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gibsonsmog's comments

gibsonsmog | 9 days ago | on: Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

>Though a variant of the last one may well have happened here, and the justification we read is just the one less damaging to everyone involved

Hegseth was planning on getting the model via the Defense Production Act or killing Anthropic via supply chain risk classification preventing any other company working with the Pentagon from working with Anthropic. So while it wasn't Siberia, it was about as close as the US can get without declaring Claude a terrorist. Which I'm sure is on the table regardless

gibsonsmog | 1 month ago | on: The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs

My understanding is that it's quite easy to poison the models with inaccurate data, I wouldn't be surprised if this exact thing has happened already. Maybe not an AI company itself, but it's definitely in the purview of a hostile actor to create bad code for this purpose. I suppose it's kind of already happened via supply chain attacks using AI generated package names that didn't exist prior to the LLM generating them.

gibsonsmog | 1 month ago | on: Why I don't have fun with Claude Code

Yeah, seriously. I've seen musicians nearly come to blows over tube vs solid state amps. Music has even more anger associated with brands and technique than gaming or tech. It's just not flooding the algos like AI currently is

gibsonsmog | 1 month ago | on: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

If you can, find an old tape deck at a thrift store and look into cassettes as well. They're super fun to find and you can buy new ones from groups on Bandcamp usually way cheaper than any other merch offerings and still get the high quality FLAC files. I spent some time last year going through a variety of tapes that were up to 40+ years old and was shocked at how good some of them still sounded.

gibsonsmog | 2 months ago | on: Netflix Open Content

It's actually a regression overall compared to physical media like DVDs and Blurays. No director commentaries, no behind the scenes, no silly menu games, etc. Streaming would theoretically allow for tons of this type of content to be made and connected to a film at any time but instead we have this stagnant recreation of cable TV. C'est la vie

gibsonsmog | 3 months ago | on: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

>improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me?

You could solve that issue (and probably lot's of similar issues) with something like Auto Hotkey. Seems like extreme overkill to have an autonomous agent watch everything you do, so it might possibly click a button.

gibsonsmog | 3 months ago | on: Copyparty, the FOSS file server [video]

Copyparty has been one of my favorite home lab tools since it popped up. Way better than Samba, less hassle than NextCloud, seemingly has more features than FileBrowser and similar. The config can be a bit daunting, but once it clicks it's pretty reasonable.

Plus you can change the UI color scheme to Hotdog Stand, the palette that signals you're hardcore and know what you're doing.

gibsonsmog | 3 months ago | on: Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters

I just cracked open osx voice over for the first time in a while and hoo boy, you weren't kidding. I wonder if you could still "stun" an LLM with this technique while also using some aria-* tags so the original text isn't so incredibly hostile to screen readers. Regardless I think as neat as this tool is, it's an awful pattern and hopefully no one uses it except as part of bot capture stuff.

gibsonsmog | 3 months ago | on: Your smartphone, their rules: App stores enable corporate-government censorship

I've been a web/ux guy for a long time now and I don't think I've ever used a single mobile app/site that is better than a proper full screen piece of software. It's always been a compromise no matter how hard myself or my designers try. Maybe quick photo/video edits but that's less because they're good or they have quality user experiences but more because its often overkill to pop open Photoshop just to cut out a dog pooping in the background or whatever. Most times I feel like mobile devs (myself included) don't even utilize the various unique features mobile devices do have.

I'm also old, cranky and turning into a crusty CLI guy as I get even older and crankier. If you kids need more than a TUI, get off my lawn!

gibsonsmog | 5 months ago | on: Why our website looks like an operating system

I love this. Internet UIs have completely degraded over the last decade and seeing an actual company decide to try something different is beautiful. I barely see devs or designers try anything new. This team even added a screen saver if you leave the tab open and inactive for a bit! Wonderful.

gibsonsmog | 5 months ago | on: The subjective experience of coding in different programming languages (2023)

This is also how I have traditionally looked at new codebases. I don't necessarily actually clean it up (I dislike changing someones style unless it is completely necessary) but I build up a mental model similar to what you're outlining. It's been really interesting with these LLM coding tools. I may not disagree with the implementation in terms of logic (it just does what I've prompted it to do after all) but something about it will 'stink'. Amusingly this feeling is the true 'vibe' of 'vibe coding' to me.

I sometimes wonder if this is the result of experience/education (I'm not a compsci major) or if it's just a naturally different way to think about systems.

gibsonsmog | 7 months ago | on: Debounce

Holy moly, for years I've had in the back of my head this thought about why, earlier in my career, I'd see random doubly submitted form submissions on certain projects. Same form code and processing as other sites, legitimate submissions too. Eventually we added more spam filtering and restrictions unrelated to these legitimate ones, but it was probably the double-click users causing those errant submissions. I'd never even have thought of those users. Fascinating
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