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lelanthran

15,074 karma · joined April 2, 2019

https://www.rundata.co.za https://www.lelanthran.com
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lelanthran··on GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research
They dont brick themselves, they stop.

Fair enough, the models don't brick them Selves either, but neither do they stop.

Bandsaws don't cut crooked lines, or change the speed, they stop.

lelanthran··on 'It's just vape, nail, charity shops': Can anything save UK high street?
> and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.).

I think you don't know why cigarettes are treated the way they are.

Hint: it's not because they are addictive. After all, caffeine is addictive and both tea and coffee is effectively unregulated.

lelanthran··on Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
> I think more people if they knoew how powerful that was would be excited about the possibilities of building custom workflows

You think "repeat my last order" is a cognitive burden?

lelanthran··on Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
Dentists are plentiful and none of them really know what they are doing (see recent experiment posted here on HN that has The data to support this asserrion).

I switch at the slightest sign of friction.

lelanthran··on Frustrated Ranchers Want People to Quit 'Rescuing' Their Working Guardian Dogs
> Otherwise how the heck are owners supposed to ensure cats stay on their property?

I have an electric fence; cats sense it and avoid it. 20+ years without a cat getting off the property.

lelanthran··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
> All data is potentially code only in a Von Neumann architecture, but not in a Harvard architecture, where there's a separation of data and code with different memory access to each.

Says you. I wrote a program for a Hardvard architecture chip (PIC) that read bytecode from the data memory and executed it. Updates were made by replacing the data block with a new data block.

In practice, there is no way to separate data and instructions. After all, JS downloaded inside a webpage is literally data, and it gets executed.

lelanthran··on AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
> It’s frustrating to have all these 0days and CVEs to patch for now, but in the long run perhaps we’ll leave with more robust software.

I'm skeptical; every line of code is a liability. Humans regularly make the trade-off between adding lines of code vs doing without the incremental feature addition. LLMs don't; everything gets added.

The recent brotli attack should have been a wakeup call - few people use it, no one actually needs it, but the exploit that it carried was present on every system. Everything from IIS to Caddy and in-between, and yet no one was actually using the thing.

It's a liability to add code, whether you're duplicating existing code in the codebase or adding a feature 1% will use.

lelanthran··on Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines
> What took you so long? I got on Windows 3.1 and off with Windows Vista.

I got off on Windows 95.

lelanthran··on Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads
> You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.

I'm pretty confident, sitting here on a different continent, that I wouldn't have that problem at all.

lelanthran··on Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads
> Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training.

Why? Is it hardware limitations or deficient software stack?

In any case, as nvidia is ignoring the gaming market, AMD and Intel both have a vacuum to fill, but I don't see them doing it.

Intel, especially, should have rushed out gaming cards as soon as nvidia shortages were predictable (2023, at least).

The problem I have is not that an old GPU can't be used for gaming (it can), it's that I am forced to upgrade from a perfectly working 660ti that once played far cry 3, 4 and 5 (and every other game I threw at it) because my kernel doesn't have support anymore (older drivers don't work on a newer kernel).

A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU but all the latest software support would be great. Right now, if I want to see certain web-pages (WebGL), I have to buy a new GPU, but there isn't any low-priced GPUs anymore.

lelanthran··on If you love a website, back it up
> This is hyperbole. Do you really think an LLM will try to rewrite the past? Come on…

Didn't they already try this last year?

lelanthran··on AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture
That link prompts for a signup.
lelanthran··on Running a bootstrapped SaaS for 20 years with my brother
> There is probably a power advantage of being able to convert n filetypes to m different formats where n and m are very large.

If they've been in business this long, they must have, by now, internal filetypes for specific classes of formats. For example, all rgb files first convert to an RGB format, and then to the destination format. Or, all transcription first convert to an internal format, and then to the destination format.

Not sure how you'd handle .ps or .pdf files in this way, though.

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> I expect people here to root for the future. In the future AI overtaking humans is inevitable.

I can't really make sense of this sentiment, because I don't really understand what it is you mean by "overtake".

Do you expect AI to replace human's who think for a living?

lelanthran··on It's the memory latency, stupid
Well, it ran on my 9600GT, which I used in a desktop from 2016 and recently used that desktop with 16GB RAM for the last few weeks.

I was unable to see any site that used webgl, which is almost all games site and many charting and graphing apps.

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> Their S-1 says they're not operating at a loss.

Where did you read this? I though it was a confidential filing (but I am open to receiving links to the S-1 that was filed).

lelanthran··on Tell HN: Scribd Breached
At the point you starts asking to prove a negative, like "Can you prove that there's no God?", you should have the self-awareness to realise that no argument will convince you, because you are proceeding on the power of belief and belief alone.

If you don't have the self-awareness to realise that you are asking the same question as "Can you prove there's no God?", then I'm afraid no proof will ever be sufficient for you.

lelanthran··on Tell HN: Scribd Breached
> I would expect code written by the latest frontier models with a "find all security issues make no mistakes" pass to be more secure than average human code written in the pre-AI era (not a high bar).

"If you write code as cleverly as you can, you are, by definition, too stupid to debug it."

Do you disagree with this? Because if you don't, then the rate of bugs/RCEs in a completely AI-written-software world will be exactly the same as the rate of bugs in a completely human-written-software world.

A combination of human-authorship + AI-review, with absolutely no AI-written code is going to have the lowest rate of bugs, because there is always one entity who understands the code (because they wrote it) and one entity who is smarter than the author who can find bugs.

The AI-generated code I see from SOTA models is absolute spaghetti, and they start running into problems spotting bugs after even a small number of refinements/changes to the software (say, 50).

The problem with all this spaghetti is that they are quick to write something that even they can't easily read. Even mediocre but experienced humans are not so eager to write something that they can't easily debug.

IOW, for any non-trivial problem, with AI-generated code you are guaranteed to get spaghetti that it cannot understand. With humans, it's only a probability that that will happen.

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> No no no, don’t burst that AI bubble just yet. I haven’t finished all my side-projects.

You'll be fine; the GPUs will be sold off for pennies on the dollar, and if you can't run one at home there are plenty of people who will buy them to host for cost of hosting +5% markup.

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> The stock exchange is the Adam Smith way of directing the assignation of resources to the most efficient company, and it's supposed to be liquid enough to allow fine-grained decisions.

So? OAI isn't on any stock exchange right now. Their value is not determined purely by supply and demand.

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> Why do I sense a schadenfreude here? It's like people are rooting for their failure.

You sound surprised. Why?

After all, they have been selling their product on the basis of driving the value of human labour as close to zero as possible (your labour included). Why wouldn't people want such an endeavour to fail?

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> The amount itself is probably meaningless. The fact that there was a shortfall at all is, for me, the signal.

It is a signal, but I am not sure what it is signalling...

It could be signalling that all surplus money has been consumed already (i.e. the investment class has no more money left to invest).

It could signal that the specific class of investment is no longer desirable (i.e. the investment money is there, but has no appetite for token-providers).

It could mean that OpenAI, specifically, is considered not worth committing to anymore.

We should be looking at how the entire class of token providers is doing; if the rest are still getting interest from investors but OAI is not, then it's just OAI that is in trouble. If the entire class is not getting the money they are asking for, then maybe the peak of the bubble is reached (or the surplus money is all invested).

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> No, they sell different products in the same category. You are basically saying Google and Bing as the same product when Bing is superior to Google search in some non-critical metrics.

In this case, it's pretty much the same product.

I mean, if you were to purchase electricity from two different providers (1x Nuclear plant and 1x Coal plant), would you actually care which one is being used to run your dishwasher on any given day?

lelanthran··on OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target
> From first principles I think youre right, but also Anthropic is making something like 80% margins.

I'm skeptical that they are operating at anything but a loss. 80% margins on a specific product (API) might still not cover the losses on the other products (Free tier, subscriptions) and their expenses (operating costs, training, research, etc).

lelanthran··on Microsoft and Epic Games Suddenly Agree That AI Is Theft
The counter argument is that a high cost to publish on steam hurts the slop devs who want to throw out 15 games a week, not the indie who works for a year on a single game.
lelanthran··on Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked
> Every time you rely on the current working directory, that's invisible state then.

And you think adding to it will improve things?

lelanthran··on US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech
What's the point of basing decisions on outliers?
lelanthran··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
> Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables?

I find it more intuitive: when I want to mix colors, or algorithmically choose colors, only oklch works to give decent results.

Maybe you want to severely darken/lighten a color on a page when the user hovers over it - doing it in RGB or HSL results in a color that does not go with the existing colors. Doing it in OKLCH does.

lelanthran··on LLM Voice
I am willing to believe it happened the same way goblins crept in.
lelanthran··on Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue
> So maybe this is a bit of good news?

How is it good news?

Consumer searches for $FOO. $FOO does not show up in the search results.

At this point, the search is useless to users.

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