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chris_st

1,622 karma · joined November 24, 2015

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chris_st··on BB(10) > Graham's Number
Thanks, I enjoyed that explanation quite a bit (didn't understand everything, but enough to get a major clue).
chris_st··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
I think of focus-follows-mouse as a different thing. FFM raises the window under the mouse, but doesn’t move the text insertion point (at least on X and Windows, the only two places I can remember using it). But the Apollo’s window manager was different - moving the mouse moved the insertion point along with it.
chris_st··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
> the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

I remember using an (early?) Apollo computer that worked that way... I was warned by the person showing me, and a bit later he accidentally bumped the mouse while I was typing! Letters all over...

I believe this was in the era before X windows took off for unix boxes. I miss SunTools - it was nice and simple.

chris_st··on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025
I had personal subscriptions to WebStorm and GoLand and cancelled them not long after getting Windsurf. Just don't need the IDE abilities like I used to... Still use 'go to definition' but that's pretty much it.
chris_st··on Strutt's Powered Wheelchair Is Not a Wheelchair (For Legal Reasons)
As a resident of an independent living facility, I live among a lot of people who use various makes and models of powered chairs. And a great many who have the joystick dislike it immensely, and would prefer to have the handlebars-style navigation. But it's kind of the only way to have the "chair" style, nothing in front of you design. Some of the more scooter-style have rotating chairs, so you can park parallel to a table and turn, but that depends on lower limb mobility, so no easy solutions here.

The "climb a 13° slope, clear a 2-inch curb and cross a 4.7-inch gap" is quite impressive.

chris_st··on Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design
You might want to look at Simon Willison's showboat [0] tool, which generates walkthroughs of code to explain changes.

[0]: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

chris_st··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
Cool, thanks!
chris_st··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
Just curious, why the 'sudo tee {file} > /dev/null'?
chris_st··on An atlas of periodic solutions to the three-body problem
A few that I looked at are annotated, "It is linearly stable (largest Floquet multiplier 1.000), so a small nudge only makes it wobble." Doesn't define "small nudge", alas...
chris_st··on Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra
I use it, and have been happy with it for the most part. Like sibling, I use it for GPT-5.6-Sol and Opus work, and use their free models (GLM 5.2 for the past few months, trying SWE-2 now).
chris_st··on My hobby of building miniatures and taking pretty pictures
Wow, so beautiful (and I say this as a tea drinker :-)
chris_st··on Nvidia AVO scores 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark
You'll find that those goalposts are very movable.
chris_st··on Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles
I'll check that out - I loved his "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography". Excellent introduction to cryptography.
chris_st··on Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach
I really liked her "Uncharted with Hannah Fry" podcast, sorry it ended.
chris_st··on SWE-1.7 Reach Near GPT 5.5 and Opus Intelligence
FWIW, Cognition has all the Sonnet/Opus/Fable models, and all the GPT ones, as well as GLM, Kimi, and Gemini.
chris_st··on FrontierCode
What "non-house" harnesses have you found to work best?
chris_st··on Tribute to Jiro Yamada, Automotive Artist (1960-2025) [video]
Interesting to see (roughly!) what percent of each car is engine.
chris_st··on Using Tailscale with an OrbStack VM on macOS
I have this setup, roughly, with UTM rather than orbstack. I think I have it set up safely, curious how you see it has the wrong permissions?
chris_st··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
Another way I'm "going slower" is to have the AI implement individual sub-steps of the current task, and review each one. It's slower than having it yolo out the whole thing, but it's much smaller incremental bits to review, so my brain doesn't glaze over in a huge review, like I had if I had it do the whole task.

I'm following an Ideas -> PRD -> Issues -> Tasks methodology, where each task has a bunch of sub-tasks. I have it just do one (or a few, I'm having it do Red/Green/Refactor as separate sub-steps, so I review the Red case, and then once that's good, do the Green and Refactor steps, and review those).

chris_st··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
Yup, just like people!
chris_st··on Using AI to write better code more slowly
Good!
chris_st··on What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)
Nope, not better quality if you don't like the smell of cigarettes.
chris_st··on Show HN: Statewright – Visual state machines that make AI agents reliable
Please add support for the Windsurf editor as well. Thanks!
chris_st··on What we lost the last time code got cheap
Awesome, stealing that!
chris_st··on Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc
And they're clearly marked as `unsafe`, so easy to find, which gives them a nice list of issues to address.
chris_st··on What we lost the last time code got cheap
I asked Claude to tell me why something was implemented the way it was, and got an excellent response. One data point, would love to hear more examples.
chris_st··on Where the goblins came from
...it came as a surprise that [leaving a Petri dish out with a window open] would end up with interesting [molds] (called [penicillin]). _It was not planned at all_.
chris_st··on Lambda Calculus Benchmark for AI
Well, to be fair, people cheat by remembering what they did last time. I think the idea here is to run the models from a "clean slate" and see how often they succeed/fail.

They are, like people, non-deterministic, so giving them several "fair" trials makes sense to me.

chris_st··on Google Plans to Invest Up to $40B in Anthropic
Possibly because they just haven't been able to manufacture enough of them yet to be a viable business to others? They're fighting everyone else for foundry space and time.
chris_st··on Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities
But it's pretty cool that LLM bug hunting is pretty cheap... the 1-person projects can do it themselves, don't have to contract out to some huge security company.
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