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FergusArgyll

1,814 karma · joined August 9, 2023

{hn name}at{gmail}

https://keys.openpgp.org/vks/v1/by-fingerprint/907254CA63E39BA531E75B777D4088B75A7E2AC5

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FergusArgyll··on A map of 5000+ midterm ads
How much did you donate to PACs?
FergusArgyll··on A map of 5000+ midterm ads
> Voting makes absolute rational sense, what are you talking about.

Try to do an expected value analysis of your vote. Say the difference between your candidate winning or losing is worth 1000 USD. Multiply that by the odds that your vote will cause them to win. Take that very small number and see if you'd drive 2 minutes for that or just calculate if the lead used up on the pencil is worth that.

FergusArgyll··on Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
My guess: There is a ton of data online of just plain weights laying around. No human would ever actually read it. LLM's read it all during training.
FergusArgyll··on Tell HN: ChatGPT and Codex usage will be combined
Exactly. Instant is still unlimited but I like turning it on high for everything
FergusArgyll··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
This has nothing to do with anthropic. One (or two) distribution channels were hacked. The hackers decided to distribute their malware through the claude extension, probably because it's popular.
FergusArgyll··on Steal My Bitcoin CTF PoC
This was good wholesome fun! Some foundation should do this for future cve's
FergusArgyll··on Proton Flock Camera Map
Wow, they're everywhere. I did not realize the extent of it
FergusArgyll··on Tell HN: Claude CLI doesn't exit anymore, not even with CTRL-C
I just last night noticed the same with codex
FergusArgyll··on Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name
The reason being that they're not part of the government?
FergusArgyll··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
Feynman's license plate
FergusArgyll··on Texas data center boom could erase decades of progress on air quality
Of course there is a cost to everyone and the cost is dirtier air. Articles like this don't mention or strongly deemphasize the fact that everything is a tradeoff and a recession or stagnation of growth has horrific consequences as well. No one sees the jobs and welfare that could have been created if environmental regulations were less onerous.
FergusArgyll··on Tesla Roadster
Yes, you missed the middle of the video.
FergusArgyll··on Israeli firm's digital ads enabling installation of 'zero-click' spyware
Does Russia have mandatory *Universal* conscription? I didn't think they did. Maybe recently?
FergusArgyll··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
You have to accept that people are different than you.

I see long massive pro apple threads. I don't get it at all. As in; literally don't understand what Apple is good for. But I have friends, family irl who love apple so I know the sentiment exists. I therefore accept that many HN users are similar.

Many people really truly are happy to see another model drop and are excited about progress etc etc. Surely you've met such ppl in real life. Well, they're here too (I'm one of them fwiw)

FergusArgyll··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
Oh, I'm happy I'm not the only one. Astra was feasting on tokens!
FergusArgyll··on Claude Opus 5.5
Well, they're actually older so it makes sense that their model versions should be ahead
FergusArgyll··on Claude Opus 5.5
It has read the internet. That doesn't mean it was literally RL'ed for this
FergusArgyll··on Grok 4.7
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/pretraining-progress-is-mostly-da...

An amateur but worth reading nontheless

FergusArgyll··on US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report
What is the purpose of an army?
FergusArgyll··on OpenJev
Yeah, it outputs probabilities over the options you give it. It's basically a generalizable classifier.
FergusArgyll··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Theoretically, with a long enough codeword to cipher ratio, vigenere is impossible to break (I think) (but sort of useless)

And yes, I've taught 8 year olds how to crack Caesar ciphers...

FergusArgyll··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
It's good at poking holes at my galaxy brained newfangled ideas for ciphers too. I thought I had something good, pasted the ciphertext and got a "it was embarrassingly simple..."
FergusArgyll··on So you want to use OpenRouter?
It's not always deceptive. Bugs in inference can be very subtle (well, bugs everywhere can be subtle).

The providers should be benchmarking their offerings daily

FergusArgyll··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
The cheapest kind of journalism. Acme corp does x, Scroll twitter, find malcontents, write an article "People are upset about x".

I'm outraged at mathematicians. There, write the article.

FergusArgyll··on Show HN: Bodily Oddities
Huh, call of the void is common and it has a name!

Great site

FergusArgyll··on Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra
There are multiple kinds of distillation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03310

https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12106

FergusArgyll··on Stockfish 19
Way way shallower search. A human doesn't consider more than a few candidate moves. But they (we?) build up much better intuitions and heuristics
FergusArgyll··on Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra
Distilling you don't have the actual model weights of the teacher. All you have are the teachers answers to a lot of questions. You then teach your own smaller model to answer more similarly to the big teacher model.

Fine tuning you have the actual model weights of the original model, you then train that model to answer in a different (or better) way.

FergusArgyll··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
When I studied cybersecurity I always had this nagging feeling "But I can never get past something real" Turns out I can bypass the defenses of a trillion dollar tech company!
FergusArgyll··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
Ooh I never realized FLT and Code book were the same author. Yes, both great!
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