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CSMastermind

9,135 karma · joined July 9, 2014

christopher.seltzer@gmail.com 7246304589
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CSMastermind··on Gemini 4 Carbon
Argon is easily the worst model I've tried this year. From all the discourse I've seen, that seems to be the general consensus.

This might be the first comment I've ever seen saying something nice about the model.

CSMastermind··on Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
I don't think that's true.

I was at Microsoft when they user-tested Windows 7 to death. Including installing eye tracking software during sessions so you could monitor where the user was looking at on the screen.

That data was in part used to justify the changes made in 8: "Users only click on the start menu 0.1% of the time and when they do they focus on a narrow portion of the screen."

CSMastermind··on GPT-6.1 Terra
> Do you then recommend Sol for technical documentation?

Every model I've tried is just abysmal at this, for what it's worth.

If any do it well please let me know and I'll give it a spin.

CSMastermind··on I turned my TV into a Game Boy Color with a Pokemon town as my home screen
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have started banning people who use their models to do this. People have started homebrewing with DeepSeek.
CSMastermind··on I turned my TV into a Game Boy Color with a Pokemon town as my home screen
If you haven't seen the trend on X of people hacking their TVs to remove the bloat and spyware then add in better UI it's been pretty awesome to watch.
CSMastermind··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
I'm curious how they got into the business in the first place.

From everything that came out they seem terribly unqualified.

CSMastermind··on Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds
It's not that 4 isn't a valid seed (though insanely unlikely) it's that once I know your values weren't picked randomly because I guessed one of them I can easily figure out the others.

In this case one cert gets defeated and you go the odds of that number being that low are 2^-384. Essentially impossible if it were randomly selected. It's much more likely you didn't choose that at random so I start guessing a bunch of other low numbers for your other certificates and find them quickly.

CSMastermind··on Triple-A Minesweeper
This was incredibly enjoyable thanks for sharing.
CSMastermind··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
Like a decade ago I got into a huge fight with a Staff Eng at our company over Dart. I had just been put in charge of the company's architecture and one of the first things I did was migrate everything to TypeScript (which was relatively new at the time). He was so angry I didn't pick Dart. Good choice by me in retrospect (though picking Angular 2 over React not so much).
CSMastermind··on US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams
Trump decided to rebrand it as Super Intelligence since AI is so politically divisive.
CSMastermind··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
Actually, one of the biggest criticisms of him is that he overperformed with bad teams.

The NFL has a draft system where the worst team in the league gets the best pick in the next year's draft.

Tomlin dragging teams that should have won 2 or 3 games into the playoffs each year just to lose immediately meant that the Steelers never got any good draft picks and thus never improved the team year of year.

They were stuck in a purgatory of sorts.

CSMastermind··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
For those who don't know Mike Tomlin is the former head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the second longest tenured coach in the league, and never had a losing season before resigning his job last year.

The idea of any NFL head coach having time to do this, especially a winning one, is absurd.

CSMastermind··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
I replied elsewhere but:

- Gunpowder and steel had essentially nothing to do with Cortez's victory.

- The Aztecs did not see the Spaniards as Gods

- Smallpox played a role at the very end but had little to do with Cortez's victory.

- They leave out the primary reason Cortez won (his ability to build a coalition of native people who hated the Aztecs).

- They leave out the secondary reason Cortez won (superior European battle tactics).

- They ignore the fact that there were Europeans fighting on both sides (a delegation was sent from Cuba to stop Cortez; they were the ones that actually brought the smallpox not Cortez).

CSMastermind··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
The post I'm replying to is correct: Spanish technology (steel, gunpowder) had very little to do with Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.

The idea that the Aztecs took the Spanish for gods and specifically that Moctezuma mistook Cortez's for the returning god Quetzalcoatl is fiction. We actually know the exact book that it came from.

Smallpox did play a role but it was brought by the slaves of Europeans sent to _stop_ Cortez nearly two years after he started fighting the Aztecs. By the time smallpox killed Moctezuma's successor, Cortez's victory was already assured. The disease was not the key to his victory; it was more that it prevented insurgency after the conquest.

Also worth noting that if your theory was that Cortez won because of the gun powder or steel that is hard to square because by the time the two forces clashed the Aztecs had more of it then he did given the rival European forces trying to stop him.

Cortez won primarily because he had an army with a nucleus of veterans from the Italian wars that applied the lessons of the Reconquista.

The technology that let him win was European tactics and political manuevering not anything physical they brought with them.

CSMastermind··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
The misinformation about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs is one of the most depressing things imaginable.

The historical record is completely clear and we have first hand accounts, primary sources, from the people present. It's all readily available and anyone interest can easily verify it.

And yet, even in the comments responding to yours, people confidently state just blatantly untrue things.

CSMastermind··on ChatGPT Pro 500
Yeah it's wild that they don't outright state the specific usage limits.

Just trust me bro accounting.

CSMastermind··on OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription
Hard to believe when all they've done so far is raise prices and reduce usage quotas.

The 20x plan right now lasts about 1 day and they're reducing it to half a day of usage?

CSMastermind··on World Labs Is Joining AMD
What is AMD getting out of this?
CSMastermind··on AMD to Buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs AI Startup for $8.2B
Dupe of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883696
CSMastermind··on Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit
Apples have some of wildest biology that I've seen as a non-professional biologist. At many genes, they carry two different alleles instead of two matching ones. They're almost all self-incompatible. A Honeycrisp flower cannot pollinate a Honeycrisp flower.

This means that you can't breed them in the traditional sense that we do with other plants. Outside of Granny Smith apples the ones you eat are mostly the results of mutations in the grown plants that we cut off and graft.

CSMastermind··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
> I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point

If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.

CSMastermind··on The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Having the chat logs enter the training data and having them have a meaningful influence on the ultimate result the model produces are very different things.

The text for all the Goosebumps books are certainly in the training data and to some small amount influenced the solve. But their contribution was so vanishingly small it would seem absurd to say R L Stein should have recourse for contibuting to the solve.

CSMastermind··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
Harness and data seem like two vectors. It's also not clear to me that at some point we won't get a snowball effect from the platform that has the most use and thus the most training data just running away with a positive feedback loop.
CSMastermind··on Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
Once they capature enough marketshare prices and restrictions are both going to skyrocket. The difference between the subscription usage and API pricing are stark.
CSMastermind··on Finite time blowup for an averaged three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation (2014)
Lol as far as I know that post was the origin of that claim and it's clearly just a guy predicting something that will happen in the future with no information about it.
CSMastermind··on Space industry lacks workers needed to rebuild satellites lost in war: report
Most American military planners assume that if China invades Taiwan they'll use smaller "tactical" nuclear missles to do things like destory carrier groups to test the will of the US on MAD. Predicting, probably correctly, that the US will not respond with a full scale nuclear strike in response to the destruction of a military target just because nuclear weapons were used.
CSMastermind··on GPT-6 Astra
I have both set up with full access to all the repos at the company, infrastructure, deployment pipelines, etc.

I can tell Sol, "Hey we need to update this core database schema to handle this new use case" and it will masterfully handle the update, version the API, roll the consumers over, including versioning the Kafka schemas, deploying things in sequence, watching the deployments to make sure the new services act actually active before cutting over consumers, exercising the website and mobile apps in staging environments before releasing to production, etc.

Fable just falls over on long horizon tasks, it does partial implementations, it cuts corners, it gives up, it doesn't verify it's work, it loses track of what it's doing, etc.

It's fine for specific well scoped tasks but can't take high level guidance for complex updates.

CSMastermind··on GPT-6 Astra
Sol easily outperforms Fable on every task I've tried it on.
CSMastermind··on Ask HN: Why are OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down? Coincidence?
I assume it cascaded from one provider to the other as people who lost claude access for instance moved to openai who moved to grok when it went down, etc.
CSMastermind··on Florida revokes permits for license plate readers on state highways
Moving here after living in NYC for a decade was a breath of fresh air. I had forgotten that competent governments exist.
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