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cure_42

134 karma · joined August 11, 2025

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cure_42··on Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
Maybe. With enough money and resources and time, maybe. But it would need to be very reliable to be at all useful, and that level of reliability is very hard to achieve with something so nuanced and complex.

You have an entire lifetime of experience and the wisdom of countless generations to inform you of the context with which you should process new information. You were specifically trained for years to be able to do this somewhat effectively. Doing the same for an LLM may or may not be possible. They contain much of that experience in some form, but are not well equipped to make use of it iteratively. It is incredibly expensive to attempt even a simple and ineffective version of it with our current methods.

If the LLM can achieve even 90% accuracy, it becomes more of a hindrance than a help. Do you make use of the function and trust it successfully understood the provenance of new information? If so, ten percent of the time you will be misled, which could be disastrous across a population. If you don't simply trust it, then do you painstakingly check the provenance of everything it tells you? Of course not, you already don't do that with current search engines and blogs and such. Yet falling somewhere in between would be so much worse than simply not having the LLM attempt to discern trustworthiness from providence in the first place.

But all of that is opinion and I may be incorrect. Perhaps someone will create some ingenious way of imparting wisdom and discernment to LLMs next year and this will all be trivial.

cure_42··on Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
Of course. But when you see text in the descriptor of a satchel on a satchel seller's site, you contextualize it as marketing. If you saw the same text in a textbook on the history, design, and manufacturing of satchels, you would contextualize it very differently.

When an LLM is the lens through which you view that text, you often don't have the context of where it came from, and the LLM is often really bad at filtering trustworthiness based on context when retrieving information to answer a query with.

I wouldn't go to a random site with a sketchy URL to get the customer service number for my xyz. I'd go to their official domain. Thus successfully navigating the treacherous waters scammers attempt to muddy.

cure_42··on I resigned from Anthropic today
No. They can't play chess on a grandmaster level without a harness programmed to make it possible. Simply training an LLM on chess games isn't enough.

It's moronic to suggest a "formal" definition of a commonly understood word is somehow necessary to say whether that word applies in a given situation.

LLMs cannot write poetry via understanding what makes good poetry. They generate tokens. They do not know whether those tokens are poetry or a recipe for cat food. Because they cannot know anything.

cure_42··on I resigned from Anthropic today
To be fair, we can't model human language well enough to accurately predict what an actual human will say either. Our ability to accurately model physics is similar to our ability to accurately model human language. And we make immense use of both kinds of model, despite their flaws, inaccuracies, and inability to ever be perfect.
cure_42··on I resigned from Anthropic today
This is so wildly incorrect I don't even know where to start.

For one, they were absolutely programmed to play chess if they can play chess. That is the only way they can play chess.

For another, they cannot understand literally anything, much less love.

Trying to actually educate you would be an exercise in futility, enjoy your willful ignorance, I hear it's bliss. But for anyone reading this, this is absolutely, unequivocally not how any of this works.

cure_42··on I resigned from Anthropic today
It isn't hard to program a gpt. You can do it in a weekend with a few hundred lines of python. The code is pretty simple. The math is not particularly high level.

The complexity and scale with LLMs come from the amount of training data used, not some kind of black magic in the programming.

cure_42··on I resigned from Anthropic today
That isn't the correct context. The code running the llm is well understood and the llm is simply the result of that code being executed. It is still a computer doing what it is told. It's just that we told it to use an incredibly large number of probabilities to calculate what series of tokens would have most likely come next after a given series of tokens. There is no hallucination or lie or rogue actions. There's just a program using math to generate tokens in response to other tokens.
cure_42··on Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution
I am trying to imagine how the magnet could be compromised. Could you theoretically embed an electromagnetic and a controller within a decoy magnet and somehow detect what was being recorded and subvert it? Probably not but... No, just probably not.
cure_42··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
Windows batch, no?
cure_42··on Show HN: Sesame - a local-first, open-source password manager
It stays plugged into my PC and requires a single second of effort to tap it. I have another that lives on my keys and again requires barely any effort to tap against my phone.

But sure, if the tiniest bit of effort is too much, there isn't really a good way to make passwords actually secure for you. Hopefully that doesn't have any totally unforeseeable consequences for you down the line.

cure_42··on Show HN: Sesame - a local-first, open-source password manager
You use a yubikey? Duh?
cure_42··on Show HN: Sesame - a local-first, open-source password manager
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/passwords/
cure_42··on Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane
Always makes me chuckle when there's this uncountably large group of people, and someone meets a handful of them and then decides they can make broad, sweeping statements about the entire group, despite having not met 99.99...% of them XD
cure_42··on Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
Is the extracted content stored in a way that could be easily converted to markdown? Seems like this could be integrated incredibly well with obsidian as a way to automatically expand your knowledge base, as well as a better search for it.
cure_42··on The Sloppification of Peptides
Is this an ad for "pangram"? Reads like one to me. Not much of anything related to peptides was actually communicated, which makes the insult about your reader's potential ignorance of peptides even more unnecessary.
cure_42··on Fast and Hard Code
They did. And it was broken. And we iterated like crazy with people devoting their lives to studying the incredibly advanced mathematics underpinning modern cryptography. But please, roll your own using an LLM and show us all how wrong we are :)
cure_42··on To become a better writer, read as much as you can
I see so many solo indie game developers who don't really play games and almost all of them fail to make their game actually fun. I'm not at all surprised to learn the same concept applies to writing.

I think the most intuitive case might be music. We would all be skeptical if someone said they were going to compose a soundtrack but hadn't really listened to many soundtracks or much music at all.

cure_42··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
Probably a VPN or your IP was soft-banned. I have the same thing happen due to my network wide vpn
cure_42··on My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup
There is nothing about using the most popular social media platforms in the world that implies someone doesn't have an active and healthy social life. If you think it does, you may be projecting.
cure_42··on Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
Terrible advice
cure_42··on The Problem
Thank you!

These morons really can't take two seconds to ask "where will the money to pay for the hardware needed to run the ASI come from?" And then realize it's quite literally impossible.

No, we aren't two or five or twenty years away from LLMS magically transforming into AGI/ASI. We are however much closer than that to this insane, irresponsible bubble popping because everyone actually involved with the data centers creating these models is burning collectively trillions of dollars and deep in debt and sucking venture and banks dry.

This is the collective insanity of NFTs but so, so, so much worse and so much stupider and so much more rooted in science fiction and marketing from the handful of people burning down the world in exchange for propping up their stocks on a bed of lies.

cure_42··on The Color of White Light
Fascinating, thank you!
cure_42··on SparrowMap – Cameras that watch government vehicles
If you don't know how to answer this question yourself, you certainly aren't able to read the source code to determine whether it's trust worthy in the first place, so what does it matter to you?
cure_42··on Show HN: BitBang – Reach machines behind NAT from a browser, no account
Gotcha. Thanks for the reply and I wish you success.
cure_42··on Software for One
Look I know you were being a dick, but that would be great.
cure_42··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
The action came from the machine. The drive could have come from anywhere, maybe it was you maybe it was someone else. The intent seems largely irrelevant to who made it.

If I commission an artwork, the intent came from me but I sure as heck didn't make it.

cure_42··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Would have said cool story but you're an ass, so.

Cool story bro

cure_42··on Show HN: Copy any website pixel perfect
Properly making a webapp responsive and accessible is not at all something Claude is good at, especially not when the entire interface is built with no architecture or structure beyond being a clone of something else.

Accessibility is baked into almost every aspect of ui and ux. Changing an existing interface to be properly accessible is very difficult.

cure_42··on I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
Unfortunately, most problems aren't.

You need a problem where you both know what the solution looks like or can otherwise very quickly and efficiently determine that a solution is correct, but at the same time can't work out a correct solution with a similar amount of effort/time/cost as it took to determine how to verify a solution.

Most problems don't match that criteria. You usually either have a problem with a known method of solving, or you have a problem with no clear way of verifying the solution besides the act of finding the solution itself which would involve in some way proving it is correct, or you have a problem where verifying a solution takes a very long time or has a high cost or even can't be done more than once, so you need to try to determine the best solution without being able to actually test or verify.

Basically all problems just don't fit the "hard to solve but easy to verify" criteria to a degree that makes llms a good fit. On the other hand, there are so many problems that even a tiny fraction is a relatively large number.

cure_42··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
Have you seen evidence he understands that running causes treats to be dispensed and is running more as a result?
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