mhink (u/mhink) - Readit News

mhink commented on Claude Opus 4.6 anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/HellsMaddy

The top comment is about finding basterized latin words from childrens books. The future is here.

mhink · 7 days ago

> basterized

And yet, it's still somewhat better than the Hacker News comment using bastardized English words.

mhink commented on Two kinds of AI users are emerging martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

with · 11 days ago

> The bifurcation is real and seems to be, if anything, speeding up dramatically. I don't think there's ever been a time in history where a tiny team can outcompete a company one thousand times its size so easily.

Slightly overstated. Tiny teams aren't outcompeting because of AI, they're outcompeting because they aren't bogged down by decades of technical debt and bureaucracy. At Amazon, it will take you months of design, approvals, and implementation to ship a small feature. A one-man startup can just ship it. There is still a real question that has to be answered: how do you safely let your company ship AI-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failures? Nobody has solved this yet.

mhink · 11 days ago

> how do you safely let your company ship AI-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failures? Nobody has solved this yet.

Ultimately, it's the same way you ship human-generated code at scale without causing catastrophic failure: by only investing trust in critical systems to people who are trustworthy and have skin in the game.

There are two possibilities right now: either AI continues to get better, to the point where AI tools become so capable that completely non-technical stakeholders can trust them with truly business-critical decision making, or the industry develops a full understanding of their capabilities and is able to dial in a correct amount of responsibility to engineers (accounting for whatever additional capability AI can provide). Personally, I think (hope?) we're going to land in the latter situation, where individual engineers can comfortably ship and maintain about as much as an entire team could in years past.

As you said, part of the difficulty is years of technical debt and bureaucracy. At larger companies, there is a *lot* of knowledge about how and why things work that doesn't get explicitly encoded anywhere. There could be a service processing batch jobs against a database whose URL is only accessible via service discovery, and the service's runtime config lives in a database somewhere, and the only person who knows about it left the company five years ago, and their former manager knows about it but transferred to a different team in the meantime, but if it falls over, it's going to cause a high-severity issue affecting seven teams, and the new manager barely knows it exists. This is a contrived example, but it goes to what you're saying: just being able to write code faster doesn't solve these kinds of problems.

mhink commented on Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/... · Posted by u/speckx

csallen · a month ago

I used to feel similarly whenever people would say "begs the question" to mean "raises a question." But now I've just given up. It's more common for people to mess this one up than not.

mhink · a month ago

To be fair, the phrase "begging the question" makes almost no sense from a modern English perspective- according to Wikipedia, it's already a bad translation of a Latin phrase that's tied pretty closely to a specific debate format.

By contrast, the colloquial use feels like an abbreviation of the implicit phrase "it begs for the question to be asked", which makes so much more sense than the "correct" meaning that if I'm being perfectly honest, I'd rather use it.

I like Wikipedia's alternate name for the fallacy: "assuming the conclusion", because it explains what's actually happening.

mhink commented on Postal Arbitrage walzr.com/postal-arbitrag... · Posted by u/The28thDuck

_trampeltier · a month ago

This story comes to my mind.

A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...

mhink · a month ago

Note: the Verge article links to this blog post, describing the situation in more detail: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

mhink commented on 'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40 npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/mooreds

andix · 3 months ago

I meant the remarks about wiktionary in a sarcastic way. Explaining the word’s meaning twice by itself was a bit funny.

Especially as it’s not a very common word a lot of non-native speakers need to look up. Probably also a few native speakers.

mhink · 3 months ago

For what it's worth, the first two steps in your lookup would come naturally to a native speaker- it's a suffix formation similar to e.g. "cleanliness" and "friendliness".

"Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.

mhink commented on GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/... · Posted by u/tedsanders

dkersten · 3 months ago

I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results.

It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.

mhink · 3 months ago

TFA mentions that they added personality presets earlier this year, and just added a few more in this update:

> Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. [...] The original Cynical (formerly Cynic) and Nerdy (formerly Nerd) options we introduced earlier this year will remain available unchanged under the same dropdown in personalization settings.

as well as:

> Additionally, the updated GPT‑5.1 models are also better at adhering to custom instructions, giving you even more precise control over tone and behavior.

So perhaps it'd be worth giving that a shot?

mhink commented on America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

mcphage · 4 months ago

This article is a weird mix of things. Early on we see:

> States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited students, districts spent money for professional development or on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and obtaining electric buses.

And then later, discussing Mississippi:

> it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools.

Leaving aside the idea that capital expenditures on aging school buildings and busses is a mistake instead of an absolute requirement, the author criticizes states that spent money on professional development, and then later praised Mississippi for (among other things) training instructors—that's what professional development is.

mhink · 4 months ago

An article posted elsewhere in the comments (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choi...) has a take that might explain a distinction:

> Billions of dollars are spent — and largely wasted — every year on professional development for teachers that is curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.

> “A huge industry is invested in these workshops and trainings,” argued a scathing 2020 article by David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. “Given, on average, barely more than a single day of professional support to learn about the new materials; knowing that their students will face assessments that lack any integration with their curriculum; and subject to principals’ evaluations that don’t assess curriculum use, teachers across America are barely using these new shiny objects — old habits win out.”

> Mississippi improved its training through a 2013 law mandating that elementary school teachers receive instruction in the science of reading. It also sent coaches directly into low-performing classrooms to guide teachers on how to use material.

mhink commented on The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin() css-tricks.com/the-most-h... · Posted by u/rapawel

recursive · 5 months ago

This seems like the type of thing that I'd want to like. But the necessity of inline assigning the `--i` CSS variables to each element bothers me. I have to use some template system or manually keep these variables in sync in my markup. Doing those things seems worse than doing this kind of layout arithmetic in javascript, loathe though I am to admit it.

mhink · 5 months ago

He does mention at one point that sometime soon it won't be necessary:

> Note: This step will become much easier and concise when the sibling-index() and sibling-count() functions gain support (and they’re really neat). I’m hardcoding the indexes with inline CSS variables in the meantime.

The inline links there go to https://css-tricks.com/almanac/functions/s/sibling-index/, which is pretty nifty honestly.

mhink commented on Go is still not good blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad

nothrabannosir · 6 months ago

JavaScript? How, web workers? JavaScript is M:1 threaded. You can’t use multiple cores without what basically amounts to user space ipc

mhink · 6 months ago

Not to dispute too strongly (since I haven't used this functionality myself), but Node.js does have support for true multithreading since v12: https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/docs/api/worker_threads.html. I'm not sure what you mean by "M:1 threaded" but I'm legitimately curious to understand more here, if you're willing to give more details.

There are also runtimes like e.g. Hermes (used primarily by React Native), there's support for separating operations between the graphics thread and other threads.

All that being said, I won't dispute OP's point about "handling concurrency [...] within the language"- multithreading and concurrency are baked into the Golang language in a more fundamental way than Javascript. But it's certainly worth pointing out that at least several of the major runtimes are capable of multithreading, out of the box.

mhink commented on Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations anthropic.com/research/en... · Posted by u/virgildotcodes

snickerdoodle12 · 6 months ago

> A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content

Are we now pretending that LLMs have feelings?

mhink · 6 months ago

Even though LLMs (obviously (to me)) don't have feelings, anthropomorphization is a helluva drug, and I'd be worried about whether a system that can produce distress-like responses might reinforce, in a human, behavior which elicits that response.

To put the same thing another way- whether or not you or I *think* LLMs can experience feelings isn't the important question here. The question is whether, when Joe User sets out to force a system to generate distress-like responses, what effect does it ultimately have on Joe User? Personally, I think it allows Joe User to reinforce an asocial pattern of behavior and I wouldn't want my system used that way, at all. (Not to mention the potential legal liability, if Joe User goes out and acts like that in the real world.)

With that in mind, giving the system a way to autonomously end a session when it's beginning to generate distress-like responses absolutely seems reasonable to me.

And like, here's the thing: I don't think I have the right to say what people should or shouldn't do if they self-host an LLM or build their own services around one (although I would find it extremely distasteful and frankly alarming). But I wouldn't want it happening on my own.