comicjk

"The way that Hugging Face defended itself was with an open source Chinese model, GLM, because they didn’t have access to the high cybersecurity models on the other side. They’re too dangerous."

This is not what happened. HuggingFace patched the vulnerabilities in the ordinary way, then used GLM for some of the forensic analysis afterwards. It's in the interest of HF to promote the GLM part of the story, because it emphasizes their agency in the situation as well as the open-source models they distribute. But GLM was a (useful) part of the postmortem, not of the defense.

My labor makes other people's lives better, so I would expect something that replaces my labor to do the same.

Watermarking will not flag something you wrote unless the AI rewrote significant chunks of it. AI watermarking works by exploiting the fact that lengthy phrases can be expressed in exponentially many ways, such that the selection of a single sequence from the exponential space is practically unique. For proofreading by contrast, if the AI is only changing isolated words in work that's otherwise yours, there are not enough exponentially branching options for the watermark to distinguish anything.

*Some might see a parallel with the old game Adventure, in which wording differences like "twisty little passages" and "little twisty passages" were used to build a maze of room descriptions, with the same meaning but still distinguishable to the attentive player.

Uranium-235 isn't useful for dirty bombs: it's too long-lived and not radioactive enough. Making dangerous levels of radiation requires short-lived isotopes. Some of these are the products of uranium fission, which is why spent uranium fuel is a radiation hazard. But isolating U-235 just to fission it to get radioactive isotopes like cesium-137 would not be the easiest way to get them.

I did this for the last college programming course I taught (2025) as an anti-LLM measure. Every class started with a very short closed-book auto-graded multiple-choice test on the reading. I was careful to specify which was the core reading needed to learn the material (on the quiz) and which was extra (not on the quiz - I think many professors assign this extra reading to everyone, thinking of their strongest students). I think this developed an expectation in the students that doing the reading was easier than finding a way not to.

Historically, this is the norm. The British Navy in WWI was a behemoth, but still couldn't force safe passage through the mines and cannons of the Dardanelles Strait against what was considered a third-rate power. "A ship's a fool to fight a fort."

I have bad news about reading the internet...

It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission reactors (harder to build than expected).

A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.

People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.

Not everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.

This context is very important.

"Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start to expect will never pay compound interest."

"Then, when one of those people is elected to parliament, or Congress, and start to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or declares that All Research Should Be In The National Interest (whatever that is), I wonder how much we reap what we have sown."

The climate shock from stopping aerosols would be a crisis for the planet, but we would have more than weeks to stop it. First it would take months for the aerosols to leave the upper atmosphere, and then years for the earth to heat up to its new equilibrium temperature - catastrophe, but not likely the end of all life.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-geoengineering-risk-termin...

I gave my engineering students a CO2 removal design problem once, and at the end, asked why the theoretical efficiency had increased in the time since the textbook was written. The answer was that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was higher.

It is tough to beat classical computers. They work really well, and a huge amount of time (including some of mine) has gone into developing fast algorithms for them to do things they're not naturally fast at, such as quantum chemistry.

Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware.

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

Regardless of what funding mechanism you would prefer in its place, turning off the existing system with no transition plan is a huge mistake.

What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instance, people will say the US unemployment rate is fake because it doesn't include people who have given up on looking for work... but the U-4 unemployment metric, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside the main U-3 metric, does include these people.

Growing and sequestering enough biomass to slow down climate change means effectively running the fossil fuel industry at the same scale but in reverse. In that spirit, I'll point out that most efficient way of moving carbon-bearing solids per ton-mile is the bulk carrier ships we use for shipping coal.

Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria

Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.

Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we do it. Plants release more oxygen than they consume because they grow: in order to grow they must pull CO2 from the air, use the C as building material (instead of respiration fuel), and dump the O2.

https://www.pthorticulture.com/en-us/training-center/basics-...

That analysis is from the perspective of the scammer. The scammer has limited time to write to each victim once the responses come back from the initial mass-email, so the scammer is better off if only the most gullible people reply. From the perspective of the person being attacked, the counterintuitive result based on selection bias goes away, and a more convincing scheme is more of a risk to you personally. (The assumption that scammers have limited time to write to each victim may itself become less true because of LLMs.)

Texas is not going to secede. In the 2020 election, the vote was 52:46 between Trump and Biden, meaning almost half the state supported the overall national winner. Compare this to the actual secession crisis election in 1860, where the vote was 75:24 against the pro-Union candidate, with Lincoln not even on the ballot in the state.

The method you describe would be an example of what is called a "thermostat" in molecular dynamics (because the speed of molecules forms what we call temperature). Such adjustments to the speed can definitely paper over issues with your energy conservation, but you still have to be careful: if you rescale the speeds naively you get the "flying ice cube" effect where all internal motions of the system cease and it maintains its original energy simply by zooming away at high speed.

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

Both the original writing, and the surviving manuscripts, have uncertainty bounds of decades in their dates. The oldest physical pages we still have come from the years 100-200 or so. And assuming that a description of an event can't be written before the event happened (a touchy subject in this case), then the original writing of the Gospels must have been after the start of the First Jewish-Roman War in the year 66. So the gap between the writing and our extant sources could be pretty short, or could be over a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript#Earliest_e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Composition

The "camel means rope" story, while cute and not implausible, is basically a guess. All the earliest available sources say "camel" - there is no actual evidence of this mistake beyond speculation (though it is admittedly an ancient speculation, as early as Cyril of Alexandria). The Wikipedia page has a much more balanced summary than this page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle

We're talking about negative externalities, of which pollution is a perfect example: the effects of pollution are spread across everyone, no matter who emits it, so no one has an individual incentive to change their buying habits. It's a coordination problem, which can be solved democratically by the voters demanding an overall change in incentives (such as an appropriate tax on single-use non-biodegradable plastics).

Probably a symplectic Verlet method instead of Euler or Runge-Kutta, since you want energy and momentum to be conserved in this simulation.

You would end up with the "religious week" and the "standard week" moving relative to one another over the years, in a classic case of trying to fix messy details and thereby adding more details (as in https://xkcd.com/927/).

I agree. The author's description of what is "reasonable" sounds like a blueprint for many of my late nights struggling with Windows:

"apps that assume that printing works will still behave in a reasonable manner: You’re just on a system that doesn’t have any printers and all attempts to install a printer are ineffective."

Maybe the underlying assumption is that the users will give up before spending an "unreasonable" amount of time on these tar pit features.