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bashtoni

1,654 karma · joined January 17, 2012

Founder, Corrected Cloud AWS Consultancy correctedcloud.au sam@correctedcloud.au
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bashtoni··on Stolen Buttons
How do you explain this website containing all the stolen buttons then?
bashtoni··on Show HN: QBasic Gorillas (Repeeled)
I don't know if the poster changed the filter after reading your comment, but the filter that is there now looks great to my eyes.
bashtoni··on Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos
Seems like a great idea for an Immich plugin. I'm really not convinced I or anyone I know would _pay_ for AI to guess the date a photo was taken though.
bashtoni··on TFTP Honey Pot Results
I can't be the only one smiling at the mention of file_id.diz
bashtoni··on Grok 4.5
But very expensive compared to Deepseek v4 Pro, which performs similarly.

Grok is stuck in a difficult place - not the best model at anything, and not the cheapest either. It's hard to make a case for using it on any dimension, even before you factor in the history (I'm not sure suggesting the company uses the model that refers to itself as "MechaHitler" is the way to a promotion).

bashtoni··on GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday
Yep, I'm in full agreement. When extending functionality of some already existing code it also generally makes sense to write tests first.

I think the value is much lower (maybe even negative) when you're still trying to work out what shape the code will take, in an initial implementation.

Of course, as others have pointed out, nuanced opinion doesn't get clicks or YouTube views.

bashtoni··on GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday
Sure. If his take was "100% unit test coverage is a waste of time" I think that's not unreasonable. You could make a case that the "you must write tests before you write code, every single time!" stuff is needlessly dogmatic. I also think that sometimes people focus too much on unit tests to the detriment of end to end tests that better model actual system interactions.

None of these were Theo's take. He was pushing the idea that unit tests in general were a waste of time because you could be shipping new features instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBHyip4peo for an example of this. The nicest possible interpretation on this is that he's deliberately saying something he knows is wrong to attract attention.

bashtoni··on GPT-5.6 Sol, along with Terra and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday
I feel like listening to Theo about anything technical is like consulting a Labrador retriever for advice on quantum physics.

Every time I've ever seen one of his videos it's pretty clear he has very little understanding of development or engineering. I first became aware of him from his early "unit tests are a waste of time" stuff, and it seems his skillset is building a personal brand. Fair play, he's clearly talented at that, but that doesn't make his opinion on anything else worthwhile.

bashtoni··on Superpowers 6
Agreed. I often take a look at the skills and maybe take something from there to create a more minimal version that does just enough for my needs and nothing more. YAGNI is definitely the principle to be followed here.

I'm sure all these people on Reddit that talk about having 5 Claude Max 20x plans and hitting the weekly limits on them all have a ton of these loaded.

bashtoni··on The US Used to Demand the Best Tech. Now We Ban It
This argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

- The Polestar vehicles most recently banned are made in Charleston SC

- Fossil fuel industries in the US receive huge subsidies

- Non-Chinese brands (Hyundai/ Kia) produce models with similar pricing

bashtoni··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
I don't see how you can make a case for a $700bn+ IPO when the government might not even let you sell your product. America is ceding the lead in the AI race. The winners here will be the Chinese AI companies.

If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.

bashtoni··on Feds deny Polestar authorization to sell cars in US from model year 2027
Are they going to be banning Volvo too given they have the same parent company?

It'll be interesting to see how far this protectionism goes.

bashtoni··on The Coming Loop
Practically, what this boils down to is having clear success criteria.

The harness (Claude Codex, Codex, Pi etc) keeps throwing things into the context and executing tools (as directed by the model) until the success criteria is satisfied.

The "rules" of using AI successfully are basically just the rules of any successful development team. Break things down into clearly defined chunks, make the success criteria clear and provide a way to get the right feedback on how the system is running (logs, metrics, traces etc).

bashtoni··on Show HN: Criterion Closet as a website – pull any of 1,247 films off the shelf
This is great, but unusable for people like me that need to have the y axis inverted. It would be amazing if you could add that functionality.
bashtoni··on US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks
They're behind, but they're catching up pretty quickly. I wouldn't bet against Chinese companies dominating this market in the medium to long term. Nvidia could easily end up being the Tesla vs Huawei as BYD.
bashtoni··on US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks
I think the next step is for China to start selling Huawei (and other) GPUs around the world, because everyone appreciates the risk of giving either of the two superpowers their data. The US is no longer in a position to pressure other countries to bad imports from Chinese companies.

This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.

bashtoni··on Policy on the AI Exponential
You missed a couple ofvery important ones:

- Your AI data centres will run only on renewable energy

- Your AI data centres will not use evaporative cooling

bashtoni··on Why Ctrl+V won't paste images in Claude Code on WSL, with a fix
A text based interface is perfect for interacting with a large language model, and it seems unsurprising to me that it's the most popular way to work with them.

Frankly, the idea of having to decipher what a picture is supposed to represent to use a skill fills me with horror.

bashtoni··on The AWS Service Quotas That Will Take Down Your Production at 3 Am
Yours is not an isolated case. There are multiple posts on Reddit from the last few weeks where bedrock quotas were set to 0, even for accounts that were actively using bedrock.

I've only seen it in accounts that weren't actively using bedrock, which is annoying but not business ending.

AWS needs to get on top of this sort of thing before people lose confidence in their platform, but I fear they may have lost too many staff to be able to get it the attention it needs.

bashtoni··on Starship V3
I was also disappointed to discover this.
bashtoni··on HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
My card did get charged.
bashtoni··on HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
You also seem to have a bug where people get randomly invoiced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679

I got a random invoice for $45.08 back in March, despite not having auto top up enabled. Trying to reach support met with a brick wall. Based on the post I linked to, I'm not the only one facing this problem.

bashtoni··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
If Atlassian had vision they'd swoop in with a sponsorship offer for Ghostty that included moving it to BitBucket.
bashtoni··on Ubuntu 26.04
Also green light for Fedora 44 release on 28 April

https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meeting_matrix_fedoraproje...

bashtoni··on An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
The Claude Code experience is still pretty bad after upgrading. I often see

  Error: claude-opus-4-7[1m] is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Bash right now. Wait briefly and then try this action again. If it keeps failing, continue with other tasks that don't require this action and come back to it later. Note: reading files, searching code, and other read-only operations do not require the classifier and can still be used.
The only solution is to switch out of auto mode, which now seems to be the default every time I exit plan mode. Very annoying.
bashtoni··on Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7
Only if you set `ENABLE_PROMPT_CACHING_1H`, which was mentioned in the release notes for a recent Claude Code release but doesn't seem to be in the official docs.
bashtoni··on The looming college-enrollment death spiral
Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM.

A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.

bashtoni··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
~$1/hr over 4 hours.

I'm pretty conservative when it comes to clearing the context, and I also tend to provide the right files to work on (or at least the right starting point).

I had seen prior to using the model that it starts producing much worse results when the context used is larger, so my usage style probably helps getting better results. I work like this with Claude Code anyway, so it wasn't a big change.

bashtoni··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
After hitting Claude limits today I spent the afternoon using OpenCode + GLM 5.1 via OpenRouter and I was very impressed.

OpenCode picked up my CLAUDE.md files and skills straight away, and I got similar performance to Opus 4.6.

bashtoni··on I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue
Me too. I got a random $45.08 invoice from Anthropic on Mar 21 despite the fact that I'm on the Max x5 plan, and have auto top up disabled.

Raised with support immediately, after being told a human would look at it I've not been able to get anything further.

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