phendrenad2

Huh sounds like freedom of speech was abridged

Jev is interesting because it adds "muscle memory" to LLMs. I think we're approaching some fusion of systems that approaches the human brain here.

Backdoors in model weights are mostly theoretical. And the "alignment problem" that the AI labs love to talk about really doesn't exist either, at least, not the way they use it. The real alignment problem is getting an LLM, which is just math, to obey arbitrary human rules. In other words, LLMs do not have "alignment" at all. However, AI CEOs abuse the term and use it to mean "AI has an alignment, just not the one we want".

It really sucks that every web hosting company is greedily trying to trick people into transferring their domains, usually by implying that you can't use your domain with them unless you transfer it. Scumbags, the lot of them.

Someone should set up an AI agent that clicks around Facebook, detects scam ads, reports them to Facebook, and then, if it still sees the same ad an hour later, file a lawsuit. One per ad. Demand that they preserve records related to how many other people may have seen that ad.

Wow, I had totally forgotten about that tradition.

It's already too late. YouTube has not given me any new favorite videos in 10+ years. And all of the older videos that were my favorites have disappeared, or worse, been inadvertently but predictably bit-rotted because someone at YouTube thought it was a good idea to forcibly re-transcode all old videos, making them look like smeared lossy JPEGs and de-syncing the audio.

Download your favorite tiktok videos, though.

BTW, the story behind "moof" and how it relates to old Macs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow

LinkedIn is a wasteland. Guarantee Microsoft leadership forgets it exists or that they own it. The sooner we stop giving it misplaced respect the sooner it can be replaced by something better.

Shannon's entropy theory disagrees. No matter how good the best AI is, its ability to hide a backdoor is limited by the information density within the programming language, and the complexity of possible backdoors will plateau, allowing much lesser AIs to discover them. Consider that binary software is just a more dense form of code, too. A much less dense form, Javascript, makes finding backdoors easy because they all have to use obfuscation via base64 or something to avoid static analysis, which itself immediately draws suspicion.

Windows 11 was just a hastily-developed salesperson-tier excuse to require TPM 2.0 wasn't it?

When was the last time you heard about a VC-backed company going out of business? They either go unicorn or they get frozen until another VC-funded company is large enough to absorb them and quietly absorb their lack of value. Postman is a big morsel but I guarantee some company is being lined up just perfectly to consume them.

Ideally, these employee packages settle back to earth post-IPO, so that only some of your employees leave to retire early. But that's not going to happen here, is it? There's no way the stock can drop low enough that all of their employees don't immediately leave.

I'll be thankful that I already built the groundwork for various projects and the rest can be done on lower quality AIs.

I did this for a while. I went so far as to built a highly advanced web crawler webapp that was better than the Internet Archive in a lot of ways.

But the modern web has made this unreasonable. Every webpage is 99% junk (CSS, JS, HTML structure, tracking pixels, UI images, navigation links, cryptominers (I joke)) and 1% content. You need a smart AI system to pick out the good parts, otherwise you'll quickly find yourself schlepping hundreds of gigs of junk to just preserve your favorite websites.

The better idea is: if you love information, back it up. Collect the knowledge from the website, not the website. And then preserve it. Create a free ebook. Or sell it on Amazon kindle. That'll last a lot longer than the website will, and any HTML backup of the site you could possibly make.

I wonder if we'll ever see nanotech xenon arc lamps.

It's true that 2 layer boards are very cheap, but there's a big jump in price when you go to 4 layers, and 5+ layers and beyond is a huge jump in price. I think that for PCI, below 6 layers will be tight and below 4 layers would be impossible.

Look at all those wires! No wonder hobbyists haven't bothered with the PCI bus much.

This is just prompt noise that any RE will be able to easily coax claude to ignore. It exists to get the big loserly game companies like Nintendo and Sony off their back.

Why was the previous discussion of this flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50299182 Is our new policy to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that CVEs don't exist? Because I'm not getting behind that!

Deskilling is good, actually, as long as it's the right deskilling. "Skill" in software development is partly raw IQ and partly knowledge of complexity. Programming author Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man-Month) categorized complexity into "essential" and "incidental". Examples of incidental complexity are: React/Rails/Django/Laravel makes a backward-incompatible change to their interface and you need to scurry around the codebase fixing invocations. Or a senior developers on your team have a weird in-house coding style and all the junior devs need to learn it to get their code approved. Or management wants to move everything from one cloud provider to another so you have to change a bunch of resource URLs. Examples of essential complexity are: Self-driving car algorithms. Making your code run faster on the CPU. Adding support for a new web standard like SPDY.

I'm not lamenting the days when you needed to pull a seasoned (read: exquisitely expensive) COVOL developer out of retirement to make a change. Now AI can figure it out well enough, I just need to know how the basic concepts work.

A lot of talk about the demise of Stack Overflow. But let's have some positive reminiscence: They really captured lightning in a bottle at one point. On the internet, everyone has an opinion, and they fight like hell to defend them. It's amazing that SO was able to remain civil for as long as it did. People actually wanted to help! And the best answers typically rose to the top. I don't know what went wrong, I suspect it was a variation on Gresham's Law: "bad social currency chases out good social currency".

Can you blame them? I blame the administration for crashing the economy and making it hard to run an honest news site.

I don't think NetBSD has ever had a reputation for what they mean by "spotty hardware support" here, which is apparently uh... power management on laptops. Their links take you here: https://wiki.netbsd.org/laptops/

Your mistake is assuming that the company is anti-ICE.

That's too bad, I would have liked to visit it one day. I hear Mt Everest will be demolished next to make room for a bodega.

> None of the substantive code was written by AI.

That is impressive

If a decent, empathy-forward place like Eugene, Oregon is powerless to control their police department, what's the point of voting?

Something I've been thinking about lately is how doing anything well is an unknown factor more difficult than you originally think. Your initial estimate of how hard something is to do is usually terribly wrong. Once you think that you're 20% into a project, you realize that you're only actually 5% into the project. Then later, when you reach what you think is finally 20% again, you realize that, once again, you're only 5% into the project! This repeated discovery of "more to do" really beats people down and discourages them from doing ambitious things.

(See also Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.)

Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.