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marshray

11,842 karma · joined December 21, 2010

Marsh Ray Also: Mastodon: @marshray@infosec.exchange Bsky: @marshray.bsky.social GitHub: github.com/marshray
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marshray··on Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google
I haven't noticed that.
marshray··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
My 2nd grader once brought home a homework sheet with some simple problems involving combinations of coins and I was like "this is unsolvable!"
marshray··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
> The subexponential solution does carry over to any (?) problems that have can be reduced to 3SAT in a linear number of variables. They list: Counting independent sets, Counting proper q-colorings, Counting perfect matchings.

Wouldn't that also include functions that can be evaluated in hardware using a fixed number of gates? E.g., symmetric cryptography?

marshray··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
If I can "count the satisfying assignments of a k-CNF in subexponential time and polynomial space", could I just count the the solutions for assignments of 0 and 1 to x_1, then proceed with whichever is greater (or nonzero), counting the solutions for x_2=0, and so on.

Doesn't that lead me to an existence proof (i.e., a solution) to a k-SAT problem in N*(subexponential_time and polynomial_space)?

And with constant folding, N is reduced by 1 on each iteration.

What obvious thing am I missing here?

marshray··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
Definitely. It will let some smooth-talker with a vibe-coded website raise billions for "Nuclear Fusion AI". Then they can use AI to squeeze your team with lawsuits until you agree to sell cheap, and maybe keep you on as an employee to build it.
marshray··on Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model
There are whole branches of data security, practices, and products dedicated to answering that question and managing that risk.

The similarities look obvious, but how are these situations different? Seems like an interesting question.

marshray··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
With the almost 10x share price run-up of the last few years, an offer of fully-vesting is going to sound pretty good to a lot of people.
marshray··on Type Server Protocol
It's just an .md file and a few hundred lines of json schema defining some extension messages, not a bottom-up protocol revision.
marshray··on OpenAI "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
What is "exceeding authorized access" if not "using APIs in a way counter to their intent"?
marshray··on Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
At least with LK-99 we had people claiming to have personally measured these properties in actually existing samples.
marshray··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
Don't forget the mothers of all those original authors, as well as everyone who labored to build and sustain the societies which produced writers.
marshray··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley

I didn't really get this book the first time through.

marshray··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
A Psalm for the Wild-Built is another cozy favorite from Chambers.
marshray··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
The first two books contain the primary story. I'm told it was originally supposed to be a single book.

The end of the first book made me wish for a paper copy I could throw against the wall :-D

marshray··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I found it quite good, but super complex.

Apparently there are typographic markers which were completely lost in the audiobook version. It made very little sense to me until about halfway through.

marshray··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Piranesi has my vote for "ideal book", at least of that genre. Not a word is wasted. It fills out beautiful scenes by slowly lowering abstractions into them. It unfolds a dreamy, cerebral story. You meet likable characters transcending the paradigm. There’s even a gun, kicked around in a parking lot if that checks any boxes for you. Did I mention the baby albatrosses?
marshray··on OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior
Don't straw-man me bro!

No disagreement that unintended undesirable behavior could usefully be described as a 'failure'.

marshray··on OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior
The answer is: It's irrelevant, because no one runs LLMs on systems without networks or missiles or some other way to "take action" because that would be pointless.
marshray··on OpenAI discloses six new AI safety incidents
"In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking."

Oh good, they told it not to "go rogue" and it just stopped doing it.

Nothing to see here, the AI is aligned now, move along.

marshray··on OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior
Computers are used to evaluate LLMs, but LLMs are not "software" or "algorithms" in the traditional sense. They are not built out of conditional branches or loops.

So trying to squeeze the observed behavior of this new thing under existing terms like "software bug" is at least as much of a force-fit, and what you're doing here is just as much language engineering as choosing to use a term like '[mis]alignment'. Which is fine, this is just one way that humans choose language.

marshray··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
A scapegoat is a goat driven into the wilderness to misdirect from the sins of the villagers.

It's a canonical example of cruelty being the point - both as a distraction and as a lesson to observers.

marshray··on An investigation into the state of corvid–human relations
I can't believe they left out Gothi and Gethli in Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
marshray··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
"Most users" are not who choose business software.
marshray··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
I think it probably has more to do with Mac's lack of adoption by the US Government and large corporations.

Microsoft took accessibility of Windows and apps as a basic requirement. The fact that Windows is the daily driver desktop for the staff of the regulatory agencies that would bring complaints would not have gone unnoticed.

But really, why wouldn't you? You almost get it for free if you use the standard widgets, and smooth keyboard navigation is far faster for experienced users than having to repeatedly move one's hand between keyboard and mouse.

marshray··on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise
The scam here is presenting average occupational accident rates as a measure of "safety" when the obvious risk of nuclear power is the rare large-scale events which render large areas of land uninhabitable for generations while producing few directly-attributable deaths.
marshray··on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise
Data centers are only 5-10% of all US electric power demand. A significant fraction of that load is responsive to spot market price. DCs incorporate their own battery storage infrastructure for backup purposes and some even sell stored energy back to the grid during times of high demand.
marshray··on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise
Most of the reactors we have in the US today are the result of building many of a few models per year during the late 1960's - early 1970's.

In 1974, 12 reactors entered commercial operation and 13 more were begun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

The technology was given almost a century to prove itself cost-effective. It did not succeed in the market and only ever worked with truly massive amounts of government subsidies.

High fixed costs + more reactor sites -> more expensive, more nuclear waste sites for taxpayers to clean up

marshray··on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise
Not the core measurably, but my understanding is that it can very slowly cool the volume of earth immediately around the heat extraction site.

I have full faith in modern engineers' ability to account for these effects in the plant designs.

marshray··on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise
Enormous amounts of storage is awesome and overproduction is a good thing when its marginal cost is ~zero.
marshray··on AI Model Atlas – visualizing populations of ML models as interconnected 3D graph
Cosmograph looks really interesting, but it's not open source. CC-BY-NC-4.0.

This is not necessarily a criticism, I just thought others might have the same question.

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