d8/content
That's a "I may afford you, but I don't have people budget for those dumb calls" button for me.
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That still doesn't tell me what it costs, though.
When I tried it last, it was painfully slow. Have there been any improvements on the performance front lately? Typing in a word processor should not have input lag in 2025. It wasn't just a little lag, but the type and watch it catch up kind of lag.
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It's laggy on MacBook Pro M4 Max. I have no idea what is it doing.
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