jerf

36 ms·

511.
by jerf 6mo ago
I've always preferred to think of normalization as more about "removing redundancy" than in the frame it is normally presented. Or, to put it another way, rather than "normalizing" which has as a benefit "remov
512.
by jerf 6mo ago
One can observe that even the proposed alternative is still awfully complicated compared to the web apps I remember making circa 1999. Much more capable, but still more complicated. Of course the entire "typescript -> compile ->
513.
by jerf 6mo ago
The only surprise is that it's publicly being stated. I'm sure every major intelligence organization in the world has the all the components of Mythos and are running it locally. That's what they do. There is still some motiv
514.
by jerf 6mo ago
I've got some tests in active code bases that are using the end of 32-bit Unix time as "we'll never get there". That's not because the devs were lazy, these tests date from when that was the best they could possibly
515.
by jerf 6mo ago
One way or another, they've been lying to us for decades now. It pretty much breaks down into, either they know about aliens and they've been aggressively lying about it for decades, or there is no evidence of aliens, in which cas
516.
by jerf 6mo ago
That's the first thing that happens. The next thing that happens is a befuddled "Ask HN: Why Do All The Daisy Wheel Printers On Ebay Suddenly Cost Thousands Of Dollars?". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai
517.
by jerf 6mo ago
Those were exactly the people I was thinking of when I said it didn't bring enough value. Yes, plenty of students saw a Zip drive bay in their school computers and bought it on the theory that if it was there the schools must know wh
518.
by jerf 6mo ago
I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It
519.
by jerf 6mo ago
Style guides always implicitly carry context for what they are the style guides for. Most of them are for journalism in one way or another. Passive voice is clearly wrong in journalism. All actions were taken by someone. All results stem fr
520.
by jerf 6mo ago
You and I would need to know "what where how". There are many attackers that are just going to feed every commit of every project of interest to them into their LLMs and tell it "determine if this is patching an exploit and i
521.
by jerf 6mo ago
"Our current (April 2026) object usage is: 14 million objects, 119GB" I mean, I appreciate the openness about the scale, but for context, my home's personal backup managed via restic to S3 is 370GB. Fewer objects, but still,
522.
by jerf 6mo ago
I remember when people would vigorously complain that Toolkit X was simply unsuitable for any task because it did not conform to the operating system's standard visual appearance. Now I struggle to even define what an "operati
523.
by jerf 6mo ago
Acknowledging that we still only have marketing material, it is their claims on Mythos' ability to auto-generate working exploits that is what actually changes the cost/benefit tradeoffs. Their own Mythos docs showed that it is on
524.
by jerf 6mo ago
In this context we are talking explicitly about cloud-hosted AIs. If you control it locally you have a lot of options to force it to do things. MITM the cloud AI on the modern internet is non-trivial, and probably harder and less reliable t
525.
by jerf 6mo ago
A dollar is still a useful unit as "the fraction of the economy that can be controlled by currency". It's true that printing a huge pile of it and throwing it at GPUs wouldn't instantly convert into more GPUs, but it wou
526.
by jerf 6mo ago
Reducing the amount of time I spend on the average code has meant I'm spending more time adding my above-average contributions to the code base. Amdahl's law, basically. Reducing the amount of time spent on one task means the perc
527.
by jerf 6mo ago
Code isn't going anywhere. Code is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than an LLM for the same task, and that gap is likely to widen rather than contract because the bigger the AI gets the sillier it gets to use it to do
528.
by jerf 6mo ago
AI being what it is, at this point you might be able to ask it for a token to put in a web page at .well-known, put it in as requested, and let it see it, and that might actually just work without it being officially built in. I suggest tha
529.
by jerf 6mo ago
Another cross-check I've run is, are the claims Anthropic is making for Mythos that out of line with the current status of AI coding assistents? To which my answer is clearly, no, not even remotely. If Anthropic is outright lying about
530.
by jerf 6mo ago
I've said for decades that, in principle , cybersecurity is advantage defender. The defender has to leave a hole. The attackers have to find it. We just live in a world with so many holes that dedicated attackers rarely end up bottlen
531.
by jerf 6mo ago
All you have to do is prompt your AI with a writing sample. I generally give it something I wrote from my blog. It still doesn't write like I do and it seems to take more than that to get rid of the emdashes, but it at least kicks it o
532.
by jerf 6mo ago
The one that gets me a lot, which is similar in practice to your point, is when I need server redundancy, even if one server is otherwise plenty for my task. As soon as I'm not running in one place, you need network data storage, and t
533.
by jerf 6mo ago
Ah, thank you. It's not the planting window yet where I am, north of Iowa, so I wasn't certain where they were.
534.
by jerf 6mo ago
Are you saying that has failed? It isn't obvious to me from that page that anything in particular is going wrong. I don't think anyone is daft enough to claim that AI solves the "Iowa remains unplantable due to winter conditi
535.
by jerf 6mo ago
One thing that may help resolve your issue is that while I do agree with the Sam Vimes theory, it is also not guaranteed. There are also scenarios where the $50 boots will last forever, or you can buy $2 boots that will only last five years
536.
by jerf 6mo ago
The law has a concept of a "carrier" [1], and has the ability to judge whether or not the carrier in question is responsible for what it is carrying. I'm not making a blanket statement that that means everything is a carrier,
537.
by jerf 6mo ago
So, this is slightly off topic, but out of curiousity, what are NPUs good for right this very second? What software uses them? What would this NPU be able to run if it was in fact accessible? This is an honest, neutral question, and it&#x27
538.
by jerf 6mo ago
You can do what you do at the MAC layer without any regard for whether or not it is "OSI layer 2", or whether your MAC layer "cheats" and has features that extend into layers 1, or 3, or any other layer. Failing to imple
539.
by jerf 6mo ago
In a nutshell, nodes enable arbitrary programming. This is one of the big success stories for visual programming. Nothing would stop you from doing all that in a text programming language but there's definitely an appeal to the graphic
540.
by jerf 6mo ago
"1979 (I was one year old then)." Well, we are roughly the same age then. Our is a cynical generation. "One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy." The cynic in me would say they were doing

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