chromacity

It's both cool and a bit confusing. Is this an attempt to commoditize flying-probe testing for PCBs? An attempt to use LLMs to reverse-engineer circuits? Both?

It almost feels like it would benefit from being split into two projects. If I'm testing my own PCBs, I probably don't want an agent in charge, at least not routinely. There's just no reason for the added cost, complexity, or non-determinism. And if I'm reversing someone else's design, then going through the effort of building an auto-prober seems like an overkill, especially since a single probe is seldom enough. Even the simplest serial interface will often have one line for clock and another for data, so you're gonna be manually making connections either way.

I guess I was right to wait out IPv6...

But more seriously, it gives me a pause when we try to bake more complex, application-centric logic into foundational protocols. The list of assigned IPv4 and TCP option numbers is a graveyard of tech experiments, but at least we had the sense to separate them from the main protocol. Baking JSON web tokens and OAuth into IP seems kinda crazy from that point of view. Is this what we want to commit to for the next 40 years?

I kinda wish that IPv6 just used this ("IPv8") addressing scheme and left everything else the same, though. I think the expectation that IPv6 should entail an architectural rethink for existing networks really slowed us down. Fun fact: at this point, IPv6 is 30 years old, we're still under 50%, and growth is visibly tapering off.

> Corporate employees abusing trust are doing it equivalently whether they trade securities or place bets.

But the crime the article is talking about isn't "abusing trust", it's insider trading. Insider trading is defined in a specific way. For one, as far as I understand it, it must involve securities.

I mean, often, yep. The real reason why they are unhappy with you having an unsupported browser is simply that it's much harder to reason about or enforce policies across bespoke environments. And in an enterprise of a sufficient scale, the probability that one of your employees is making a mistake today is basically 1. Someone is installing an infostealer browser extension, someone is typing in their password on a phishing site, etc. So, you really want to keep browsers on a tight leash and have robust monitoring and reporting around that.

Yeah, it sucks. But you're getting paid, among other things, to put up with some amount of corporate suckiness.

I discussed this in more detail in one of my earlier comments, but I think the article commits a category error. In commercial settings, most of day-to-day infosec work (or spending) has very little to do with looking for vulnerabilities in code.

In fact, security programs built on the idea that you can find and patch every security hole in your codebase were basically busted long before LLMs.

Well, at least you know it's not AI-written because it's delightfully weird and evidently about some pet theory of the author. This day and age, that's something to unironically celebrate.

This is yet another instance of a weirdly specific domain that pops up and starts posting seemingly LLM-generated articles that follow a single pattern - in this case, how "they" made everything worse. We had a similar instance few days ago with smarterarticles.co.uk, and many others before that.

I get that this says something we might believe, but I don't think it's a good use of our time to engage with engineered nerd-bait that probably wasn't produced in good faith.

> There are a few species you can sometimes find in washes when they get buried during massive floods, but other than that most museum quality specimens are impossible to find for rockhounds.

Well, that's kinda how it has to be, right? If art museums displayed the artwork anyone can paint, they wouldn't be interesting to most people. Most museums are about displaying the stuff you otherwise wouldn't be able to find, buy, or make. It's still fun to learn to paint, even if you're no Rembrandt.

To be fair, there are some museums that go for depth instead of scarcity and I personally find them more interesting. The Computer History Museum does this pretty well. They have some truly unique items, but also plenty of stuff you can buy on eBay, just presented and explained well.

Raspberry Pi was and is selling official desktop kits: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-desktop-...

I wouldn't wish it upon an enemy, but it's a thing.

It's a cool argument, but I don't think it's how YouTube is being used or how it makes money. Most views go to a relatively small number of mainstream content creators who converge on more or less the same sanitized format, down to the same style of video thumbnails.

Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they disappeared overnight, I don't think that YT viewership or revenue would budge.

YT might have gained steam as a video equivalent of the old Reddit, but it converged on mass-consumption of professionally-produced, focus-group-tested content.

No. I don't think it's a good use of anyone's time to "debate" an infinite stream of chatbot-produced text. If you look at the website, it's clear that article wasn't published in good faith. See the comment from nayroclade.

I'm guessing they also didn't teach writing, because AI wrote this article.

> It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.

The vast majority of college degrees are nowhere near that. Average in-state tuition in the US is something like $9,000.

Now, some people want a trophy from Stanford, but that's a separate topic.

First, I'm not dismissing anything. I'm just saying it's not the most significant concern. Second, Mythos doesn't create "new ways". You already have plenty of vulns to go after, and you can write exploits for them (or pay someone). It just lowers the cost / commoditizes the toolkit. It's not the first time it has happened - the trend goes all the way back to Metasploit or before.

And again, I'm not saying it doesn't matter. All I said is that it's probably not the #1 thing to lose sleep over.

If it's allowed by regulation and zoning, they generally don't have a say in the first place. These stories are never about building another box-shaped building in an industrial zone. We're talking about rezoning, variances, or otherwise preferential treatment.

This is a perfect illustration of what cracks me up about the hyperbolic reactions to Mythos. Yes, increased automation of cutting-edge vulnerability discovery will shake things up a bit. No, it's nowhere near the top of what should be keeping you awake at night if you're working in infosec.

We've built our existing tech stacks and corporate governance structures for a different era. If you want to credit one specific development for making things dramatically worse, it's cryptocurrencies, not AI. They've turned the cottage industry of malicious hacking into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that's attractive even to rogue nations such as North Korea. And with this much at stake, they can afford to simply buy your software dependencies, or to offer one of your employees some retirement money in exchange for making a "mistake".

We know how to write software with very few bugs (although we often choose not to). We have no good plan for keeping big enterprises secure in this reality. Autonomous LLM agents will be used by ransomware gangs and similar operations, but they don't need FreeBSD exploit-writing capabilities for that.

I'm honestly surprised why local governments are so eager to make datacenter deals in the first place. I'm pro-progress, but a datacenter brings approximately nothing to the local economy. It doesn't employ any noteworthy number of people, it doesn't generate any real tax revenue, and it increases electricity costs for the region. So if the voters don't want it, that feels like their prerogative.

I don't know if it's the elected officials conflating data centers with the region becoming a bustling tech hub, rather than just a way for a Bay Area company to capitalize on cheap electricity... or if it's kickbacks.

I don't know. In a vacuum, if we prevent them from ever finding out that there's a faster way with less cognitive overhead? Sure. Until they have to explain to an agent precisely which shoes they want the AI agent to buy them...

In any case, in practice, people pick up stuff from each other. I'm old enough that learning to use the computer mouse needed to be a deliberate effort on my end. I never really had to "teach" that to my kids, they just picked it up naturally. So you might even have a difficulty producing that "computer-naive" subject in the first place.

> I have ZERO doubt that if you put people that haven't used a computer in front of one ... presented with a chatbox in the middle of the screen and you just ask the computer what you want I am 99.99% sure that everyone would prefer to use that chatbox

I don't know. We've been telling ourselves things like that about user interfaces for a long time. For decades, it was pretty much universally understood that everyone would prefer to talk to their computer instead of using a keyboard. Now that you can, no one really wants to. In fact, now that we can text / email / IM other people, we don't talk to them as much as before.

One obvious problem with the interface you're proposing is that sometimes, it's easier to do the thing than to explain precisely what you want. For example, it takes much longer to ask ChatGPT what's the weather forecast for this week, and then read the flowery response, than to press Ctrl-N, "wea", enter, and see it at a glance in a consistent format with pictograms.

And of course it's an AI-generated article.

I understand why you're doing it, but as a person who has to wade through dozens of these "minimal amount of utility" sites on almost every search, you're not making things better for the rest of us (or for the people who do hands-on ballistic testing that the LLM is just repeating without attribution).

I will actually concur with one of the less upvoted comments here: the most fascinating thing about this article is the website. I've seen that pattern on HN a couple of times in the past couple of months.

It's an incredibly specific vanity domain called passiveradar.com. Who would want that unless they're a radar manufacturer or an expert in the field? In both cases, they would put their name on it, but there's no attribution whatsoever.

The site contains two short articles, mostly illustrated with photos lifted from elsewhere. For example, the schematic of how the radar works in the earlier article comes from:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-schematic-diagram-show...

The article is also illustrated with what appear to be two vibecoded SVG animations that don't look quite right.

So, what's going on here? I suspect it's an attempt to farm domains for resale, or for LLM spam operations down the line?

Almost everything you can do on your own is a "solved problem". Why go into woodworking if you can buy an Ikea stool? The point of hobbies isn't to solve problems - that's called a job - but to learn and have fun.

Find a niche where you can resist the temptation to constantly compare yourself to eight billion other people on the internet. Something where success isn't measured in Github stars, Youtube likes, or Reddit upvotes. Once you get in that mindset, almost anything goes. I know people who collect RPN calculators and are having a blast. All kinds of hands-on crafts are great too. I like making electronic music and I'm pretty bad at it.

> I understand the sentiment, but.. do you realize how much more expensive that would make all these services?

It wouldn't. For example, before Gmail, email was often free or nearly free (bundled with your internet service), but in most cases, you could talk to a human if you had issues with the service.

What we couldn't do is turn these business models into planetary-scale behemoths that rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. In essence, you couldn't have Google or Facebook with good customer support. I'm not here to argue that Google or Facebook are a net negative, but the trade-offs here are different from what you describe.

Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.

With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.

I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.

But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?

Eh. It doesn't start or stop with people like Altman, Zuckerberg, or Nadella. I think it's a symptom of a broader problem in tech. Half the people on this site made a decision to work at companies that do shady things, and they did that to maximize personal wealth.

The difference isn't that the average techie doesn't dream of making a billion by any means necessary; it's that most of us don't think we have a shot, so we stick to enabling lesser evils to retire with mere millions in the bank.

There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:

1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.

2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.

3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.

Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?

Indeed. Gotta keep that body in a tip-top shape so that we can pull off all-nighters at some dude's AI startup while eating pizza and pretzels.

I'm increasingly unsure if this is something to aspire for. I make an effort to only follow people I know, and I turn off algorithmic feeds on social media, but it doesn't matter because the people I know routinely reshare made-up political bait and AI slop that's coming from the broader ecosystem.

This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets, but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration". This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The pursuit of truth is a distant second.

I think that for social networks or forums to be at least somewhat healthy, they need to be small, specifically to limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and content that doesn't interest you at all. If you open up the ecosystem too much, it devolves into some flavor of Facebook.