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barkingcat

4,415 karma · joined February 16, 2010

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barkingcat··on ChatGPT-4o vs. Math
Have you tried actual math tools like wolfram alpha?

My response to attempts to use llms to do math is usually, use the right tool for the job.

barkingcat··on Not an iPad Pro Review: Why iPadOS Still Doesn't Get the Basics Right
the 1 person per ipad is 100% a product decision to get people to buy more ipads.

if they made ipad's multiuser capable (it's is perfectly easy to do it technically) ipad sales would tank.

they will never do that to their sales figures.

the single user nature of the ipad is not a deficiency but a feature.

barkingcat··on Apple M4 benchmarks suggest it is the new single-core performance champ
the ipad is not a replacement for macbooks so the assumption is not correct.

I think it's more likely that current owners of m3 macbooks will be enticed to buy m4 ipads and thus apple makes more money.

And owners of older macbooks would buy both the m3 macbook and the m4 ipad

It sounds backwards, but that's how the apple ecosystem works.

barkingcat··on The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day
meh, if you did everything right, you'd be laid off 1 day after launch.

So there's really absolutely no risk to do this.

Either way you will be fired/laid off, so why not just do it.

barkingcat··on At Microsoft, years of security debt come crashing down
They should run that security AI on their own systems, maybe then it would find all the holes the hackers are using to root their systems.
barkingcat··on London Drugs closes stores until further notice due to cyberattack
You are assuming about the wrong kind of insurance…
barkingcat··on London Drugs closes stores until further notice due to cyberattack
You are mistakening medical insurance with computer/cyber insurance.

The post above you is talking about having manual communication with the provincial and federal medical insurance (Canada has national insurance) to confirm customers have the appropriate insurance ready so they can dispense pills, medication, and medical equipment, which is life critical equipment and supplies for many of their customers, without access to computers (which is doable if they had the procedures ready)

It’s to do with business continuity of the pharmacy’s work, nothing to do with breach.

barkingcat··on Tiny GPU: A minimal GPU implementation in Verilog
Is that pronounced gee pee you, or Gip Pee You?
barkingcat··on Snowflake Arctic Instruct (128x3B MoE), largest open source model
Training LLM is the cryptobro pivot.
barkingcat··on JetMoE: Reaching LLaMA2 performance with 0.1M dollars
This kind of assumption is super deceptive.

The Facebook budget includes money to pay off people they've ripped off (in private settlements) and money for lawyers to shield the developers so they can feel free to rip off copyrighted content without having to pay personal penalty or be imprisoned for infringement. It also includes the price of buying lobbyists to alter laws to let this practice continue.

Also, unless the authors work inside Facebook, they have no idea how much Facebook spent on training that model specifically.

barkingcat··on Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor
that's precisely what sock puppetry does ... talk/write in a different writing style to make others believe it's different people.
barkingcat··on InternLM2
It's not abnormal in many fields. A lot of biology or physics papers have more than that number.

In academic labs, so you're a postgrad working the overnight shift watching some petri dish to make sure the bacteria doesn't die, etc. It's super boring grunt work but you do it so you get on the paper's author list.

barkingcat··on GitHub Disabled the Xz Repo
xz is also used in Windows and who knows what versions or how it is used there (impossible to verify because of the closed source nature of the windows ecosystem)

if Microsoft security detected some kind of relations between xz and exploits injected into the Windows source code/build process, they are pretty much 100% going to order github to nuke the entire repo regardless of what other people in the open source community thinks or wants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils

barkingcat··on Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
Amazon was ruthless at making money from day 0.

Amazon was famous for not taking profit, and instead putting profit back into the company, but revenue? Amazon was generating gobs and gobs and gobs of revenue from day 0.

barkingcat··on Redis adopts dual source-available licensing
Do people not read licenses that they use? MIT means anyone can use it for anything. The text is very short, and very clear.

why are people surprised when other people start using the software/close sourcing/packaging it and selling it?

barkingcat··on Ask HN: Why can't image generation models spell?
A good analogy is asking a English speaking tattoo artist who doesn't know any Japanese to tattoo a Kanji letter.

The tattoo artist knows roughly what a lettershape is, but has no idea how to write it.

Leads to hilarious tattoos

barkingcat··on Brain waves appear to wash out waste during sleep in mice
the trigger could be like a sequence of flashes or certain pulsing of sound frequencies, it'd be like hacking the nervous system via unsanitized inputs
barkingcat··on Apple Buys DarwinAI Ahead of Major Generative AI Updates Coming in iOS 18
how long do you set your hot dog done timer for? do you cook it until plump? usually my dogs split, probably with too high temperature?
barkingcat··on We hacked Google A.I.
this is even too advanced. 99% of modern hacking is :

username: admin

password:

barkingcat··on Meta outage
It will be DNS related.
barkingcat··on 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech
yes exactly, the entire goal of my post was to describe how aliens could have entirely different thinking processes and/or scales than humans.

If one alien entity/organism is actually the size of a galaxy, a single solar system would be on the scale of maybe a transistor at 20-30 nm to us.

At that scale it's no longer performance art, but maybe a small part of a engine of some sort.

What I'm saying is thought patterns like "what is it for" "this is inefficient" or "that would be way too big" ... etc is only defined from our point of view.

barkingcat··on 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech
this is a great idea too!
barkingcat··on 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech
"Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this" Is a very similar answer to why humans would make microprocessors out of logic gates.

I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits.

One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impulses of gravitational waves, the way we generate signals in binary. Imagine an alien race who uses gravitational effects from orbiting bodies as the basic building block of their "mega processors" that are the size of galaxies. So one solar system that has a division cycle of "2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4" could be their representation of a value/"bit pattern" but written with planets in orbital mechanics, just like how we represent decimal 10 in binary 1010.

as an aside, it is very easy to also ask "why would humans spend so much energy taking silicate sand and turning it into intricate patterns at the size of angstroms and nano meters just to consume power? wouldn't it be easier to just let the sand organize itself into components as needed?" of course, the answer seems obvious to us, but the question is analogous to yours.

barkingcat··on OpenAI Deal Lets Employees Sell Shares at $86B Valuation
Of course microsoft is cool with it. They reinstalled sam as ceo specifically so he could do this.
barkingcat··on Coding in Vision Pro
The problem with the vision pro is that you can't wear glasses to use them, and neither does Zeiss make all the prescriptions available.
barkingcat··on I accidentally Blender VSE
very inspirational post. thanks for making this software better!
barkingcat··on GitHub is preparing for IPv6 support for Github.com
Sad that even for experts ipv6 is still a no go filled with landmines.
barkingcat··on Apple Vision Pro and ADHD
If you need more than 14 days, it seems a purchase upfront isn't the best idea to begin with. What would be better is to either borrow or rent it from someone/some place that already has one.

Making a purchase is very different from getting one to try. Beyond a 14 days return policy, you start getting abuse from people trying to exploit the exchange policy.

As many people say, 14 days is kind of a standard. Many companies have even fewer days so read the fine print before you buy. If you don't like the return policy, don't buy it.

If you absolutely have to have one on Day 1 but don't feel 14 days is sufficient, maybe evaluate why you need it on Day 1? Wait for some other people to have it in their hands, and the rentals/loans usually start a few weeks after launch.

barkingcat··on Thanksgiving 2023 security incident
I think they did have to do that far though.

Getting in at the "ground floor" of a new datacentre build is pretty much the ultimate exploit. Imagine getting in at the centre of a new Meet-Me room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet-me_room) and having persistent access to key switches there.

Cloudflare datacentres tend to be at the hub of insane amounts of data traffic. The fact that the attacker knew how valuable a "pre-production" data centre is means that cloudflare probably realized themselves that it would be a 100% game over if someone managed to get a foot hold there before the regular security systems are set up. It would be a company ending event if someone managed to install themselves inside a data centre while it was being built/brought up.

Also remember, at the beginning of data centre builds, all switches/equipment have default / blank root passwords (admin/admin), and all switch/equipment firmware are old and full of exploits (you either go into each one and update the firmware one by one or hook them up to automation for fleet wide patching) Imagine that this exploit is taking place before automation services had a chance to patch all the firmware ... that's a "return all devices to make sure the manufacturer ships us something new" event.

barkingcat··on Take the Road Most Documented
This post is annoying in that it doesn't tell you what laptop the person got to have a good experience. It tells you the bad example but not the one that worked.
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