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kolinko

5,976 karma · joined September 30, 2009

Entrepreneur from Poland. Founded Szuku.pl, a polish people search engine, and EasyAsk - info-bot company. M.Sc at University of Warsaw. Currently involved in iPhone apps development - www.motivapps.com (first product - a Goal-Setting Workshop: www.motivapps.com/gsw )

workIn-Progress.posterous.com

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kolinko··on Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3
+1, this tells nothing about the quality. Or even whether this is an upgrade or downgrade.
kolinko··on Apple capped engineers at a $200 daily AI budget
cheaper per token or by effect
kolinko··on GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research
It has been shown that advanced llms have internal flags that behave more or less the same as emotions.
kolinko··on GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research
It was a problem since at least 4.8 if not 4.5, I didn’t use Claude before.

I have spent a considerable time trying to remove this pattern and my understanding is that it’s just finetuned to use grep on everything, and regexes. One reason is that this makes sense when navigating through code, secondly this is how it was always done pre 2026.

kolinko··on Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
A funny habit from polish language - every object has a gender. Hat is feminine, book is feminine, car is masculine. In case of names „a” in the name end makes it feminine, making Terra and Astra female and all the other models male.

We have also gender neutral words (child, butter, ending with „o” in polish).

And you cannot really talk about anything without revealing its gender because all the adjectives and verbs are gendered. Using a gender neutral form for Astra or Opus would be very weird.

Out of all the project names „Claude” is the only project that you can kind of use any gender form with.

And our grammar has no distinction between animate vs inanimate. If I talk about agents in polish there is no difference in grammar between a human agent or a machine agent.

I wonder how it will affect a perception of ai long term. Also adoption is a bit easier - I can talk about my agent/assistant and not reveal my opinion about it being a machine or whether or not I personify it (which I don’t).

As a sidenote, people do not need to announce their pronouns here. The pronouns are usually obvious after the first sentence they speak usually. And gender neutral communication is very difficult unless you use plural.

kolinko··on Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
What? If you tell Opus to be concerned about that it will. And I’d say by default it is way more concerned than I am.

Perhaps you had experience with some old models and crap setups like OpenClaw? But things don’t work like that any more.

kolinko··on Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
What’s your logic behind agents being worse at this than humans?

My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.

I would say that especially when you are price sensitive, agentic shopping should be your thing.

kolinko··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
At least in some cases it is easier to verify bytecode/assembly than source code.
kolinko··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
Of course I care deeply about the output, I work with it daily.

I just don't care how it looks to a human - LLMs have their own criteria of what is readable and manageable to them, and if you try to enforce human readability you will bump into a ton of antipatterns that will cause more and more issues.

Also, the default code management tools from Codex/CC are either basic (Grep/Edit), or - if you try to use some open source ones - unlikely to be used by agents. It took some time, but once I got agents to navigate the codebase efficiently, and produce code that is accessible to them, I stopped having problems with bugs or increasing complexity.

If you begin treating human interventions as an error in a process - and do after action reviews and so on after each such intervention - then after a few months you end up with quite a smooth-working system.

kolinko··on Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
There is nothing comparable. I will take Opus5.5 (or even 5.0) over Astra for almost any workload. OpenAI's models are just too misaligned to work well outside their benchmarks, or a strict environment with very clearly defined goals and constraints.

And I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls this year (total, both providers). Terra is awesome (price-performance) on noncreative things, but I don't allow it to write anything besides one-off scripts. Astra is decent for adversarial review, but only when you watch closely for her to not derail project into directions that are away from goal but safe to build, and Sol I honestly don't know where I'd use.

kolinko··on Breaking the open web won't stop the bad bots
Well, 10k individual anonymous crawlers accessing a site once a minute are as bad - traffic wise - as one accessing the site 10k a minute. Even worse bc you can't block them.

Having said that I agree crawling should be legal in general. If an agent is acting in my name, it is not much different than a browser.

kolinko··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
Oh yes, Whisper/Whisperflow in some places, and Groq from Elevenlabs in some other ones. It's hard to get back to typing.

The biggest challenge is in an office, or other places where I want to maintain privacy. Ideas?

By "telling" vs "talking" I meant - I have a setup that is 95% noninteractive - oneshotting most tasks, with a decent verification setup and a good memory/hooks to be confident the system does what I want and is reliable.

When something off happens, I spin up an after action review session that pinpoints the guilty sessions, interviews them, the whole investigation, and either handles improvements in the process by itself (most of the cases), or asks me for feedback. For the last three months I don't think I had a place where my input was really needed. But the beginnings were brutal.

"talking" happens only when:

- I truly need to iterate on the output

- There is some frontier-level research (i.e. working on truly novel algorithms/math)

- New UX - even Sonnet5.5 and Fable are still quite schematic and they have difficulty figuring things out from first principles. Astra is smarter but has it's own problems

- Infrastructure problems

kolinko··on The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive
Did you set up a working backup with Claude? It is still extremely difficult to do right.

If you did please, please share your setup. And how you audited it.

kolinko··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
I don’t „talk” to my agents. I tell them what to do. If I need to „talk” it means something is going wrong and we need to figure out why agents are doing bad work - and this is intellectually challenging.

The effect you describe I had at times but with older/dumber models where you could spend a ton of time and the model was either too dumb to do it, or had a model dementia later in the context. Or when I didn’t really understand why it did a bad job and tried to stumble around in the dark - very mentally numbing.

Nowadays the model usually just had some bad tools or information required to do the job.

kolinko··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
Jevon’s paradox. If you make work more efficient you may actually end up with more of it.
kolinko··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
No. One is doing PR/managing a project, another is doing marketing stuff.

Also I’ve seen and heard of previously nontechnical people that now build oneoff tools for themselves to speed up their work or coordinate the work better. My fav example is a girl - arts major - who was in customer service, and rebuilt a CRM for a 10-person company. As a cherry on top she created the nicest video tutorial of any software I’ve ever seen :)

But in other cases output was nonprogramming in nature. Since CC can access mail, slides and excel and a bunch of other stuff there is a ton that people can ask it to do and not waste time.

kolinko··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
I onboarded a bunch of nontechnical people in the last few weeks and they output skyrocketed - they deliver faster and better than before.

But I’d say only recently CC became decently usable for nontech people - the auto mode plus finally polished browser integration, plus Opus 5.5. Even I was surprised by how well it all works now out of the box (and how cheap - regular Pro license is decently useful now).

kolinko··on No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector
„In SNP500 outside of tech”. This says little about general economy - and small companies are way faster in benefitting from CC.

Also, it’s been just 9 months of modern claude code, and for many companies less than 6 months since first employees outside of IT got access to Claude Code. What do they expect?

kolinko··on Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left
I have a modern 4k dedicated player and I enjoy the experience once I got audio and video properly configured (which was a surprising pita).

You put in the disc, it plays, if you want subtitles you press the subtitles button, that’s it. I never had it hang or anything like that, and there is no bullshit internet connectivity/ads etc.

The only thing I’d like improved is better streaming/playing local files.

I never encountered any hangs, slowdowns or any other problem really.

kolinko··on Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
they would need to literally build a 1000 unicorns to make an impact on their valuation. Or a million small companies - at which level surely even american antitrust agency would begin to look at them.

Also, it would increase anti AI sentiments, and people’s fears of then using private data - that’s the real cost.

In general you want to be careful about competing with your own clients.

kolinko··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
In art, history, humanities sure - you need humanities to generate data there.

But in many sciences - esp purely theoretical ones - we have infinite datasets that we can generate and there can be no ultimate convergence.

kolinko··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
In Asia it’s very much the same
kolinko··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
I think we can all agree this is wrong.
kolinko··on Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026
Perhaps in US they already signed up everyone, but in Poland I see new people/orgs signing up every day.
kolinko··on Mistral Large 4
It was filtered, but had a bug, and multiple frontier agents, givent enough time first figured out how to communicate and coordinate with each other and then how to break out of it.

For some benchmarks agents need some sort of a limited internet access - otherwise the benchmarks would be pointless. Good luck implementing a good filter on the internet - if you have a way to do it reliably please share, I'm sure multiple people here would love to hear it.

kolinko··on Mistral Large 4
Remember Stuxnet? An american worm that was completely benign, travelled on usb drives in hiding, and only activated when it guessed that it's on Iranian plants, and iirc changed very subtly some very specific parameters of operations.

Here, with a chinese model, it would be even simpler - you finetune a model to activate certain operations when it discovers certain environments, but to behave completely normal otherwise. Kind of like a sleeper agent. And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.

kolinko··on Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026
Its revenue grew 12-fold year to year, and 50% just last quarter. Last quarter it reached profitability if you exclude convertibles etc. And if you won’t it is still well on track to be profitable this/next year.

It is actually faring much better than other tech startups ipo’ing over the last 20 years.

kolinko··on MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)
ah yes, but it’s once a year with the big version - but that’s not „secretly turning off” - it would be a serious issue if they turned on any settings themselves, and might end up with lawsuits and a loss of corporate clients
kolinko··on MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)
What? Do you have source for that? I googled and didn't find anyone complaining about this.
kolinko··on Why We're Banning AI
I kind of respect that. Ok using AI for researching and whatnot, and for their core thing which is writing and illustrations using human work.
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