krisoft

That feels very optimistic.

Nothing nuclear is easy. People will want to make sure you are not going to contaminate the atmosphere, or the aquifers. Not just on the day of the explosion, but long term. They will want to know your plans about how you will contain the nuclear contamination for thousands of years.

And then everyone and their uncle will sue you for any property damage they think they suffered as a result of your engineering. Which can be everyone who owns real estate for hundreds of miles?

But apart from those things there are really no major legal problems with it.

> Obviously ai still can't play chess

I believe you are wrong on that. Do you mean large language models can’t play chess?

> The idea that the Kremlin is worried in the slightest that you can prove it's them is absurd.

I mean they are. That is the reason they haven’t sent balistic missiles to the same airfield. They could have sent the same agents who placed those drones to the fence of the airport with a shoulder mounted missile and shot down the planes as they were departing. Or even shoot them down on the ground.

Or similarly they could send a submarine and disrupt the railway services of the Netherlands with missiles from that.

Those would be clearly attributable actions which trigger an immediate military response. That is the reason why they don’t do them.

You look at the actions they take and conclude that they don’t have any restraint or worries. But you should also be looking at the actions they could have but did not take to see that they are in fact restrained and probably quite a bit worried. If they werent they would play the game differently.

> You don't need a real basis for a response. There's nobody here enforcing any rules.

First order, maybe. But the clearer the attribution the more political capital there is to act. Just look at the article. We don’t know, and won’t know for a while, if this was caused by Russia or the FDF protestors or who. That is all confusion all kind of actors can use to criticise a government who puts more sanctions on Russia.

Could you be more clear on who or what you are claiming to be AI slop?

Are you saying that geraneum's comment is AI slop?

> The rest of your response is predicated on this mistake.

You have to tell me more. Which part of the text you quoted you think is not true?

That various people attempted to decipher it? Or that they were missing a crucial hint? Or that they tried the listed methods?

The quote is not claiming that these are the only methods people tried.

Because the annotation is making it clear what exact part of the comment I'm referring with each part of my answer.

> Who is going to miss that context?

On hacker news? Anyone. Sometimes you blink and there are 200 different comments between the comment you responded to and your response. Often going into different tangential directions. People reading your comment have to trace subtle variations in padding to follow the thread of a conversation.

If you read HN with open eyes you can see confusion and misunderstanding caused by this every day.

> just say what you want to say

I do. Thank you. And I will say it how I want it.

> Writing more does not in itself make a comment more thoughtful!

Of course! You have to write the right words. What you are seeing in my comment is a one line opinion "Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them." surrounded by my analysis of why I think them. This way you can not only see how I come to this conclusion but also what information I considered.

If we were agreeing I could just write "yup". But because I disagree with the comment of geraneum, i better be precise what I'm disagreeing with and in which way. Exactly in the name of intellectual charity and curiosity.

> There are two comments (Jan and Helmut) from 2014 under the blog post which posit that it's a book cipher.

Ok? but the clue is that the key is the "32 Proquiritations" immediately before the numbers. Not that it is a book cipher. Both Jan and Helmut misses that. Jan assumes that the keys are the "names of the ancestors", while Helmut assumes that the first row are page numbers and the second row are word numbers. With hindsight both appear to be incorrect, thus they missed the hint.

> It appears that is not true.

Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them.

Let's look at each part of the quote you claim is not true.

"Various people attempted to decipher it". Your link support this, doesn't go against it.

"but it seems they were missing one crucial hint." the link you provide doesn't show anyone getting the right hint. Yes they were groping in the right direction, but they didn't get that the "32 Proquiritations" is the key itself.

"They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked." I don't know if people tried these methods. The sentence doesn't claim these are the only method people tried. That would be obviously unsupportable. So as long as there is someone for each of these methods who tried them the sentence is true.

"That’s because they missed one easy clue." It is obviously impossible to prove that everyone missed this clue. Maybe someone during all those years got the hint, solved the riddle, chuckled and never wrote about his experience. Perfectly possible and we won't ever know. What is certainty that the people on the link you provided misses the hint. But you also haven't shown that those people "got the clue".

So which part do you feel is "not true"? Because they each seems to be holding up.

> once properly dried

That “properly” is doing most of the heavy lifting there. The reason i would be weary of running the dishwasher with a toaster inside because i would worry that liquids trapped around thin electric conductors will corrode them. In othet words toasters were not designed to be easy to “properly” dry them out. And that damage might not be appearant right away or after a single wash.

In fact i wouldn’t trust the professor’s claim that the “toaster is perfectly fine” unless the professor conducted a lot of experiments. And even then i would only trust it with the toaster models he tested the claim with.

It sounds like at least some units has battery problems? Based on the description it sounds like water found its way into the battery compartment and short circuited something. A true product design nightmare.

That being said: I just don't understand the reason for the existence of this product. I'm a happy owner of an interdental water flosser and it is just not a problem aiming it at between my teeth. And the rare occasions when I mis-align and spray the water at my teeth is not an issue at all. And you feel when it is miss-aligned (or rather, not feel the water between your teeth) so it is not a thing I feel was in need of improvement.

I guess combining the water flosser with a toothbrush is nice, but does that need the whole camera stuff?

> If there's one thing that should be obvious from the war in Ukraine it is that relying on private companies is a bad idea for certain types of weapons.

I’m not following how that is a lesson from Ukraine. Their drones and missiles are made by private companies.

The true lesson i think is that in times of peace (or in times of wars of choice) procurement is dominated by excercises, lab tests, and design reviews. When you are doing that it is hard to tell apart the “good enough” from the “over engineered”. To every choice you can dream up a “counter”. Some real or imagined response or tactic by your enemy which would negate your system. And then your engineers have to design some counter-counter, or harden the system somehow. This leads to complexity which leads to high cost per individual weapon.

In contrast Ukraine is fighting for their existence. If they want to know if a new weapon is good enough, they send it to the front and try it. If it hurts the enemy more than it costs great. Order more. If it stops being effective, try something else. They are not picking the weapon system which will serve them for the next decade. They are picking what is available and effective today.

Different incentives, different opportunities which lead to different choices and different outcimes. But the difference is not if they are using private companies or not.

> the low-cost drone thing doesn’t look that great

In what sense do you mean that?

And that is why i always carry my groceries with an Antonov An-225 Mriya. Is it really needed? No, but i refuse to compromise on what is(was/will be) the best.

> These pets are domesticated.

Undoubtedly true.

> They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.

Ok? What you say can be true, and at the same time many pets can suffer too. Unsuitable housing, neglectfull or worse owners, bad circumstances. Evolution doesn’t guarantee happiness of individuals.

> the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all

That is a deep philosophical question. I have my doubts. But if it is true, why are you not breeding dogs at an industrial scale? After all every dog who could have been born but wasnt would be rather alive, if i hear you correctly. That is millions of potential dogs not born who you could have bread during your lifetime if you were more efficient about it.

> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.

That is a great reason for not putting down old Fido and replacing him with a robot dog. I wouldn’t recommend that.

On the other hand if we just breed less dogs, and get robot pets to the people who are circumstantially, habitually, or emotionally less suited to have a living one. That way they can fulfill their emotional need without torturing a living animal.

I don’t know what you are on about. Can the robot exhibit signs of the emotions described? If it can then the sentence is not a lie. If it can’t then it is a lie. Are you saying that it won’t do what the sentence says?

The sentence is not saying “it is a living creature”. It says it behaves as one. How much of that sentence is a lie obviously depends on how well the robot works.

Sure, prompting can be very free form. In that it is somewhat like managing a human.

But then there are ways it is very much different. Claude never quit on me because we didn’t let it add its new pet programing language to a large estabilished project. Claude never had a bicycle crash on the way to work, after which we haven’t heard of it for two weeks, and after the two weeks it could only work with accomodations. Claude never found a wonderfull girlfriend in a far away locale who made Claude extra productive for a few months, but then when HR refused Claude’s request to work from that locale the productivity collapsed, and eventually Claude quit. Claude never had to be moved to a different team because of ongoing personality clashes with a team member there. Claude never produced code of negative value because the teeths of Claude’s twins were growing out. Claude was never devastated because someone from recruitment promised Claude that Claude can manage a team, but forgot to mention said promise to basically anyone else.

These are all things i have managed / seen managers around me manage with real humans. You don’t have any of this with Claude. In that it is quite different working with Claude from managing humans.

It makes every sense. andsoitis claimed that the process is optimised for "greater good". My observation is that it is not. It is optimised for profit. That's it.

If there were some change they could enact which improves the "greater good" (whatever that is) at the cost of profit, they wouldn't. Simple as that.

> or need assistance first

yeah. Like a grandma with a tenuous command of the language and four kids. :)

> thereby creating the issue described in the OP.

I'm sure a fictional airport organised by other principles would have other problems. Doesn't change a bit that the current airport you can experience is optimised for profit, and not for "greater good".

> optimize for the greater good

Greater good my posterior. The grandma was in the wrong place at that time because they optimised the experience to extract the most money out of the flying public. They were boarding the people who paid extra, and since she didn't they couldn't let her board. Because if they do why would anyone pay extra for their "higher class" more expensive tickets. They could have said "passport?" and then pointed her towards the gate. But doing so as a policy would net the corporation less profit. So they don't.

In other words the grandma's distress was by design. You can avoid the indignity of turned away from the gate by coughing up more money. She quite literally "didn't know her place" both in the queue and in the hierarchy.

> the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.

Maybe what causes the effect is not directly in the mushroom, but it needs first to metabolise into it? As in maybe the effect is caused by molecule A, but the mushroom only contains B which then breaks down into A. (for example by the liver or perhaps intestinal microbiome.)

> I'm not reassured that we need this warning for people allowed to handle that.

Not sure what type of explosive that is but the rumour is that C4 when ingested gives a high similar to alcohol. Or at least that is what some troops believe.

“Amongst field troops in Vietnam it became common knowledge that ingestion of a small amount of C-4 would produce a ‘high’ similar to that of ethanol, and it is possible that this was the reason for this episode.” From the clinical description of a c4 poisoning case.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1279680/

It is not a “should”. At least not in the “we wish it were so” sense.

It is more that there are multiple reasons why this idea (burning an LLM into silicone and deploying it into a device in people’s pockets) requires huge piles of cash and the kind of engineering chops only a few company posesses.

Of course i would like it if a small upstart would do this, but it doesn’t seem likely as a posibility. They won’t have the funds to fab the IC. They won’t have the funds to train and validate the model before burning it into silicone. They can’t absorb the risk of the first tape out going wrong. They can’t absorb the risk of the model being faulty in some subtle way. They don’t have a device to integrate the IC into. They won’t have the funds to develop one. If they somehow would make a device they don’t have the marketing and sales channels built out to get the device into people’s hands in sufficient numbers to justify the development cost.

Basically this idea feels ruinously expensive. Apple has deep pockets, they already have working well-regarded phones, and an ethos of privacy preserving innovation. This is why this idea feels well suited for them and not many others.

Do i want the winners to keep winning? No. But not many others can pay for a moonshot crossed with a manhattan project. They just can’t.

> What harness did you use?

I let her do all of it without influencing her choices. She choose the web interface of ChatGPT because she already had an account and that's the tool she was familiar with.

While I agree with you it is not an optimal choice, web chatgpt can solve the problem. I just asked it now to do it (in my own words) and it spit out the code in one go.

Mayhaps. But Spanish prisoner letters were known much before that. Which is basically the same advance fee scam but with a different cover story.

Here is a story which describes one such letter from 1913: https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...

> What makes this anecdote hard to believe is that seemingly two things happened simultaneously

What i described is what happened. I don’t appreciate the undertones where you are insinuating that i’m lying for whatever reason.

> The layperson was able to to steer the session(-s) into full PM/PO mode ideating, refining and explaining features and ideas

You call it steering. I would call it falling into that grove. Probably tiny things in the initial message made the first response more likely to be a clarifying/ideating type. And once that happened the conversation was gaining momentum in that direction and neither participant was trying to guide it in a different one.

> the user must have been proactively co-operating (say sidetracked) on not achieving the stated goal.

Exactly. The LLM itself sidetracked her. They were just talking about cool features they could add, and at no point did she put down her feet and say “stop asking more questions and just write the code”.

It can be a combination of many things. Attitude (some people hate to be rude, and not answering a question feels a bit rude). It can also be that she enjoyed the process of unpacking and elaborating on the idea.

The meaning of the story is not that no lay person can possibly develop using AI. That would be silly, and untrue. I know clear counter examples. The point is that if you don’t know what you don’t know it is harder to steer the AI in the direction you could very easily with the right lingo.

I did a test a few months ago. A friend of mine wanted to develop what i understood to be a simple single page web app. But since she didn’t have any software engineering experience she asked me to help. Around that time everyone was talking about how literally anyone can develop software with LLMs i asked her if she could give it a try first, and if I could watch the attempt.

I was fully expecting that writing the code will pose no problem for the AI. But i was curious if the AI will realise that my friend is a novice and needs extra help with things like: copy pasting the code into a text file and saving it with an html extension, helping her host the file online so she can share it with others, buying a domain for it, etc. I assumed they will get there eventually, but i also assumed that it will take a lot of stumbling around and misunderstandings.

But i was completely wrong. They didn’t even get to that point. Because my friend didn’t have the vocabulary to ask the AI to write code. They were just going around in circles where the AI was brainstorming with her about possible features and getting thints more and more complicated. We terminated the experiment after one and a half hours and many many messages exchanged between her and the LLM.

Whereas to me who knows the terminology would have probably just taken a single exchange of messages to get the result she described to me. I would have prompted with something like “Please write to me an html page which does X, Y, Z.” But since she didn’t know the right terminology she got into a vortex of feature discusion, and she didn’t find a way to tip the AI into “just do it, write it now” mode. In other words in that case the LLM would have rewarded even just a little bit of expertise, but without it there was a confusion about goals between the human and the machine.

Curious that none of the attempts draw the frog from side profile. If i have to draw this i would immediately know that drawing a recognisable frog is the easy part of job. Expressing a particular jaw shape and melding it on the frog is the hard part. And jaw shapes are more prominent from the side.

Even absence of thinking this through you would think that some frogs will be from the front, some from the side. Just by chance. And yet all appears to go for the harder pose.

> this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy

I don't know. This is the scenario i was thinking of: I imagine a giraffe taking a palette of goods (maybe 1200kg) into its mouth and trying to lift it off from a high shelf. I don't think that will go well for the giraffe. Totally normal load for a forklift, impossible for a giraffe.

The other scenario I was thinking of: Giraffe picking items from totes, but the totes can be very high. Each individual item is light enough for a giraffe to not immediately break its neck. But I would not be surprised if the repeated stress of raising and lowering its head hundreds per hour would break something in the giraffe's body. If you ever seen a giraffe bend down to the ground you see that it is a whole operation. Plus the items will be all covered in giraffe saliva.

> their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount

I didn't doubt that for a second. What I doubt is that they have any useful capacity to carry extra weight besides their own neck/head. Like economically useful capacity. What work could a giraffe do in a warehouse which doesn't break the giraffe if it is doing that work all day every day for years.

> giraffes for warehouses.

I’m not even sure if you are joking there or haven’t thought your proposal through. Sure giraffes are tall, but they can barelly lift any weight. What use would a robotically controlled giraffe be in a warehouse?

> There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo.

I very much doubt this. If nothing else the MIT Cheetah’s actuators are a whole different ballgame compared to asimo’s actuators. (Backdriveability, variable stiffness) And then there is a lot of interesting work being done with combining elastic elements with the actuators.

I wouldn't think that should be a problem here if there is any sanity how the system is implemented. With a normal (short stay, long stay) parking lot it is expected that cars leave all the time. A thief breaking into your car and driving off with it, and you getting into your car and driving off with it looks almost the same visually.

Here cars normally leave by a robot picking it up and depositing the vehicle in a garage. Probably there is a vehicle entrance to the parking area for maintenance, but it would be weird to see a car leave through that. Similarly thiefs could cut a hole in the fence and drive through that but again, visually very distinct from a normal operation. Of course it still doesn't help if the security is in on it, but it would be easier to notice that things are askew for a competent security.

So that leaves us with the thieves somehow confusing the digital systems so it dispenses the car to the thieves. And that very much depends on the security of their digital systems.

Hence why I think it would be hard to secure a normal parking lot even when operated competently. But this has the potential if implemented well, to be much more secure.

There are some horror stories when those kind of systems break down.

For example this one is about a van which got stuck in one for two years: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx207jwknp5o

Or there was one in Sweden which trapped cars for 2 months: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/fnurret-pa-psnurran--m-vill-se-... (sorry, could only find a swedish source)

It is because these kind of systems are complicated bespoke automation. When it breaks down it costs a fortune to fix it. And what can happen is that different parties (operators vs manufacture vs maintainer) gets into a contract dispute to see who is liable to pay to get it fixed. Which as you can guess can take years to play out. Meanwhile your vehicle is stuck and nobody who could is interested in spending a penny on getting it out.

In contrast to that this project is better in two ways. There are multiple robots. (or at least there really should be) So if one breaks down the other robots can still retrieve cars (albeit of course with reduced throughput). And because the storage is just a flat parking lot if all the robots give up the ghost at the same time humans can drive out the cars from the edges of the storage rows.