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simondotau

5,427 karma · joined September 1, 2020

Owner and chief moderator of whirlpool.net.au

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_(website)

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simondotau··on Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
We were never this absolutist about intellectual property when individuals were the perpetrators. I don’t feel morally entitled to criticise Big AI for doing what individuals have done for centuries.
simondotau··on Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
Fairness isn’t the relevant lens. Copyright isn’t the right lens either. This is purely might-makes-right, where the winner is whoever has the best offence and best defence.

It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.

simondotau··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
There is a difference in moderation policy. There is no difference in the intellectual poverty demonstrated by the purveyor of such insults. If anything, the opposite is true, since a target-rich subject like Musk requires no hyperbole to ridicule.
simondotau··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
It's highly probable that Russia's top state-controlled hackers have been attempting to exploit/infiltrate SpaceX and Starlink for the past four years.

China has probably being doing so for a decade.

simondotau··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
Then shouldn't we just eat diseases to build immunity?
simondotau··on Gemini 4 Carbon
It makes humans go insane. On the other hand it’s perfect for AI research.
simondotau··on Ten days later, Git on macOS still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates
Somehow I doubt many people will be saying that about eMudhra a decade from now.
simondotau··on Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates
I've seen this referred to as the "All Roads Lead to Rome" fallacy.
simondotau··on Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office
> the rise and fall of the NeXT platform

In a very real sense, the NeXT platform never fell. It just changed its name to Mac OS X. Apple still ships Chess.app and TextEdit.app which can be launched from Dock.app, and you might see a spinning beachball cursor while it loads.

simondotau··on Nikon photography contest winner loses title after scientists spot signs of AI
Over 100 metres, a typical athlete can probably run faster than they could scoot.
simondotau··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
Nobody said that
simondotau··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
I sincerely tried to read your response but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Is this speech to text? Were you inebriated at the time? Can you rewrite it for me?
simondotau··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
The problem with Grok 4.7 is that it's not amazing at anything, and didn't even retain the blazing fast performance of Grok 4.5 which made it awesome for highly interactive workflows.

But despite all the negative coverage, I can say with confidence that Grok 4.7 is a great code reviewer. You know who says that? Every other model. A lot of my time is spent orchestrating code reviews. I will give the same prompt to three models, then give each model the responses from the other two models to assess and rank them. Finally I give the rankings and meta-rankings to Opus to synthesise a final report.

Right now, for the code I'm dealing with (embedded c++, python, swift, and CFML) I'm fairly consistently seeing every other model rate Opus 5.5 first, with Grok 4.7 a very close second, often finding real issues other models miss.

simondotau··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Kimi K3 has been my go-to model for its writing style and (prior to Muse Wonder) my go-to for a third opinion during multi-round/multi-agent analysis tasks. Its writing style is IMHO so good that, for code which humans need to review, I regularly got it to clean up the painfully verbose comments left by Opus.

I'm excited to see if its writing style and unique takes have been retained in this new release.

simondotau··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
Late to reply, but for the sake of posterity:

You are correct that many developers complain about Safari because they are lazy little shits who would much prefer the whole world be forced to change which browser they use in order to make their jobs a bit easier.

Nobody is saying anyone needs to test on an unpopular browser. Safari on iOS is, by the numbers, very popular.

simondotau··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
Or maybe your opinion of Grok and its affiliated entities is slanted, and mine is straight. Without an objective reference point from which to measure deviation, all you're measuring is the relative angle between our opinions.

It's also worth noting that, living in an unfavourable time zone relative to most HN activity, I'm rarely here to offer the opening opinions in a discussion. More often I'm arriving 12 hours into a conversation, where everything I'd want to say has already been said. I end up contributing only where I think a different perspective is missing. Naturally, that means my comment history will disproportionately reflect the rare instances where my opinions buck the prevailing HN orthodoxy.

If you disagree with a particular claim I've made, by all means challenge it on its merits. That could be the basis of a much more interesting conversation than this fatuous one.

simondotau··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
Always fascinating to see someone so allergic to the idea of an opinion differing from their own that they immediately invent a covert marketing operation to explain it. Someone liked a model you don't like? Impossible! Clearly, there must be a conspiracy.

Of course, it should go without saying that my comment was a genuine, good-faith account of my real world experience with these models. Not that a public reputation seems to count for much these days, but for what it's worth I have over 25 years of public involvement in the tech sector, and I'm posting under my real name and real identity.

simondotau··on LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale
Opus 5.5 is a god tier model, but for serious large scale work, nothing beats getting at least three non-similar models to repeatedly refine a super detailed plan before any code is written.

Right now my consortium is Opus 5.5, Grok 4.7 and Muse Wonder. These three are different enough that their insights are very complementary. Once a plan is detailed enough, any decent model can execute on it successfully, but I personally like Grok’s ability to stick to the plan. (And no 5-hour quota!)

simondotau··on Quad9 to exit France
Hopefully someone has pointed this youtuber at Rick Beato / Legal Eagle's initiative in this direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HxQkk0PSY

simondotau··on Epic Games Inc v Apple Inc
(FWIW my day job directly involves that Act.)

Beach's ruling determined that Apple should not be allowed to block, as a policy, competing app stores. Beach also recognised that Apple's commission is not merely a payment-processing fee, but a means of recovering its investment in the broader ecosystem, including developer tools, security, app verification, distribution infrastructure and intellectual property. He also acknowledged Apple's entitlement to a commercial return on those investments.

The question remains how Apple can get the commercial return which Beach acknowledged Apple is entitled to, given the weirdly arbitrary restrictions defined in Beach's order. This contradiction is left unresolved and is begging for an obvious overturn on appeal.

I personally have no problem with competing stores, so long as they're not just a mechanism for redirecting money previously going to Apple into their own pocket. But this ruling doesn't establish competition, because there's not competitive reason for alternative stores to exist except to avoid fees which Beach acknowledged Apple is entitled to.

simondotau··on Epic Games Inc v Apple Inc
I’d be happiest if they were all brought to heel at exactly the same time. We don’t need precedent, we need legislation.
simondotau··on Epic Games Inc v Apple Inc
As an Aussie, I hope Apple maliciously complies to the greatest extent possible until the same rules are applied to all companies equally. And I mean ALL. Every single computing platform with any kind of loadable software developed by any third party should be similarly unlocked.

If the rules are good enough for Apple, they are good enough for everyone.

This might sound like a defence of Apple, and to a small extent it is. But actually, I’m being deadly serious. I think the world would be a better place if these rules applied to everyone.

“But poor Nintendo” rings as hollow to me as “but poor Apple” probably does to you.

simondotau··on Upcoming critical PHP security release (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)
Either way you're having a day or more of downtime. No reason to assume today is worse than tomorrow.
simondotau··on Upcoming critical PHP security release (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)
> From a Machiavellian standpoint

From a marketing standpoint, having the first model to find a bug of this magnitude and severity would be a pretty damn impressive proof of capability. Finding previously unknown, critical vulnerabilities in widely used open-source software could become a gold-standard test of frontier AI competence.

simondotau··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
To be fair, the fact that you gave it the task at all is a clue that you know the answer might be uncharacteristically simple.
simondotau··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
Not only should they never be trusted again, the individuals responsible can't either. They need to be blacklisted somewhere. This wasn't garden variety stupidity, this was (IMHO) do-not-collect-$200 stuff.
simondotau··on Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now
Absolutely they do. Off today is better than a ransomware attack tommorrow.
simondotau··on Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now
I would have expected there to be a hundred entities running every single model over major code like PHP, and clang, and pretty much any behemoth open source project the world relies on. This is the sort of thing the model makers should be doing as a matter of course, as part of routine testing of their new models.
simondotau··on Upcoming critical PHP security release
Undoubtedly, but presumably not this specific set of vulnerabilities.
simondotau··on Upcoming critical PHP security release (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)
Once the dust has settled, it would be interesting to give LLMs the pre-patch source code and see whether any of them can identify this chain of vulnerabilities. Even if they can't identify the full chain, can they at least spot one of the constituent bugs and recognise its seriousness?

If they can't, why not?

If they can, why haven't they already?

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