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davesque

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alphahistory.com 3y ago

Vaucanson's Mechanical Crapping Duck

davesque
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www.youtube.com 3y ago

Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU

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www.reuters.com 6y ago

Deepfake used to attack activist couple shows new disinformation frontier

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en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Mongolian Death Worm

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www.theguardian.com 6y ago

Majority of anti-vax ads on Facebook funded by two organizations

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www.calnewport.com 7y ago

Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player (2011)

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www.ribbonfarm.com 7y ago

Immortality Begins at Forty

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www.gamasutra.com 8y ago

A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II

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www.cnbc.com 8y ago

Instagram removes post after Russia watchdog orders

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www.businessinsider.com 8y ago

Facebook employee concerned company tracking his phone for leaks

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tools.ietf.org 8y ago

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

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developer.mozilla.org 8y ago

418 I'm a teapot

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www.businessinsider.com 8y ago

Facebook's Sandberg just hinted that Russian-bought ads could be fair game

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www.theverge.com 8y ago

Twitter pledges to update public policies after Trump threatens North Korea

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techbeacon.com 8y ago

Project management: A surefire way to kill your software product

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www.nature.com 8y ago

Molecular machines open cell membranes

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www.washingtonpost.com 8y ago

Mindfulness would be good for you. If it weren’t so selfish

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www.windy.com 8y ago

Windy.com

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mathyawp.wordpress.com 9y ago

Mathematics for Human Flourishing

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www.nytimes.com 9y ago

Trump Fires Acting Attorney General

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arc.aiaa.org 9y ago

Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum

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www.theverge.com 9y ago

Google's answer to 'who won the popular vote' is a conspiracy blog

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www.washingtonpost.com 9y ago

How can you tell if someone is kind? Ask how rich they are

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en.wikipedia.org 9y ago

ZTerm

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www.usatoday.com 9y ago

Facebook employees tried to remove Trump posts as hate speech

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www.gourmet.com 9y ago

Consider the Lobster

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hothardware.com 9y ago

Intel Unveils Project Alloy Merged Reality Headset

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nytimes.com 9y ago

Apple Sales Continue to Drop, but Services Are a Bright Spot

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www.sciencealert.com 10y ago

Scientists' biggest search for dark matter to date just turned up nothing

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www.youtube.com 10y ago

Molecular Visualizations of DNA

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Without any more context, "keep going" seems to be doing a lot of work. The user is placing a lot of faith in the LLM to not make subtle logic mistakes and to take good approaches to each problem. In my experience, even frontier models (such as Fable) are quite capable of getting confused during even simple technical work I've done in the dev ops world. For example:

LLM: This package hasn't made it to production.

ME: are you sure? i see it right here!

LLM: You're right to push back. I inferred that based on weak data. I see now that the package has been deployed!

If the above conversation is typical for me, how could one expect to achieve a sound result by repeatedly prompting an LLM to simply "keep going" in dense mathematical proofs? Perhaps the user in this case had actually checked the LLM's work before issuing the prompt, but I think you see my point anyway.

I'm finding it extremely hard not to have a cynical perspective on all of this. There's an idea that I've been mapping onto this whole this, which could be called something like effective knowledge. Regular old knowledge is just information, or access to information. Effective knowledge is the integration of all that information into an understanding that can be acted upon. That requires things like time, money, and involves the usual socioeconomic hurdles that have separated people into groups like "laborers" and "knowledge workers". Sure, in theory "anyone" could read textbooks and learn, but only a select few have the time, money, mentors in their lives, and so forth to really do that.

The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.

When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.

But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.

Kind of highlights how ridiculous their notion of safety is in this case. By this measure, I guess making the model "safe" means making it play dumb and intentionally ignore security bugs that it notices in the code? And what will the eventual legality of this look like? "Yes, your honor, we allege that this AI system that was sold to us willingly and knowingly ignored a critical security vulnerability in our software system, thereby leading us to be hacked and causing our business to fold."

It's exactly the same problem as backdoors in crypto systems. Criminals will find the crypto that isn't broken and use it regardless (or make it for themselves), while the rest of us losers are stuck with the broken version that we're allowed to use.

On this issue of cyber security, it seems better if authorities just start acting like the cat is out of the bag instead of pretending like it isn't. ASI is basically here now, so what are we going to do about it? Let's not bother pretending otherwise.

On another note, I doubt this was anything other than a vindictive administration enacting revenge on a party that refused them. We all know the Trump admin's priorities.

Googlebook 2 months ago

What I would buy: a local AI focused laptop with a built-in, powerful TPU. And it would have to open its hardware interface so that I could actually do what I wanted to do with it.

One question jumps out at me: just because a string of text happens to be a good compressed representation (in the autoencoder) of a model's internal activation, does that necessarily mean the text explains that activation in the context of the model? I want to take a look at what they released a bit more closely. Maybe there's a way that they answer this question?

Pretty neat work either way.

Wow I've never disagreed harder with an HN comment in my entire life. Counting Crows were a single band that got some radio time in the early 90s. Calling them the big megastars during '96-'99 makes you sound like you weren't alive then. That statement just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. It's like a narrow-minded European claiming that everyone in the US just eats nothing but hot dogs. Timeless albums from that era:

- Odeley (Beck '96)

- Aenima (Tool '96)

- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)

- Homogenic (Bjork '97)

- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)

- Stankonia (Outkast '99)

- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)

You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.

Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.

A lot of the comments here are reacting to the censorship aspect, which is obviously an important point. But the more interesting subtext to me is that I feel like this gives insight into the situation within the company. I'm assuming they wouldn't do something like this unless the recent load issues (mostly driven by OpenClaw usage) were seen as an existential threat. So I'm guessing that's how the leadership views their current situation. Between OpenClaw and their (probably inaccurate) capacity planning, they simply can't onboard any more consumer users. In other words, things are going to get worse before they get better. Anthropic has taken drastic measures because their service is about to implode.

The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped. They also seem strangely oblivious to this side of things.

Their approach has also been bizarrely chaotic. Banning then restoring OpenClaw usage. Removing Claude Code from the Pro plan, then re-enabling it and claiming it was an A/B test. Honestly my read is that Dario has a weak leadership style within the company where he either doesn't give enough specific guidance to his reports or overreaches with reactionary instructions.

Something discussed in the article, but absent in the diagnosis of the final paragraph: the unique phenomenon of Donald Trump in American life. To half the country (including me), he's the worst leader in the country's history. Even if a person has faith in humanity, they may still feel like they are swimming against the man's personal tide of anger and bad judgement. Things might be great if it weren't for the disastrous tariff policy and Iran war, which have needlessly crippled the economy. As long as a person like him is in charge, it feels like we're always taking two steps forward and twenty steps back, and for no good reason. To the other half, Trump rode in atop a wave of grievance, so even to those who like him, he's sold them the notion that their society is on the brink of collapse (because Democrats, leftists, etc.). Overall, the sum effect of his presence has been to shift the entire national culture (and even the world's culture) towards knee-jerk rage and resentment, in accord with his behavior and personality.

This wasn't some kind of mansion. It was a 1300 square foot house. I guess I'm aiming too high then while making 4x his salary? And people have been whining about this same problem for decades so nothing to be done about it?

Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did and can't even dream of buying the same house.

Claude Opus 4.7 3 months ago

So then why expect that you're making the world safer by limiting the capability that your vendor locked customers have access to while attackers will go find the best de-censored model that works for them, wherever they can find it?