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brightball

17,475 karma · joined September 26, 2014

Brightball (personal company / blog) https://www.brightball.com/

Carolina Code Conference https://carolina.codes

Carolina Code Cast (tech podcast) https://blog.carolina.codes/podcast

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brightball··on Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
It can do that too, but you can tell it that it’s allowed to access specific computers it’s installed on. I allow it on a couple of computers on my network and from there it can SSH elsewhere.

It can send all bot traffic through those computers too so it’s less likely to get blocked.

brightball··on Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
I gave it access to a box on my network and it spins up agents in herdr with whatever prompts I give it. Works really well with any agent you tell it to use.

Over the weekend I decided to try Lauren Tan’s pstack via her Dr Eggbot and had it built a bot that would run a build for me for a few days. It was a complex enough prompt that it triggered something to let me tell it which models to use and ended up settling on Opus 5.5 for planning and review with Grok 4.7 for the actual coding.

Ran for the weekend and completed 5 phases of a project with about 15 PRs. Reviews caught several things and sent them back premerge.

I enjoyed a fun weekend with my daughter clearing Escape Rooms in Colorado. Came back to a completed project.

It was great.

brightball··on Claude Duet is the first personal-assistant-type harness that feels useful
I will be shocked if anything can beat Grok Bot for usefulness at this point.

It took me 2 days to hit “how did I ever survive without this” and it’s only gotten better.

brightball··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
It’s a leap to claim anyone loves a federal agency.

I followed a lot of the news about them regarding this thing. If I own a business or even simply act as a manager and I know of a constant threat to my staff I would take any action I was legally allowed to protect them. Doesn’t matter if it’s ICE, the postal service, a gas station, theme park, etc.

It’s basic self defense.

ICE agents didn’t start covering their faces just because, they did it because people were doxxing them and going after their families.

People are going to protect themselves and their staff. It’s basic human nature.

brightball··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
The article is talking about a license plate scanner website that was being used to track the movements of ICE vehicles, follow them and harass agents.

If people started doing that to UPS delivery trucks I would expect UPS to do everything in their power to protect their staff.

brightball··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t this in response to a massive organized anti-ICE operation?

Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.

brightball··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Yea, I thought the whole Lavabit episode made it clear that privacy oriented solutions based in the US were going to have a hard time. Most Proton’s whole selling point is their location.
brightball··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
It does happen. There’s just enough people who have realized the negative side effects of going along with it that fewer and fewer people are willing to.
brightball··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
“Moderate Democrats” say hello
brightball··on US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
They do. It's the entire Libertarian wing of the party.
brightball··on Anthropic S-1
A lot of things. The UX for non-code related activities is excellent. They've removed the friction from setting things up by giving each agent their own machine which can give you remote desktop. The process of creating and working with each agent is as simple as naming it and then explaining it's job. You can keep feeding them information, ask them to train themselves, etc.

They can access anything you can, whether there's an MCP/CLI/API or not. I create speciality bots for each 3rd party tool that I use at this point. The bots can talk to each other, have group chats. You can give them access to the machines that you're running the software on and give specific bots permission to do things on certain machine (like an Obsidian bot that writes logs of daily bot activity on a specific machine with a Dropbox folder shared). I've got a Security Scan bot that downloads anything that a bot wants to download to it's personal machine at SpaceX and runs a slew of security scanners before the other bots can work with it.

I got locked out of one machine while I was travelling and I asked Grok Bot on another machine if it could get into that one over SSH, so it sent me a temporary authorization link via Tailscale, connected to the machine and restarted the stuck process for me.

The usability is off the charts. It's really like having a team of people working for you. I've run a conference for the last few years and was getting completely overloaded. Now I have 14 bots specialized just for the conference helping me do it better than ever and participating in architectural discussions to build a system that help long term.

If you find yourself trying to juggle a lot in your life and work, it's a gift.

brightball··on Anthropic S-1
Once people start using it, the usage is constantly increasing as well.
brightball··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
It takes less than that.

“I’m not going to do that. Moving on.”

brightball··on Anthropic S-1
SpaceX will just use the compute directly if they don't have buyers. They are already talking about the data center shortage as well because they can't get capacity elsewhere either. It's a weird problem to not be able to use your own data centers because you rented them out.

Between SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Neuralink, X, Grok, Grok Bot & Cursor there's not a demand shortage.

Grok Bot's the fastest growing product in the history of the company and the moment you use it, it's clear why. Took me about 1-2 days to realize I'd have a very hard time going back to not having it available.

brightball··on Is PHP Running on Your ColdFusion Server? How to Check, and Remove It
ColdFusion...now there's a name I haven't heard in some time.
brightball··on The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive
EPA planned to do the same thing in 2022...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220124192618/https://archive.e...

brightball··on US designates helium as a critical material
Yea, the sale of the federal helium reserve never made sense to me back in 2013.

https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-helium-system-sale-pro...

Messer American is in a good spot now I suppose:

https://www.blm.gov/announcement/blm-accepts-bids-sale-feder...

brightball··on Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model
Exactly. This is not "any" model. This is a model designed to run locally. That's the entire selling point of the model.

If you have a model that's going to run locally and then call home, it defeats the purpose. When that model tries to upload an entire machine profile to the internet when you explicitly are building a defensive rule, it's worth.

When it calls back to China in that situation, it's much much worse.

It's good that they determined the behavior was rare. Maybe there's a good way to prevent it in the future.

brightball··on I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
This is essentially the case for Starlink
brightball··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.

Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.

It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.

brightball··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
I saw a big write up on using Dagger for CI no matter your git host and I was curious if there were any real benefits?
brightball··on Root shell on Samsung TV
It’s unfortunately only a symbol of bot activity or popularity with the crowd in the subreddit.
brightball··on OBS Studio 33
I saw somebody else besides DHH talking about their decision not to accept PRs with AI written code briefly. I believe there’s a Rust fork in progress.
brightball··on Docker is weird
In 2014, Heroku was the only game in town on the PaaS front. Nobody else was even close.

Java App Servers with their WAR file deployments across a cluster were the closest equivalent.

Docker was the enabler for alternatives.

brightball··on Docker is weird
I remember going to a demo of Docker in South Carolina before it hit 1.0. Came back and wrote the “Docker is the Heroku Killer” article on my blog and it was the first thing I wrote that made the front page of HN.
brightball··on Personal software factories are a waste of time
There's a 2 part answer to this.

1. If these all took a very long time to run, it would create a case to defer to the CI. With Elixir, virtually every check you see runs maximally parallel and the entire precommit stack finishes very quickly. I use this as part of queued, local "/goal" commands because I have built up a level of trust that queuing a dozen goals and then reviewing them in the morning will be correct virtually every time.

2. Since everything finishes quickly, having it setup as a precommit check let's the agent see and correct all of the failures locally before anything goes up to the CI itself. All of these checks are duplicated at the CI layer, but it's extremely rare for anything to fail. As a bonus, the AI learns and adapts to the feedback of these checks so it's correct the first time eventually.

brightball··on Linux 7.3
This is why I direct most family to Apple devices. Otherwise it’s constant tech support.
brightball··on Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
Just like any other registrar, yes.

The process is standardized.

brightball··on Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
How is that any different than any other domain registrar though? There's nothing stopping you from just moving the domain to another provider if it's a problem.

Compared to the Namecheap and GoDaddy stories, Cloudflare has been a gift to use.

brightball··on Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains
Not really. I've had about 50 domains with them for the last few years and have never seen them reach out do to something like that.
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