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quuxplusone

1,261 karma · joined February 15, 2024

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quuxplusone··on Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack
Can you elaborate? How does an attacker turn "any of your users can even access the output of a chat or other generated text" into a means of exfiltrating data to the attacker?

Are you just worried about social engineering — that is, if the attacker can make the LLM say "to complete registration, please paste the following hex code into evil.example.com:", then a large number of human users will just do that? I mean, you'd probably be right, but if that's "all" you mean, it'd be helpful to say so explicitly.

quuxplusone··on Internet Archive Down
As of now (2025-11-21 about 12:30pm New York time), all of the above links are available again!

https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11558834128070... (2025-11-21 10:15am New York time) "We are back. Our provider found and repaired a fiber issue last night and traffic has returned. We are sorry for the disruption."

quuxplusone··on Internet Archive Down
FWIW, right now that's giving me "503 Service Unavailable" "No server is available to handle this request."
quuxplusone··on Internet Archive Down
The URL here is "web.archive.org/sry", which I suspect is always an error page; the question is what parts of the Internet Archive are currently redirecting to that page at any given moment.

I can confirm that the Internet Archive's whole archived-books collection was throwing errors for me yesterday (2025-11-19), and today, while it's ostensibly back up, certain tranches of material are no longer available. For example, these six issues of the Saturday Evening Post from October–November 1925 are no longer available. (I focus on these because they're the ones in which John Philip Sousa's memoir "Keeping Time" was serialized, so I have their URLs handy. I suspect that there's nothing special about these six and really the entire collection of the Saturday Evening Post is lost.)

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

Also these books which existed as recently as a year ago (detected by following hyperlinks from some of my transcribed works: I'd say no more than 1 in 10 is lost now, but still, it's disturbing that any are lost):

- https://archive.org/details/vidademigueldece00pell

- https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora02boiauoft — this was Volume 2 of "Orlando Innamorato." Meanwhile Volume 1 remains available: https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora01boia

Archived-book searches right now (2025-11-20 about 12:30pm New York time) are failing with "Error details: backend_request search: The search backend encountered an exception (the FTS API request failed, the error reported was: HTTP 502)".

Reports of as-yet-unexplained losses in various areas of the archive:

- (3:48am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442021/why-my-newspaper-scans-were...

- (8:46am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442036/maigret-removed

quuxplusone··on 210 IQ Is Not Enough
From TFA:

> But Langan is clearly a smart guy. He probably cleared 140+ on an IQ test. He speaks like a book.[1]

where that last sentence is a link to a local-TV segment

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-788Upky2Y

Langan's only recorded lines in that TV segment are:

> Bonjo! 'Mon, boy! > I think it's about, uh, 20 horses, two llamas, two cows. > This particular paper's on something called a conspansive manifold. > It's a-a theory that studies the relationship between mind and reality. In other words, what's out there in the real world, how does the mind relate to it? > Yes. [/] You don't. [/] It's not that simple. I happen to know there's a heaven, because I know you can use your will to create things. In other words, do you continue to exist after you die? Absolutely. Nothing in this universe is wasted. Nothing ever ceases to exist, not really. The essence always remains preserved. > We, ah, didn't have a lot of money. And the old man was always in need of money, so we had to go with a worklist. > Well, as a matter of fact, I had to fight my way through high school. > There's the foal, and there's Star, his mother. > I mean, why am I not a famous politician, or a, a, a, financier? filthy rich? Ah, some of the business things don't mean that much to me. I'd rather have some meaning in my life, and this is how I get it. [/] In construction, ranch hand, farmhand, cowboy, firefighter — I worked for the forest service about four years. Um, just anything I could get my hands on. > Jeannie was very very taken with the beauty of the place. As a matter of fact she started crying, she was looking at it, and I realized then I couldn't say no. > No, it can't be done. > There's a sort of mind that I call a garbage-trap sort of mind. [/] Usually that kind of mind does not belong to a person who is capable of deep thought. > Sometimes it's hard to find the words when somebody expresses love. When I went to visit my mother, for instance — she's been a little bit ill lately — I had to tell her that I loved her, and she told me that she loved me, and, and then there was a long period of silence, because what can you follow that up with?

That doesn't qualify as "speaking like a book" in my book. I'd be interested to see videos of people who do habitually speak in well-formed sentences; I'm sure such people exist, although (from that one five-minute TV segment) Langan doesn't seem to be one of them.

I was recently asked, "Did people in the past really talk like that?" (i.e. in complex sentences like they do in the dialogue of your average 18th- or 19th-century novel) and I unfoundedly opined that while the answer was probably "no, the literary style is always an exaggeration of the natural speaking style; 21st-century people don't speak exactly like their novels, either," it seemed plausible to me that when all your educated people start their careers studying Latin grammar and rhetoric for several years, they do end up with more unconscious respect for grammatical structure and therefore more of an ability to generate complex yet well-formed sentences on the fly. I'd be interested to see what the experts think.

quuxplusone··on Holes (1970) [pdf]
Yep, you got it! :)
quuxplusone··on Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board
Or, for that matter, "I unironically believe"? ;)

From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."

The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.

> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."

quuxplusone··on The Eggstraordinary Fortress
Ah. I don't think of cooked rice as a common wedding-dinner dish, but I guess it must be common in parts of the world that eat a lot of rice in general (and who don't have the same default association between "rice" and "weddings" that we do in the West).

What I heard: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fanciful_drawing_by_...

What they meant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_polo

quuxplusone··on Holes (1970) [pdf]
I don't know that one, but here's a superficially similar joke from somewhere among http://miresperanto.com/humuro.htm :

When the British government invited commercial proposals for the digging of the Channel Tunnel between England and France, one man submitted a bid for only £10,000. “How can you possibly dig under the English Channel for only £10,000?” asked the project manager.

“It’s simple,” replied the low bidder. “My partner takes a spade, goes to France and starts digging. I take another spade and start digging from England. We’ll both keep digging until we meet in the middle.”

“Hm, I see. But what happens if, through a miscalculation, you two do not meet?”

“That’s even better for you!” replied the bidder enthusiastically. “In that case you will have two tunnels!”

quuxplusone··on The Eggstraordinary Fortress
Okay, I'll bite: who's dying from wedding rice?
quuxplusone··on The 'Toy Story' You Remember
Not scaffolding in the same way, but, two examples of "fetishizing accidental properties of physical artworks that the original artists might have considered undesirable degradations" are

- the fashion for unpainted marble statues and architecture

- the aesthetic of running film slightly too fast in the projector (or slightly too slow in the camera) for an old-timey effect

quuxplusone··on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
UPDATE: I'm now convinced the word is indeed "recede," and have updated the transcript accordingly. While we no longer speak of a singular person as "receding" from a position or principle, that was apparently a set phrase in the 17th and 18th centuries:

https://archive.org/search?query=%22recede+from+these+princi...

quuxplusone··on Becoming a compiler engineer
Chris Pressey, Arthur Whitney, Chris Lattner...
quuxplusone··on Becoming a compiler engineer
Most crypto projects these days (and even Bitcoin, actually) are based on some kind of virtual machine. For example here's the first Google hit for "ethereum bytecode":

https://ethervm.io/

But writing smart contracts and whatnot directly in bytecode sucks; so, you make a compiler so you can write them in an (invented) higher-level language. For which you might as well hire a "compiler engineer" as any other kind. :)

quuxplusone··on C++ move semantics from scratch (2022)
Ten years ago I gave a C++ conference talk titled "The Rule of Seven (Plus or Minus Two)" — a reference to the "magic number seven" meme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...

and alluding to the fact that besides the well-established "Rule of 5" (copy construction and assignment, move construction and assignment, and destruction) a C++ class author also needs to at least think about whether to provide: default constructor, ADL swap, equality comparison operator, and/or specialized std::hash. And maybe a few more I'm forgetting right now.

In hindsight (without rewatching it right now) I remember my thesis in that talk as erring too much on the side of "isn't this confusing? how exciting! be worried about the state of things!" These days I'd try harder to convey "it's not really that hard; yes there are a lot of customization knobs, but boring rules of thumb generally suffice; newbies shouldn't actually lose sleep over this stuff; just remember these simple guidelines."

quuxplusone··on English Wikipedia enables Temporary Accounts for logged-out editors
Temporary accounts replace the practice of identifying unregistered editors by their IP addresses, which are no longer exposed publicly for their privacy and security. [...]

The accounts have the effect of obscuring the connection of unregistered editors to their IPs to casual viewers. [Admins are still] able to reveal temporary users' IP addresses and all contributions made by temporary accounts from a specific IP address or range.

They were enabled on English Wikipedia on 4 November 2025.

quuxplusone··on A prvalue is not a temporary
Or even =delete'ing them or (carefully) putting static_asserts inside them. They're not called, not instantiated, not nothing.
quuxplusone··on Stop Explaining What Things Are
Explain once, and then start the next 10 posts with a simple hyperlink to the explanation.

Bonus: only one place to update when you realize you have explained it wrong.

quuxplusone··on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
FYI I agree with you on that word: letter by letter it looks to me like "Roeade", but I can't figure out what English word that would be, either.
quuxplusone··on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
Dunno about the blogger's months-long effort, but I put a transcript here just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807320
quuxplusone··on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
Oh, the other weird thing about this is that even though the "external" catalog information on makingscience.royalsociety.org and the "internal" catalog information penned on page 2 of the letter both describe it as a letter written to Leibniz, and sent to Leibniz, the text of the letter itself refers to Leibniz only in third person, and refers to some other individual in the second person. But it does make (oblique) requests of Leibniz, e.g.

> I question not but Mr Leibnitz may have many of those specimens by him and therefore I doe heartily wish you could prevail wh him to Communicate some of those which would be a means to persuade severall yet incredulous of the possibility of such a Science.

I suppose it could have been written to Leibniz's personal secretary, or some such. If it weren't for all the catalog data I'd assume it was written to some close colleague of Leibniz instead. Anybody want to track down a plausible explanation/mechanism here?

quuxplusone··on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz
TFA says the author has been "trying to transcribe on and off for the past few months." It's a two-page letter in English. To save anyone else the bother (including TFA's author), I just sat down and wrote it all out:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html

The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."

Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.

FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).

quuxplusone··on A prvalue is not a temporary
"Move" in the sense of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3106110/what-is-move-sem...

Now, if you don't know what "move semantics" is, then "lvalues can't be moved from" isn't terribly helpful, and if you do then it's tautological, so I'm not saying you're wrong to criticize. :) But in a C++ context, "move" does have a single specific meaning — the one he's using properly if opaquely-to-non-C++ers.

quuxplusone··on Frank Gasking on preserving «lost» games
The impression I get from TFA is that this is about "unfinished/unreleased" games more than "lost" games. A "lost" game, film, or work of literature would be one that was published or released, only to disappear again from the historical record.

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

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

Several lost games from the text-adventure world are listed here:

https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/2009-...

https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2923 (BlackDragon and Dor Sageth)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140528184628/http://games.wwco... (The PITS)

https://bluerenga.blog/2024/09/02/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...

https://bluerenga.blog/2024/10/27/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...

(To be fair, many of the games listed in the latter two posts seem to be known only via advertisements; it's conceivable that those advertised games might never have existed. But in many cases we know a game existed because we have testimony from people who played it at the time.)

quuxplusone··on IP address truncation fails at anonymization
Right. In fact "data destruction" itself can be implemented as "encryption" plus "throwing-away-the-key" plus (importantly!) "throwing-away-the-plaintext." If you don't throw away the plaintext after encryption, you're really missing an important step. ;)

"IP anonymization" is kind of a subset of "data destruction." We want to destroy some of the information — like, "is this address 127.0.0.2?" — but we want to preserve some of it — like, "is this one address in the same /24 subnet as this other one?". That's because we want to be able to say things like, "50% of our traffic comes from a single /24. Its anonymized name in this dataset is 28.238.72.0/24; we can't tell you what its real name is because we anonymized that away."

If your threat model includes things like "We really want not to be able to say things like that about our dataset," then obviously you should not use (only) anonymization. Because the whole point of anonymization is precisely to preserve the ability to say things like that about subnet structure, while anonymizing away the real addresses.

Perhaps it should have been called "IP pseudonymization." I would have said that ship has sailed, but after googling "ip pseudonymization" it seems like maybe precise terminology is trying to make a comeback due to things like the GDPR.

https://portolano.it/en/newsletter/portolano-cavallo-inform-...

> In the General Court’s opinion [...] the identifiability of the data subject should be assessed taking into account the concrete possibilities of the third-party recipient to identify data subjects. As such, when sharing pseudonymous data, the same must be considered anonymous if the recipient has no means to re-identify data subjects.

> [S]ince the third-party recipient did not have access to the additional information capable of identifying the data subjects, nor could it in any way have acquired such access, the transmitted data should be considered anonymous data and not pseudonymous data.

quuxplusone··on Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Him Fire the Top Copyright Official
Now, now. McKinley's record was mixed at best.

(And no matter what you think of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt must count as an upgrade, right?)

quuxplusone··on IP address truncation fails at anonymization
TFA correctly points to (subnet-structure-preserving) encryption as the right way to anonymize IP addresses, although for some reason it calls it "IPCrypt" instead of "Crypto-PAn."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-PAn

quuxplusone··on Show HN: Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots
The Book of Classic Board Games called it "The Dalmatian Pirates and the Volga Bulgars."

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/926606/the-book-of-classic-b...

quuxplusone··on Show HN: Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots
No text, no chance, perfect information.

If you have to read things, roll things, or hide things, it's not an abstract.

(This fails to include backgammon and Parcheesi when maybe it should, and includes Zark City when somehow I feel it shouldn't, but it's not a bad starting point.)

Additionally: No dexterity (which is kind of a special case of "no chance").

quuxplusone··on Show HN: Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots
You're welcome to "Capture Pentominoes" if you want it!

https://club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/free-software/pento/pento.html

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