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XorNot

17,365 karma · joined January 22, 2013

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XorNot··on Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?
Why are bioweapons the only thing tech bros worry about, when some bags of nails, fertilizer and diesel in a sedan will defeat any security measure they care to build for themselves quite reliably?
XorNot··on Gemini 4 Carbon
All I know is that I currently pay Anthropic a bunch of money per month for Claude and that Google wasn't even on my radar for that.
XorNot··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
Seeing a physics result in there has got me hyped.

Turn this loose on LHC data ASAP.

XorNot··on JetBrains Thinkrail
The trouble is that's doomsday anyway. When I don't use most of the features of your product, you're competing with the monthly cost of my Claude subscription for value - and that's very good at building me exactly what I want.
XorNot··on JetBrains Thinkrail
Code review is the problem I'm currently trying to figure out for myself. I've never liked GitHub PRs but I'm not 100% sure what I want instead (which is possibly just: it feels like it should be a VS Code plugin... But maybe I don't like VS Codes interface that much either?)
XorNot··on Code is clay now
That is...not at all my experience of Opus 5.5, which has absolutely both spotted weird workarounds, then spotted the underlying bugs which were leading to the workaround, then spotted the race conditions which were masked by the workarounds.
XorNot··on Code is clay now
This is outdated news though. It's cope. People are out there telling themselves "well it's insecure". That was true. The AI models are better hackers then humans now though. Red teaming your own code with AI will produce a better penetration test then any developer trying to implement OIDC.

And frankly...have you tried configuring Keycloak? It is a gigantic "do everything app". The idea that it's going to have a narrower attack surface is basically fantasy.

XorNot··on Code is clay now
You are seriously underestimating how good something like Opus 5.5 is at testing.

That's what truly convinced me programming was over: it writes better tests, more thoroughly, then any developer.

XorNot··on Triplet of 'ghostly' galaxies hints at what dark matter is and isn't
It also has to do so without destroying a bunch of other exceptionally well tested theories - it's very easy to explain something if you ignore other requirements, like being compatible with relativity - which has been a big problem for MOND but is no problem at all for dark matter (because it's just extra matter being normal out in space).
XorNot··on What shall I teach my son?
No they won't..like, observably they won't. This is a problem almost every entrepreneur who looked at small businesses as a start up opportunity ran into immediately: most small businesses are run by people who are exactly happy with where they got to, and so showing up and promising you'll expand the business goes over as well as a lead balloon.
XorNot··on It's still ok to enjoy programming
Conversely for me AI is letting me focus on the part I actually enjoyed: organizing and planning systems, and powers through the parts which were just a grind to get there.

By far my biggest use at the moment is just getting all the software I use to function as I want it too.

XorNot··on Tesla Roadster
As opposed to just exploding from the high pressure tanks of gas onboard due to an otherwise survivable fender bender?
XorNot··on Tesla Roadster
Okay but he also hasn't cured cancer, hasn't delivered full self driving, and this car is not useful as a car in anyway.

Any sign of the tens of thousands of Optimus robots?

XorNot··on I know why the mathematicians weep
It'll be fine. You voted for strong labor protections, universal healthcare and a welfare system right?
XorNot··on I know why the mathematicians weep
Seriously I don't get what everyone else is doing where they say things are getting worse somehow.

There's days I no longer need to sit at my computer: Claude Remote prompts my phone when it needs direction, the hardware stays busy and I can just go out with my family instead.

XorNot··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
How timely, I just now pointed Claude at my work laptops MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.
XorNot··on QGIS enacts moratorium on AI contributions
I said "in an hour" to mean, the time it takes to identify the issue.

That fairly obviously doesn't turn into "bugs per hour" to verify, but if you find 10 candidates in an hour and then get reproducers of them out over the next few days, they are real bugs.

Like sure, "not properly reviewing" could be a thing but if I'm looking at a hard crash on my console, that's not behavior as designed.

XorNot··on QGIS enacts moratorium on AI contributions
Okay for feature work but the amount of bugs I can find with Claude in hour, with deterministic reproducers is staggering.
XorNot··on Grieving the loss of details
Claude's code review is a lot less interesting then getting Claude to reproduce the bugs it claims to find in code review, which has had an absurdly high hit rate for me.

The biggest problem I see with how a bunch of people use these tools is they go to them as an oracle, rather then letting them be plugged into and interactive with problem.

And it's in that later context that Claude is amazing: it can run tests and setup scenarios which would take days or get stuck in some weird problem loop. And then you can just say "okay, walk me through this problem" and see it yourself right there.

XorNot··on How Protein Took over the World
I won't call it common sense, but humans with highly limited technology lived and reproduced to build sophisticated civilizations in almost every biome on the planet.

Our biology is immensely adaptable, so anyone declaring you absolutely need some finely decided very specific thing in order to be "be healthy" should be treated skeptically.

With regards to protein specifically: your body doesn't trade in proteins as inputs, it trades in amino acids which cracked off the protein chains you eat. Everything else is just trying to keep the crowd of gut bacteria from making you feel uncomfortable.

XorNot··on Programming Isn't Special
One habit I've really noticed I have to break myself of with Claude is the temptation to say "maybe later" when I have an idea. There's never a reason to do that: if something might work, I can leave Claude in a tmux window to check the details I think should exist and then just...go do something else.
XorNot··on REA Reverse – Engineer Anything
I mean thats not why I have Claude decompile things. I have it so it because my software should work exactly how I want it to.
XorNot··on The dawn of the age of the exoskeleton
I just do a lot of DIY construction. Being able to lift even 100kg safely would be a game changer.

The trades would benefit enormously from such a thing.

XorNot··on Show HN: K10s – A Clickable Kubernetes TUI (Go, Bubble Tea)
As a former AI skeptic I get it and still get it.

But now other people's code is just a starting point for me forking an app to do exactly what I want it to - it's inspiration because code is cheap.

Of course for larger projects we will still need solid components underlying them, but what you're really talking about is just maturity - it's very easy to produce a lot of output now but you can't replace actual history or having more then exactly 1 maintainer.

XorNot··on Show HN: K10s – A Clickable Kubernetes TUI (Go, Bubble Tea)
It's because tmux makes session resumption easy. Although for K8S it makes no real sense, for Claude it does.

Of course with all the running around with AI programming, it would be nice if we could task sometime to making remote desktop not suck on Linux.

XorNot··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
But why should process of discovering mathematical insights be any less attainable to AI models?

The concern is being raised without evidence, because the evidence points to the gap simply being frontier models have just started to be able to get a raw proof out. Why, given existing progress, should we expect them to be unable to distill insights from those proofs?

Certainly this even more likely doesn't matter at all for applications: if I can send a radio signal further because my AIs design it a certain way, that's an unambiguous result. Which is really the next step here: turn a proof into a "mechanical" application.

XorNot··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
That seems short sighted though. A few years ago models couldn't do this at all, I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest exploring and refining results is outside their capabilities or will remain so.

OAI obviously have a fiscal incentive here, but to presume a year from now we won't see improvements and more succinct work on the results coming from models?

XorNot··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
This relies on the idea that AIs will only ever do the thing they just did, and nothing more.

It's the same argument which is invariably wrong yet comes up over and over again.

There's no real reason to think AIs solving lots of problems will stop further work on alternative paths - certainly a machine which never tires and can be trained on its own solutions is going to continue to improve.

There's precedent for this: just look at any overconfident post regarding what China will clearly never be able to do, despite decades of steady if frequently flawed progress.

There's no persuasive argument being presented as to why machine mathematical research should have a limit beyond hardware capabilities.

XorNot··on Sharing AI progress in mathematics
Okay but who cares? Results are results.

If the proofs work thennwe can put them to work doing more things.

It is not particularly important that Einstein discovered relativity, just that it was discovered (Maxwell was very close).

XorNot··on Accountability mechanisms can be joyful (2024)
Okay but like, why?

If you're actually doing the thing who cares how achieve it.

The problem isn't when people do things, it's when they spend all their time coming up with the game and then stop playing, which makes it just a form of procrastinating yet far too common.

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