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petercooperon Social Cache Busting

Stuttering John used to do this back on Howard Stern by asking celebrities questions that were far out of the expected gamut at red carpet events. This was all for shock/comedy value, but "who are you and what makes you famous" type questions can really throw celebs off script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P0hENpnMXk

petercooperon A Man Who Reads Books for a Living

I'm not the OP and I imagine all cases are different, but my dad was a software developer who had early cognitive decline in his 60s (he died of vascular dementia recently) and he used to talk about it a lot. He said it was like his tolerance for complexity kept closing in.

Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.

petercooperon Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

Its image processing is terrible. I ran several tests against it against Qwen 3.5 0.8b (yes, 7% the size) and Qwen beat it every time with Gemma often getting things entirely wrong. I even gave it a plain image saying "This is a test" and it thought for 6 minutes trying to analyze it and failed. Qwen 3.5 0.8b confidently got it in under a second.

It may be that the Q6 quant I got is borked (or my LM Studio is), but either way, the 0.8b's performance is mind boggling in comparison.

petercooperon MAI-Code-1-Flash

"It’s not just smarter; it’s leaner"

petercooperon 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices

Can't speak for browser demos, but I just got the ternary model working on my M5 generating images. The 1 bit didn't work, as it has a known bug with XCode 24.5 and I wasn't in the mood for installing 24.4 alongside.

Here's a generation in your honor: https://peterc.org/img/johndoe.png

petercooperon 'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut

This year seems to be turning a bit of a corner. Of the top box office movies so far this year there's Michael, Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, Wuthering Heights, GOAT.. with Obsession and Backrooms rapidly rising.

Last year it was basically F1 and Minecraft (and while not sequels, both are arguably well known "franchises" outside of movies - but I guess MJ and Wuthering Heights are too ;-)).

petercooperon Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug

There are some older studies that showed nicotine (not via smoking, which makes sleep apnea worse) had a positive effect on sleep apnea as well due to the stimulation increasing muscular activity in the airways. Obviously lots of downsides too so it never caught on, but this seems to have a similar mechanism.

petercooperon NTSB pulls docket after AI recreates dead pilots' voices

I'm only an ardent viewer of crash investigation stuff, not a pro, but it seems to be a good way to show specifics of warning noises, engine sounds, unusual cabin noises (if relevant) and sometimes even structural failures happening over time in a more direct way from the cockpit voice recorder without sharing the actual "audio".

petercooperon Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)

Criticism noted! But it is experimental, unconstrained FFI is inherently unsafe, and not all JavaScript developers are "mildly educated web devs".

I doubt we'll see this go into mainstream dependencies likely to be used by such developers – it hasn't in Ruby which has had easily accessible FFI mechanisms for years.

Though, there is already a fun experiment using it: https://blog.platformatic.dev/destino-doom-terminal-nodejs-f...

petercooperon Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)

https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v26.1.0 is particularly cool as it added initial FFI support.

petercooperon A few words on DS4

I agree philosophically about building more takes on ideas to flesh out ideas. I guess I was querying more the idea about an agent being part of DS4 specifically.

I'm 100% up for an "agent by antirez", but I'm intrigued why it would/might be part of DS4 itself. Is there something extra to gain from a tighter coupling between inference and harness? (My gut instinct is.. maybe? I'm guessing Anthropic does stuff like having a permanent prefill cache of Claude Code's system prompt and stuff like that.)

petercooperon A few words on DS4

I've been using the Q4 version on my Mac Studio over my local network and it's been good. Indeed, I had the first ever experience where I was playing with it alongside my various other agents and forgot it was a local model as it was doing such a good job.

I do wonder, though, if another agent is really needed. I've been driving it with Pi (Claude Code's system prompt is far too heavy given the prefill speeds) and it's been great. OpenCode is another good option. Is there anything else to gain from another similar tool specific to Deepseek 4?

petercooperon Show HN: Hallucinopedia

Give it a week and see what Google AI Overview has to say about the Great Pigeon Census of 1887!

petercooperon Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX

I don't know if it relates to the same data centers, but this also comes hours after several still recent Grok models were deprecated at short notice. Grok 4.1 Fast is the cheapest way to do research on X (cheaper than the X API!) and it's gone on May 15: https://docs.x.ai/developers/models - freeing up compute to sell?

petercooperon Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers

Because image models at the basic level are just text tokens in, image tokens out. You'd need an agentic process on top to come up with a strategy, review output, try again, and so on.

I believe Nano Banana and gpt-image-2 have a little of this going on, but it's like asking a model to one-shot some code vs having an agentic harness with tools do it. Even the most basic agent can produce better code than ChatGPT can.

petercooperon Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers

This seems analogous to how a human would do it accurately. If you asked an artist to paint stones in a large circular arrangement with the numbers in order in one shot, with no fixes or sketching allowed, it wouldn't be surprising to end up with problems in the arrangement.

petercooperon Apocalypse Early Warning System

Bloomberg Terminal chat?

petercooperon Reverse Engineering SimTower

I did something similar, though at a much smaller scale, with Windows 3.1 Solitaire a few weeks ago, both to see how possible it is (with LLMs) and also to learn about Ghidra for myself. Sadly, I discovered nothing new that wasn't already surfaced through previous reverse engineering, but did turn it into a behavior-equivalent (almost, Draw One by default, and I got lazy with Vegas scoring) Web port: https://peterc.org/solitaire/ (you can press W to trigger the win animation without winning, just for laughs)

I can certainly believe a much larger app like SimTower could overwhelm an LLM-based process without a lot of handholding as even Solitaire required a fair bit of that from me. I'm hoping to take on 1991's A-Train next (the game that inpired SimCity 2000's interface).

petercooperon Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

I used the term "smuggling" in the casual sense of hiding something. I have edited it to "place such identifiers surreptitiously" to avoid making whatever implication appears to have been taken.

petercooperon Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

I wonder if projects which are anti-AI could place such identifiers surreptitiously into docs or commits as a way to sabotage people using Claude Code. Your project isn't going to get many AI PRs if just cloning your project wiped out their quota.

petercooperon Making UIs like text adventure games

This idea made me think that maybe point and click adventure gams could provide an interesting model here, too. You still have nouns and verbs and locations, but the possible nouns and verbs are made much more explicit.

petercooperon Gte-go – my over-optimized embedding model

Nice work! I've been simultaneously working on something similar though a totally different approach. I'm using `snowflake-arctic-embed-s` (which I've benchmarked to be the most accurate small embedding model for my use case - source code embedding) and a pure Go approach, but unsurprisingly it is somewhat slower than your approach. Did you attempt a pure Go version at first before adding in the Go assembly?

petercooperon GPT‑5.5 Bio Bug Bounty

It sounds like asking CS PhDs to do a world record speed run. I wouldn't be surprised if the people best suited to the task aren't the type to get onto "a vetted list".

petercooperon AI chatbots could be making you stupider

I'll need to engage in conjecture over elementary school lessons from 35 years ago, but one thing that comes to mind is we were calculating circle circumferences and areas quite quickly following the formulas. We still learnt arithmetic techniques by hand (though never logarithms, for whatever reason - I guess calculators replaced the log tables!), but when we moved on to broader things like geometry and statistics, calculator use let us focus on the actual topics and formulas and not repeating the grunt work like generations past.

For anything beyond that, I'd need to take it up with whoever wrote our curriculum! But I know it was mildly contentious at the time, much as the use of even more elaborate technologies are now.

petercooperon AI chatbots could be making you stupider

I remember when my school introduced calculators and my parents got upset about it: "They won't learn to do sums in their heads!" Yet it opened us up to working on more interesting, larger problems, at a faster pace. LLMs could atrophy skills if used solely out of laziness (like the cover letters in the post), but they could also help you punch higher, and learn more, and faster, if you're motivated and mentally integrate them properly.

petercooperon Codex Hacked a Samsung TV

Not as cool as this, but I had a fun Claude Code experience when I asked it to look at my Bluetooth devices and do something "fun". It discovered a cheap set of RGB lights in my daughter's room (which I had no idea used Bluetooth for the remote - and not secured at all) and made them do a rainbow effect then documented the protocol so I could make my own remote control if needed.

petercooperon Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

I'm going to join the exodus, though for a different reason. Switched to Orbstack and ever since Backblaze refuses to back up saying "disk full" as Orbstack uses a 8TB sparse disk image. You can exclude it, but if they won't (very easily) fix a known issue by measuring file sizes properly I don't feel confident about the product.

petercooperon Claude.ai down

Went down for about 10 minutes for me, but back now. Though it did force me to login again.

petercooperon Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it

As a newsletter company, we've dealt with this for over a decade now since we do the right thing and do double opt-in which involves sending the subscriber an email on signup.

Until a few years ago, IP reputation was a good defence against this. The bad traffic almost entirely came from IP addresses in certain countries or from datacenter IPs we could block. Nowadays, that doesn't work due to the prevalence of VPNs, so many legitimate users appear to come from low reputation IPs.

Turnstile is a reasonable solution in its normal form, though the 'invisible' option still lets a lot of them through. Another thing that works, surprisingly, is looking for "webdriver" usage. Despite being easy to strip out webdriver fingerprints, we find that the majority of automated attempts do not bother to do this. Adding more steps, honeypots (with an immediate short term IP ban), etc. also have an impact. It becomes a game of piling up numerous defences in a sort of "Swiss cheese model".

petercooperon r/programming bans all discussion of LLM programming

We also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content.

How can that be true? Reddit is vote-based. So if people weren't interested, they wouldn't vote it up and it wouldn't appear on the front page. Hacker News has no rule banning posts about Barbie and yet, amazingly, Barbie rarely makes it to the front page, because that's how upvotes work.

People clearly are interested enough to vote LLM related posts up, but a bunch of mods who don't like AI are upset enough to want to dictate what others can find interesting. Which is not unusual for Reddit.