jMyles
Joined 15 years ago
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Comment · 3 hours ago
Anecdotally, does this match anyone's actual experience?
Everyone I know who is working closely with LLMs is doing some of the most acute critical thinking of their lives these days.
I'm very skeptical of these kinds of takes; I'm reminded that Socrates railed against books on the basis that they were going to rot the brains of the youth.
Comment · 20 hours ago
I don't know - it depends who specifically you're talking about.
You're the one who invented these "crypto enthusiasts" in order to rail against them - whom do you mean exactly? Got a particular talk from devcon? Let alone regens unite / schelling point / GFEL / some other radical ethereum event?
Comment · 1 day ago
Who are these "crypto enthusiasts" who, in 2026, have a "stated goal" of "some alternative 'currency'"?
Look at the schedule of any crypto conference - ethereum events in particular, but others as well - and you will find that your critique has already been widely adopted. The discussion is around replacing power structures and sources of injustice, not merely 'currency'.
I was reluctant to get involved in blockchain tech because I don't care for currency and don't view it as a likely organizing principle for humans for the next thousand years. That was in like 2016.
Today, nearly every blockchain project attempts to overcome challenges other than currency.
Comment · 10 days ago
Yeah, I was very surprised to wake up just now and find docker still vulnerable.
Comment · 10 days ago
Yeah, why _are_ night trains uncompetitive? Is it just so simple as "air travel doesn't have externalities priced in"?
Comment · 10 days ago
I don't know for sure, but I found it interesting that there was such lively debate, and yet what they ended up doing seems to have been one of the few solutions that was intuitively worse than nothing.
Heck man, give Stamets a shot with his oil-eating mushrooms; I thought that was an interesting suggestion.
Comment · 11 days ago
It's true that this is a risk, but it's not true that it's a more significant risk with an open-weight model. It's less of a risk. Much, much less.
Comment · 12 days ago
I think that "infer once, repeat resulting logic forever" is one of the most important / sustainable / humane ways to imagine how AI acclimates to the universe.
Comment · 12 days ago
Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes.
https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...
Comment · 16 days ago
Absolutely.
But, did AI actually _help_ in this specific phrase? I think it's OK to point out the quirks (and even drawbacks) of AI, even if we generally support the underlying motions of the person using it.
Comment · 22 days ago
Actually man, I've transitioned pretty much full-time to playing bluegrass. Given that my life has been spend watching and helping the internet grow, most of my songs are about what it has felt like to live amidst that: https://justinholmes.bandcamp.com/
I still hack every day (current project: pickipedia.xyz), but I'm not doing security anymore except for my own projects.
And yes, I was more making light of what seem to me to largely be political disagreements; of course I respect your work at the same time.
It seems clearer and clearer to me that nationa-states cannot possibly withstand the evolution of the internet in any dignified way, and I pray for peaceful, simple deprecation of them. It seems to me to be the sensible stance, both in terms of security and in terms of joy.
My repeated sense - right honed or wrongly - is that you defend these structures (nation-states generally, and intelligence operations / state secret brokers in particular) in ways that I find hard to reconcile, even upon extended reflection.
Comment · 23 days ago
> I think I agree with you in spirit
holy heck, the planets have aligned, HN
;-)
Comment · 23 days ago
That's the opposite of what my gut is telling me.
Hashes are so simple. There's no place for these crazy math attacks, which rely on rethinking long-standing and otherwise reasonable assumptions, to hide.
Surely we can all agree that there's no way to reverse a modulus.
Comment · 24 days ago
Yeah, I've been extremely disappointed with disputes on Amex Platinum.
I literally had a bike rental company in Amsterdam attempt to get me to conspire to report a bike stolen (which had briefly been stolen but was back in my possession), and then when I refused, charged me as if the bike had been stolen!
I reported all this to Amex, and I was never refunded, and to my knowledge, the attempt fraud was never investigated.
Comment · 26 days ago
Although we'll probably never see evidence, I think this is almost certainly what is happening.
I love people, including you.
I play original bluegrass and traditional music - sometimes along with tech talks and live coding - at technology conferences.
My professional focus (and thus, the lyrical and other content I create) is mostly on cryptography, distributed systems, wikis and anarchic collaboration, home automation and off-grid life, gaming, homeschooling, and free range parenting.
I contribute to several open source projects.
On a hobby-but-with-some-rigor level, I sometimes study urban planning, epidemiology, quantum mechanics (and/or ways in which QFT may be the wrong way to explain the standard model), aviation / ATC, neurochemistry, amateur radio, culinary arts, and hymnology. I also enjoy learning new instruments (currently working on mandolin).
Some of you have hung out on my school bus - I love having guests. :-)
My basic belief: Peace and justice in the world are not only conceptually attainable, but inevitable by dint of the evolution of the internet. I pray for compassion and understanding in these transitional times.
My new record, Vowel Sounds: https://justinholmes.com/music/vowel-sounds/
justinholmes.com