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nlh

9,595 karmajoined 16 years ago
Self-taught software developer, proud nerd. MIT '00.

Full-time professional numismatist. I buy, sell and trade rare coins & currency. Instagram @numismattack. Wanna talk about coins or have a question? Email me / DM me. I love this stuff.

https://nlh.me email: nlh@ above

comments

nlh
·3 days ago·discuss
Can you elaborate a bit on what you're trying to get to work?
nlh
·9 days ago·discuss
I hate that you're right, but you're right. Twitter and HN can scream and yell as loud as they want but the fact is, enterprises are going to use Fable via API and pay the bills. In fact, restricting individuals probably makes it MORE likely that enterprises will pony up.
nlh
·9 days ago·discuss
It's usable for coding and code auditing. The classifier will have some false-positives and some tasks will be downgraded to 4.8 if it's security-adjacent (I presume), but otherwise there's no restrictions on using this for coding.
nlh
·10 days ago·discuss
Dario Amodei (Anthropic's CEO) had previously been directly liaising with the government and apparently it wasn't going well.
nlh
·10 days ago·discuss
Here's a copy of the letter that Commerce sent to Anthropic (note who it'a NOT addressed to...)

Source: https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2072103733715194048?s=20

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June 30, 2026

Tom Brown Chief Compute Officer Anthropic 548 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94104

Dear Mr. Brown:

Since the issuance of my previous letters, dated June 12, 2026 and June 26, 2026, Anthropic has taken steps in close coordination with the U.S. government to address the risks associated with Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5. Among other things, Anthropic has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models; and to inform the U.S. government of any malicious activity.

In light of these actions and commitments, as well as the Bureau of Industry and Security's evaluation of the diversion risks now presented by Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, the controls in the June 12 letter are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.

Commerce reserves the right to reevaluate the decisions made in this letter and the necessity of reimposing a license requirement, should circumstances change or should Anthropic fail to adhere to its commitments.

If you have any questions about this letter, please contact me or the Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, at (202) 255-1864.

Sincerely,

Howard W. Lutnick

------
nlh
·last month·discuss
I'll take it one step further - we have a 2-year-old toddler and recently I realized that I was spending a full, solid, real 1-1.5 hours per day doing the same kitchen & play area clean-up. Every day. No matter how hard I tried, the daily chaos of my wife & I working from home, preparing meals, and our family spending time in this part of the house meant it just needed this work.

I hired a lovely person recently who comes to the house for exactly that hour a day every day and now does this task for us. It's the most "luxury" labor service I've ever hired, and it, easily and without question, the best use of $$ I have ever spent on a service. I have an extra hour to hang with the family now and our kitchen & play area are now fully reset and spotless every night when we go to bed and every morning when we wake up.

It's not streaming service cheap, and I'm thankful that my business can generate enough $ to allow me to pay for this service, but man is it freeing and wonderful.
nlh
·2 months ago·discuss
I’ve read so many stories like this that I’ve actually gotten scared of making PRs open source projects.

There’s one in particular where a feature I really wanted didn’t exist, so I forked and had Codex 5.5 assist with building the feature on my local version. It works perfectly. My life has been improved in being able to have this feature now.

Normally I’d want to share it back with the community so others can benefit as well (presumably if I wanted this feature, others probably want it too.) But…I am not pretending this is perfect, great, or even good code. I spent about an hour total on it - it works, I haven’t had any issues with it, but it’s probably slop by any hard-core engineering account. And I neither want to get attacked for submitting slop nor do I have the time to properly engineer it to be hand-coded, so the net result is that it lives on my machine alone.

Is this the right outcome? I feel guilty that I’m getting a better version of this software and others aren’t. I want to help makes others lives easier too, but I don’t want to burden the project maintainers or get yelled at for submitting slop.

What’s the future look like here?
nlh
·2 months ago·discuss
Totally fair point!
nlh
·2 months ago·discuss
We're in this weird in-between phase of the tech world where projects like this can now be put together in a few hours/days, but the audience of us HN folk are still trained on the idea that this is the result of months or years of work.

We're going to have to re-train ourselves on what hard work looks like (and thus what should be upvoted here).

I don't know whether the project's creator (@willchen96?) is a lawyer, or if they work at a law firm that helped them shape this, or how much time and effort they put into this, or whether law firms even want or need a vibe-coded open source project for their legal AI stack, but we should be considering the totality of those things when looking at new projects these days.

There's a lot of red flags here.
nlh
·3 months ago·discuss
I'm guessing a lot of similar debates were had in the 1970s when we first started compiling C to Assembly, and I wonder if the outcome will be the same.

(BTW: I was not around then, so if I'm guessing wrong here please correct me!)

Over time compilers have gotten better and we're now at the point where we trust them enough that we don't need to review the Assembly or machine code for cleanliness, optimization, etc. And in fact we've even moved at least one abstraction layer up.

Are there mission-critical inner loops in systems these days that DO need hand-written C or Assembly? Sure. Does that matter for 99% of software projects? Negative.

I'm extrapolating that AI-generated code will follow the same path.
nlh
·3 months ago·discuss
Their best model to date and they won’t let the general public use it.

This is the first moment where the whole “permanent underclass” meme starts to come into view. I had through previously that we the consumers would be reaping the benefits of these frontier models and now they’ve finally come out and just said it - the haves can access our best, and have-nots will just have use the not-quite-best.

Perhaps I was being willfully ignorant, but the whole tone of the AI race just changed for me (not for the better).
nlh
·4 months ago·discuss
This has been a fallacy for as long as businesses have been built, and it will still be a fallacy in the AI era.

Ideas are cheap and don't need to be protected. Your taste, execution, marketing, UX, support, and all the 1000 things that aren't the code still matter. The code will appear more quickly now: You still need to get people to use it or care about it.

I've found almost without fail that you have more to gain in sharing an idea and getting feedback (both positive and negative) before/while you build the thing than you do in protecting the idea with the fear that as soon as someone hears it they'll steal it and do it better than you.

(The exception I think is in highly competitive spaces where ideas have only a short lifetime -- eg High Frequency Trading / Wall Street in general. An idea for a trade can be worth $$ if done before someone else figures it out, and then it makes sense to protect the idea so you can make use of it first. But that's an extremely narrow domain.)
nlh
·4 months ago·discuss
A close friend who was born with way more candor than I has made fighting this scourge his life's mission and I love him for it.

He has no shame about calling people out. He will walk up to a person - rich, poor, old, young - in a bar, restaurant, on an airplane, or wherever and just let them have it. He'll start politely ("Hello sir would you please either turn the volume off or put headphones on") and if they don't, he will escalate until either there's a shouting match or they relent.

His record is nearly flawless in accomplishing the mission.
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
I dunno.

I've been reading a lot of "screw 'em" comments re: the deprecation of 4o and I agree there's some serious cases of AI psychosis going on with the people who are hooked, but damn this is pretty cold - these are humans with real feelings and real emotions here. Someone on X put it well (I'm paraphrasing):

OpenAI gave these people an unregulated experimental psychiatric drug in the form of an AI companion, they got people absolutely hooked (for better or for worse), and now OpenAI is taking it away. That's going to cause some distress.

We should all have some empathy for the (very real) pain this is causing, whether it's due to psychosis or otherwise.
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
I pay $200/month, don’t come near the limits (yet), and if they raised the price to $1000/month for the exact same product I’d gladly pay it this afternoon (Don’t quote me on this Anthropic!)

If you’re not able to get US$thousands out of these models right now either your expectations are too high or your usage is too low, but as a small business owner and part/most-time SWE, the pricing is a rounding error on value delivered.
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
Or the same number of tokens in less time. Kinda feels like the CPU / modem wars of the 90s all over again - I remember those differences you felt going from a 386 -> 486 or from a 2400 -> 9600 baud modem.

We're in the 2400 baud era for coding agents and I for one look forward to the 56k era around the corner ;)
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
amen!
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
Also a very good question and the answer is also...it depends. The "premium" (delta to spot) on 90% silver (aka "90%") varies with supply and demand. At this very moment with the meteoric rise of base silver, 90% is selling for less than spot. But there have been times when it trades above spot.

The reason is that silver itself is traded on the various international commodity exchanges and those traders are not the same supply & demand sources as the little guy(s) who likes keeping some old silver coins in their garage. So as those supply/demand curves shift, the premium over/under spot price changes as well.
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
A very excellent question and totally reasonable thing not to know (congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000!)

I'm speaking from the perspective of US coins because that's what I specialize in but this generally applies to coins all over the world as well:

Prior to (and including) 1964, US 10c, 25c, 50c, (and when they were made, $1) coins were made of 90% silver. We made A LOT of these, so in terms of outright rarity, most are not rare. Today they're referred to as "junk silver" because in terms of collectibility, they're junk, but the 90% silver content means there's some inherent precious metal value (as of this moment on Jan 30, 2026, they have ~approximately~ 60x their face value in silver content, eg $6, $15, $30, and $60 in silver respectively.)

So that's their basal value that fluctuates with the silver market. But the next layer is actual rarity / collectibility -- if a given coin is desirable enough that it surpasses its metal content, you get a different set of values.

Now to your actual question: Do they get smelted/melted down? The answer is...sometimes. They trade somewhat like financial instruments, based on the assumption that you could melt them down (and there's a cost to doing so), so that's how people value the various silver coins. In reality, there's usually enough demand from people who want to hold physical silver in various forms that they don't actually need to be melted down.

There's obviously a lot more to it, but that's the 5c version ;)
nlh
·5 months ago·discuss
Chances are, he was indeed jerking you around. Nearly every one of these traveling road show style buyers pay very very very very little for coins. They have no reputation to uphold and are the literal definition of “fly by night” - and by the time you realize how little they paid you, they’re gone.

Source: Am full-time professional coin dealer (who is NOT fly by night!) and have to deal with the repercussions of people getting hosed by these roadshows all the time :(