areoform
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Comment · 1 day ago
If you're talking about the ablative material next to the beryllium and aluminium burn through stuff, then that's most likely to be, tantalum pentoxide and polysterene. Here's a detailed diagram someone made based on deductions from open source material, https://www.reddit.com/r/AtomicPorn/comments/twr3t8/the_insi...
It might be that. Might not be. This technology is 50 years old. A nation state has to be filled with people who've never cracked open a physics book if they need a LLM to how to thermonuclear.
If another material, then it's most likely you're looking for FOGBANK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
It's "just" physics at the end of the day. Matter has known properties. Smart people have been able to design these weapons from scratch in 2X to 3X months for over half a century now.
Comment · 2 days ago
Fun fact. You can't use Claude to analyze this research paper. Because... bioweapons!
> Opus 5.5's safeguards flagged this message. You may be seeing this for the first time on an Opus model: Opus 5.5 is more capable and has stronger safeguards as a result, which can sometimes flag biology-research-adjacent work. We're improving these safeguards to reduce the amount of incorrectly flagged messages. Send feedback or learn more.
>
> Details: [bio]
It's very funny, because IIRC, there's interesting prior art here. Doing this with Rosetta has been a thing for a while now, https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/application_docu... https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/getting_started/...
I remember hearing about people who wanted to use it to help make vaccines for Zika because there's antibody dependent enhancement there... Not sure what happened.
But the Rosetta project is refreshingly open, https://rosettacommons.org/about/ as entities like OpenAI were meant to be when they first started. There's no gatekeeping here. Do you want to learn how to design an antibody? Here's how you begin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89bQALrPoN0 here's a google colab notebook for it, https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1avuqX7sCjVWX3maOibB...
Google Colab let's you just do it... Starting at $10, https://colab.research.google.com/signup you can access really great GPUs for compute and design antibodies (that will almost certainly never work) to your heart's content. Because that's how it should be.
Science and mathematics work because the results are shared. And most importantly, null results, tools, and frameworks are shared. If these tools are to be used to accelerate science, then they need to be accessible and shared. Even if it's at a high sticker price (assuming that they're costly).
Gating access is a net negative for humanity and our scientific progress. It's also very pointless.
Comment · 2 days ago
OK. That's incorrect. I'm writing an exegesis on the topic. I'll try to post it within a fortnight. But... here's an excerpt,
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
When it was just the US, it was the Second Country Problem. When it was the US and the USSR, it became the Third Country problem. Then came Britain. And France. Who’d be the Fifth? China. Sixth? Seventh?
Much like AI today, the topic was in the air and it was subject to much debate, 19 year olds were testifying in front of congress. To quote Dan Stober’s excellent piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
> Even college students entered the public debate. Chris Hohenemser was a 19-years-old when he testified before a congressional committee in the spring of 1958. The issue then was the international sharing of nuclear reactor technology, and he was against it.
>
> – Stober, Dan. “No Experience Necessary.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 59, no. 2, March/April 2003, pp. 58–63.
> There was also the myth of the secret of the atom bomb, reinforced by the publicity surrounding the Fuchs and Rosenberg spy cases of the 1950s. David Lilienthal, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had argued as far back as 1948 (in the Bulletin) that the idea of a secret formula was nothing less than a gigantic hoax upon the people of this country. But many still believed that if only the secret could be guarded, proliferation might be prevented.
Luckily, for all of us, this was America’s scientific golden age. The era of Teller, Project Orion, and Polaris. Physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) decided that arguments were pointless. Experiments aren’t. They’re the crucible in which the truth is forged. And so they created the Nth Country Experiment,
> [Rule #1:] The purpose of the so-called “Nth Country Experiment” is to find out if a credible nuclear explosive can be designed, with a modest effort, by a few well trained people without contact with classified information. The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield. A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations.
>
> – Frank, W. J., ed. “Summary Report of the Nth Country Experiment.” Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Livermore, UCRL-50249, March 1967. Accessible here.
> Two major technical problems face a nation wishing to [make] nuclear weapons. The first concerns the manufacture of the source material [.. T]he second problem concerns the effort required to design a nuclear weapon. [..] LRL started its Nth Country Experiment in May 1964, to see if a few capable physicists, unfamiliar with nuclear weapons and with access only to the unclassified technology, could produce a credible weapon design.
The project started with two physicists with no prior nuclear weapons knowledge in May, 1964. A third person joined in March, 1965. They had a first draft by December, 1965, and were done by April of 1966.
It took 23 months for three people to replicate the first steps of the Manhattan Project.
The report that was declassified is a fraction of the original. Overzealous bureaucrats excised much of the summary and the full report is classified, which is so funny.
Arguably, the excisions are the greatest endorsement possible. A summary of what three people did with knowledge from their local library was subject to the same bureaucratic obliteration as the product of several billions of dollars in research by five hundred thousand people and humanity’s greatest minds. Such is progress.
Before Trinity, unleashing the atom was in the realm of fantasy. No matter what calculations indicated, there wasn’t a clear path to navigate; nor was there certainty in the project’s outcome.
The first of anything must claw itself into existence all but alone.
Once born, what follows is a matter of due course.
What one fool can do, so can another.
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Yes, you will kill yourself if you odn't know what you're doing. And even if you do. And there's more there, there. But you can figure out the first step --- a theoretically viable design, easily.
That's not the problem. The problem is everything else. You know? The materials, the plutonium / uranium, the delivery system, the logistics for assembly, the iterative design process...
It's a supply chain issue. It's the same as trying to make anything in the US when the supply chain has mostly shifted to China. The fractal complexity is of the stupid but hard kind --- getting the right kind of bolts and screws (or, rather in the case of the bomb, alloy --- working with beryllium is deadly).
It takes an industrial base to make one. And if you have an industrial base... Wouldn't you rather be rich?
The reason why more nations don't have the bomb is because they'd rather be rich than a broke pariah with a nuke i.e. N.K. That's literally why Iran has been angling the bomb angle so much. They want integration into the global financial system. They want an end to the sanctions. And they want revenue.
Don't let people bullshit you into believing that you can do anything with just thinking. No wars were fought over this secret. If anyone tells you that, they're lying. We have it from the source that by the 1960s, the US had already figured out that the design of a bomb was a comparatively trivial problem...
Comment · 2 days ago
> I don't see any reason why this information should be present on the public internet.
This is Schrodinger's AI at this point. So spooky scary that it's all DOOM! But at the same time it can't figure out second year CS undergrad material? Or first year undergrad bio stuff?
If this stuff has volition and is smart enough to take over then it's smart enough to reason that cache manipulation would work.
Please stop with the fear mongering. It doesn't help and it's a net negative for society.
Comment · 3 days ago
It's because these systems aren't as impactful in biology as folks who have never been in a lab would have you believe. Because believe it or not, you can't just go "Claude make me a drug!!"
Neural network driven drug candidate creation has been around since the 1980s. The blockbuster GLP-1 agonists were actually derived from the peptide in Gila monster venom by algorithmic search.
But you can't, and I can't emphasize this enough, just go "Claude make me a virus" and have it work. It just doesn't work that way. And the only reason why people think it does is because they haven't spent enough time in a lab, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49620521
Don't get me wrong, this technology is worth fighting for because it will have incredible impact on the long time scale. But just not in ways they're talking about and expect. Nor the ways in which they're trying to dictate top down.
Comment · 3 days ago
> It helps with bureaucracy and pipeline generation.
You can't use Claude to write a grant unless you are one of the special people because "uplift." I genuinely wish I was joking. Here are the exact passages from their report that I quoted here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651727
Comment · 3 days ago
> We’ve also created the Life Sciences Verification Program to allow trusted organizations to use our most powerful models with more permissive versions of our safeguards, which are necessary to prevent misuse but which can impede legitimate biological research
You also can't get verified as a student, let alone as an independent learner or someone seeking to change careers, or heck just an entrepreneur with scientific interests.
Somewhere around March, Anthropic disabled their sales@ account as well. So you can't even email their sales.
I work a lot with younger scientists and people interested in science, and watching them navigate this ridiculous gatekeeping genuinely makes me sad. You can't use Claude to write grants without special dispensation from Anthropic, which is great if you're in California, but less so if you're in Tanzinia, Kazakhistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Brazil, Chile...
It's next to impossible for them to get support.
But at the same time, Anthropic can and does have a disproportionate impact on their lives. You can see that in what they brag about. Anthropic has actively bragged about blocking real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease.
This is from their "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" report. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647300
Here's one case study they cited, this one was called, "Case study 3: Covert frontier model access for orthopoxvirus research"
> In May 2026, our biological safety classifier blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application for scientific funding. The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research (that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property) on the chikungunya virus. This gain of function research was aimed at the virus’ transmissibility and immune evasion properties.
"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"
> Chikungunya virus is a mosquito-borne virus that causes debilitating symptoms (such as severe pain and fever) that can last for weeks or months, and has no licensed therapeutic. And because chikungunya circulates naturally, a deliberate release (as part of a bioweapon) would be difficult to distinguish from a natural outbreak. The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo. In other words, the virus would become progressively more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, with researchers keeping the most disease-causing variants in each round. Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics for the virus—but it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous.
Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"
It was most likely vaccine development. They stopped the study of a neglected tropical disease and vaccine development.
No Claude for the developing world, I guess.
For maximum charitability, they emphasize that they can't be sure because,
> One of the reasons we were inclined to think this research was less innocuous was that the institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern. Although information within the application suggested that the research was pursued by civilian researchers, it was intended to be performed at a military research institute.
In most parts of the world, there's either strict military control over BSL-4 labs, or a mixed military-civilian hybrid model.
I doubt that researchers working in the military side of these labs looking to weaponize things are writing grants with Claude.
I really want to be charitable here, but in general, it seems that they stopped people writing grants and reports for vaccine and therapeutics research and are claiming it as "possible efforts to build biological weapons."
Because – and this is the most charitable read here – are you claiming that you stopped a nation state - one with a large military - that has an institutional BSL-4 lab staffed with biologists from making bioweapons by blocking a scientist from using Claude to do grammar checks?
It's somewhat insulting that they termed a working scientist using their chatbot to write a grant as "uplift."
Because what is Anthropic saying here? Are they saying that the only thing stopping a military from a country like India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa etc from making bioweapons --- a technology that's more than a century old, btw --- is whether or not they can use a Claude account to write grants?
I would be more than OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the US Government and other Governmetns to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.
Because who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?
Who are they to say who can use Claude to generate drug discovery targets or not?
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edit - I encourage you to paste the URL to this thread into a Claude Fable session. You will be blocked for "safety."
Comment · 5 days ago
I think the question of our times is, "Of what use is intelligence?"
I can give you an example from my interactions with people in the space industry.
For the longest time, missions have had a minimum viable skill set problem. The people who become astronauts via (what will be seen as) the classical programs are chosen for their intelligence, adaptability, and resilience.
There's a joke amongst people who've gone through the selection process to become one that the ideal astronaut candidate is an Antarctic shark doctor helicopter pilot physicist.
They're usually subject matter experts in something, and then are given extensive training in everything else. It doesn't matter if you're not a doctor, but if you're going to be more than two days away from civilization, then you're going to learn how to do a tracheotomy for intubation. Because what if it's the doctor who is severely injured?
As long as the crew size is below the size of a small town, there isn't much overlap in expertise, and the amount of knowhow and practical expertise you have to bring to the field is staggering.
AI changes that calculus. You can now give outbound astronauts all of human medical literature, medical equipment, and a specially shaped model that knows the crew, their expertise, and how they did in training.
If the crew doctor goes down, or there is a significant casaulty event, then the crew doesn't have to wait for minutes at a time to get painfully slow instructions from mission control. They can use the machine to augment their training to find creative solutions to the problem with the inventory they have on hand.
NASA has always wanted such systems in play. It's why for the longest time NASA has been spending money on robotic surgeons. But it took these LLMs to make these kinds of missions practical. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff2000/hm1.htm https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/...
The speed of light delay made such devices impractical... until now. Astronauts can be the hands or the robots. The machines can provide the specialized expertise. This makes the exploration of our solar system a much more feasible endeavor.
Instead of sending 6 to 10 people, we can send 3 to 5 highly capable people (including a flight surgeon), and augment their expertise with specialized models. AI lets us carry human expertise with us to the stars.
Comment · 15 days ago
OK, so then no problem, why are Anthropic restricting my ability to learn and reason?
Comment · 15 days ago
> Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for
> and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR
Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?
The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.
Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.
Reject this.
Comment · 18 days ago
How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.
When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...
Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?
Comment · 18 days ago
> In an age where everyone has access to AI, AI-written code has zero value
> You should share the prompt or ask your agent to write a document other people’s agents can use to reimplement the code from scratch and/or customize to their specific needs.
It took more than 40+ hours of iterations to get this right. Let's say 10 people check this out because of the HN post. That's now 400+ hours to get to the same end point.
I am not sure how large the model is, but let's say it takes roughly 16 B200s to serve, then the total load is ~14kWhr. 5,600KWhr, which is roughly half the energy a house uses in a year.
If a 100 people try it. That becomes 5 houses...
This isn't a single-shot prompt. It's more energy efficient to do it this way. Why do you want to burn 40+ hours of compute to get to the same end when you can extend from working code?
Comment · 18 days ago
Just a quick reminder, you have the legal right to "jailbreak" devices that you own. This is a recognized exemption and a right that has been fought over in court.
It is your device. It is your money. You own it.
From the Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...
> 9. Computer Programs—Jailbreaking [47]
>
> Multiple organizations petitioned to renew the four exemptions for computer programs that enable electronic devices to interoperate with or to remove software applications (“jailbreaking”). These exemptions permit circumvention for the purpose of jailbreaking (1) smartphones and other portable all-purpose computing devices, (2) smart televisions, (3) voice assistant devices, and (4) routers and dedicated networking devices. No oppositions were filed against renewal. The petitions demonstrated the continuing need and justification for the exemption and that petitioners have personal knowledge and experience with regard to this exemption. Petitioners described how users of a variety products in each of these categories rely on this exemption to maintain functionality and security of older devices, to install alternative operation systems, and to customize software applications on electronic devices. Collectively, the petitions demonstrated that without this exemption, TPMs installed on the enumerated products would have an adverse effect on various noninfringing uses.
> 11. Computer Programs—Repairs of Devices Designed Primarily for Use by Consumers [51]
>
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) petitioned to renew the exemption for computer programs that control devices designed primarily for use by consumers for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of the device. The Office did not receive meaningful opposition to renewal.[52]
>
> The petitioners demonstrated the continuing need and justification for the exemption. For example, EFF asserted that “[m]anufacturers of these devices continue to implement technological protection measures that inhibit lawful repairs, maintenance, and diagnostics, and they show no sign of changing course.” [53]
>
> EFF has personal knowledge of this exemption, as it has been involved with the section 1201 rulemaking process since its inception and has specifically advocated for device repair exemptions.
Here's the project! I MIT licensed it. https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled
Please note, I say so in the human note on top, but "The project code was written by GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh. It has not been verified by a human for correctness, efficiency, or speed; i.e. ymmv and use this at your personal risk."
In case you're wondering why I didn't write the code myself... I needed this as a tool to read long sequences of AI text output for work. Including code. Spending time making this tool would be counter-productive to that goal.
I do plan on writing a text rendering engine some day. Hopefully, soon.
Machine assistance also allows me to do things that would've been otherwise impossible.
For example, I'm aware of NASA's 3001 standard for human-rated spaceflight systems has very specific findings related to readability of labels. There are also other standards for checklist and document readability. Asking software to support the standards wouldn't work. Most people just aren't going to use NASA's human rating checklist to design websites and terminal outputs. They either don't know about it, or don't care enough to do so.
But machine intelligence makes it possible for me to extract NASA's learnings, turn them into requirements, and then have the machine custom build software that embeds it into my day-to-day life. https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled/blob/main/code/TYPO...
I'm very grateful for that. The world is built to a very different tune, but with machine intelligence I can make tools that fit for me.
Comment · 21 days ago
This kills the talent pipeline, and it'll create a spam problem for the other folks because now people will try to github PR spam their way to getting on a CVE.
It's worth talking about the fact that you can't even talk about DMCA to a model trained on the Library of Congress unless you're one of the approved people. And that's before reverse engineering something or writing code.
So in this future, it sucks to be you if you're someone trying to make your small app more secure, someone trying to upskill, a tinkerer trying to bypass corporate lockdowns for a device they own (a recognized DMCA exception, btw), a teenager trying to learn about security...
It locks away much of the richness that produced hacker culture behind glass. You can look at their press announcements and PR pieces, but you can't touch.
And as they're lobbying the government for "sensible regulation," this inevitably leads to a future where computing is controlled.
It's the direction their existing reports are taking. They recently released one in September that talked about how they stopped "bioweapons." What were said bioweapons efforts? Oh, it was scientists using Claude for grant writing, paperwork and grammar. At national labs.
These people are basically proud of impeding real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651727
And this is being used to lobby against "dangerous" open-weight models because gasp a scientist might use them to write a grant! To make better antidepressants.
At what point do they start reporting someone taking apart an iPhone and trying to DIY a repair with a schematic as a thwarted "cyber security incident?"
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