Recent submissions

Comment · 21 days ago
> nobody in decades thought to make this information accessible to the programmer!

Obviously this is untrue. Under GNU we have malloc_usable_size(3). What's true is that it never became standardized, but standards for just about anything in C are very bare, so it's not too surprising.

Comment · 1 month ago
Yes, they would be sued out of existence otherwise. It also says on the site "lyrics licensed by musixmatch", so there you go.
Comment · 2 months ago
>Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this

You uh, missed a decimal point there. A year at 40 hours/week would be 2000 hours, not 200. The quote "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months" seems accurate in light of that, but rather odd: why wouldn't it be created slowly at odd moments over several months, or even years? Was prehistoric man lacking in free time? The article eventually continues: "why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?" Keeping a fire going or protecting from predators are tasks with rather a lot of down time. I can easily imagine a person doing either of those while also whittling on a piece of bone. It's also just ridiculous to assume that subsistence living meant being constantly on the verge of starvation. Sometimes times were bad, and many people died. Then later, times were good, food could be obtained easily, and plenty of time would be left over for leisure tasks.

Comment · 2 months ago
Cloning games is not copyright infringement. Think what that would mean for a popular infiniminer clone
Comment · 2 months ago
This is DMCA. DMCA does not absolve hosts if they "receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity". So if google hosts an app and makes money off of that app, they can't claim safe harbor if that app is infringing. Hence, under the DMCA, they need to take down the app as soon as they have even a suggestion that it might infringe somebody's copyright, and not put it back up until they are certain it doesn't.
Comment · 2 months ago
A number is not in the first place its digit sequence. A number like pi is in the first place the ratio of a circle's diameter and its circumference, and only incidentally a certain (infinite) decimal expansion. A name is in the first place something you say, hence the thing you say has to be (at least theoretically) sayable.
Comment · 2 months ago
names have to be finite in length. i think that's pretty obvious
Comment · 2 months ago
The proof is simple: there are countably many names, but uncountably many real numbers. Hence, some real numbers must be unnameable.
Comment · 2 months ago
> This is doing a lot of work though isn't it ?

I don't think it is. I think you could detect sandbox escapes reliably more often than you could actually prevent sandbox escapes (which is, itself, very high). If you had an external watchdog that looked for unusual processes running on your machine, that looked for unusual connections being made, you could detect even very sophisticated attacks.

> If you think about this in an evolutionary context, What you're doing is putting even stronger pressures on the AI to evolve in a manner you don't want it to

No, because we are using failed sandbox escapes as negative training examples. So >99.99% of the time when the AI attempts to escape the sandbox, that will produce another training example that will cause it to try and escape the sandbox less. The remaining <0.01% of the time it will be pushed to try and escape the sandbox. The 99.99% will have a much stronger influence than the 0.01%.

Comment · 2 months ago
It seems like the fix should be really really simple, but maybe I'm missing something: instead of giving the AI a sandboxed environment and telling it "go wild", give it an (apparently) unrestricted environment, and tell it "don't access the internet", "don't communicate with other AIs", "don't try to get root access", etc. Then, if the AI tries to do any of those things, the sandbox detects it, marks the run as a failure, and adds it as a negative example to the training data. Instead of routing around the restriction, the AI would very quickly learn to follow the prompt instruction with respect to restrictions, even if there is no obvious enforcement of the restriction. It would develop, in other words, a conscience and a sense of morality.
Comment · 5 months ago
Right, linux should instead go by the normal extension for an elf, which is no extension... instead this problem is solved by prompting the user if they want to execute the program.
Comment · 5 months ago
Where's the other 300k going? If you aren't spending it, what does it matter if it all gets taxed to nothing? And if you end up spending it, then boom there's your consumption that needs to be taxed.
Comment · 5 months ago
Some file formats, eg png, require a particular file header in order to be considered valid. This is true regardless of your operating system, be it windows or linux. If that is hidden information, then it is hidden regardless of which operating system you're on. On windows, if I have a png named .doc, then there is absolutely no way to determine that it is a valid png and could be opened with my image viewer with standard tools. On linux it will recommend you open the file with an image viewer regardless of the file extension. That seems to me like significantly less hidden information.
Comment · 5 months ago
Am I missing something? Hiding things from users is a property of the windows approach. Did you reply to the wrong person?

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