HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

lanternfish

692 karma · joined June 25, 2018

lantern.fish
submissionscomments
lanternfish··on Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
Extremely unlikely - these are very sparse domains.
lanternfish··on Neural networks are clean
Orthogonal means something different in mechinterp, so it'd be an overloaded term. Usually orthogonal would imply that there are actual vectors under consideration, which isn't the underlying claim.
lanternfish··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
For a given short-context (hash function seeding) you do have detectable manipulation of the completion (how they can read the marking). But, because (assuming enough entropy in context) the hashing function is decoupled from the log-probs, the perturbations are independent from the underlying distribution, so you're still sampling from the same distribution quotient some noise.

The only way you'd notice this is they weren't independent, and the most plausible way that happens is if you're re-completing pre-fills (resampling the same hash function against the same log-probs).

lanternfish··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
There are no watermark related tokens, there is no watermarked set - read the paper, it's public and not that complicated. It doesn't change the distribution of completions, and won't change the situation where one output token has the majority of probability mass.

You're missing the fundamentals here!

lanternfish··on Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
If it really was the case that the harness is at fault here, that'd be much more terrifying, as it would imply that current frontier-adjacent open models (like K3) would be able to achieve similar ends with a custom maladapted harness.
lanternfish··on Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era
10 Axios's within 5 days.
lanternfish··on 4D Doom
Why not?
lanternfish··on Artemis II is not safe to fly
Engineering is done in the context of constraints, cost is one constraint - and its a relatively conserved constraint. Saving labor in one area allows for more care in other areas. Especially given that labor is often not cost constrained, but skill constrained, which is less elastic.
lanternfish··on YouTube's $60B revenue revealed amid paid subscriber push
Mobile app compatibility is presumably the biggest seller.
lanternfish··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
In Iraq, JSOC operational doctrine was literally to target assassination campaigns based on 'nodal analysis' from contacts lifted from cellphones; if telegram had existed, they certainly would have used it too.

Famously, they didn't have enough Arabic translators, so Delta Force was often taking targets entirely based on reported association. They couldn't target based on language because they couldn't even tell what language locals were speaking most of the time.

lanternfish··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
That wasn't my point. My specific argument is about US operational policy on the ground in similar engagements. Based on precident, we would expect them to engage in the behavior the commentor indicts.

I dream that neither of these imperial powers - Russia or the US - will be allowed to inflict imperial violence, but I wouldn't be mistaken and assume that this military action will be any different than, say, JSOC in Iraq.

lanternfish··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
See: Panama, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
lanternfish··on Quadratic memory reductions for Zero-knowledge Proofs
The problem is the same problem with crypto dao projects - cryptographic certainties only apply to mathematical structures; you can't validate that someone actually holds a quality until you can embed that digitally. That turns out to be very hard to do for most things.
lanternfish··on Busy beaver hunters reach numbers that overwhelm ordinary math
In a mathematical sense - absolutely. You can dual halting problem against many very tangible qualities - like whether a (proved) statement is true or false. A (large-n) halting program is closer to an instantly halting program not just because n is always closer to 0 than inf, but because 'large n halting' and 'instantly halting' are ontologically similar in a way they just aren't with unhalting programs.
lanternfish··on Claude jailbroken to mint unlimited Stripe coupons
An LLM - which has functionally infinite unverifiable attack surface - directly wired into a payment system with high authentication. How could anyone anticipate this going wrong?

I feel like everyone is saying 'we're still discovering what LLMs are good at' but it also feels like we really need to get in our collective conscious what they're really, really, bad at.

lanternfish··on The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst
I think that's called Myst (1993)
lanternfish··on Magma: A foundation model for multimodal AI agents
`M(ultimodal) Ag(ent) [ma]` maybe
lanternfish··on Analysis of 2024 election results in Clark County indicates manipulation
I'm honestly not sure that their analysis passes muster. It seems that the main consideration is that Harris underperformed compared to down-ballot races and that the underperformance was ahistoric. However, the campaign was also ahistoric: she ran as a pseudo-incumbent under an unpopular presidency without as much of the name recognition incumbency usually offers. It seems extremely likely to me that this drop off in early voting numbers is indicative of an exceptionally weak campaign as opposed to widespread (consistent across all swing states) manipulation.
lanternfish··on Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s
I agree that it's not the best term, but I don't think its so disqualifying that it makes the claim untrue: it's misleading at worst, and that imprecision only kinda interacts with the underlying claim.

I guess the better phrasing would be "Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is largest since (org) has been collecting data", which honestly doesn't change the implications for me.

lanternfish··on Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s
"Recorded history" in the title refers to the period of history where the agency has been recording the numbers. It might not be the best phrasing, but it's not strictly untrue; the underwritten thesis (TB is on the rise) is still supported by the evidence.
lanternfish··on In the belly of the MrBeast
The actual work underlying the essay - the one published in Cambridge Core - is pretty strong and has a lot of pretty compelling analysis. It's just long.
lanternfish··on In the belly of the MrBeast
This seems an insufficient analysis. The meaning expressed by contemporary music, film media, or streaming television isn't very profound, but they at least still make a passing effort to "signify" something. The highest grossing movie of 2024 - Inside Out 2 - is not a deep text, but it does have a thesis.

The "Pixar apparatus" is definitely increasingly consumed by audience demand, but they're at a minimum in a transitional phase: something like Seeing Red would never get workshopped out of committees.

Youtube and other social media (emphasis on media) is ground zero for the decay of meaning into intensity; the ultimate incestuous product of auto-simulacra.

lanternfish··on In the belly of the MrBeast
Your conclusion is the exact same one the above essay comes to in the next paragraphs. It concludes that the "alignment" between MrBeast and his work is a result of the larger thesis: creators are ultimately created by the audience conditions of the platform. Or, authenticity doesn't mean much when the root of the creator isn't a ground truth, but a synthesis of demand.
lanternfish··on Disco Elysium Explorer
Contact Mike is one of the most important encyclopedia checks in the game, honestly.

Its one of the few direct hints you get to HDB's backstory before the literal last scene, which can actually give you actionable insight in a couple scenes IIRC.

lanternfish··on What Is the "MFFAM" Policy?
Oh shit I totally misread the policy - I interpreted "payments to such accounts" to mean donations etc. made through channels that the host supported. As written, it's not really an offset, and really just a way to wash hands, which honestly I probably support more.
lanternfish··on What Is the "MFFAM" Policy?
They hope to offset some sort of imperative burden (presumably moral) of hosting onerous content by countermanding the effect of hosting that content with paired monetary support of its adversary. My consideration is that pairing effect there is extremely weak - maybe so weak that the policy is on net dubios.
lanternfish··on What Is the "MFFAM" Policy?
Maybe its unfair pessimism, but I definitely believe that Kiwifarms (ex) is way more efficient at turning money into targeted hate than - say - the Trevor Project is at countering it.

I guess my sense is that if you actually want to counter this kind of harm, you have to do so on a fundamentally structural level, and the host in question is the structural enabler.

lanternfish··on What Is the "MFFAM" Policy?
This relies on an EA adjacent market fallacy where we can resolve all moral action down to funding actors of various moral alignments - there's no reason to believe that the end utility (or whatever metric) of the action is linear w.r.t amount of cash moved.

Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever.

This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk.

(edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)

lanternfish··on School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study
you pay them in the only resource known to humanity to be worth more than money - petty forum power predicated on exclusivity.
lanternfish··on U.S. math scores drop on major international test
For anything weight bearing, I really wouldn't trust it for translation. More than once I've gotten an output that had subtly different meanings or implications than the input. A human translator is going to be significantly more interrogatable here - just as a logical reasoner.
Page 1 of 6Next →