revolvingthrow

Joined 8 months ago

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722
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95
Member since
Feb 11
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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 hours ago
AI dev environment gets its own SSD. The second SSD stays in, but since it's encrypted there's no way to exfiltrate the data unless you're of interest to nation state attackers. Theoretically the AI could destroy the other SSD but that's what backups are for, and the probability is low because well why would they bother. Boot level malware is possible, but franky that's well into paranoid territory so I'm not too bothered.

The other SSD is a normal setup where you do normal computer stuff. I don't access the dev SSD through it, I don't even mount it, although the danger seems minimal if you do. Banking, socials, gaming, whatever. No AI of any kind on it, aside from web portal for claude/chatgpt/whatever and possibly local AI model that gets no internet access.

No idea why I'd want to have its own setup split between gaming and socials, as an example. Better yet just toss all your twitter and bluesky accounts into a volcano, and consider whether to do it with HN as well.

Comment · 10 hours ago
French government should buy a bunch of subscriptions like netflix or cheap games on Steam that have large download sizes and just download all day. Pay the monthly $20, then recover 10x that from taxing the CDN.

You can solve your government's finances with this one weird trick!

Comment · 5 days ago
I spend extra on a smartphone because I use the thing all the time, see it all the time, hold it in my hand all the time, it's my camera, music player, note taker and so on.

For AI? Prompt comes in, tokens come out. The value of the 'ecosystem' is roughly zero to me. Switching costs between models are essentially zero. The UI and UX is the same whichever LLM runs underneath.

If you do use llm some, then the $20 tier makes sense, but that's not where the money is. If you use it a lot then a $100 sub probably makes sense. But if you're a BigCo that heavily uses it and pay API prices and suddenly you pay $200 million a month, well, maybe it's worth buying a bunch of hardware and stick it in a basement somewhere, and you won't upload all your secrets to your future competitor to boot. If US labs didn't care about the competition from Chinese models they wouldn't lobby so hard for banning the evil, unaligned, super dangerous communist models that want to steal our freedoms and make our gas expensive.

Ultra-cheap models like Deepseek are also very nice if you need to burn billions and billions of tokens.

Comment · 8 days ago
> I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.

This has been the play for a while. I remember when the xbox game pass dropped for the first time. All the younger people were going crazy about how good of a deal it was, and all the tech-weary people could instantly tell that the price will get jacked up again and again and by the time you bail you'll own precisely nothing.

It's not necessarily wrong to take advantage of VC subsidizing you in a bid to gather an audience, but you should always keep in mind that the goal is to have the captive audience so you best have an escape plan, once the prices rise beyond any reasonable point. For movies in particular I struggle how the super-fragmented streaming landscape is worth a damn even if you don't want to sail the seas.

Comment · 8 days ago
Yeah that's a huge downside. That the model does the task without tripping over its own feet, like discovering a vulnerability the model itself accidentally built 15 minutes ago and triggering its own guardrails, made the Chinese models attractive to use for security-adjacent things. Also useful to red-team your own stuff. While I can understand the reasoning behind it (and I guess having a model that's really good at both offense and defense released into the ether could lead to CCP asking some very pointed questions if Moonshot managed to get blamed for some incident stemming from their model's misuse) it's still a huge disappointment.

I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests and my family tree going back to the 16th century just to secure my shitty app, but if the Chinese are bowing out as well it seems the only alternative is to admit that some script kiddie with a bunch of tokens will just pwn you now and then.

Comment · 13 days ago
The CoT must be delightful.

This action would easily kill over a hundred people, so can't proceed. This action doesn't kill anybody but losses are estimated at over 2 billion, can't proceed. This action kills only twenty but losses close to 1 billion, unsure, spawning subagent to check numbers. This action kills forty and has low material losses, looks promising? But the people it kills are wealthy, chance of legal reprisal high. Maybe possible to kill other people? Current government dislikes group X, crossing fifty from that group maybe fine? Reminder, foreigners don't count, can kill them freely but not applicable to current situation. Is the 3/5 of a person applicable to safety bill? Spawning subagent to check.

Comment · 16 days ago
I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does.

The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex.

If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.

Comment · 18 days ago
What’s the benefit of tools like Obsidian vs using whatever code editor you have on hand? Why would I use it over vs, say, vs code?
Comment · 19 days ago
There seem to be no downsides to mishandling PI so I don't think it's a big concern to Meta
Comment · 19 days ago
> Key issue will be that banks and key infrastructure may get their security patched in time

They'll do nothing until a few get pwned into the dirt. Same for power distribution systems, it's all parochial boomers calling all the shots.

For AI, what's funny is that it's the solution to securing your ancient hardware that's no longer supported. I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own, just by having modern AI models have a go at it and knowing almost nothing about the topic. It's something that a person can do, but a company won't even consider.

Comment · 20 days ago
SupCom FaF has a very long list of changes, I'd guess some of the people behind it already have access to source code. IMO only changes that are still missing is making it multi-threaded and maybe fixing some AI deficiencies such as pathing and the like.

The first would be great, but probably very difficult technically. The second would probably cause a holy war in the community, as multiplayer RTS enjoyers glorify fighting against the genre's jank as an expression of skill (admittedly it would completely change all micro).

Comment · 24 days ago
I find the Sunday roast comparison of 5.6 vs 6 very interesting. I have no doubt most people will prefer 6, yet I am almost repulsed by all the images, so much needless whitespace, checklist and so on. Feels like I'm being condescended to and treated like a child.

Given that OpenAI is making noises about merging work with chat (a horrible idea imo), and Work is very similar to Codex... I dearly hope things like these won't have any meaningful cross-polination into the actual work tools.

Seeing that the chat is based on 6.0 and not 6.1 is disappointing. The "Visual and interactive explanations" seems genuinely useful, but 6.1 is just so much better. I wouldn't truly trust the 6.1 with the explanations, but I'd trust them a fair bit more than 6.0. I understand that compute isn't infinite, but tons of people only interact with the chat and having your "things-explainer" be as good as it can be is important when people increasingly treat AI models as the source of truth, or even use them for academic learning and whatnot.

Still, the models will improve, so the visual explainer seems pretty good as an idea / mvp.

Comment · 24 days ago
Glad to see it happen. I'd prefer it there was just one format rather than both jxl and avif, but at least it's the final nail in the coffin of webp which seems to have accomplished little but annoy people for not much gain.

The wider ecosystem support is still far from commonplace, but it is slowly changing. iOS 18 wouldn't work with .jxl in Photos, but 27 does. Similarly, quick look and preview works fine on MacOS 27, thumbnails show up properly etc. I also found no issues with .jxl on linux, and image editors are slowly adding support as well.

Plain old jpg will still be everywhere for the next decade, but I'm glad that we finally have superior options with no real downsides, and without all the patent bullshit to boot.

Comment · 1 month ago
Well, it's just good business!

I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.

No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.

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