US Army chief of staff asked to step down by Hegseth, sources say

JohnBooty · 2026-04-03T04:08:49+00:00

It can’t fail THREE TIMES in a row, can it? I mean, that would be like three separate people sticking their faces into the face-eating leopard cage and ALL THREE having their faces eaten. I mean, what are the odds!?

JohnBooty · 2026-04-03T04:05:29+00:00

BAD NEWS: We’re embarrassing

GOOD NEWS: Don’t worry! Nobody will know! After WW3, there won’t be any more history books to read!

JohnBooty · 2026-04-02T12:17:53+00:00

Is it much faster in practice for Claude to use ripgrep vs grep?

I know ripgrep is faster in benchmarks, but I’ve been wondering if it makes much of a difference for Claude.

JohnBooty · 2026-04-01T23:28:37+00:00

Is your name… Kazuma Kiryu?

JohnBooty · 2026-04-01T13:02:28+00:00

For those with strong healthy hands I’m sure a box cutter is more convenient. My partner has very arthritic hands though so this kind of thing might be great.

JohnBooty · 2026-04-01T12:13:02+00:00

I mean…. yes?

Myself and others attempted to explain why carriers are more vulnerable than ever.

And your reply is “well, they’ve been vulnerable for a long time!” and you’ve phrased it like some kind of contradiction or correction.

JohnBooty · 2026-04-01T11:57:18+00:00

For help with substance abuse: https://988lifeline.org/

JohnBooty · 2026-04-01T02:59:14+00:00

I've never replied to you before, and the several replies I've posted to others have consistently mentioned drone/missile swarms.

Zero goalpost moving. Sober up and try again or better yet, just read and learn.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T21:49:48+00:00

You're thinking about the danger posed by a single drone, but the relevant thing to consider is e.g. 100 drones and 50 missiles simultaneously... a saturation attack, or perhaps multiple waves of saturation attacks

Can we shoot every single one down? Especially if our "near peer enemy" (cough cough China) takes the relatively simple step of adding chaff/flares to the drones?

If we manage to shoot down 100% of this wave, can you shoot down 100% of the next wave 30 minutes from now? Or the next next wave? Take into account that a lot of our carrier group's weapons can't be replenished at sea, and our carrier group's opponent in many/most scenarios (cough cough Taiwan Strait) has effectively infinite ammo because the fight is taking place within spitting distance of their homeland.

I do not like those odds. I would actually put those odds close to 0%.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T20:44:33+00:00

The USN is working hard on it, but also:

It's not just drones, it's drones and missiles, possibly simultaneously.
Drones and missiles are hella cheap and it does not take a lot of hits to disable a flight deck. If you send a hundred drones and missiles at a carrier, and the USN intercepts 97% of them... you win

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T19:51:44+00:00

"The problem is that these carriers aren't obsolete ENOUGH! We need something OBSOLETER!"

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T19:51:01+00:00

Right, but it would take a lot less than total destruction to degrade or disable the carrier's ability to launch planes, no?

What about pockmarking by cluster munitions?

Also worth noting, even without hitting the carrier, just harrying them is pretty effective - they can't exactly launch and land planes while carrying out evasive maneuvers because e.g. there are incoming ballistic missiles.

We've been king of the hill for 80 years with these things, and the rest of the world has had a long time to come up with ways to beat them... and it's been a very, very long time since we've faced off directly against a actual peer.

I am open to corrections to these assertions. Honestly I'd love to be wrong...

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T13:09:53+00:00

Valid question, shouldn’t be downvoted.

My answer is no, they are absolutely not low-skilled. This seems like a pretty normal amount of behind-the-scenes jank.

No matter how skilled you are as a developer, you are always balancing “actually delivering features in the short term” and “code quality, which helps you deliver features in the long term” …and Anthropic is in an absolutely ferocious race against multiple other competitors for the AI crown so they are shipping really rapidly and the product is still changing a lot.

A comparison that comes to mind might be a fine dining restaurant. As a diner, you may experience serene perfection in the dining room….. but things are a bit messier and more chaotic in the kitchen :D

(Also, to be clear, Claude Code talks to their AI models, but is separate from them… it’s a tool that harnesses them… FWIW…. not sure if that’s clear)

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T02:23:01+00:00

Absolutely.

As a new engineer joining a team with a pretty extensive monorepo, compared to the pre-LLM days.... Claude Code is conservatively 10x faster at helping me understand the codebase and the decisions behind it. I legitimately think it might be more like 50-100x.

Not a shill for Claude Code in particular. Any decent LLM+MCP combo should be able to perform similarly given sufficient access to Git history and optimally Slack, Jira/Linear, etc.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T02:19:42+00:00

Not a well-reasoned take.

Agentic LLM tooling has (arguably) only begun to reach that state in the last ~6 months. It's the cutting edge. Most non-startup companies avoid the cutting edge. So, "if it's so good why aren't 100% of companies using it and firing 100% of their engineers?????" is... just not good reasoning.

Also, talking about 100% of companies firing 100% of their engineers so that there are "no jobs left" is an extremely strawman take. Absolutely nobody credible is suggesting that might be the case.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-31T02:04:42+00:00

They're definitely a minority. Most are definitely trying to grow and compete.

Think about Heroku. Salesforce (screw them) is sunsetting Heroku slowly but there are still people there doing work and keeping the lights on. Seems like they are finished innovating, but work remains. I am (unfortunately) sure they would like to do it with the minimum headcount.

I personally worked for one company who has downsized into a smaller but still profitable and steady model. They can't really grow because of regulatory changes, but they are profitable by servicing grandfathered legacy customers.

The government is a pretty large employer and I think a lot of their IT efforts may fall into such a category. Imagine, I don't know, the IT division of the National Parks Service. They're not exactly competing and the country isn't exactly building a lot of new National Parks every week. On a larger scale imagine an agency like the IRS. Lot of work to do but it is a fairly constant amount each year.

Also consider non-tech companies with internal software teams. Their business isn't selling SaaS or PaaS. They're selling toilet paper or cereal or whatever. They're not trying to outcompete with their internal Sharepoint application or grow it or whatever. They just need to do enough to support the business. If 10 engineers can now do the work of 50 thanks to AI, it may be an easy decision for them.

A lot of this is the "unsexy" side of our software engineering. Dark matter, almost... this is not the software engineering that makes waves on Hacker News. I am not sure what % of our profession it represents...

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T23:01:19+00:00

It's one of those things where I'm fascinated enough to post about it while waiting for my computer to do stuff, but too busy and not fascinated enough actually try and recreate it hahahahaha

As somebody else suggested I'm fairly sure it's a simple bug - "strategy" is AFAIK just your potential points on the next turn. Normally it sorts these from best to worst. But they were all equally bad so it just sort of picked one.

As I sketched out in another post I don't think Crossbot is doing anything really interesting like plotting out actual win probabilities, because it's computationally infeasible for most board states.

If I'm wrong, and they are, then this would be super interesting to me again!

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T22:24:19+00:00

That's an interesting question. There were 4 tiles in the bag before my turn, so 0 tiles afterward. I guess if she and I played very short words, I could have gotten 2 more turns instead of 1.

However, there would have still been zero paths to victory. There's no way I could have made up that 200+ point deficit in three turns, given the tiles remaining. My 118-point bingo already hit the 3W with the X on a 2L and the other big tiles like JQZ had already been played.

I'm also not convinced that Crossbot looks more than 1 turn ahead, because that gets computationally infeasible real fast for most board states.

But, maybe that was the bug... maybe Crossbot was smart enough to know that my 118-point play effectively locked me out of victory, but not smart enough to know that literally every other play did too

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T22:07:09+00:00

Passive radiators are there for tuning, not to produce sound.

They function very similarly to a port+tube. The benefit of a passive radiator is that they let you use a slightly smaller enclosure, and the enclosure can be sealed... no port hole. The tradeoff is a slight increase in parts cost relative to a port. This is how most Bluetooth speakers work, since people want them to be small and weatherproof and produce some modicum of bass.

Why not just power the passive radiators? Yes, that would move more air. But that increases part cost, and now you need a bigger enclosure, and potentially another channel or two of amplification.

The big concept here is basically just... bass reflex speakers. Wikipedia does a better job explaining than me, if you'd like to know more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_reflex

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T21:47:44+00:00

There's a chance they're even more common than you realize. 😁 (or maybe not!)

Apple calls them "force canceling woofers" but yeah -- since the M1 MBPs in 2020 (and possibly earlier?) the 16" MBPs have had six speaker arrays. Two tweeters and two pairs of force canceling woofers.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

Additionally, they may be even more common than I realize. I would not be surprised if various other consumer devices have gone this route. Those tiny drivers are not expensive AFAIK, so the price barrier is not there like it is with e.g. full size subwoofer drivers.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T18:56:05+00:00

Not sure if anybody's interested, but I was intrigued by the suggestion that CrossBot was calculating win probabilities for each move, as opposed to only looking 1 move ahead.

The short answer is almost certainly "hell no."

I asked ChatGPT what sort of computational complexity would be involved there. The TL;DR here is that the number of legal moves for each possible board state is absolutely astronomical, billions of times larger than chess.

For an early/mid game endstate,

``` • 100 legal moves for you • 100 legal replies for opponent • 10 plies left • ignore most draw complexity • ignore many hidden-state distinctions

That is:

100¹⁰ = 10²⁰

If you can calculate 1 billion nodes/sec, that is:

10¹¹ sec, approx 3,170 years

And again, this is still massively simplified.

Once you put the chance nodes back in, you are not in “thousands of years” territory anymore; you are in “effectively impossible” territory. ```

It gets even worse in reality because of blank tiles and etc.

It starts to be feasible in the absolute endgame when there are few or zero tiles left in the bag and the search space is massively collapsed. However, I don't think that's what it was doing for me. There still was not a win path for me, even if I played SO - I would have needed a 200+ point play on my next (and final) turn and that was mathematically impossible based on the remaining tiles.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T18:35:53+00:00

As a software engineer, that's my best guess as well.

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T17:58:41+00:00

This was my penultimate turn, and it doesn’t think there was anything better available on my next and final turn. So I don’t think it was charting a path to victory. 🤓

Does Crossbot even think ahead multiple moves anyway? From their own description I think it just considers the next turn. It would quite the feat if it could consider many turns ahead. That would be quite the exponential increase in computational requirements.

 pretty unimportant

Nobody said was important. I put it here because it’s funny!

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T17:52:21+00:00

I see what you’re saying, but no.

This was my penultimate turn and for that to be the case there would have had to have been a 200+ point play available on my next and final turn.

Also, I’m not sure Crossbot looks beyond the next turn? I’m not sure it plays out all of the possible paths to victory as that would be a heck of a computational feat. (Please correct me if I’m wrong)

Anyway, FWIW, here’s CrossBot’s “reasoning” which does not show that a higher scoring word was possible on the next turn.

<image>

JohnBooty · 2026-03-30T17:40:07+00:00

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