Rastonbury (u/Rastonbury)

Rastonbury commented on We put a coding agent in a while loop github.com/repomirrorhq/r... · Posted by u/sfarshid

beefnugs · 2 days ago

"At one point we tried “improving” the prompt with Claude’s help. It ballooned to 1,500 words. The agent immediately got slower and dumber. We went back to 103 words and it was back on track."

Isn't this the exact opposite of every other piece of advice we have gotten in a year?

Another general feedback just recently, someone said we need to generate 10 times, because one out of those will be "worth reviewing"

How can anyone be doing real engineering in such a: pick the exact needle out of the constantly churning chaos-simulation-engine that (crashes least, closest to desire, human readable, random guess)

Rastonbury · 2 days ago

For the work they are doing porting and building off a spec there is already good context in the existing code and spec, compared with net new features in a greenfield project.

Rastonbury commented on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network? · Posted by u/mbix77

Filligree · 7 days ago

Firefox might be an okay browser, but that would imply supporting Mozilla.

I've been meaning to switch to Vivaldi. Just as soon as the onboarding dialog stops crashing.

Rastonbury · 6 days ago

I wonder how bad does Mozilla have to be that you have to continue using Chrome without ublock?

Rastonbury commented on Toothpaste made with keratin may protect and repair damaged teeth: study kcl.ac.uk/news/toothpaste... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

ClassicJesus · 10 days ago

Is there any blogpost or website to get my mind unstuck on toothpaste? I feel this market is extremely confusing and I don’t know what to buy anymore.

EU citizen here.

Rastonbury · 10 days ago

If you have no issues like sensitivity or cavities, imo I don't think there's a need to spend time optimizing the type of toothpaste. Went down that rabbit hole once reading research papers of tested and optimum fluoride concentration for remineralization, no idea why I did that considering I just use the toothpaste my partner gets and I haven't had a cavity in a decade probably

Rastonbury commented on How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/ioblomov

mna_ · 15 days ago

Start your kids onto the path of gambling? No thanks. Better to teach them chess, xiangqi, shogi or go/baduk.

Rastonbury · 14 days ago

Once kids get familiarity with odds and probability they will soon realise that casino games they have no edge and the house always wins. Also you cannot bluff a casino dealer which is half the fun

Rastonbury commented on The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers simonwillison.net/2025/Au... · Posted by u/tosh

gonzo41 · 18 days ago

No. Confront reality. there are some really cooked people out there.

Rastonbury · 18 days ago

They don't even have to be "cooked", people generally are pretty similar which is why common scams works so well at a large scale.

All AI has to be is mildly but not overly sycophantic and as a supporter/cheerleader to someone, or who affirms your beliefs. Most people like that quality in a partner or friend. I actually want to recognize OAI courage in deprecating 4 because of it sycophancy. Generally I don't think getting people addicted to flattery or model personalities is good

Several times I've had people speak about interpersonal arguments and them having felt vindication when chatgpt takes their side, I cringe but it's not my place to tell them chatgpt is meant to be mostly agreeable.

Rastonbury commented on Do LLMs identify fonts? maxhalford.github.io/blog... · Posted by u/alexmolas

Rastonbury · 23 days ago

I've asked LLMs to suggest fonts/similar fonts for me from screenshots and seems like they are close enough to my untrained eye

Rastonbury commented on OpenAI delays launch of open-weight model twitter.com/sama/status/1... · Posted by u/martinald

ryao · a month ago

Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? Cars, planes and elevators have safety tests. LLMs don’t. Nobody is going to die if a LLM gives an output that its creators do not like, yet when they say “safety tests”, they mean that they are checking to what extent the LLM will say things they do not like.

Rastonbury · a month ago

I think that's a bit uncharitable, the top companies have hired top talent who's explicit job is safety, which is obviously a hard problem ever since Microsoft's Tay. Anthropic publishes pretty extensive safety reviews of their models. Misalignment on incentives,prioritisation of speed and it being and almost an impossible task may make it seem like a marketing scheme. It's not like companies who slap on all the certifications AWS has just because they run on AWS

Rastonbury commented on Preliminary report into Air India crash released bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx20p... · Posted by u/cjr

throw310822 · a month ago

> the pressure difference at altitude works to hold the window in place

Curious, is the pressure difference actually greater than the force of 800km/h wind pushing on the window? Or is it just for side windows?

Rastonbury · a month ago

The outward pressure is about 5-6x greater than the force of air resistance at cruising altitude

Rastonbury commented on Preliminary report into Air India crash released bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx20p... · Posted by u/cjr

1over137 · a month ago

Is that "nothing like" though? You are saying they are in different places, ok, but are they similar in other ways? Are both controls the same shape? size? colour? texture?

Rastonbury · a month ago

God knows the number of times I confused my num lock key for my caps lock key, they are both keys after all!

Rastonbury commented on Ask HN: Is every company's internal wiki just broken by default? · Posted by u/NanaAmun

Rastonbury · 2 months ago

I'd say 2/3 of the time I find what I'm looking for on first page of search using Confluence, 2nd page is totally irrelevant. So I'd say it's not that it's broken, it's just that it isn't there and that tribal knowledge isn't written. So imo forcing tribal knowledge to be written documented is the issue. LLMs won't help here because a contractor or first line employee has conflicted incentives whether to document their tribal knowledge which loses them value

u/Rastonbury

KarmaCake day1472January 8, 2020View Original