Unlurker

Hybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text (arxiv.org)

The code is available at: https://github.com/togethercomputer/HybridAgent LLM Models and data: https://huggingface.co/collections/togethercomputer/hybridagent Evaluations: https://arxiv.org/html/2610.18861v1#S5

This seems really cool, and it actually increases intelligence than just speeding up inference. How does it convert latent reasoning into human readable text?

Oh cool, it's the Most Forbidden Technique

https://x.com/Jiaru_Zou/status/2110400256647340476 https://github.com/togethercomputer/HybridAgent

We'll put those links at the top as well. Thanks!

Where are the benchmarks? Does it just speed up inference and reduce token usage or does it seem to improve accuracy on certain tasks as well?

Did you even scan the paper? There are benchmarks right there starting on the 9th page.

Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse (hoaspy.com)

The way to deal with a bad HOA is to get on the board. Normally, HOA boards attract the most petty minded people because most of the normal people living in the community are too busy but if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.

> if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back. This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.

The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.” Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long. What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.

> From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.” Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.

I understand why they do that though. Cities don't usually make enough money from property taxes to fund the infrastructure in the suburbs. That why they always seem to be on the verge of budget cuts, raising taxes, or bankruptcy.

And Florida plans on making it worse by cutting property tax limits.

There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.

In my local area HOAs are apparently required by the city. We manage ours, a very small HOA, and recently were in discussion about removal. If we remove the HOA, the cost for each house will likely go up significantly because there's work needed to manage a detention pond that the city requires we manage. If the HOA dissolves, they city takes it over but charges much more for the same management. Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm) .

Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community

> The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. No, it isn't. You can also get in that situation by having the HOA cite you for a violation of its rules and regulations and you not fixing the violation. An HOA acting in good faith will not do this unless it's actually necessary. But an HOA run by busybodies can cite you for things that aren't actually violations (and often what is or is not a violation can be subjective, because the language in the rules and regulations is often vague or ambiguous), but which you still have to take the time and energy to respond to--or else they can say you didn't fix the violation and put a lien on your house. And if you do respond, now you're embroiled in an argument about whether what they cited you for actually is a violation or isn't, and you're arguing with bad faith actors who are not going to be reasonable. And who might put a lien on your house anyway--even though they're actually not supposed to do that if you're following the process established by the HOA (and often by state law) for disputes--and now you're faced with having to hire a lawyer and convince a judge that the lien should be dismissed.

Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them

If you want a simple one-sentence description, I would HOAs are an example of the old saying about a beautiful theory being spoiled by an ugly fact.

People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?

The facts don't seem to support your implied claim that being governed by people who do live in your neighborhood is better. At least not in Florida. My own personal experience from my wife having owned one condo and she and I having owned four houses is not very encouraging for your claim either. Of the four HOAs involved, the two that were run entirely by management companies (i.e., by people with no personal connection to the neighborhood, with little or no activity from the community members on the Board that we could see) were fine, they kept the common areas maintained and basically did nothing else that affected us. The condo association, while it had a management company, also had a Board filled with community members who had nothing better to do than harass everyone else, which they did with an energy that would have been amazing if it had been directed towards something productive. The other HOA had no management company, just the Board of community members, and was very intrusive, and from what we learned from neighbors, had been a mess for the entire history of the community. So we now live in a neighborhood with no HOA, we only have to deal with the municipality. We like it.

The implication is the people in my neighborhood know anything at all about what would make sense from a neighborhood regulatory standpoint. The sell is to drum up ancient peasant fears of the far away feudal lord vs local villagers gumptions, but the reality is usually denying genuine domain expertise besmirched by the mark of coming from a higher centralized government, in favor of rule by the loudest of the local bigots.

I'm not sure how much "genuine domain expertise" is actually embodied in most laws or regulations at any level of government. When I look at the US Code (or the Code of Federal Regulations), or state laws, or city or county municipal codes, I see some things that make sense, sure, but also a huge bunch of rules that are just arbitrary, and are only there because some special interest got a law or regulation written to benefit them at the expense of everyone else. The one advantage of higher levels of government over HOAs is that they are generally impersonal. The faceless bureacrats that are processing your forms generally don't have any personal animus against you . They don't have to live next door to you and they don't have to care what your personal oddities are. They're just executing a bureaucratic process. Whereas with an HOA, every little petty personal grievance gets magnified, and so-called "governance" turns into endless feuding.

If HOAs are a good example of self-governance, I can only conclude that self-governance is bad.

The term "self-governance" has always seemed to me to be an oxymoron. On its face it means everyone governs themselves, and nobody governs other people. Which if the people are reasonable mature adults, works out fine. But the term is always used to refer to some kind of governing institution, which means some people are given the power to govern other people. That's not "self-governance".

You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office. The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate. This leaves only the people who want to be, frankly, petty little shits. It is not hard to exert influence over a group of 20-30 despondent neighbors.

I'm on my HOA board, and not because I want to be, I can tell you that. I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot. At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything. The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything. I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?" I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it. Anyway, thanks for listening to my TED talk.

> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be. The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.

We have other situations where you can end up owing a debt, you don’t get to foreclose. You go to civil court, get a judgment and then try to collect.

Then the risk, delay, effort, and expense of pursuing a now unsecured debt is transferred from one defector to 150 cooperators. Every month of delay increases the loss.

True. Another middle ground is a mechanics lean. You can't alter the title until you clear it, but they can't foreclose.

You don’t seem to know how HOAs work. I’m not really a fan of how they currently work either, but you can’t just kick out a member when the legal “member” is the plot/home, and what would that even look like when you get kicked out, you are, e.g., still behind the gate benefiting from common elements. Do you get barred from, e.g., driving on the HOA owned and maintained street? Do you not get to enter the HOA controlled access gate? Even if it’s a very low maintenance and amenity HOA on public roads, how do you resolve the fact that all the fees and costs have accumulated if the home were to be sold, you essentially end up at a similar end point where the home is sold. Usually these are also not individual circumstances, i.e., a person who has ignored all kind of warnings and letters and board meetings over usually years, also has many other issues going on and often they’re just letting the home go anyways and e.g., are just living there for “free” for about 1-3 years of HOA/bank legal proceedings.

I know how they work. I simply think they should not exist at all. Home is a property a thing. It is not a member. There is no need for "HOA owned and maintained street". You do not need HOA to maintain streets.

Small-claims court exists.

Do you agree that you should sue your neighbor for not shoveling the sidewalk and causing a fine for the whole community?

Investing in the public benefit (anthropic.com)

feels like a prenup for government bailout

"anthropic bad because it makes profit" smh

in the 2026th year of our Lord, why are you pretending to believe a business to care about the public benefit? anthropic bad not because it makes profit (FYI, it doesn't). anthropic bad because its PR and marketing departments have adopted a strategy of concealing their stakeholders' regulatory capture efforts behind the obnoxious narrative of it being the only company that can be trusted with the technology. this particular fluff is an effort to demonstrate how heckin' wholesome they are.

What's your source? Sundar Pichai was given a $692M pay package this year (incentive-linked over three years) https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/07/google-just-gave-sundar-pichai-a-692m-pay-package/

This article: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/alphabet-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-earn-692-million-pay-package It shows his comp over a number of years, including these enormous 3 year packages that are a ceiling, not a guarantee. Picked 2025 specifically instead of the 2022 three year package or the 2026 three year package, to make it more comparable to what you might expect from a pre-IPO company like Anthropic; otherwise it would be too much apples and oranges.

And his potential pay for the next 3 years is in that range as well. Was 2025 specifically a cherry-picked off year for him? Or is the $10.5m simply false?

> Was 2025 specifically a cherry-picked off year for him? Or is the $10.5m simply false? Yes, to make it more comparable to what you might expect from a pre-IPO company like Anthropic; otherwise it would be apples and oranges. Read https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/alphabet-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-earn-692-million-pay-package which gives you a sense of how and why it varies. Know also that the $692m number is a ceiling, not a guarantee.

Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains (reddit.com)

Sounds like Namecheap. They took one of my domains (held for many years) and try to sell it back to me for thousands because now it's a valuable domain.

It shouldn't even be possible to seize a domain in the first place. Too often it ends up hurting legitimate actors.

Like I have said previously¹ about choosing a registrar: If you have regular backups, and if some downtime is not really a problem, it might be fine to use web site hosting, e-mail (and in extreme cases even DNS hosting), from some fly-by-night el cheapo provider. But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else. Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer. A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks. Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market. 1. < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499 >

I have used gandi.net for many years. They provided good support and offered things like free email forwarding. Then they were bought and the new owners just double or more prices and made anything extra including email a ridiculously expensive extra.

Picking a small registrar to optimize for reliability seems iffy. Perhaps today there's a passionate and knowledge owner personally picking up the phone (or empowering a small custom service department). But will that person still be doing that in 3 years time, or will they have moved on?

If your business strategy involves going with a vendor with 'cheap' in the name, that's probably the Root Cause of most issues that arise from that vendor

They used to be great, I had 30+ domains with them and support used to be great. They got acquired by PE and went downhill.

So what company are people switching to? Namecheap used to be a reasonable choice -oh wait there is another thread with that discussion

CloudFlare

Dynadot

Porkbun

Yeah, I'm not waiting around for Namecheap to screw me, I'm moving to porkbun. They do all the stuff Namecheap does for me now. I've been waiting for the "porkbun screwed me" stories, but haven't seen any yet.

Hetzner, OVHcloud are decent European options. I migrated to them after geopolitical risks with US providers got too high. No problems so far.

Have you ever contacted their support? I'm thinking about switching to Hetzner.

Out of curiosity where are people going for their domains. I have a GoDaddy because changing seems like a task that would be more annoying than it is worth and that is even if you can find a place that is better.

I'm all "well shit" reading this, I must have missed all of these issues. I'm not 100% sure, but at the moment, I'm thinking, AWS. I know, Amazon isn't super cool, and are imperfect in a bunch of ways. But at least it appears to be highly configurable and cheap, and Amazon ain't gonna get bought out by private equity and enshittified, legally bullied into oblivion, generally has pretty good quality and competent support, and has plenty of experience in not handing the keys to your castle of services to any random phone caller with a sob story.

I remember years and years ago moving all my domains to Namecheap because they were considered "the good guys." I suppose I'm going to have to start looking around once again to see who are currently the good guys.

To that end, Network Solutions is still around

I've been using joker.com for ~25 years - solid registrar.

I'm not sure which name I hate more - porkbun or joker. It looks like I'll be picking one of them though.

Someone behind the software (karrisaarinen.com)

I agree, what's the point of writing 100x more LOC ? To deliver 100 more features ? With competent people, writing good code is not the bottleneck. Users don't ask for 100x more features, not even 2x more. This week Porsche showed the mission-S concept, not even a screen in the car. Few features, dedicated to driving and I guess the user manual won't be a 500 pages book. In France Dacia Sandero (low cost car with only basic features) is the most sold in the country. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs and never owned an Apple but, correct me if I am wrong, he wanted a limit set of useful and perfect features for his products.

> The industry often talks about software as though it comes out of a factory. A lot of good software, if not most of it, doesn't come from "the industry"...

Strong agree. This also applies to how every org I’ve been a part of that preaches data driven decision making is either using data to make unintuitive wrong decisions or chasing down stats that reinforce their priors.

Yeah, the implementors also act as representatives of the human users of software to be built. That's something which can't be automated away pretty much by definition.

i find the quality coming out of these software factories to be shocking, it's clear to me that the developers are either not using their own products or they just don't care. pretty much every mainstream coding agent suuuuucks, and it doesn't make sense why. i built my own harness in a couple of days that isn't even comparable to codex/claudecode/pi/opencode and you kind of have to ask wtf they're doing with their software if i can produce a better harness in such a short time by myself... my guess is they're asking their "factory" for features without considering the product as a whole, which would be in agreement with the article. but features must be considered and integrated as a whole, not the sum of their parts.

“Great software is opinionated” is something life been saying for years. I forget if I read it somewhere, heard it or came to the concept in my own thinking. All that is to say I don’t claim it’s a unique thought. And yet. I have to say it so often to the teams I’ve worked with or managed. The opinions are those of the creators and that isn’t changing with AI.

You should watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII

As a SaaS author, I couldn't agree more. That's how I see my work: the value is not in the code (AI can code better than me at this point), nor even in the software architecture (AI is just getting to the point where it will get better than me). It's in deciding what to build and what not to build, defining the overall character and vision of the product, looking at each screen and thinking "how does this help my customer do their job". This, unfortunately, takes time, as one has to restart many times because of ideas that turned out not to be as great as one had initially thought. And it results in software that is called "opinionated", and often does not follow what the "industry" does.

If AI can write better code and design better architecture, why can’t it make better product decisions? I don’t see how they are fundamentally different

Products that people use require the developer to imagine they are the person using this. Those of us who develop user interfaces whether visual dashboards or automations driven by voice agents call it "empathy for the user." AI is not capable of empathy. AI is not capable of having good taste.

So to clarify it can imagine its way through writing massive gnarly page-long regexps or imagine how a complex API works and what will happen if it makes a given call or imagine just by reading disassembled code precisely how a binary works, but it will never be able to imagine how a human might feel about a user experience? I have an experiment to offer. Find a really, really great example of something poorly-designed, too busy or whatever other metric you want to use as your "poorly-designed" thing, then ask Claude what's wrong with it and how it should be improved?

There’s still inherent value in people that can write code better and make architecture better than LLMs; even if you can’t.

> the value is not in the code (AI can code better than me at this point), nor even in the software architecture (AI is just getting to the point where it will get better than me). It's in deciding what to build and what not to build, defining the overall character and vision of the product, Defining what to build in enough details is how you get the business logic nailed down (aka essential complexity, aka the domain in DDD). Code is just formal writing and architecture is there for maintenance (a program can be in a single file). Sure there are accidental complexity like the intricacies of the tech, but those are actually explained very well in the docs.

I wrote in my AGENTS.md "do not use chained ternary operators." I'm still waiting for it to work.

I would actually prefer chained ternaries over more verbose if/else expressions with duplicated LHS, so this does go back to the argument about "taste".

My feeling is that this will be near apocalyptic for the devs who found their joy in the finer grained aspects of implementation, like crafting individual “perfect” blocks of CSS and component code. Many developers enjoy the practice of writing software, as something distanced from actually delivering a product. Retooling thought to be delivery-oriented is very difficult.

I used to be among those that appreciate a well structured codebase. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about that and making sure each file was as clean as the timeline allowed, with regular tech debt cleanup when you had to cut some corners or you accumulate some cruft. And I’m still are, with the difference that I still enforce this at agent and code review level because I believe a solid foundation is important for long term success, especially now that it can be cheaper to achieve if you choose to

The opposite actually. I suspect some programmers may come to realise what some of the people in product, design, marketing, who they suspected didn't do very much at all actually do. Finding programmers especially those who self-define as programmers with good product instincts is hard.

It's funny how AI has suddenly caused this great awakening in developers/mathematicians: that building stuff or working on purely technical stuff wasn't their actual value, but rather "taste", "understanding", "deciding what to or not to build" etc. It's like the parts of the field that were janitor-adjacent have suddenly being elevated and they now define the field. This transition happened so fast that it'd make your head spin if you're paying attention.

macOS 15.8.2 Breaks OpenGL (developer.apple.com)

what, there are still regression in the age of AI? or OpenGL is never in regression test suite to begin with?

I honestly don’t think Apple has test automation. So many things have made it out in the past that there’s no way releases have anything close to resembling comprehensive unit or integration level tests.

Why even work in tech with that attitude? You are wasting your time on this earth. The margin is better in selling crystal meth and fentanyl, and has a far tighter product market fit.

I dont hold this attitude myself, I actually don't have any of the products I work with because they are kind of exploitative, but its what the people want and most people have very low self-control, mixed with that neoliberalism has convinced them that their path is completely in their hands. Also it pays me really well so I can take my family and friends on trips and live a nice life :)

You'd think there is no point in astroturfing the latest macos. They make no money from you or me upgrading their OS software. If anything it is a net negative for apple's brand to have me upgrade and face the B.S. newer OSs saddle upon you. The turfing would do better to keep me on my current OS if the goal is to increase my pleasurable feelings towards the apple brand.

They make no money from you either way this quarter, but people talking about bad experiences are sure to deter new customers. I guess Apple is just counting on their walled garden to keep existing customers from leaving.

Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching (neilmadden.blog)

I don't think you need those switch defaults with the sealed types. I didn't check with a compiler, but I think those are unnecessary.

The switches with defaults are both switching over a String with only literal cases. That can't be exhaustive without a default, and switch expressions must be exhaustive.

Isn't that overkill? You can check exhaustiveness with a trivial little helper: function exhaustive(witness: never): never { return witness } https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?#code/FAFwngDgpgBAKgZQBYEsBOIEoF6wLwwBEAGgDKEwA+R5VRAshdYQocMAGYCuAdgMYgUAex4woADyQBDLgGdBANygAKAO4oQPKLNkAuGFqVoAlPsNQ0MAN7AYMNFBBc0o9Zu2zgAX3bd+gkRgQWVQMUigeAHMQJGVZHCh9RFDMBNMDLgBbACMLa1sYWTc+JBg4tPy7Oz4pWVgAcgR6-QcnFxgANgBOAG4C6tqG+mb7R2dRACYADj6qmBq6mHrSEdbxmAne-pgAEygOGQAbEH1tuwlpOUUVeNxjGAB6B6DIWAs0ITR9Dk-IoRAiGQ2HYfF4gA

Agree, python calls this little helper assert_never [0]. I opened an PR to add it to the TypeScript docs some time ago: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-Website/pull/3599 [0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.assert_never

The analogy is very sensible, but I would like to add that Kotlin isn't really hoardning features in the same way Scala did. Compared to Scala, C++, or even Typescript and C#, Kotlin feels a like a well thought out minimal modern language (as minimal as you can be, while still providing conviniences that we have grown to expect like nullability checks, or data classes). (*Except coroutines, I feel like Java is achieving that goal waaay better with virtual threads and structured concurrency than Kotlin did with "forever experimental" API that is full of footguns and lacks any observability.)

I find Kotlin to be full footguns in general, letting you do stuff because 'why the hell not'. It feels like the Kotlin designers just wanted to show off, without considering that many of the resulting code patterns would be terrible.