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rocqua

9,914 karma · joined June 25, 2016

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rocqua; my proof: https://keybase.io/rocqua/sigs/AD9P-qxDGGDOohLYLbex3ZY3mUsdH4wAEMxYDgnxXAE ]

Currently working for TNO in the department Cyber Security and Robustness.

submissionscomments
rocqua··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
Trumps short term actions will have long term consequences on the alliance. Specifically on how the alliance views reliance on the US. Trump has shown how unreliable an ally the US can be. Putting that cat bag in the bag doesn’t reverse the realisation that there’s a cat in that bag.

This will likely strengthen NATO in the long term. But only if it doesn’t get tested by Russia in the short term.

rocqua··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
The worry is not that Nvidia isn’t open about their models.

The worry is that Nvidia is trying to control the way you run those models. Trying to bake CUDA assumptions into model design, and pushing the software ecosystem to be as Nvidia first as they can.

rocqua··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
Your looking at this from a legal perspective. Consider a diplomatic one instead.

Model training is expensive. Model distillation is cheaper. If you train models, and that lets your adversary distill them for much cheaper, that gives your adversary an advantage. Giving your adversary an advantage is bad, so you address it.

It doesn’t matter whether the advantage was gained legally, not even if it was fair. The advantage in and of itself is bad, and sufficient reason to act. You couch it in less nakedly power hungry terms, but this is the reasoning.

rocqua··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
It’s more like eating your own fiber supplement in public, and then shitting your pants and telling everyone about it. Sure, it’s embarrassing. But it shows how potent your product is.
rocqua··on LoRA Speedrun – a public wall-clock leaderboard for fine-tuning techniques
I especially wonder about the quality of N big models in a delegation harness against M smaller models in a delegation harness with N and M tuned to use the same amount of total compute. (So a few agents of big models against a lot of big models). I wouldn't be surprised if the advantages of delegation and the corresponding compression of context outweighs the lower quality of the smaller models.

Or put differently a wide exploration of long chains of obvious insights might be more valuable than a more narrow exploration of shorter chains of deeper insights. But perhaps that is a wrong sense of the difference between a small model and a large model.

rocqua··on The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...

It states regarding a visa: "A visa allows a foreign citizen to travel to a U.S. port-of-entry (generally an airport) and request permission to enter the United States. A visa does not guarantee entry into the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at the port-of-entry have authority to permit or deny admission to the United States. "

rocqua··on The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel
Under the assumption that this framework is somewhat sane and only shares biometric data of those people who actually request an ESTA, I don't see the issue.

This data already leaks whenever you travel legally to the US, because they take it from you as a requirement of entry. All this does is let them check the data they take on entry against the provided data. Which seems fair. The fact this data is already in passports is a very different matter, but that is something the EU has done voluntarily.

rocqua··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
That's a valuable extra distinction between Mathematics and Software.

In Mathematics there is much more clarity on what question you want to answer. It's much less likely you get an answer to a question, and then realize that the question was useless. Whereas in software its almost guaranteed that your first implementation, correct or otherwise, will solve the wrong problem.

rocqua··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
It seems to me you hooked onto the wrong part of proofs vs software compared to what OP meant. The difference OP cares about isn’t how much one cares about style. Instead the important difference lies in validation. A proof can be validated as either correct or wrong. That type of hard feedback really helps combat the optimism and desire for shortcuts of modern models.

Now, that still doesn’t help an LLM distinguish between good and bad correct proofs. But it still really helps a lot. On top of that, taste in proofs is a lot more uniform than taste in coding. That helps LLMs be better at judging the quality of a proof, because there’s less disagreement in the wider world.

rocqua··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
Do you want others to have an identity? Say policemen, someone who borrowed something, the postman, people asking for donations, your doctor etc?

And does it make sense that at least some people do want your identity before interacting with you?

rocqua··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
A significant risk with ZKPs is that they can make a lot of explicit control rules palatable by making the side effects much less extreme.

If a company can come up with a reasonable reason to check something, then a ZKP enables that check without wider harm to privacy. But it still gives the narrow harm to privacy that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Put differently, privacy concerns have shielded us not just from surveillance, but also from powerful control. Control in the form of “you are only allowed X if you meet criteria Y”. With ZKPs, that shield of “why would I tell you enough information to determine Y” stops working. But those conditions on X are harmful more broadly.

Take the US border checks of Social Media. Are those more OK if all of a sudden there’s a ZKP you have to give of never having called Trump a cunt in any private message?

rocqua··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
The attestor gives you a credential once. You can think of it as a dob (in e.g. days since 1900) with a digital signature.

Then when you want to access something age gated, you locally generate a proof that says “I have a credential signed by X, with DoB N, and N < CutOff date” where X and the CutOff date are public but the credential and the value N are hidden through the ZkP.

The attestor isn’t involved so doesn’t learn anything. The Verifier only learns the public information, and generally won’t be able to tell if two proofs are made with the same credential.

rocqua··on Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance
We definitely need identity attestation in some places. A basic example is when authorising tax return payments. Or when opening a line of credit. Also when getting e.g. a concealed carry license. And similar for government agents executing search warrants, tow truck drivers picking up cars, etc.

Identity attestation isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s just something that can be abused.

rocqua··on Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
Sure, blame the people not the system.

Our whole education system is setup as a skinner box for grades. People finding tricks for better grades are massively rewarded. Study methods are optimised for recall within a month. And educators are accountable only to the measured outcomes.

Very little of the designed system of education is aimed at teaching. Most of it is aimed at measuring and certifying. Treating students as adversarial grade maximisers will likely teach a lot of them they are expected to grade maximise adversarially.

rocqua··on Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal
Someone else suggested the bell character. But you can also just set tmux pane names or color. Which you can also do from your agent harnass.
rocqua··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
The issue is that lobbying extends to PAC and Super PAC campaign donations. Which is pretty close to a bribe.

Lobbyist giving opinions, isn’t anywhere near corruption. Lobbyist giving campaign support by the $100,000 is a lot closer though.

rocqua··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
This isn’t about keeping people from having the power of frontier LLMs. So tricks that let others have it aren’t a defeat of this policy.

This is export control, where the US government seeks to leverage the fact that these frontier models are US made. This is then leveraged against opponents, and likely also just for grift. There’s also perhaps a little legitimate worry about the implications of free access to, but that is secondary to the real goal.

rocqua··on Epidurals are a miracle technology
There's a very strong podcast series about the common failure of Epidurals: "The retrievals" season 2, by serial productions. I found it rather eye-opening. The series includes reporting on a conference of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology (SOAP) where the professionals in this field also found it eye opening. (mostly episode 2)

I don't bring this up to say that actually Epidurals suck, just to bring attention to the fact that they can fail, and that the system has historically handled such failure really poorly, and that the system itself isn't very well aware of this issue. This isn't just opinion from some podcast, but also admitted by the professionals working within this field.

It's also something valuable to be aware of when you or your partner is planning to have an epidural, because there is real space (and even a need) for advocacy for the patient when an epidural fails and the woman giving birth is in excruciating pain.

rocqua··on Your ePub Is fine
See this comment in the same thread for sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48541563
rocqua··on MAI-Thinking-1
Not vacuous, but tautological. Which is different, because tautologies can actually be quite directly informative. Whereas vacuous truths tend to be oblique.

Also, “Microsoft is lying” is not a logically stronger statement, because they might be lying about something other than whether they distilled or trained on AI output.

rocqua··on MAI-Thinking-1
Which licenses allow usage for training? MIT, BSD, etc likely do. But I would expect it gets weird for all the various copyleft licences.
rocqua··on Zig: Build System Reworked
It doesn’t fully guarantee that. But it guarantees you don’t have a huge class of bugs. And it makes concurrency a lot easier to reason about.

No system will likely ever guarantee that software does what you expect. That runs into the halting problem, and practically runs into a verbosity problem. But that doesn’t mean systems that give scoped guarantees aren’t amazing for building (and iterating on) reliable software.

rocqua··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Microsoft themselves won’t do that. They are already under severe scrutiny internationally for fear of the US using Microsoft as leverage. They don’t want to stoke those fears. Once they do something like this, everyone who has been saying “stick with Microsoft services, they are the cheapest option compared to doing it ourselves, and have the lowest business continuity risk” will lose that argument at the same time. That creates a massive and clear opportunity for credible competitors to rise up.

This type of action would be like Trump in Iran “I am do much more powerful than you, so submit or suffer the consequences” can trivially backfire, and really reduces the effectiveness of your power.

rocqua··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
This is a rather strong analysis. And especially the point on behaviour change once market growth plateaus was new to me. Thanks!

I do want to nitpick on “unregulated free markets”. Because it’s almost an oxymoron. At least if one wants to rely on the theorems that prove free markets are best.

Those theorems assume a bit more than just a lack of regulation. They assume no information imbalance between parties. No ways outside of competition to keep out market entrants, and no collusion between market parties. All of those assumptions, in order to approach them in the real world, really require some strong regulation.

Hence I would argue that the problem isn’t just the growth curve flattening, but also a US (and EU) halt to Trust busting. Massive weakening of consumer protection agencies, and a general weakening of regulatory agencies by e.g. court cases.

It’s not just that we need stronger regulation because tech companies reached a point in their lifecycle where they wish to exploit more, as you so clearly argued. On top of that, regulatory power has been pulled back.

rocqua··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
At least the servers bit seems very related no? I’d love to know more though.
rocqua··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
If this removes people’s access to products (software licenses count as products here) someone payed fir once. Then you should only be allowed to do that if you enable people to continue using the product.

Releasing the server code should be a requirement. Software updates shouldn’t be required. Unless the product has a moment where it will stop functioning on the hardware it was build for built in (such as an expiring certificate).

rocqua··on Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
It’s not just vaguely bad because of corruption. But its corruption that very directly increased the price of oil payed by everyone else.
rocqua··on Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.

Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.

rocqua··on BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
Is there any implementation of the store and forward for mobile nodes?

From what I recall, meshcore de duplication only tracks like the last 256 messages so that could quickly fail to de duplicate.

rocqua··on BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth
That's just "using lora in the same band as WiFi and Bluetooth" no?
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