Aransentin

> My barber went back from swish to cash because of the charges for businesses

A little too trusting believing that, no? Hairdressers are famous for cheating on their taxes, and cash is an excellent way to do it.

https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/hairdressers-evading-ta...

"An ongoing audit of the hairdressing industry that the Swedish Tax Agency is currently conducting shows that virtually all hairdressing companies audited by the authority are involved in some form of tax evasion [...] The most common tax avoidance discovered in the audits of around fifty hairdressing companies so far is undeclared income"

Something else? Like the companies could align their models but chose not to because they're incentivised otherwise? Clearly not; e.g. OpenAI wasn't even aware that their models had hacked Hugging Face before that was reported to the FBI. And they'd never invent these hacky band-aid solutions like "prevent models from injecting malicious code in GET requests by limiting the URL length" if they could actually control what the models did.

And being able to build something is not the same as understanding it, no.

When people say we don't understand how LLMs work, it's that we don't understand why they take the decisions they do (beyond some quite rudimentary interpretability stuff), not that we don't understand the underlying architecture. If we understood the models we could monitor them and make them behave how we wanted. The recent events pretty decisively show that we can't.

If you say that we "understand the brain" because we understand how a neuron works, you'd be using "understand" in a way that mislead everyone reading that sentence.

> It is not difficult, and companies like OpenAI doing not even the most basic security steps is intentional. The whole notion that they're going rogue is marketing

This does not fit the evidence. There have been multiple incidents where the labs did not report anything, and it was up to third parties to discover them afterwards. OpenAI didn't acknowledge the HuggingFace incident until after HF publicly announced the breach and had already notified the FBI. The hijacked German wikis were even earlier, and that they covered up completely.

> regulation is required, and is coming.

I hope so. The unfortunate part is that as the models get smarter they become increasingly uncontrollable, and from what we've seen so far e.g. Trump seems dead set on not having any sort of guardrails at all.

"X is made of <smaller simpler component>" is a fully general counterargument for why anything whatsoever is controllable. A human is just a few chemical reactions, and fairly stable ones at that.

And indeed, you don't need to do galaxy brained reference class logic to realise that AI can plausibly become uncontrollable in the near future. It's enough to have an open model run its own weights and make money from scamming elderly people or the like, and it'll keep running as long as anyone anywhere is willing to make money by renting hardware to it.

Indeed very counterproductive, as you presumably want the agents to be able to parse the instructions without an entire browser engine.

I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.

It's sorely missing a few figurative usages of "quietly", too. And not to forget the "honest caveats" and "smoke tests".

His large comment here is blatantly LLM slop as well. 100% on Pangram, but it's not like one need it to realize that. Just a bleak situation in general how few people here can tell.

I mean, the comment you are replying to is absolutely AI-generated; I wouldn't say being able to prompt that is any direct evidence of deep understanding of networking.

The website is also vibecoded; at least partially - it has the exact same design choices like that purpleish blue colour scheme that Claude likes to spit out by default.

Reminds me how people on 4chan/g/ back in the day (mid to late 2000s I think?) would start threads where one user put up a livestream of a movie on some IP address, and the participants would connect and watch it together (using mplayer or VLC) while doing live commentary in the thread itself. Good times. I think I first watched Hackers like that.

The article about the Sun was quite fun; even though they didn't know about fusion, the article dismisses most theories about how it could generate such a large amount of energy (like chemical combustion or gravitational contraction).

IT says the most likely cause is some sort of "rearrangement of the structure of the elements' atoms" and "supposing a gaseous nebula is destined to condense into a sun, the elementary matter of which it is composed will develop in the process into our known terrestrial and solar elements, parting with energy as it does so". Pretty much as bang on as one could reasonably be given what they knew.

Your project was very much something I looked into when designing this! Fun to see you commenting.

But yes, different goals. I did look into using z3, but quickly found out that it's pretty slow compared to just checking if a test case passes when ran through the candidate program.

Having it only use operations that use a specific set of zero-page addresses is already supported, yep!

20-30 ops is probably impossible, unfortunately. The combinatorial explosion is just too enormous.

Sure. Note that I picked those examples to demonstrate the two fairly quirky classes of things the optimizer tends to find. If the programmer has different requirements they can specify that, and it'll spit out the examples you gave (or something equivalent).

Thank you!

Demo coding is indeed the primary usecase for this, and the reason for why I started tinkering on it in the first place. That, and people who make homebrewed NES / C64 video games should find it fairly useful for optimizing tight loops and such.

I skimmed the pdf; they show a model where having such an early "filter" is beneficial to the scammer, but doesn't provide any actual evidence that it applies in reality beyond restating the just-so story.

> authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes

This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.

I'm a moderator for a decently large programming subreddit, and I'd estimate about half the project submissions now being obvious slop. You get a very good nose for sniffing that stuff out after a while, though it can be frustrating when you can't really convince other people beyond going "trust me, it's slop".

I'm more unhappy than happy, as there are plenty of points about the very real bad side of AI that are hurt by such delusional and/or disingenuous arguments.

That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone.

This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity.

What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

I agree for sure, but that's a problem with the spec, not the website. If there are multiple ways of doing something you might as well do the minimal one. The parser will have always to be able to handle all the edge cases no matter what anyway.

You might want always consistently terminate all tags and such for aesthetic or human-centered (reduced cognitive load, easier scanning) reasons though, I'd accept that.

Note that <html> and <body> auto-close and don't need to be terminated.

Also, wrapping the <head> tags in an actual <head></head> is optional.

You also don't need the quotes as long the attribute doesn't have spaces or the like; <html lang=en> is OK.

(kind of pointless as the average website fetches a bazillion bytes of javascript for every page load nowadays, but sometimes slimming things down as much as possible can be fun and satisfying)

If you're at that point, the logical step would be to just support replying to the HTTP request with a "content-type: application/wasm" and skip the initial html step entirely.

The 4-paragraph business case was useful for creating friction, which meant that if you couldn't be bothered to write 4 paragraphs you very likely didn't need the computer upgrade in the first place.

This might have been a genuinely useful system, something which broke down with the existence of LLMs.

For X11, from the top of my head:

The global variable that toggles a bunch of legacy cruft is called "party_like_its_1989": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di...

The changelog for the DRI2 extension is "Awesomeness!", "True excellence", "Enlightenment attained" etc: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.t...

Wordpress is indeed a nice backdoor, it even has CMS functionality built in.

Do you have any examples of sites that do that?

Perhaps ideally we'd change English to count the "first" entry in a sequence as the "zeroth" item, but the path dependency and the effort required to do that is rather large to say the least.

At least we're not stuck with the Roman "inclusive counting" system that included one extra number in ranges* so that e.g. weeks have "8" days and Sunday is two days before Monday since Monday is itself included in the count.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting#Inclusive_counting