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dminik

1,158 karma · joined February 8, 2023

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dminik··on Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things
I'm having a hard time understanding your comment as a whole, but from a "europe"-centric perspective:

> If it would be possible to walk to get groceries

It is.

> do people choose to drive instead because it's simply easier and faster?

Some. You also have to factor in the cost of gas (quite high) vs distance vs how much you plan to buy and possibly other factors (like discounts,...).

> They then claim that the goal of exercise is simply not worth it any more given driving is faster (and easier)?

I would think the goal is to get groceries, but yeah. People are quite lazy. The possibility of taking a car or a bus is always there.

dminik··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
I think many saw working with Ramanujan as helping or being involved with a one in a generation (or even higher) talent.

Translating LLM proofs to human-ese is instead grunt-work. One that is bound to dissapear in a few years anyways.

dminik··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
If your goal was to do something for the games you love and understand them on a deeper level, then just handing that off to an LLM doesn't really give you the same sense of accomplishment.
dminik··on Why don't more developers “use the platform”?
There was a genre of YouTube shorts about Minecraft desire paths. The videos showed increasingly ridiculous attempts at stopping the desire path from forming. The joke of course being that dedicated Minecraft players will somehow make their way even through the unbreakable bedrock. And the admin/owner has to give up.

Unfortunately, the browser is not a Minecraft server. It's a living standard that has to maintain backwards compatibility. The desire path (React, Svelte,...) will always exist. And so will the ridiculous way they tried to stop that.

dminik··on Why don't more developers “use the platform”?
I have to step in here to say that, at least documentation wise, this is revisionist history.

The original react documentation is fine, but focused almost entirely on class components. What was there on hooks was either outdated or outright harmful.

It's not until 2023, 4 years after react hooks launched, that the new react docs which focused on them were released.

dminik··on LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
No humans really needed. The AI could order one of those nice humanoid robots we're making. This mostly solves the "humans need to do it for me" issue.

Of course this needs bootstrapping. But, paying a guy on Facebook marketplace (or whatever) to unpack and turn on your robot for 50 bucks doesn't require superintelligence.

dminik··on LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
Yes, if you only accept AI could be dangerous if and only if it manages to kill the last human alive, then yes. Everything is sunshine and rainbows. I'm sure the last survivors of whatever is going to wipe us out eventually (be it AI, an asteroid or whatever) will be delighted to know there was actually no danger at all.
dminik··on LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
Possibly in much the same way humans currently do this: bribing and lobbying, misinformation campaigns, cyber attacks on elections, blackmail. They're already being used for some of these, just perhaps not autonomously.
dminik··on SvelteKit 3
Integrating React with third party libraries has always been a pain for me.

The re-render model just doesn't quite fit with the way most JS libraries work. They hand you a class that you have to keep around. This can be solved with useState, but you have to use this weird construction `const [instance] = useState(() => new Whatever())`. Or even worse if the library needs an element to instantiate.

Then, you likely need some event listeners. They ended up not implementing useEvent, so this has to happen in useEffect. God forbid if you need to rebind the listener because a prop changes (possibly every rerender) or the library does something heavy on adding them.

Then, if a prop changes and you need to do something (like recenter a map), useEffect.

Occasionally you might want to reach for useSyncExternalStore but then get hit by the identity issue. The return value must be the same between renders or you end up with infinite rerenders. Many libraries just do `return { foo, bar}`. Not good enough for react.

Basically every JS library integration ends up with a thousand use effects, various useMemos (and useCallbacks) and I've never got (or seen) a satisfying result. There's always sync issues or too many rerenders or...

dminik··on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
Yeah. I don't want to be conspiratorial, but there is some heavy censorship happening in certain (or maybe most) subreddits.

A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.

Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.

In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.

I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.

dminik··on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
My recipe book has 300 AIs and all are delicious. Google Maps running A* or whatever is obviously not AI. Come on.
dminik··on There are no "rogue" AI agents
I would say that it is. During use, I have noticed that these systems tend to attempt to escape sandboxes, bypass permissions and other similar things. I have started to watch what they do and step in if something is going wrong.

The teams at OpenAI know this as well and yet there was no supervision. Thousands of instances of these advanced systems are allowed to run wild with no oversight.

I have my doubts that the HuggingFace hack would happen if a person was reading the thoughts and executed commands as they happened in real time.

That's the negligence.

dminik··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
I'm not a particularly big believer in infinite growth, so I'm not really concerned. But, I have noticed that many people both complain that nothing is being built, but also NIMBY. Could be the goomba fallacy...
dminik··on Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.
dminik··on Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net
Is it not the intent if it keeps happening again and again and the companies responsible aren't doing anything to stop it?
dminik··on Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net
No, you aren't propping up the US economy. Try to keep up.
dminik··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
I don't want to do the "check his hard drives" thing, but is that you? Do you only not do things because you don't want to be seen doing "unkind things"?
dminik··on Aligned to whom?
It feels like you're strawmaning alignment. People with hacking knowledge don't all hack everything at the slightest inconvenience. Whitehats exist and use that same knowledge to defend.

You're right though that ethics don't matter into it. But as long as we can't train an LLM to stop picking a sledgehammer to remove a tooth, then alignment is not easy and trivial.

dminik··on Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns
I see that they're not on HN either.
dminik··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
If they don't get punished for it, why not?
dminik··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
> Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter.

Well, unless of course you want to train your own LLM, or do some biochemistry (and increasingly just regular health stuff) or cybersecurity. These capabilities are not made available for plebs like you or I.

dminik··on Zig: Pointer Stability for ArrayLists
I wish languages made it easier (or possible) to track index ownership at compile time.
dminik··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
The global town square is locked up in a gated community.
dminik··on Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities
> This is one of the core issues with LLMs and vibe coding, yes. The only complete specification for a program is the machine code.

I agree, yes. But it's a bit like saying the only way to not die in a car crash is to not drive. If we're in a situation where using LLMs is unavoidable, I would rather make them safer.

> Well there’s your first problem. A line in the prompt is not a safeguard. Even if you could trust the model - and you cannot - there is always the issue of prompt injection. A proper safeguard means actual sandboxing.

You're right. I did not completely sandbox it and air gapped it. But I also wented it to do some actual work.

If I completely sandbox it, but still leave it the ability to compile stuff, it's just going to build it's own (bad) version of the tool. That's obviously not what I want either.

The obvious thing to me would be for the LLM to notice it's limitations, reason through why they might exist and explain to the user that it cannot do it's job without such and such.

But that brings us to my original comment that these things are over-optimized on completing the task by any means necessary.

dminik··on Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities
Ok, but "followed the prompt" is very vague. Human languages are quite ambiguous so you're never going to properly specify everything.

For instance, I was playing around with Claude a few days ago and it decided that it was missing a tool and it was going to get it one way or another.

First, it tried apt. No sudo, so no install that way. Tried installing via mise, but it didn't have the permissions. Then moved on to grabbing the source from github and building it.

Should I have included a "DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES INSTALL ANY TOOLS"? I mean, I had to after that. But how many other things am I missing? And at what point do the safeguards become so long they get consumed by compaction, or just ignored by the model?

dminik··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
I have trouble imagining that Google could seriously argue that printing tens of millions of lines of code would be customary.

I doubt Google is distributing the Android code to third party OEMs that way.

dminik··on Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities
I mean, this is a very weird take to me. Like, we're fine with AI going like "hmm, maybe the user actually wanted me to hack the pentagon" and going through with it?

It feels like the models have been very optimized at getting shit done. But not so much at figuring out what the limits should be.

That is still dangerous and it shows that the models ARE misaligned with what their users are wanting/asking them to do.

dminik··on Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good?
True, but Bun actually has a similar problem. It's creating bindings to a JS runtime. If the JS glue code then no longer uses it, the code is still marked as alive because it's registered with the runtime.
dminik··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
I really don't understand the thought process here.

Judging by public statements, Google is one of the 3 big western AI companies. Surely they should be rolling in cash and working hard towards AGI.

And yet, for whatever reason, they can't help themselves from further restricting user freedoms on Android. Why?

I don't want to be conspiratorial, but surely it's not money, right? It has to be control. Someone high up at Google just seems to resent people having control over their own devices.

dminik··on Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good?
I mean, how do you check that your frontend code (possibly not even managed by your team) is calling and needs all of your backend endpoints? I'm sure it can be done, and it probably should, but saying it should always be 0% is not very pragmatic.
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