Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
Does playing Wingspan count?
Comment · 18 days ago
Cyber operators I agree would tell you that physical airgaps are necessary, and I know they are being used for running agents. But ML engineers training agents? That is far more complicated. At that point sensibly you are talking about physically airgapping an entire datacenter, and when moving around petabytes of training data, model weights, training results, researcher code? The process moves too slow for most companies to tolerate. This is how we got into this mess in the first place. I think the industry woke up to the idea that the security threat model of training ML models has fundamentally been rewritten, and there is some serious non-trivial scrambling to come up with a better workflow.
Comment · 18 days ago
100% on point. We're talking about Artifactory here, and even though people love to hate on it, I don't think anyone is claiming that using Artifactory to isolate these agents while giving them a way to run pip/cargo/whatever to install packages they need to write and test scripts.
Comment · 18 days ago
Yes, the AI labs are making security mistakes. But, choosing a reasonable package repository (regardless of individual opinions on Artifactory, it is widely used and usually considered a safe choice) that their LLMs found 8 zero-days in? That was not one of them. Even if OpenAI were totally on top of their game, these paperclip-maximizers are going to find holes in the sandboxes they are given. And fully airgapped systems are frankly unrealistic for most systems. This whole narrative of blaming the frontier labs for shoddy security, while being quite an attractive target narratively (they made the mess, they should clean it up), misses the fact that from a cybersecurity perspective these LLMs, no matter what they are, are inherently dangerous and require far more resources to secure, not to mention expertise that I am unconvinced actually exists.
Comment · 2 months ago
Wait wait wait. I don’t accept this premise: “But anger is different from anxiety because anger needs to be directed somewhere.” Citation needed; where did this come from? I think it is very possible to be angry without a source or obvious target of that anger; IANAP but my 10-minute googles could not find any authority in the field that would claim this statement.

From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.

Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.

Comment · 1 year ago
“ What will happen to democracy in a world where 100% of the population are 27/7 consumers?”

…we’ll add three hours to our day?

Bu seriously, I support what you are saying. This is why the entire consumer system needs to change, because in a world with no jobs it is by definition unsustainable.

Comment · 1 year ago
> "Smart Local Control" home devices work as expected until the electronics fail

Recently one of my Zigbee-controlled thermostats started pumping cold air constantly. To fix it, all I had to do was open and examine the board; one of the varistors got some battery acid on it when I had an alkaline battery burst in the unit. Because it was a no-name with an actual PCB, I was able to solder a new varistor in place, and it works good as new.

So I would say that "Smart Local Control" isn't the problem, but rather the ability to repair the thing. Also, the thermostat was $45 when I purchased it 5 years ago, so it was a good investment IMO. I think that's why everyone is upset about the Nest gen 1 and 2 sunsetting; there should be no reason that these devices should be breaking now (no failing electronics) but they die anyway because the company is too cheap to keep an extra endpoint running.

Comment · 1 year ago
You don’t need an LLM for this. Use `kubectl` to create a simple pod/service/deployment/ingress/etc, run `kubectl get -o yaml > foo.yaml` to bring it back to your machine in yaml format, then edit the `foo.yaml` file in your favorite editor, adding the things you need for your service, and removing the things you don’t, or things that are automatically generated.

As others have said, depending on an LLM for this is a disaster because you don’t engage your brain with the manifest, so you aren’t immediately or at least subconsciously aware of what is in that manifest, for good or for ill. This is how bad manifest configurations can drift into codebases and are persisted with cargo-cult coding.

[edit: edit]

Comment · 1 year ago
Anaconda was a good idea until it would break apt on Ubuntu and make my job that much harder. That became the reason _not_ to use Anaconda in my book.

venv made these problems start to disappear, and now uv and Nix have closed the loop for me.

Comment · 1 year ago
Oh sure! While we’re at it, let’s increase the existing dystopia by giving employers the ability to track our stress levels and let them “compensate” as they see fit…
Comment · 1 year ago
Alphabet will definitely try to do that (within their business interest and all that), but I still choose to believe in the precept that “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, as old and outdated as that sounds.

A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal. They don’t get the recent model (costing half as much), hold onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for “required” apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work on Chrome…) and the personal phone for everything else.

As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.

Comment · 1 year ago
I love the idea of this flake to run Ollama even on Windows, but just pointing people to your _everything_ flake is going to confuse people and make it look harder than it is to run Ollama on Nix.

If you are using a system-controlling Nix (nix-darwin, NixOS…), it’s as easy as `hardware.services.ollama.enable=true` with maybe adding `.acceleration=“cuda”` to force GPU usage or `host=“0.0.0.0”` to allow connections to Ollama that are not local to your system. In a home-manager situation it is even easier: just include `pkgs.ollama` in your `home.packages`, with an `.override{}` for the same options above. That should be it, really.

I will say that if you have a more complex NixOS setup that patches the kernel or can’t lean on cachix for some reason that using the ollama package takes a long time to compile. My setup at home runs on a 3950X Threadripper and when Ollama compiles it uses all the cores at 99% for about 16 minutes.

Comment · 1 year ago
Is it because pi isn’t measured, but calculated? The wikipedia article (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant) makes a distinction between a mathematical constant and a physical constant, stating that the latter cannot be calculated but instead needed to be measured experimentally… Pi could be measured experimentally, but it has an exact definition and can be calculated outside of any experiment.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
“Even are ads are private…”

I don’t think that’s possible. Modern advertisers require those sweet sweet metrics, which can never be truly anonymized, and in most cases attempts to anonymize are half-hearted at best.

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