gorgoiler

If everyone has access to the same offensive tools, everyone is able to run their own pentests and patch themselves before the bad guys get to them.

It’s like a vaccine where you get to try a medication based on the original pathogen by performing a dry-run on a backup of yourself already in a hospital ward.

Open models aren’t like firearms. If everyone has a gun the mall parking lot is a much more dangerous place because the consequences of using a firearm are so dire, even if you’re in the right.

Debian Airport is debating whether to allow aircraft to land on autopilot. On the one hand it’s nice that autopilot gives more people the chance to fly, and it lets experienced pilots fly more often. On the other hand, Debian Airport has, to date, been run by a carefully curated club of “stick and rudder” pilots. It’s a club where the air safety is backed up by nothing more than the name and reputation of the pilot coming in to land.

What if Claude goes down on approach? Or you run out of OpenAI tokens just before touchdown? What’s the point of having a named pilot if the control of the aircraft is in someone else’s hands, in part or in whole?

With actual pilots you have to take an exam and pass a practical test to prove you are competent. It’s a part of the analogy that could apply well to the real world Debian project.

The counter argument: dinosaurs were around for a staggering amount of time, no pun intended. 165 million years is reasonably long enough to ensure they left behind some nests, bones, and a feather or two. Modern humans have been around for more like 0.02 million years.

The counter-counter argument is that while we’ve been here for a comparative blink of an eye, we’ve left behind 4 orders of magnitude more stuff than just nests, bones, and a feather or two.

I sort of agree with your analogy but in another sense, think of Firefox.

Could I have made it myself? No!

Am I grateful that I can have the output of Mozilla’s internal efforts — the browser source code — so that I can at least tweak it and rebuild it myself, and even ship the results myself? Yes!

A open weight model is both an incomprehensible binary blob like Photoshop, but also patchable and adjustable piece of source code, like Firefox.

Incredibly depressing, but a good and important thing to read!

Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.

I tried searching for Flatbush on streeteasy.com and typing “Fla” into the neighborhood typeahead gave me:

  Chelsea
  [blank]
  Flatiron
  Murray Hill
  Flatbush

Delete the three letters and search for “Bush”:

  Chelsea
  Chelsea
  Chelsea
  Murray Hill

Street Hard indeed.

I bought an iBook G3 specifically for running Debian back in the early 2000s. It worked absolutely perfectly and one of the huge features I miss was that the small option key to the right of the space bar was converted to a middle mouse button :)

You should write up and publish your notes on how to fabricate connectors from cat5 wire, in the field. It would be a hit.

As much as I would like to “evolve”, I don’t want to buy an RTX5090, I don’t want to run a model trained on stolen IP, and I don’t want to pay a monthly subscription to a tech bro. I suspect that I’ll never work in this industry ever again!

Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home.

It’s as if they had two choices:

“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs

“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”

and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.

I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.

Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.

Comments like this make me really worry for the future of Hacker News. Here we are, on a seemingly informative thread, and you’ve jumped in with baseless political propaganda no doubt designed to influence the upcoming election.

His honour Count Binface is from Sigma IX not Sigma 6! To lump him in with those scurrilous, pro-littering hoodlums is the kind of anti-Recyclon smear I would associate with Sigma X’s online forums, not this place!

In general (I’m not saying this is the case with this project) if you don’t have their prompt history and you can’t re-run the LLM “compilation” yourself, is it open source? It feels a bit more like those “source available” projects where you can read the code but don’t have access to the build system.

On the other hand, aside from the commit messages, one didn’t ever have access to the underlying thought process of human developers either, so maybe it’s not equivalent to say that secret prompts mean closed-source.

I recommend my own personal democracy metric: your level of democracy is proportional to how easily you can shout “moron!” at your representative and have them hear you. Do you know who they are, can you find them at a public meeting, and will they be able to hear you? For the EU, all three combine to give a pretty low score.

As we’re seeing in the UK right now, if you stump up £500 and find ten people to counter-sign your candidacy, you can even run against your MP as a novelty candidate. If you choose your novelty name right you also get to stand next to them at the alphabetically-ordered result announcement.

Compare with comatose Kentucky senators on their deathbed or EU commissioners based in a country with French train signs. Neither are insurmountable obstacles to democracy — hold up a sign? Google Translate? — but, by my metric, they are lesser options to something more local and accountable.

I’m sure, back in the day, rural folk took umbrage at having to ride their donkey to the local town just to be able to throw cowpats at their despised burghers. We of course can do it on TikTok nowadays but nothing beats yelling in person.

Commoditize your opponents USP then eat up their engineering talent / silicon / real estate when they fail, perhaps?

I’ll be the first to admit it seems ambitious / implausible to try to (1) undercut the megalabs (2) move everyone’s focus back to tweets and then (3) profit.

A bit like handing out free horses to undercut Standard Oil so that you can go back to reaping the profits of your wheel tapping business.

Capitalism works great for shoes. You pay the proletariat for their labor and they labor away in your shoe factory. The shoe economy ticks over on scarcity.

The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket.

Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.

Interesting to see that on Desktop, Firefox (5.8%) just overtook Safari (5.0%) for third place. It doesn’t feel statistically significant but it’s a bit of data at least.

(I’m a big Firefox fan and idealist.)

Have you ever lost a laptop, through theft or coffee spill or mainboard failure or just accidentally wiping something?

I have three machines now: two laptops that syncthing to a mini pc that sends snapshots offsite. Losing access to one laptop is no longer a day-ending, world-stopping event!

As such, the safest ground state for any machine is to be sync’d then powered off. I do it after every “session”: before lunch, at the end of the day, and often in between if I’m at home and just using the machine for 45 minutes to e.g. buy a mattress before going back to the garden.

Similarly, with my work machine, I push everything to the central repository at the end of every day and delete all my local branches. They are more prudent with spending so I don’t have a hot-spare second machine like I do at home. The next best thing is to be prepped for catastrophic data loss at all times.

I often think about why I only have one phone. Losing that would suck but it’s harder because it’s iOS and I’m less knowledgable about how to automate it as a cattle phone, not a pet phone.

I think you’ve nailed why Robin Williams was a great actor. The therapist character absolutely has lived all of these experiences, albeit in fiction. The writing and delivery makes them real.

The article is saying a good, homemade breakfast is important. Robin Williams is a packet of store bought pancakes. ChatGPT, particularly in the sense that it is made from ground up and reconstituted humanity, is Soylent Green.

You absolute bloody gem. Brilliant.

Thank you :)

Some things in life happen for the very last time and we never realize it. Where were you when Jim Maxwell interrupted the test match coverage, for the final time, to declare that “listeners on long wave will now hear the shipp-ing four-cairst”? :)

With apologies to Affabeck Lauder

Because physical movement is intuitively transitive. Going from A to B then B to C is the same as going from A to C.

The journey from Y to Z might feel more tiring than the journey from A to B, but only if you do them all in one day :)

The rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience:

1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”.

2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world.

3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk.

4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil.

Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk, I say!

How is enforcement supposed to work? The firmware narcs pull your printer over and checksum your SD cards against permitted firmware? Or they scan it for illegal gun-algorithms?

Good for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered.

Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.

Do I recognize the UI style here as being that cool, hacker, dark-mode, glowing aura text, rounded mono typeface style? Whoever came up with that motif and inadvertently coaxed fhe AI tools into copying it into ubiquity has had an enormous impact on the world!

There are a lot of cells used for rank and vote count. If you used A-Z for rank and dropped the vote count you’d be able to see 50% more title, which is a lot. Vote count could be an optional overlay shown at the end of the title in the last 3 seconds of each frame. Or just drop it altogether.

In my experience it’s extremely difficult for a highly resourced corporate engineering team to get married to an open source project run by volunteers, consensus, or both. It is possible but you need to have a first class relationship with an upstream who will take your patches.

Every patch delay puts more pressure on you and your team to fork the codebase and go it alone. You and your team sit down and promise you’ll rebase over upstream releases and everyone nods wisely. Then you skip a release, and another, and presto: you now you have Bank Redis or Bank Selenium or Bank Hadoop trapped on the last version of upstream before the fork but to which you can patch changes as fast as you like. I’d liken this to crossing an event horizon except the astronaut sees the universe freeze and fade away instead of the outside observer.

It’s possible to make it work if the upstream project either gives you a majority vote (or at least a substantial share of the vote) on project direction, or you’re working on a project large enough to have lots of corporate (ie funded, high velocity) stakeholders already.

I’d not heard of this fallacy* but it makes perfect sense. Well executed human greeting is such a killer asset if you get it right. There’s a few million years of genetic programming inside us all that responds unreasonably positively to hospitality. If someone enters my home and is not drinking their desired beverage in under four minutes, I have brought shame on me and my family!

I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect. When a computer game level has a nice tutorial “level 0” then I feel good. When my dishwasher has color coded component to help me clean it, I feel good. When I click a text area containing an order number and it auto selects the number, I feel good. Great design is about the same kind of warm fuzzies as great hospitality. Maybe we should even call industrial design “passive hospitality”?

*No apostrophe btw. It ought to be The Doorman Fallacy. If you want an apostrophe then call it The Hotel Manager’s Fallacy :)

It sounds like an interesting case study. Do these things get reported with a patch?:

(a) add a new function that does regular expressions searching / matching with a resource checker (eg a timer);

(b) write a local linter that reports an error for any use of the builtin regular expression tools;

(c) fix all the lint warnings;

(d) commit the linter.

Nuclear weapons… somewhat complicated to build and complicated to maintain, mass-produce, transport, smuggle, hide, and use.

Models on the other hand are just software. You can download Fable / Mythos / Praxia / Concordicon and hide a copy in your shoe. You can make two copies even! One per shoe!

We have lived through decades now of the glorious open source revolution so it’s easy to forget about a different time, in the 1990s, when a black market in CDs jammed full of cracked, slightly off branded copies of Windows / Photoshop / Corel / Office, etc. was all the rage.

Execution isn’t trivial. If anything should be controlled like nuclear weapons, again like the 90s, it ought to be compute hardware. I’m not sure it should.