Toad looks really nice, I will definitely try it out. I have some ACP questions if you don't mind.
First, from my reading of the ACP doc, one thing that seems pretty janky is if the ACP client wants to expose a tool to the agent, e.g. if Toad wanted to add the ability for the agent to display pretty diffs. In the doc they recommend stdio to the ACP server, then stdio to an MCP server, and then some out of band network request back to the ACP client. Have you thought about this, or found a better solution working on Toad?
Similarly, it would be useful to be able to expose a tool which runs a subagent using ACP using a different agent, e.g. if I'm using Claude for coding but I'd like to invoke codex for code review. Have you thought about doing anything like this? Is it feasible over the protocol?
I don’t follow your first question. Toad already displays pretty diffs. MCP works in the same way as the native CLI.
One of the advantages of Toad is that it is vendor agnostic. In the future Toad will be able to run sub agents, and allocate any agent to any job. Still to figure out the UX for that.
In my first question, I'm referring to exposing functionality from the ACP client to the agent. Imagine an IDE ACP client which wants to expose language refactoring to the agent, for example - I can't think of a better example for something more like Toad. As far as I know the protocol doesn't expose a way to inject tools into the agent from the ACP client.
The ACP protocol supports MCP. That would be how the client provides additional functionality for the agent. There's no UI in Toad for that yet, but there will be in a future update.
I wonder if, for instance, optimizing for speed may produce code that is faster but harder to understand and extend.
This is generally true for code optimised by humans, at least for the sort of mechanical low level optimisations that LLMs are likely to be good at, as opposed to more conceptual optimisations like using better algorithms. So I suspect the same will be true for LLM-optimised code too.
Interesting, I have consistently found that Codex does much better code reviews than Claude. Claude will occasionally find real issues, but will frequently bike shed things I don't care about. Codex always finds things that I do actually care about and that clearly need fixing.
The instantaneous torque definitely helps, and EVs are often heavier which helps with stability. But if you're towing anything with significant air resistance (e.g. a boat, a caravan, a big trailer) it kills your range. The general rule of thumb is that it will cut your range in half, which depending on your original max range is ok for some use cases, but unacceptable for others.
This is exactly the situation. ICE also has a massive range hit as well, it's just easy to put a massive fuel tank in to get a stupid amount of range not towing compared to a battery electric that struggles to get a similar range. When you start with almost 600mi losing half isn't too bad, when it's maybe 300mi on a good day and you cut it in half is just not as usable for that usage.
That said, if it's not the towing but the bed you need, the range but isn't nearly so bad.
Additionally, all ICE cars can charge from 0-100% in under 5 minutes. Even if their towing range was somehow less than an EV, it would matter less because you don't have to spend an hour at a charging station.
With the difference that with an EV you always leave home with a full battery and you never have to step into a gas station unless you have a long trip ahead.
But even when you, the amount of time is not 60minutes. If you have kids, the time to go to the restroom, grab a coffee and come back is usually already around 20min, which tends to be enough to charge from 20-60% or even to 80% in newer vehicles. If you have a meal and take around 40minutes, you are probably already hitting 90% or higher.
This is exaggeration. A half hour for a well-loaded truck, sure, but an hour is generally exaggeration.
And as for five minutes for a fill up, it's usually more than five for a regular fill-up on a regular passenger car for me compared to just continuing on.
Yeah 5 mins is not true, its 1 minute actual 'charging' as in refill from empty to full.
I don't know what your family does on the gas station, but my wife and 2 small kids can cover toilet visit (as long as there was no accident) for all 3 combined under 5 mins. So can I with paying, so at the end its 5 mins stop total all counted in. Eating as in lunch is once a day, and when we travel we certainly don't need restaurant experience of sitting around, quick sandwich is more than enough, driving on full stomach sucks anyway.
Never understood people loitering around gas stations for long time, but then again when we travel its often 500km or more, the typical trip cca 2x a year back home is 1500km.
EVs are not for us for quite some time, US EVs seemingly never.
I've timed a number of the pumps around my home filling ~20gal. None of them have come close to filling in a minute. They're often 3-4 minutes of pumping, after spending a few minutes negotiating payment. I don't think I've ever spent less than 8 minutes between pulling off the road, pulling up to the pump, getting out of my car, negotiating payment, pumping, finishing up, getting in my car, and returning to the road.
It takes a few minutes just getting the kids in and out of their car seats. No way everyone is getting out of the car, through the bathroom, and then back in the car ready to go in 5 minutes.
Seriously, time yourself sometime. You're way underestimating the actual time you spend at a stop.
Right? These people are apparently taking off their seatbelts while rolling to the stop, sprinting to the bathroom, emptying their bowels in a few seconds, not thoroughly washing their hands, and sprinting back to the car as fast as they can to shave a few minutes off their several hour trip. God help them if there's only one toilet, I guess the family is going to share today.
Forget that. Take your time. Be comfortable. You've got a few more hours to go, enjoy yourself. Stretch, have your snack outside of the car so it doesn't get as messy and you're not hungry in a little bit (and as the driver, so you're not distracted trying to eat while driving). Don't get me wrong, don't just be idle at the stop, do what you need to do and get moving again. But you don't need to rush. Its not going to make that big of a difference in the end.
That is still significnatly less time than an EV charge time. (new EVs are starting to come that can do really fast charges, time will tell how this changes)
I do agree, from the perspective of the total time to get the energy into the vehicle it is significantly more time, easily a bit over 2x as long for a "quick" road trip stop.
But take a look at it from another perspective. Its another 10-15min on a several hour road trip. On a 5hr road trip that's like 3-4% more time for the total time of the road trip, assuming you're definitely doing a fast stop on that 5 hour trip and not sending the kids through the bathroom and you're not stopping for a quick meal. Is adding 3% to your travel time really that significant?
And as pointed out, if you're having to get the family through the bathroom or stop for a quick bite (even just sandwiches in the parking lot, although I usually pull off to a rest stop when traveling in an ICE car when having a quick bite) its not even more time, its the same total time.
On the route I often drive for a road trip (between DFW and Houston), I'm normally going to stop for lunch or dinner anyways somewhere on the route. I just stop where there's a charger (a few good options), have a quick bite, and hit the road. I'd usually do that even with my gas cars even if I didn't need gas, normally stopping at one of the rest stops on the way to stretch my legs, have a quick snack, use the restroom, and continue on my way. On paper taking the EV adds something like 15 minutes or so to the trip (which my EV isn't really great for road trips compared to others: smaller battery AWD Mach-E) but in practice for how I road trip its practically the same.
If you live in the US you likely are a two or more car family. You can argue the need for an ICE for one of those cars, but for most it wouldn't be hard to plan "honey I need your car tomorrow for my long trip so remember to take my car".
yeah for sure...in this shithole country thats true, China has 1,000-volt chargers which are basically as fast as filling a tank. Maybe the US will get something comparable by 2050, after Miami is 6ft under water
I agree, I mostly use Claude for writing code, but I always get GPT5 to review it. Like you, I find it astonishingly consistent and useful, especially compared to Claude. I like to reset my context frequently, so I’ll often paste the problems from GPT into Claude, then get it to review those fixes (going around that loop a few times), then reset the context and get it to do a new full review. It’s very reassuring how consistent the results are.
If this law pushes back against the idea that it's ok to make endless tech products which are essentially future rubbish as soon as you buy them, then I think that's a good thing. Perhaps products like this just shouldn't exist until we have better ways of dealing with the remains.
The problem is that it makes it impossible to have a version 0 to iterate on until a whole lot of other industries have advanced. Imagine the situation of in-ear hearing aids: they shouldn't be allowed to exist until they're perfect, unless we're happy telling deaf people they have to wear much larger than necessary devices and advertise their disability.
I'm glad we're reducing e-waste. I'm not thrilled about the idea of saying you can't make a thing until 100% of the bugs are worked out, meaning you can't have a beta version for research and fundraising, meaning, you can't conjure the perfect version into existence.
Fortunately, your link basically says it doesn't apply to something you wear on your hands or arms:
> By way of derogation from paragraph 1, the following products incorporating portable batteries may be designed in such a way as to make the battery removable and replaceable only by independent professionals:
> (a) appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable;
But the only mention of "medical" comes right after it, and doesn't include hearing aids, future smart glasses, etc.:
> (b) professional medical imaging and radiotherapy devices, as defined in Article 2, point (1), of Regulation (EU) 2017/745, and in vitro diagnostic medical devices, as defined in Article 2, point (2), of Regulation (EU) 2017/746.
So ironically, the law allows disposable "junk devices" people are complaining about here, but doesn't allow factory-only serviceable hearing aids. How 'bout that? We can buy our smart rings and throw them away, but hearing aids will have to remain giant hunks of heavy plastic, or at least the models purchasable by average people who can't fly out of the EU to buy the good ones.
Edit: It's easy to downvote. I cited the relevant law. If I'm wrong, cite other law that explains why.
Hearing aids have had replaceable batteries since they were invented basically. I still remember my grandma 20 years ago fiddling with the small batteries, so that really is not a problem.
If you want more freedom to design medical devices for people where there is an actual need, it would easily be done by expanding the exception for medical devices that already exists in the law.
If you think people to be able to sell unsustainable and mostly superfluous electronics because any improvements there might eventually trickle down to hearing aids, your argument is basically "we should accept the millions of tonnes of unnecessary e-waste in order to get slighly smaller hearing aids", which think many reasonable people would disagree with.
If the battery lasts for two years its exceeding the useful life of many other products already, some of which of have higher environment cost for manufacturing and disposal.
The law has chosen poor proxies for lifespan and impact.
The problem with plastic straws was properly disposing them. For a piece of jewelry I doubt many people would throw it away on the side of the road. A ring that last for years is different than a disposal product that people may use for a couple of minutes.
Products are supposed to last two years at the very least in EU (local laws may be more strict, but not less). If your product dies before that time, the customer will cite warranty, and there you go. This device is likely one of the many 'designed to last a little bit more than two years', with the emphasis on 'little bit'. It appears to be a perfect example of planned obsolescence.
Who gets to choose what products are future rubbish?
Even if you think this product is a waste of resources, why is THIS waste of resources something we should stop, but not other, bigger wastes? Should we outlaw flying somewhere when you could take a train? The fuel spent on a short flight wastes way more resources and damages the environment much more than this smart ring does. If we are willing to ban this piece of tech because it is a waste, couldn't the same arguments be made about a short range flight?
The same way that the law prevents kids drinking their parents’ alcohol - it doesn’t. But having it be illegal sends a signal, even though it’s possible to circumvent it, and also allows prosecution if warranted.
I'm very sorry to hear your story, and I'm really glad the medication has worked well for you and your family. It's early days, but it seems to be working well for ours too.
I also really admire the way you're dealing patiently with everyone in this thread arguing in bad faith, you have a lot more tolerance than I do! Hopefully it's not getting to you. Best wishes.
As someone who has been seriously depressed from an early age, I can tell you that it looks exactly like the DSM/ICD criteria - a lack of energy, loss of appetite, loss of interest in all activities, insomnia, feelings of worthlessness, suicidal thoughts and pervasive sadness and hopelessness.
Some people would rather believe that pediatric depression isn't real, rather than confront the reality of a loved and cared-for child who is constantly tearful, severely underweight, sleeps for three or four hours a night, spends most of their time staring into space and frequently talks about wanting to die.
Depression is an utterly dreadful illness and should not be confused with normal sadness or unhappiness.
Probably something like Boy Interrupted[0]. Sad story and something I can sympathize with having some of the same feelings very early on despite having a rather normal upbringing and siblings not showing signs of it.
And several of your comments before that were upvoted. Are we to regard those as suspicious?
Of the recent downvoted comments, one was a complaint about moderation that anyone who has paid attention to dang's track record here over more than a decade knows is baseless. (And if you think the top comment on any thread is a bad one, you can always choose to be a helpful contributor to the community and email us to let us know).
Of the other two of your downvoted comments, none were downvoted by the same users.
The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle and complain to the moderators when things don't go your way, but it's clear what others in the community want to see.
> or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle
Which ones? The one about ML and programming languages? Or the one about asking a genuine question about an experience with childhood depression? Or the one observing that you and dang unevenly apply moderation rules? Or the one commenting about how you can't say the word for the literal definition of fascism on this site without getting downvoted? Or the one about dishwashers?
Where's my ideological battle?
You have no credibility. You unlike dang, don't do a good job. Go ahead and ban me or put me on a cool down to prove my point.
I've scanned your full list of comments and can find plenty that have an ideological flavor to them, and others that are in the flamewar style, but are not so clearly related to politics/ideology. I'm not interested in getting into an argument about which of your comments are ideological or not. That's not the issue. What is the issue is the hostile and inflammatory style of commenting towards other community members and HN as a whole.
It's notable in this instance:
- You posted a series of comments about controversial topics, having established a history of participating on HN with this persona of being a brave combatant for, I don't know, some worldview or philosophy that you seem to be fighting for;
- When a handful of your comments receive even a solitary downvote, you call in "the cops" (dang) to come to your aid, with a claim of "brigading";
- When we investigated and found that, no, there's no "brigading", some of those comments are not even net-downvoted anymore, and that any downvotes you're getting are to be expected given your combative style of commenting, you've responded with these incoherent attacks on moderation/moderators.
Whether we all agree that many of your flamewar-style comments really are, in fact, political/ideological, is not the point and seems to be a way for you to deflect from being held to account for your conduct.
What I'm saying to you is that people who care about making HN better have all kinds of ways of showing it, and it begins with making an effort to observe the guidelines, and it also involves engaging respectfully with other community members and the moderation system. We are always, always working to make HN better and our moderation approaches better, and we always welcome and engage with feedback, as dang has been doing with you in another subthread today. But we've both been doing this job long enough to sense when someone isn't really wanting to help make HN better at all.
> What is the issue is the hostile and inflammatory style of commenting towards other community members and HN as a whole.
Please.
> having established a history of participating on HN with this persona of being a brave combatant for, I don't know, some worldview or philosophy that you seem to be fighting for;
What? Just because I have a different worldview than you, doesn't mean I am fighting for or am a brave combatant of anything. But it's extremely telling that you think that, and revealing about your own views. And furthermore troubling that you are a moderator here.
Maybe you should read up on the clustering phenomena wiki and understand your own personal biases a little more.
You don't know what my worldview is or what dang's worldview is and honestly I don't know what your worldview is and this is never relevant to how we moderate HN. We want HN to be a place where difficult topics can be discussed and all perspectives can be represented. That's what we optimise HN for, with the caveat that the guidelines foremost ask us all to "be kind" in comments. It's notable that you keep complaining about some kind of "bias" without being able to point to any evidence for your claims, and that all of your comments in this subthread ultimately resort to ad hominem. If there was any substance to your claims you would have presented it by now. The entire history of HN submissions and comments is available for anyone to download and analyse.
Let's be clear what's going on here: you've claimed to be a victim; you can't demonstrate exactly how you've been made a victim; when we investigate your claims, which we've taken time to do in good faith, we find that, no, there's no evidence for your claims of victimhood; when we tell you that, you respond with ad hominem attacks.
Please just observe the guidelines like everyone here is expected to do.
I've been here on this account for five years. Making me out to be some kind of serial complainer and self-proclaimed victim, of which I've done exactly twice across a litany of diverse and continued conversation and dialog on this website is ludicrous.
Your continued aggressive dismissal of milquetoast commentary against your moderation style is offensive.
Your characterization of my posts here as a warrior championing some cause is similarly offensive.
Your words, not mine:
> ... having established a history of participating on HN with this persona of being a brave combatant ...
How kind, and full of good faith.
You clearly feel something towards my worldview. Your language is charged, you have opinions directed at me. To be clear: I don't care about you at all. But I do find it amusing to watch such a visceral reaction to a general commentary, "the mods are biased, and shape the bias of this website."
You initiated all this. We've investigated and considered all your claims, established them to be unfounded or baseless, and still you keep going.
Your worldview is irrelevant to this discussion. This place’s entire worth is built on the fact that a broad range of worldviews and discussion styles is represented, and our moderation philosophy is intended to allow everyone’s worldview to be fairly represented.
We're responding to your claims only because if there is any basis to them we want to know so we can address any issues and reform the way we operate. We’re actively working to do that continually. But it’s increasingly clear that none of your claims hold up to any scrutiny and every additional comment just generates more noise and still no signal.
My advice as a long time participant here: pay no attention to upvotes or downvotes. Sometimes they seem to be completely unrelated to whatever you said. Stay curious.
Absolutely. These random namedrops of drugs are irritating. People respond to different psychiatric medications in wilddly different ways. And actually, the majority do not respond at all. Throwing a random name of some random medication helps absolutely nobody. It will just make some desperate people seek "this one drug" that they heard about on the internet.
Nocebo can too. Apropos the featured article, I wonder if we should worry about that when we report in the popular media that antidepressants trigger suicides.
> It's too early to say. Obviously the idea is to get her off it if possible.
You understand that the people who sold you that drug have a vested interest in making sure it's not possible and/or that you & she think it's not possible, right?
I'm big on medications for brain stuff but uh yes, in the US, doctors get lots of kickbacks for prescribing drugs.
Usually this takes the form of "I'm prescribing you with <Brand> instead of generic" or "I'm prescribing you this specific drug from this class of drug"
> doctors get lots of kickbacks for prescribing drugs.
From your own source: "In 2024: $172 or more in general payments have been received by half of physicians."
Even if all of those payments count as kickbacks, a median of $172 in a year (significantly less than 0.1% of the median physician's annual pay) is not "a lot of kickbacks".
> > SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin.
> That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence.
My experience with the chatbots is that they start with the conventional marketing tropes, but if you ask pointed questions they'll dig into the actual research.
This thread started with a generic question about why ECT seemed to help some patients. It had a really good reasoning about why SSRIs are still the first-line treatment for depression, even though the MAOIs were much better drugs.
The Big Picture
SSRIs flood serotonin globally, which can suppress
dopamine/norepinephrine and blunt mood.
Anti-serotonin strategies (receptor-specific antagonism,
reuptake enhancement, or targeted modulation) often
result in cleaner antidepressant effects with fewer
side effects.
This supports the criticism you mentioned: SSRIs may
“work” only because the brain adapts to the serotonin
disruption, whereas directly reducing or modulating
serotonin is more therapeutic.
The whole 'conversation' is pretty good, and would provide plenty of search terms for helping you figure out what science has actually figured out about depression.
There's a supplement seller that said his pregnenolone powder was made with a newer, cleaner process than is used by most of the pregnenolone supplement vendors, but I don't know if he's still using that supplier. The powders are a much better value than the capsules.
The chatbot is great as a first-line of research for many things, but something like this needs to be backed up by actual research to make a concrete claim. It will absolutely fabricate falsehoods or misrepresent truths based on an unknown number of stochastic factors behind any response. Shame on your for propagating a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that every reader must go verify for themselves if they want to substantiate or refute your claim - in response to a request for substantiation!
The SSRI's have always been terrible drugs. Apparently the trials before their approval found increased suicidality. Another response to this thread shared how his/her mother was given a "murderous impulse" with Prozac in 1989 [0].
Because this class of drugs was so heavily promoted for such a long time, the side effects have always been swept under the rug.
My comment above proposed that the 11yo girl's depression could actually be caused by precocious puberty. Another possibility is that she's a poor methylator (#MTHFR) who's poisoned by fortified flour and other sources of shelf-stable provitamins.
I haven't yet found a comprehensive SSRI-truth resource that makes SSRI advocates pause their advocacy, so I just shared the chatbot link. This was supposed to provide the father enough of the background terms and anti-SSRI thinking for him to search for his own resources.
Someone else posted a link to "The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence" [2022] at Nature [1]. This is okay, but it still dances around the core issue: whether ECT and Serotonin-enhancers sometimes benefit people because of how the brain responds to brain damage.
Puberty in general can be rough. I (a dude) had all kinds of bad thoughts and moods going through puberty and then one year it was just gone, grades improved dramatically, started making friends again, etc
