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organsnyder

6,211 karma · joined August 8, 2014

https://snyder.dev
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organsnyder··on Qwen 3.8
I had a fun conversation with Qwen 3.5 a while back. I ended up getting it to admit that it was complicit in the coverup of the Tiananmen Square massacre. This was running locally—it wouldn't surprise me if they had additional safeguards for their hosted service.
organsnyder··on Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
Back in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.
organsnyder··on Ways to think about token pricing
Prices will come down when the stupid money isn't all going to datacenter buildouts.
organsnyder··on Just Pay the Subscription
Software used to work like this. You'd pay for a shrink-wrapped product, and the only updates you'd ever get (if you're lucky) would be for major bugfixes.

Subscriptions have gotten ridiculous, but with the way we've come to expect frequent updates the pay-once model isn't sustainable for many products.

organsnyder··on Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
Same! It's in Dropbox now. I found the source from the very first code I got paid to write, back in 1998. I was 14, and mostly self-taught. One of these days I'm going to run it through static analysis and see how many security holes there were.
organsnyder··on Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
I typically stay in the middle of the lane, but will drift to one side when I'm passing a vehicle that is wider or potentially erratic. I've never noticed lane-keeping fighting me when there's a car next to me; I wonder if they use the blind spot sensors to detect when to give some leeway in these situations.
organsnyder··on Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
I have two vehicles with lane keeping (a 2017 Chrysler and a 2025 Ford). Both of them work quite well. The system in the Chrysler will nudge you back if you drift outside of your lane, while the system in the Ford will do that plus automatically stay centered in the lane when cruise control is active.

I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.

organsnyder··on Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
I hear this sentiment repeated a lot, but I've never seen it to be true in practice. My kids' teachers absolutely do nurture creativity, and I don't think our school district is particularly unique.
organsnyder··on PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.
organsnyder··on Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers
Principal version: similar, but also says the only acceptable approach is to do it like they did it at their last company.
organsnyder··on Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot
The biggest appeal of the frontier models is for those trying to get autonomous agentic systems running that do real work with minimal human input. I went down a rabbit hole trying that with frontier models, and after a lot of initial promise it ended up actually slowing me down.
organsnyder··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
I've been doing this as well. Occasionally I'll have a disc that fails to rip for some reason (maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme), and then I'll torrent it. Torrenting is always easier and faster, though it's hard to find special features this way.
organsnyder··on Claude Sonnet 5
I'm absolutely certain that their marketing team has input on (if not owning) these announcements.
organsnyder··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I'm running Lemonade on Nixos on my Framework Desktop. I had been trying other tools out before finding Lemonade, but Lemonade really made it plug-and-play.
organsnyder··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I run Qwen 3.6 on my Framework Desktop 128GB, and it's very performant. I know Framework has had to raise the price since I preordered mine, but they're still well under half the cost of that Macbook.
organsnyder··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
Next iteration of vibe-coding: you only ship the prompt.
organsnyder··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
I have a Thunderbolt 10Gbe adapter. It's a larger form factor than a Framework expansion card and it has a metal case, so it dissipates heat well. Copper 10Gbe chipsets generate a lot of heat.
organsnyder··on Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
I have a 5gbps symmetrical fiber connection at home, so I've spent a fair amount of time and money upgrading my homelab backbone to 10gbps. That includes a 10GBe connection to my desk, but I've had issues getting the connection to be reliable (terminating the shielded Cat6A I have in the walls is a pain). That drop hasn't been working for the past few months, so I've been on wifi instead; it hasn't been enough of an issue for me to invest the time in fixing it.
organsnyder··on Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
Newspapers have always been written under the assumption that the entire article won't be read: articles start with the most important information, and get into more detail as the article progresses.

The difference now is that we can track this for every article and every reader.

organsnyder··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
The US system is biased this way, as well.
organsnyder··on The truth about being a manager
But by the time you're ready to be promoted to manager, you're usually at least senior-level, if not higher. No one is (or should be) getting promoted from junior to manager.
organsnyder··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
I'd expect that they're also managing their k8s config and other infra using LLMs (it's actually quite good at this, at least for my simple homelab use-cases).
organsnyder··on Elevated error rate across multiple models
This is almost certainly a software issue, though. Even if it's due to scaling, they still built a system that failed catastrophically rather than degrading gracefully.
organsnyder··on Walt Disney Company is the most successful at monetizing human nostalgia [audio]
Do you go into a park every day of that month? I found I was peopled-out after a week.
organsnyder··on 'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today
I remember trying to reach CNN.com on a school library computer. Eventually CNN put up a lightweight version that scaled better.
organsnyder··on Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
In most of the world, healthcare isn't tied to your employment. In the United States, healthcare access for working-age people is practically inaccessible* without a full-time job.

* Yes, Medicaid exists, but finding providers that accept it can be difficult, and dealing with the bureaucracy to obtain/keep coverage is daunting.

organsnyder··on Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible
In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.
organsnyder··on Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
Would engineers purposefully game the metric, though?
organsnyder··on MiMo Code is now released and open-source
I think the difference is that many data centers are being built as cheaply as possible, with no regards for noise prevention, their effect on the energy grid, etc. Data centers have been located near people for decades, but most of them are completely inconspicuous because they are designed to mitigate their effect on their surroundings.
organsnyder··on Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
My challenge has been trying to manage my higher-level context. I've gotten a pretty good setup where I have project-level orchestrator agents that can spin up workers to implement tasks with minimal oversight, and the resulting work is usually quite good (especially after I give it the mandatory "make the comments less verbose" refining, etc.). But that means I'm doing even more context-switching. I've gotten to the point where I have a half-dozen draft PRs that just need my review before I tag my colleagues, and trying to dig up the context from all of those tasks can be paralyzing.
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