zamber (u/zamber) - Readit News

zamber commented on Meta just suspended the Facebook account of Neal Stephenson twitter.com/nealstephenso... · Posted by u/SLHamlet

maxwell-neumann · 4 months ago

I’ve experienced something similar in attempting to report very explicit and outrageously racist posts and comments. Zero action on blatant neo-Nazism (including specific threats of violence), and several lost appeals. However, far more benign posts and comments that don’t really violate the ToS are often flagged. This is quite prevalent on Instagram especially, which is quite worrying as it’s acting as a radicalisation tunnel for large numbers of impressionable young people. It’s almost as if the algorithm attempts to throw you into a far-right rabbithole because they know it boosts engagement.

zamber · 4 months ago

That's exactly what happens. The algo does not judge how hurtful a rabbithole may be - it optimizes for engagement with some moderation sprinkled on top. I've tried to make my facebook feed palatable for a couple months and eventually passed up on trying. I'd rather IM my family about cat photos than engage with their fringe political views. Same goes for colleagues on LinkedIn.

Tentacrul did a good video on it and more across the years https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MPyJBJTHyO0&pp=ygUWZmFjZWJvb2s...

zamber commented on Getting good results from Claude Code dzombak.com/blog/2025/08/... · Posted by u/ingve

xcf_seetan · 4 months ago

Well, the only thing i need to write code is to be alive. No Github or AWS? No problem, have local copies of everything. No Claude? ok, i have local llm to give some help. So, internet is not so needed to write code. No IDE's just a CLI? Sure all i need is a text editor and a compiler/linker working. No computer or electricity? Get a pen and paper and start writing code on paper, will get to the computer when possible. I do not depend on cloud working to be productive.

zamber · 4 months ago

No pen a and paper? Compile it on fleshware.

It's not a question of what you can do, but where the comfort level reduction outweighs the project importance/pay.

zamber commented on Getting good results from Claude Code dzombak.com/blog/2025/08/... · Posted by u/ingve

jamesponddotco · 4 months ago

I have multiple system prompts that I use before getting to the actual specification.

1. I use the Socratic Coder[1] system prompt to have a back and forth conversation about the idea, which helps me hone the idea and improve it. This conversation forces me to think about several aspects of the idea and how to implement it.

2. I use the Brainstorm Specification[2] user prompt to turn that conversation into a specification.

3. I use the Brainstorm Critique[3] user prompt to critique that specification and find flaws in it which I might have missed.

4. I use a modified version of the Brainstorm Specification user prompt to refine the specification based on the critique and have a final version of the document, which I can either use on my own or feed to something like Claude Code for context.

Doing those things improved the quality of the code and work spit out by the LLMs I use by a significant amount, but more importantly, it helped me write much better code on my own because I know have something to guide me, while before I used to go blind.

As a bonus, it also helped me decide if an idea was worth it or not; there are times I'm talking with the LLM and it asks me questions I don't feel like answering, which tells me I'm probably not into that idea as much as I initially thought, it was just my ADHD hyper focusing on something.

[1]: https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/dat...

[2]: https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/dat...

[3]: https://github.com/jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/blob/trunk/dat...

zamber · 4 months ago

Is this true? I'm getting a feeling that most of this is adding external stucture when coding agents already provide a framework for it.

I've had moderate success in throwing a braindump at the llm, asking it to do a .md with a plan and then going with the implementation for it. Specialized thinking prompts seem like overkill (or dumbo-level coding skills are enough for me).

zamber commented on Show HN: I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o hnbooks.pieterma.es... · Posted by u/pmaze

jdthedisciple · a year ago

> Either way, I can't keep the site open for more than 30-40 seconds before it crashes.

Yup, probably was about to happen to me too, had I not closed it.

CPU fan almost launched off the troposphere about 30 seconds in.

Probably a cluttered bunch of heavily unoptimized ReactJS modules in there (no offense to OP, I know it probably sped up development by 10x at least)

zamber · a year ago

Nope, hug of death is seems:

Failed to load module script: Expected a JavaScript module script but the server responded with a MIME type of "text/html". Strict MIME type checking is enforced for module scripts per HTML spec.

Ad infinitum for a list of a couple .js files with repeating names.

Guess we'll have to come back in a day or two to experience it in it's full glory :).

zamber commented on Second factor SMS: Worse than its reputation ccc.de/en/updates/2024/2f... · Posted by u/F30

dools · a year ago

A family friend of ours recently fell victim to a phishing attack perpetrated by an attacker who paid for Google Ads for a search term like "BANKNAME login". The site was an immaculate knock off, with a replay attack in the background. She entered her 2fa code from the app on her phone but the interface rejected the code and asked her for another one. In the background, this 2nd code was actually to authorise the addition of a new "pay anyone" payee, and with that her money was gone[0].

I have accounts with 2 banks, one uses SMS 2fa and the other uses an app which generates a token. I had thought that the app was by default a better choice because of the inherent lack of security in SMS as a protcol BUT in the above attack the bank that sends the SMS would have been better because they send a different message when you're doing a transfer to a new payee than when you're logging in.

So really the ideal is not just having an app that generates a token but one that generates a specific type of token depending on what type of transaction you're performing and won't accept, for example, a login token when adding a new payee. I haven't seen any bank with that level of 2fa yet, has anyone else?

I guess perhaps passkeys make this obsolete anyway since it establishes a local physical connection to a piece of hardware.

[0] Ron Howard voice: "she eventually got it back"

zamber · a year ago

Banks like that exist. mBank from Poland does in-app approve/reject - similar to what you get on an Android phone when you try logging in on a new PC.

They also send phishing warnings when they find active campaigns.

That said, plain old social engineering works well on people. Last week one small-scale influencer fell victim to a bank transfer scam. Got phoned by a bank person telling her that her account is targeted by hackers, then a cybersec police head phoned her and asked to transfer her savings to a 'secure account'.

zamber commented on 'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue thehill.com/policy/energy... · Posted by u/c420

zephyrthenoble · 2 years ago

> I don’t personally think that other animals will have a verbal inner monologue in the way that I do

I find it funny that this article and the quotes within state that humans have a "dense internal monologue" as if that is some requirement of the species. Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0].

There are frequent Reddit posts with some variation of "TIL people [have|don't have] an internal monologue" full of comments of people from both sides, and a significant portion of people who don't have the classic internal monologue, but something in between instead.

We can't even begin to truly describe our own minds, how could we possibly know how all species would think?

0: Hurlburt, R.T., Alderson-Day, B., Kuhn, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: Neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147932

zamber · 2 years ago

Weren't these TIL's about hearing an imaginated voice VS imagining the meaning?

zamber commented on You Suck at Excel (2015) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=0nbka... · Posted by u/kristianp

berkes · 2 years ago

This problem gets worse with localized formats. In my locale, $13.377 is 13377 dollars and zero cents. And $13,377 is 13 dollars and 37(and something) cents. Obviously, CSV exports randomly chose my locale, their locale or something else. Same for date-formats. But at least date-format errors are visible and often obvious. Having a giant table of prices and a very few being off by a thousand, isn't.

Add, indeed, the localized formulas and you end up with sheets that are completely unportable, unsharable.

I'm certain that this is because Excel was designed in a pre-internet era. Where collaboration, if it existed at all, evolved around intranets, shared drives and company-managed computers.

zamber · 2 years ago

This is an issue with CSV numerical values stored as strings, for numbers it's a bit better. Libraries sometimes allow for a raw import that preserves the internal data type of the format, then you get proper numbers, not adjusted to locale formats.

If you do it for excel it even handles dates pretty well because they're in a numerical format and you can infer that a column is filled with dates because of the range.

The pre-internet conclusion is right. They try to keep backwards compatibility. Also, Excel doesn't handle big data well (1-2M rows) and neither do import libraries (at least in JS land).

zamber commented on Show HN: InvokeAI, an open source Stable Diffusion toolkit and WebUI github.com/invoke-ai/Invo... · Posted by u/sophrocyne

cercatrova · 3 years ago

Speaking of SD, I wonder if 1.4 will be the last truly open release as Emad said 1.5 would release a while ago but it's been held up for "compliance" reasons. Maybe they got legal threats due to using artists' works and stock images. If so, that would be sad to see it.

In a way it reminds me of people who make unofficial remakes of games but get cease and desists if they show gameplay while in development. The correct move is to fully develop the game and release it, then if you get C&Ds, too late, the game is already available to download.

zamber · 3 years ago

There was an AMA with Emad yesterday on discord. He got asked this. The promise is that 1.5 will be released in the following week.

The slowdown has numerous issues. They got legal threats, death threats, and threats from some congresswoman to have them banned by the NSA (1).

Stability.ai workers (except for one) have a clause that they can open-source anything they're working on. They do and supposedly will open-source everything because they want to do a ecosystem, not a cash grab in the model of DALL-E.

Also they don't have one central place for all their projects and will scale from 100 to 250 employees in the following year so things should speed up.

1) https://eshoo.house.gov/media/press-releases/eshoo-urges-nsa...

zamber commented on Git in one image raw.githubusercontent.com... · Posted by u/guptarohit

temac · 4 years ago

I disagree that you need to know the internals. You need to understand an abstract model, that may have been influenced by internals of early versions, and part of such internals may have been preserved into current versions. But unless you want to modify git, you should not have to know anything about the internals. The abstract model is enough. I consider to know virtually nothing of git internals, yet I consider to be proficient in understanding its abstract model and using it.

zamber · 4 years ago

Or so you may think. Working with diffs / merge conflicts already exposes you to internals. Knowing that committing big binary blobs is a bad idea also could be categorized as "knowing internals". Knowing why LF/CRLF leads to conflicts (without setting .gitattributes) also is knowing git internals.

zamber commented on Show HN: Bulk convert images online without sending to server webutils.app/image-compre... · Posted by u/akmittal

akmittal · 4 years ago

Squoosh already had wasm files built, all i had to just import and create a common API.

For now wasm can be compiled from C,C++, Rust and Go, so mostly compiled languages. https://emscripten.org/ can help compile C,C++, Rust and Go has native support to compile. There is also a Typescript like language which compile to wasm(assembly script)

Python or most dynamic languages are too difficult to compile to wasm.

zamber · 4 years ago

You could consider publishing it on GitHub and pinging squoosh guys: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/issues/1084