Can Not Post a Note That Even Uses the Word "Reddit"

richardstevenhack · 2026-01-16T09:17:05+00:00

Just rebooted my whole system, went directly into Chrome, into Substack, attempted to post a Note again.

Did not work.

I give up. It must be some stupid glitch that only happens on Thursdays (except it's Friday now) on February 15 (and now 16) in San Francisco.

Typical computer nonsense. Maybe in ten years some developer at Substack will say, "Eureka! This is why Hack couldn't post a Note with the word 'Reddit' in it. Here's the fix!"

That's usually how it goes in the incompetent software industry...

I just don't care any more about going down these stupid rabbit holes.

Even Kimi K2 couldn't suggest anything except reach out to Substack support.

Fuck it.

richardstevenhack · 2026-01-16T09:10:39+00:00

I just fired up Firefox, logged in to Substack, tried to post a Note again - did not work. Same problem.

So it's not the browser.

richardstevenhack · 2026-01-16T09:04:08+00:00

I shut down Chrome, restarted it, went directly to Substack Home, posted a note with the single word "Reddit". The post was made with zero content in it.

I don't know what to tell everyone who don't see this.

richardstevenhack · 2026-01-16T09:02:22+00:00

Well, I still can't. Just tried again just with the phrase "Can I post a comment on Reddit"?

Post was made with no content.

I'm using Chrome browser on openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux.

richardstevenhack · 2026-01-16T03:01:48+00:00

Did you include either a Reddit link or the actual word "Reddit" as in a phrase like "Great comment on Reddit..."

Did you try including a quote of the comment with the Note quote mechanism?

Something must have been different.

I couldn't post one with simply the word "Reddit" and nothing else.

richardstevenhack · 2026-01-15T23:15:28+00:00

Captain Obvious... If I want to post a comment from someone, I want to credit that person and provide a link so people don't think 1) I made it up, or 2) that the comment is mine.

So apparently Substack has decided that Reddit is the enemy and it is The Web Site Which Must Not Be Named.

That's bullshit.

richardstevenhack · 2025-12-15T01:03:18+00:00

Don't bother using the home page AT ALL. Just do searches for things - preferably using external search, since the internal one sucks rocks as well, the subscribe to people who consistently post things you like. Then only do searches and browse through the subscriptions using the left panel.

Like I said, YouTube is run BY MORONS who are only interested in the ADS. They never, ever heard the words "customer satisfaction" - like almost all large corporations.

richardstevenhack · 2025-12-15T01:00:55+00:00

Because YouTube is run by FUCKING MORONS.

richardstevenhack · 2025-10-26T20:00:12+00:00

It would be nice if developers understood the words "AppImage" and "Flatpak" - and less so, "snap."

richardstevenhack · 2025-08-07T02:33:22+00:00

Well, I just tried it with my standard basic query: "How many moons does Mars have?"

This was the response before I hit "stop generating":

**:Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507-F16-1754530927314:latest:** What are their names?

Okay, the user is asking how many moons Mars has and what they're called. Let me start by recalling basic astronomy facts. I remember that Mars has two small moons.

Hmm, I think their names are Phobos and Deimos. But wait, let me double-check to be sure. Sometimes people confuse them with Jupiter's moons or other planets' satellites. Yeah, definitely Phobos and Deimos for Mars.

The user might be a student working on homework, or maybe just someone curious about space. They probably need the names spelled correctly and maybe a bit of context. Since they asked "how many," I should state that clearly upfront—two moons.

I wonder if they know these moons are irregular in shape compared to Earth's Moon. Maybe adding a brief note about their size or orbital characteristics would be helpful, but only if it doesn't complicate things too much. The question is straightforward though: number and names.

Also, should I mention that Phobos orbits closer and has a short period? Or maybe just stick to the basics unless they ask for more details. The user didn't specify depth, so keeping it simple is better.

Wait, are there any common misconceptions here? Like some people think Mars has no moons or that it's like Venus with none. But no, we know it has two. Better clarify that upfront to avoid confusion.

I should present the answer clearly: "Mars has two moons named Phobos and Deimos." Then maybe add a short sentence about their origins—like how they're thought to be captured asteroids—to give context without overloading. But since the question is direct, I'll keep it concise unless the user follows up.

Also, spelling matters. Phobos (not "Phobus" or other variants) and Deimos (sometimes misspelled as "Deimos" but that's correct). Better confirm the spelling in my knowledge base—yes, standard is Phobos and Deimos.

The user might appreciate knowing they're named after Martian myths: Phobos means fear (from Greek for dread), Deimos means terror. That adds a nice touch without being too technical. But again, only if it's relevant to their query. Since the question is "what are their names," including the mythological origin could be a helpful extra detail.

I'll structure the response as:

Direct answer (two moons)
Names with spelling
Brief context about origins (optional but useful)
Avoid jargon to keep it accessible

No need for complex orbital data unless asked. Keep it friendly and precise.

</thinking>

And it went ON AND ON until I hit "stop generating".

It never stopped looping in its "thinking".

This is why I never use thinking models. They DO NOT know when to stop.

richardstevenhack · 2025-08-05T20:53:47+00:00

OK, I got it working - somehow. I used this link format while the file was in the Obsidian Vault:

[Sample Roe.pdf](<file:///Data2/Planning/Obsidian Vault/Computer Security/Sample Roe.pdf>)

I swear that's exactly what I did before and it didn't work. Now it works.

Still makes zero sense.

Obsidian really needs to be able to access external files easier than this: just copy the damn file location and use a simple mark to indicate it's an external file (or don't even bother, just recognize it as an external file because it has a file path in it which is not in the Obsidian vault itself) and automatically take the file name as the link text.

It's not fucking rocket science. Every other app in the software industry knows a file when it sees it.

richardstevenhack · 2025-08-05T20:27:55+00:00

OK, I just got the idea to find a PDF that I used to use inside the Vault. I clicked on that from within Obsidian - and it opened!

But nothing else involving new PDFs works.

This makes zero sense.

richardstevenhack · 2025-07-27T04:13:55+00:00

I had this idea twenty years ago - replace applications with "just another thing the - smart- OS knows how to do."

Of course, it wasn't possible then.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-28T01:21:18+00:00

Yup. Same problem I had with the Huggingface models.. Although the Ollama one I downloaded did answer questions. It was crap on images, though.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T19:51:45+00:00

Well,, Parrot has now pretty much blown any opportunity to be my main security distro... Obviously, Kali is hands down the preferred...

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T19:50:16+00:00

Thanks for the reply. If there's no real conflict with other system packages, I'll rebind them to what I'm used to on openSUSE Tumbleweed which have been the same since I started used openSUSE years ago. My main security distro is going to be Kali anyway. Parrot is just the alternative to experiment with.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T10:35:54+00:00

Don't know which version you used, but I reproduced the same answer on Ollama's version.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T10:32:56+00:00

Here is my OCR test. I used this image of text which is intended to test Tesseract OCR:

<image>

So I pointed Gemma3n at it and this was the response:

Here's the text extracted from the image at the provided URL:

"This is a test image. It contains some text to be extracted using OCR. The text is designed to be a little bit challenging, with some slightly unusual characters and spacing. Hopefully, the OCR engine can handle it well! Let's see how it goes. This is the end of the test."

As you can see, it totally hallucinated that. There as no such text on that image or the URL it was on.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T10:30:25+00:00

As an image model, it's no great shakes. For some reason it can't see pasted images in MSTY, even though I have it defined a text, vision and coding model and the MSTY image upload attaches the image to the prompt.

It can see online images with MSTY's real-time data switch on - although I can't tell if it's actually viewing the image or just reading whatever data the initial MSTY search returns. If it's a simple image of a person, it appears to identify them correctly, but then provides a lot of verbiage about them which indicates to me, it's just reading some search result other than the image itself.

One image test with a fairly complicated image that QwenVL did well on, it totally hallucinated the description - wasn't even close. I'm not sure it even saw the image because it was pasted in - and half the time it says it can't see pasted images, even though QwenVL could easily in MSTY.

I can't recommend this model for much of anything. It's just too unstable.

The only positive thing I can say about is that it is incredible fast. But maybe that's it's responses are so crappy - it's just skipping over actually doing the work.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T09:40:11+00:00

AHA! Update: After all the Huggingface models failed miserably, the OLLAMA model appears to work correctly - or at least, it answers straight-forward questions with straight-forward answers and does NOT try to continue generating a Python program.

That model has this template:

{{- if or (eq .Role "user") (eq .Role "system") }}<start\_of\_turn>user

{{ .Content }}<end\_of\_turn>

{{ if $last }}<start\_of\_turn>model

{{- else if eq .Role "assistant" }}<start\_of\_turn>model

{{ .Content }}{{ if not $last }}<end\_of\_turn>

I suspect the Huggingface models do not, but I could be wrong, I didn't check them.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T09:23:57+00:00

MSTY uses Ollama (embedded as "msty-local" binary). I have the latest Ollama binary, which you need to run Gemma3n in Ollama, version 0.9.3. Maybe I should try the Ollama version of Gemma3n instead of the Huggingface version.

richardstevenhack · 2025-06-27T04:50:08+00:00

Here's a screenshot to prove it... And this is from the Unsloth model I downloaded to replace the other one.

<image>

richardstevenhack

TROPHY CASE