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adtac

4,657 karma · joined September 5, 2016

building https://subtrace.dev

email: adtac [at] domain above

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adtac··on Muse Spark Open
because (0, 0) is on the left
adtac··on Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence
grug realise grug also rely on "harness" for work? grug just call it by other names: coffee, chair, desk, ubuntu, mechanical keyboard, github (if not broken that day)
adtac··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
but you can click the link and reveal the information. what is being hidden? from who?
adtac··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
why is this such a bad thing? it's not really any different from using a uuid as a user facing key, which basically everyone does.

and trying to protect your moat isn't automatically a bad thing. they clearly feel it's helping competition, so they're closing a hole. competition is good doesn't mean help your competitors.

- coming from someone who's been using fastmail as my personal for ~10 years because i don't want my emails to be backprop fodder

adtac··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
LOC is the worst metric for engineering output, except for all the others - Churchill
adtac··on AI is killing B2B SaaS
> camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible

tiktok alone has 1.5 million directors! it's just that we call them creators now.

the meaning of the word director has changed, that's all. but professional roles shift in meaning all the time. a computer used to be a literal human doing arithmetic. an engineer was someone who designed war machinery. being a doctor used to mean teaching at an university.

human beings are natural tool makers. we always have been. the frontier material to manipulate where the most advanced engineering happens constantly changes: stone -> bronze -> iron -> ink (descartes) -> steel -> silicon -> javascript (YOU ARE HERE).

notice how each step is an improvement/abstraction on top of the steps that came before it. some say english is next in that chain. i honestly have no idea. all i know is there will always be The Next Thing and it'll be much nicer to work with.

adtac··on Exe.dev
i got to try exe a while back and i have to say, the "Login with exe" [1] is probably the most magic thing i've seen since tailscale :)

[1] https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe

adtac··on Some Epstein file redactions are being undone
ed is the standard Unix text editor.
adtac··on Musk Foundation
December 2018 was the last version to not have "Development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity"

https://web.archive.org/web/20181223120124/http://www.muskfo...

adtac··on Show HN: Strange Attractors
too many of these vaguely look like what galaxies look like from earth

e.g. https://i.imgur.com/ZjiBF8f.png

just a coincidence?

adtac··on The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
weekend hackernews best hackernews
adtac··on Deterministic multithreading is hard (2024)
if you haven't read the factorio devblog before, please do!

after HN, it's one of my favourite places on the internet because i constantly learn new, random, insane things almost every time. imho it teaches you how to think + shows you what great engineering taste looks like. sorry if i'm overly effusive but each post is so deeply technical and well-written that i can't believe it's free.

you don't need to know anything about factorio or gamedev btw (i don't), just pick a random number between 1 to 438 and start reading :)

adtac··on A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
> or endeavor to

you picked the worst example company to complain about how they're are not trying lol. just in 2025 from anthropic:

Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met...

On the Biology of a Large Language Model https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

Progress on Attention https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attention-update/index...

A Toy Model of Interference Weights https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/interference-weights/i...

Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools https://www.anthropic.com/research/open-source-circuit-traci...

adtac··on A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
>Note that there isn’t the slightest attempt to explain the planet trajectories (specifically, why the planets keep ending up where they do regardless of how many epicycles you bolt on) from a theoretical perspective. My impression is that they have absolutely no idea why the heavens behave the way they do; all they can do is stare at the night sky, record, and see what happens. That is not reassuring to me at least.

- AstronomerNews user, circa 1650 (probably)

adtac··on Adaptive LLM routing under budget constraints
Why not something dumb like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b60199-b6ac-8009-b50d-3e7cfff1d7... (gpt-4o)
adtac··on Eternal Struggle
wow not even yin-yang can escape entropy or the heat death of the universe
adtac··on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers
>That's basically your documents lossily encoded.

Vector embeddings are lossy encodings of documents roughly in the same way a SHA256 hash is a lossy encoding. It's virtually impossible to reverse the embedding vector to recover the original document.

Note: when vectors are combined with other components for search and retrieval, it's trivial to end up with a horribly insecure system, but just vector embeddings are useful by themselves and you said "all useful AI retrieval systems are insecure by design", so I felt it necessary to disagree with that part.

adtac··on Claude Code weekly rate limits
if you feel cheated now, I promise you'll feel more cheated if they did this after you rely on it for several months. the least worst option is to change pricing as early as possible.
adtac··on ZUSE: IRC terminal client
this is just XMPP and it has been around for years before Slack was even a thing

Slack won anyway for the same reasons most centralised, commercial, closed sourced products often win: less fragmentation, more marketing, stronger network effects, simpler onboarding for normies, richer integrations, and most importantly, an enterprise sales team that actually showers

adtac··on Git experts should try Jujutsu
clicked hoping for an out of distribution argument for why a specific type of Japanese martial arts is perfect for git users :(

good article nonetheless!

adtac··on Building Linux kernel on macOS natively
1. modern computers are insanely fast

2. they compiled a version of the kernel with as many configurable options disabled as possible

3. modern computers are insanely fast

adtac··on The Shape of the Essay Field
1. PG is implicitly talking about good essays. And it's very hard to write a good essay if you don't believe it's true.

2. Whether something is true has nothing to do with whether the reader knows it. I know many false things and ideas.

adtac··on Moment of heart's formation captured in images for first time
this is like saying "same way cells know how to be anything - quantum electrodynamics"
adtac··on Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice
> Our models will be available under an Apache 2.0 license.

^ from the post

https://github.com/SesameAILabs/csm is empty for now, but I imagine they'll be releasing it soon: https://x.com/_apkumar/status/1895492615220707723

adtac··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
Not in the very short term, but we've talked about it internally and we might do it in the future!

If you'd like to use Subtrace on Windows, it would be super helpful to understand your use-case deeply so that we build the right things in the right order. Please reach out to me at adtac@subtrace.dev, I'd love to chat!

adtac··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
Flat pricing with unlimited requests hosted in the cloud (https://subtrace.dev/pricing).

We also have an on-prem version of Subtrace for enterprises. It runs in their own AWS account without ever talking to subtrace.dev so that companies in regulated industries like healthcare can use Subtrace.

adtac··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
What would you like to see?

One of things we're thinking about is automatic method/function call tracing. Something like attaching the entire stack trace of calls done to handle the API request. Ideally using the same UI so that you can see the headers/payload that was sent and the function-level stack trace right next to each other. None of the OpenTelemetry verbosity, all of the observability!

adtac··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
One of my litmus tests for software is "can I use it on a flight?", so you'll be pleased to know Subtrace works great locally without ever talking to subtrace.dev!

    subtrace run -devtools=/subtrace -- python3 -m http.server
Run the above command in a Linux machine, go to http://localhost:8000/subtrace and send some requests to localhost:8000 to see a stripped down version of the Subtrace dashboard working fully locally.
adtac··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
re self-hosting: yep! Use the -devtools flag to get a stripped down version of Subtrace running entirely locally:

    subtrace run -devtools=/subtrace -- python3 -m http.server
This starts a Python server on localhost:8000 but with Subtrace. Everything except /subtrace is forwarded to the Python server like usual, but if you go to http://localhost:8000/subtrace you should see the Chrome DevTools network tab running in the browser like a regular app. Any request you send to localhost:8000 + all outgoing requests made from inside the Python app will automatically appear in that dashboard!
adtac··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
in a different context, maybe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38044786 :)
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