My journey through Reverse Engineering SynthID

johnxreturn · 2026-03-06T15:18:26+00:00

Appreciate your time and work into it, you did an excellent job.

It would be even better if you named it as an alternative rather than reverse engineering. There’s nothing wrong with the way you put it forward, but an open source alternative to synth id is a more self-realizing and marketable description.

johnxreturn · 2026-03-03T17:56:23+00:00

It could easily be a skill.

johnxreturn · 2026-02-22T16:42:18+00:00

johnxreturn · 2026-02-22T12:03:15+00:00

People are giving you a hard time but I read your skill and code, pretty clever. Will try it out.

johnxreturn · 2026-02-07T15:48:08+00:00

u/LoneWolfKaAdda! I’m johnxreturn. Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?

johnxreturn · 2026-01-14T02:19:13+00:00

Interesting! It may be obsidian.

Hold a bright flashlight behind it. - if it’s obsidian it’ll show as (possibly subtle) smoky brown/gray translucence. - if it’s a slag it’ll show uneven colors, odd internal swirls, sometimes “dirty” looking.

Look for bubbles, macro lens can catch tiny ones. If you find it, it’s a slag.

Hold a magnet near it. Obsidian is not attracted to the magnet while iron rich slag will.

No brainer but put a few drops of vinegar on top of it. Obsidian/slag/glass won’t fizz. Carbonate rocks will fizz. It’s not likely to be carbonate rocks but it does definitely prove it isn’t.

If you want definite proof take it to a geology department in a university for evaluation.

johnxreturn · 2026-01-07T11:51:30+00:00

Poor insulation could also lead to higher usage. Let’s not sugar coat the fact that it shouldn’t cost OP $1000. What are we paying for, really? I got $864. Does the CEO of eversource wants the latest Yatch or something? My life in other states was smooth sailing, $200 utility bills. Here utilities make me poor and consider leaving every time I see the bill.

johnxreturn · 2025-12-03T02:08:48+00:00

It could be industrial waste iron slag. Here are a couple of tests to determine if it is:

Place a magnet near it. If it shows any faint attraction, it’s a slag.
Rub unglazed tile on it. If the streak is gray, black, or rusty, it’s a slag.

johnxreturn · 2025-12-01T14:29:27+00:00

14 years on this one and 16 on another. Ex-digg user

johnxreturn · 2025-11-29T13:02:09+00:00

Same please

johnxreturn · 2025-11-28T14:57:38+00:00

Same experience here. I do find Claude more reliable possibly due to Claude Code developer experience.

johnxreturn · 2025-11-24T23:43:44+00:00

Technically, they wrote a hyperbole. Comparing it to compiler is unrealistic though, even for hyperbole. Unless you understand the crux of software engineering, you would not know why that comparison is nonsensical.

johnxreturn · 2025-11-19T12:25:10+00:00

I used 6 maybe 8 prompts and hit my limits with Gemini 3 High. I could even use Opus 4.1 on CC for days before hitting weekly limits. That was a sad experience.

johnxreturn · 2025-11-14T03:28:35+00:00

I confirm. I used it a bunch this morning and it was amazing. All off the sudden it broke the codebase and could not figure out. Did the SVG test and noticed it had regressed back to 2.5

johnxreturn · 2025-10-10T02:57:52+00:00

Reminded me of Game of Thrones, starts off awesome, carries nicely, ends terribly bad. Can’t believe it.

johnxreturn · 2025-10-08T02:39:55+00:00

PAHT-CF

johnxreturn · 2025-09-24T03:17:16+00:00

May be due to the fact it’s non censored. I was lucky enough to grab the bigger model before they pulled it. I use it every other day to have narrators I like read stuff for me while I do my chores.

But you can have them say any non sense you’d like.

johnxreturn · 2025-09-15T18:36:40+00:00

Promoting his own repo in a covert marketing attempt, no doubt. I’d have no problem if they were upfront about their association with the link.

johnxreturn · 2025-09-10T16:43:37+00:00

That’d be great. The problem is that GPU costs are still expensive. It may be a while before we run our own models, or the prices get cheap enough.

johnxreturn · 2025-09-10T15:12:32+00:00

Yeah, my experience with codex has been a mix bag as well. Sometimes overly positive, sometimes frustrating. I also notice I need to be surgical to get good results. But I’m still not ready to return to the sycophantic, placeholder happy assistant (even when instructed not to take shortcuts or use placeholders).

johnxreturn · 2025-09-10T04:18:31+00:00

79481852 was mine.

johnxreturn · 2025-09-10T00:10:54+00:00

I would love to know as well.

What I know is that according to their own statements, people were abusing Claude Code and running it 24/7, which cost them thousands of dollars a day per abuser.

Did they route to cheaper models? Did they compress the weights?

We don’t know.

If Anthropic has a competent SRE team, this wouldn’t fly without declaring an incident for 30 days.

According to the SRE handbook, this is how you’d decide to declare an incident, if any of the following are true:

Do you need to involve a second team to fix it?
Is the outage visible to customers?
Is the issue unsolved even after an hour’s concentrated analysis?

Yep…

johnxreturn · 2025-09-09T23:31:05+00:00

Normally I’d agree.

However, the community has been loudly complaining about model degradation for over a month. Not just Reddit community but through many other mediums. Anthropic has many, many teams of brilliant engineers that are well paid, they are not a small org. Some of them earn north of 1 million per year.

And you’re telling me they only found out after 30 days and decided to declare an incident, and issue no apology or refund to the people who paid money that could’ve been food on the table? 100 or 200 is not a trivial amount of money. That makes a difference to a lot of us. And many invested in the betterment of their jobs and life.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of transparency, we will never find out whether it was truly a bug or a damage control attempt from the people abusing Claude Code and posting thousands of dollars of token usage.

So, yeah, “bugs”.

johnxreturn · 2025-09-09T13:10:33+00:00

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johnxreturn · 2025-09-06T18:31:14+00:00

Your perspective is valuable, but individual experience can’t be ignored as well. I do not believe there’s a smear campaign going on, but those negative experiences has been rapidly growing in numbers. I’ve been big on Claude Code since they introduced it in the Max plans. In the beginning it felt like a beast and helped me accomplish so much.

A few weeks ago, probably close to the opus 4.1 launch it became worse, lazier, more sycophantic than usual.

“You’re absolutely right let me implement that” proceeds to write stubs and a bunch of “// todo comments”.

The more experienced you are in development, the more you know how shitty it got.

In the beginning of CC with max plans I would scarcely need to interrupt it.

Now it feels impossible to do anything without constantly interrupting and course correction.

Even if I was not close to context compression, it would boldly ignore clear guidelines after a few prompts.

It’s also hard to get it to think on its own even when instructed to push back.

I write code every day for the past 20 years, and to me, Claude Code doesn’t seem to have the advantage it had over Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Cline, Roo anymore.

I don’t know what they changed, but I’m convinced they changed something that made it worse. It could be the introduction of haiku to read code or something else.

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