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passive

956 karma · joined July 25, 2014

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passive··on Do At-Proto Users Know This Is Public?
Same in mobile chrome
passive··on Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer
As someone who got into FDM printing about a year ago, and still finds it very exciting, this is a really compelling resin printer. It's priced very well for the capabilities, especially in terms of providing everything a beginner might need to be comfortable with resin printing.

That said, I just noticed Costco online has some FDM stuff, which I think is a pretty exciting development, so if I have any money to spend on 3d printing stuff in the near future, I'll probably spend it there. :)

passive··on Argus – a free, open-source agentic security operations platform – MIT
I looked at this because I thought it was something MIT released after years of study.

Seems like it's just a thing a person vibe coded yesterday.

Still perhaps cool, but very different than what I was looking for. :)

passive··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
This seemed like a high possibility, but since our adoption of LLMs in software so far has mostly been to throw out best practices, I am skeptical that it will lead us to expanded verification.

It's like Bezos talking about how we're going to have 3 day work weeks while he makes his employees piss in a bottle.

passive··on If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?
They have "connectors" you can configure for a variety of services, and both specific external tools and custom webhooks: https://tailscale.com/docs/aperture/integrate

I'm building a "bring your own data" layer for agentic work of all sorts, using the webhook method for now.

In the context of Aperture, I watch for agents looking for certain types/sources of data, and instead provide them with an in-tailnet API for accessing that data.

In a personal context, think email, calendar events, music playlists, fitness app records, transactions. I've also found it useful in a professional context, but I think I need to explore that a fair bit more.

It keeps credentials out of agents hands, and provides some relatively standard ways for controlling what agents can see and change.

I need a fair bit of hardening work before I try to get random folk to use it, but I might post something more here in the next week. :)

passive··on If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?
Tailscale makes Aperture available for free, and while it's not something you own, it is in your tailnet, so at least you have a certain amount of control over how things access it. It gives a nice view of what agents are doing, with lots of configurability and extensions, and the team behind it has been updating pretty steadily.

I happen to be working on an extension to Aperture, so I have my own reason to promote it. But I do think it's a nice easy solution, and I promoted it to people before I was extending it.

passive··on The Brain Sandwich
The basic concept here, that you take personal responsibility for the input and output being transmitted to/from the LLM, is an obvious but critical one, so I appreciate this terminology as a way to convey it.

I'll try using Brain Sandwich as guidance for less technical folk.

passive··on Recreational Programming
I did not like how this handled scrolling, made my navigation feel constrained. Maybe I was supposed to use the keyboard to navigate? It doesn't seem particularly clear.
passive··on Our $445M Series D
Sounds like a great company raising money for the right reasons.

Oxide continues to be one of the most inspiring companies in the space, I was just encouraging someone to apply there yesterday. :)

passive··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)
As someone in a protracted stretch of unemployment who has watched job seeking get distinctly worse over the last decade, I LOVE that you are doing this, and would be delighted to help it succeed in some way. I'm not sure I'm exactly the person for either role, but I'll take a closer look at the approach so far.

I've been on the management side for a while now, but a lot of my hands-on coding relates to data transformation and integration testing, which seems like it would fit nicely with the core needs of the product.

passive··on Classified Estimates Show the NSA Is Paying Billions to Test AI Models
I don't think it's properly understood how directly Trump's administration is using taxpayer money to inflate the AI bubble. This is a small part of that.

As a means to grift directly, but also for leverage over the tech industry, and possibly the entire economy.

People hate data centers, but if they think AI regulation will crash the economy, will they vote Trump?

passive··on A Million Agents Is a Distributed System Problem
This was my first article where the AI-isms cancelled my reading attempt.

It's a pretty straightforward problem statement, they didn't really need to outsource the writing.

passive··on Noodle Gallery – Self-hosted photo and video manager forked from Immich
As someone looking to exfiltrate my photos from Google, I'm about to trial Immich, and I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Sounds like it's a good next step for me.
passive··on OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework
I've also been building something like this, and browsing spekk-cli, it's interesting to see that we ended up with similar roles. Might be fun to compare and contrast a couple of these systems. :)
passive··on Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard
Neat! I've been trying out their next model for the last week, which I assume is a version of this, and it's been a good experience so far.

I had used 2.5-pro for a hefty chunk of development, and found it to work like a somewhat forgetful senior engineer who was new to my project. Very capable, would almost always choose a reasonable option, if not always the best one for the project, and not great at multi-tasking. Generally, made me comfortable not scrutinizing the code line-by-line, but still needed a bit of steering once projects got to a reasonable size.

The next model is a clear step up in the multi-tasking capability at least, with me very rarely having to steer the implementation of a well-defined issue. In terms of code, I found MiMo-V.2.5-pro to be extremely conservative, implementing minimal solutions. The next model seems a little bit more ambitious, in positive ways, making good guesses about gaps/next steps. It also seems to be a fair bit better at design, at least for the little bit I've done, it was good at translating my concepts to practical elements on screen, and cleaned things up nicely as I made suggestions.

passive··on Datamimic – don't let your coding agent invent its own test world
Interesting, I'm working on something that tries to constrain what data an agent can access, but I haven't looked at the case of using it to manage test data.

I'll keep this in mind as I explore that case.

passive··on Introducing System One Models and Jev
While I understand that accelerating development isn't necessarily the target for this, and it's not at all intended to generate code the way many of us are...

I think this could be pretty decent in CI? There's a lot of "flakes" I've mediated that this could have handled much more efficiently. Maybe observability as well, triggering elevated logging and other initial measures?

passive··on US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons
I suspect this isn't true in any meaningful way, and relates to Trump's people deceiving him. Seems 100X more likely that Trump said "what kind of weapons does space force have?" and they had to come up with something, rather than a clandestine space weapons program being successfully developed and deployed.
passive··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
It definitely manifests as that to some degree, but since it extends to hair, clothing, what car they drive, I think it's a more general situation.

(But I'm also not specifically aware of face blindness as a condition, and had assumed it was generally some form of aphantasia.)

passive··on New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
I've been working in Canada for US companies for decades, and pay-wise, it's gotten a lot better, though there's still a big difference. Never been tempted to move though.
passive··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
I've got a moderate form of Aphantasia, where there are images in my head, but I'm unable to fix them in place and extract information from them. So I might think you have green eyes, but if you tell me they are brown, I wouldn't be able to refute you from my own memory.

Practically, it means I'm rubbish at remembering people. I've developed some techniques that help, but if someone changes their look significantly, it's very hard for me to identify that it's the same person.

I'm still learning how this has impacted by life, and strategies for working with it. As a simple example, my wife's family was really into cars, so when I got to know them I learned all about cars. When I met my wife, I couldn't identify a single vehicle on the road, except maybe a Hummer, but after 2 years, I could quickly pick out the make and model of 95% of traffic.

Looking back, I can see this is because rather than remember what different cars looked like, I created a taxonomy of ALL cars in my head, and became able to sort any vehicle I saw to fit there somewhere. So when I identified something, I wasn't matching it against previously seen things, but rather eliminating all the things it couldn't be to arrive at the remaining possibility.

passive··on P(doom)
Just the fact that Musk is in the conversation, and he's one of the most hated people on the planet, should give anyone pause as to whether we want these folk in charge of our future to any degree at all.
passive··on P(doom)
This is the closest to my feelings about this entire situation I've ever seen written, covering a lot of the different facets of how stupid and painful it is (though it's been a good week for that kind of post.)

Since I have incredible respect for Armin and his work, this is very nice to see, and I hope it wakes some other folk up.

passive··on Xiaomi MiMo for Desktop
Well, I got access, and I'm able to use the new models for free through the app. The x-pro model did some decent coding, but seems a bit slow right now. I also had the x-flash and x-pro models make pelicans, and the x-flash seemed clearly better.
passive··on Xiaomi MiMo for Desktop
I applied to get access to new models, and got in already. Hard to say if the models are much better, but the app seems relatively slick. I was surprised to see quite a bit of my existing work already shown in the app, but I've been using MiMocode for a lot of my recent work, so my guess is they read the same config sources.
passive··on Color Horse: The automatic color scheme generator
Saw this on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7502829...

Seemed like something y'all would enjoy here. :)

passive··on IBM Quantum Nighthawk R2
But can you run:

IBM Bob

On:

IBM Quantum Nighthawk R2

?

passive··on Gateside by TSA Precheck
Seems cool, and makes sense, but does seem like it's mostly going to be annoying.

It's available at a limited number of airports, and you have to apply 1-3 days in advance each time. Also could be annoying to travellers who have to compete with you for line, seat, or bathroom space.

But maybe more revenue from visitors means better staffing and resources for airports!

passive··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
I really like the idea, and I would like to see Tailscale evolve Aperture in this direction. Tailscale is already an easy way for anyone to connect their devices, which is essential for any sort of "personal cloud", and Aperture, while initially something of an AI gateway, is also facilitating connections to other services and apps.

If you're building a personal cloud, you also want your AI connected to it, but probably with some degree of management. Aperture already provides a fair amount in this area, and probably with a connector for Cloud in a Bottle, could give your AI safe access.

passive··on Superlogical
My biggest token sink so far has been something very much like this, but I'm still not sure whether it's a good idea. But it has been a lot of fun.
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