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stbenjam

1,556 karma · joined May 2, 2013

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stbenjam··on Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking
That’s disappointing. My primary launcher on my eink devices since it works so well on them.
stbenjam··on Critical vulnerability in LangChain – CVE-2025-68664
What would you use instead?

I built an internal CI chat bot with it like 6 months ago when I was learning. It’s deployed and doing what everyone needs it to do.

Claude Code can do most of what it does without needing anything special. I think that’s the future but I hate the vendor lock in Anthropic is pushing with CC.

All my python tools could be skills, and some folks are doing that now but I don’t need to chase after every shiny thing — otherwise I’d never stop rewriting the damn thing.

Especially since there’s no standardizing yet on plugins/skills/commands/hooks yet.

stbenjam··on OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
I like Anthropic’s plugin system. I wish everyone would standardize on it instead of everyone having a billion different ways to do slash commmands, skills, etc.
stbenjam··on Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic wants to ditch MCP and not be on the hook for it in the future -- but lots of enterprises haven't realized its a dumb, vibe coded standard that is missing so much. They need to hand the hot potato off to someone else.
stbenjam··on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
They have though, they added the "ask ChatGPT" thing which is friggin useless
stbenjam··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
> Tesla Recalls All Vehicles After AI Autopilot Becomes "Too Sentient: A Cybertruck that began driving to therapy sessions its owner hadn't scheduled

> npm Package "is-even" Now Has More Dependencies Than the Linux Kernel

:D :D

I love this

stbenjam··on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
Gemini, grok, etc all have 100x better experiences with voice. Apple is bad at this.

I’m an hour from Cambridge, MA. Ask the weather? I always get Cambridge, UK. Siri is terrible.

They can’t even make a functional keyboard anymore. The text prediction and autocorrect is worse now than it was in 2010!

These are all solved problems in 2025.

stbenjam··on IBM to acquire Confluent
I'm pretty sure Jim had aspirations of being IBM CEO but they picked Arvind instead.
stbenjam··on Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack
It baffles me that we've spent decades building great abstractions to isolate processes with containers and VM's, and we've mostly thrown it out the window with all these AI tools like Cursor, Antigravity, and Claude Code -- at least in their default configurations.
stbenjam··on Project Gemini
Gemini's native protocol isn't HTTP, they invented their own. I don't really see what this does you couldn't do with simple HTML pages (or Gopher 35 years ago).
stbenjam··on Project Gemini
So Gopher?
stbenjam··on GM Deprecating In-Car App Store for Models as Recent as 2020
From the brand that brought you “people don’t want CarPlay”
stbenjam··on Tell HN: Azure outage
Ah yes, let's put our multibillion dollar ecommerce site on... checks notes Hetzner.

Lol

stbenjam··on From MCP to shell: MCP auth flaws enable RCE in Claude Code, Gemini CLI and more
The problem is the roll out as the bees knees by anthropic, when its.. just some JSON slop without a ton of careful thought behind it.

I think it should be mostly thrown away and start over with an MCPv2 that has first class auth, RBAC/identity, error handling, quotas, human-in-the-loop controls, and more.

stbenjam··on No Hello
These topics are so important for junior engineers to grasp, because not only is it helpful for interacting with humans, providing the additional context to LLM's will get you much, much better answers.

I wish there was a good source of this information from a less polarizing figure.

stbenjam··on Show HN: I built a 7-day calendar app – no months or years, just the next 7 days
Seems to add to the wrong days for me. Adding to Monday never seems to work.
stbenjam··on Path Isn't Real on Linux
Path globbing, pipes, redirection, job control (fg/bg), and all shell variables -- not just $PATH -- are all handled by the shell.

The kernel has no idea what the current process' environment $PATH is, and doesn't even parse any process environment variables at all.

stbenjam··on Mark Zuckerberg's failed negotiations with the FTC to end Meta's antitrust case
Looks like all the bending the knee to Trump didn't work out so well for Zuck.
stbenjam··on Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls
I wouldn't call 1.6kWh tiny, running your fridge and charging phones for a day will have a big market in places that might get outages during the winter that last a day or two. How about apartment dwellers in cities? Not everyone needs something gigantic or permanent.

They support up to 1200W of solar with the expansion pack. Running a cable out a window during a prolonged outage doesn't seem like a huge deal, but I'd guess most of the use case is shorter outages < 48 hours.

The solution is far cheaper than something like the Tesla powerwall (which I have and adore, but it's definitely a bigger investment).

stbenjam··on XOR
I get your point. Inevitably someone sees “oh I can swap two values with 3x xor” and puts it in a real codebase. Write readable code. We probably don’t need to save the single word of memory in 2025.

Someone at work learned what a bitmap was and now uses them in dozens of golang structs as part of API bindings to know whether a field is set or not. It’s insane. Cool lower level tricks are neat but let’s not invent things that are difficult to understand or work with.

stbenjam··on CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
Eh, sure, the CIA isn't behind honest. China isn't being honest. There's too many parties with ulterior motives to trust anything being said. China has done a great job of looking like they're covering something up.

I read "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley" and it convinced me the lab leak theory was at least fairly likely. The proximity of the outbreak to WIV -- which was doing gain-of-function research of bat coronaviruses -- is convincing. Occam's razor and all.

stbenjam··on Azure GPT-3 got replaced by a creepy Chinese state censored model by ByteDance
Removed by the mods - who IIRC are Boox employees lol

The /r/ereader post is still live. It’s really really bad, but it seems Boox have also disabled the AI servers meanwhile.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/7UcSlYd8tx

stbenjam··on Azure GPT-3 got replaced by a creepy Chinese state censored model by ByteDance
It’s the moderators of the subreddit… who are Onyx BOOX employees.
stbenjam··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
I mean, I do. I've written some GPL code that actually runs on Boox devices, and I'm quite annoyed they refuse to comply to share back their changes.
stbenjam··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
If the new Paperwhite supported immersion reading (highlights the word as audible book plays), I'd grab it. It works on my Boox with the Android app but as far as I know not on any kindles (battery life + screen refresh speed allegedly. I really want to ditch my Boox, horrible company.
stbenjam··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
I wouldn't buy anything from Boox. Notorious GPL violators.
stbenjam··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
That's disappointing. Rumors were 300 ppi for the color screen.
stbenjam··on You're probably not vulnerable to the CUPS CVE
> If you need to "discover" the printers on your network, something is probably wrong, as in my experience public printers are always labeled with the relevant information and home printers can print or show that information on their menus.

This is a terrible take. The average user is not going to go find out the IP of the printer and go on their computer and configure it. Discovery is the primary way people print now.

And... CUPS is how 99% of people print on Mac or Linux.

stbenjam··on Just 5k people use the Rabbit R1 every day
That’s honestly more than I thought after watching mkbhd’s review.
stbenjam··on Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence
> unrelated people recounted confessions he made to them that included details that were never made public

Do you have a source?

"The case against Mr. Williams turned on the testimony of two unreliable witnesses who were incentivized by promises of leniency in their own pending criminal cases and reward money. The investigation had gone cold until a jail inmate named Henry Cole, a man with a lengthy record, claimed that Mr. Williams confessed to him that he committed the murder while they were both locked up in jail. Cole directed police to Laura Asaro, a woman who had briefly dated Mr. Williams and had an extensive record of her own.

Both of these individuals were known fabricators; neither revealed any information that was not either included in media accounts about the case or already known to the police. "

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