post_below's recent activity
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Comment on A deep sense of ease – what the Danes call ‘tryg’ – is a collective responsibility that allows individuals to flourish in ~health.mental
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Comment on What can be done about Linux being slopified? in ~tech
post_below Link ParentI can add another anecdote. The development process I've settled on doesn't look anything like "prompt then review results". It's human guided throughout and I understand what comes out of it...I can add another anecdote. The development process I've settled on doesn't look anything like "prompt then review results". It's human guided throughout and I understand what comes out of it deeply, roughly equivalent to the understanding I'd have if I'd written all of it by hand.
It's also slower than vibecoding, which is why there's a lot of slop being churned out right now, and there will be more to come. But agent assisted development doesn't automatically mean slop. It really is a tool that can be used well or used badly, and we're still figuring out what using it well looks like.
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Comment on Exposing AdFection - how Discover-Tech turned targeted ads into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware in ~tech
post_below (edited )Link ParentSort of... First, the only thing interesting here is the zero day. Ad networks collecting data, selling data and de-anonymizing people is happening all the time. Which makes it a minimal threat...Sort of... First, the only thing interesting here is the zero day. Ad networks collecting data, selling data and de-anonymizing people is happening all the time. Which makes it a minimal threat because everyone's basic data is already out there. Not counting people that don't use the internet. When you take all the decades of data breaches, the important stuff like SSNs has already leaked. All the ad networks can add is behavioral data. Which isn't nothing, but it's mostly only dangerous if someone is trying to target you.
The reason the exploit is news is that browsers are some of the most hardened software around. Zero click vulnerabilities that result in breaking out of modern browser sandboxes are rare these days and, with the speed of automatic browser updates, usually short lived. That makes them very valuable, you wouldn't expect to ever see them being used to indiscriminately infect random internet users. Instead you'd use them for something specific, with the goal of not getting caught quickly and burning the exploit you paid 6 figures for.
The first part is what happened here. They were specifically targeting people at Al Jazeera, 45 of them according to reports. No one else was even served the exploit.
Last I checked, no info about the actual exploits has been released. It's entirely possible that it only affected a specific browser/os version combo. Possibly even specific devices. By the time CVEs come out, the browser in question will already be patched.
So yes the only way to be absolutely sure you don't get exposed to malware via ad networks is to block all ads. But then you could still be exposed via a regular website visit, so you'd need to instead disable javacript entirely in your browser, thereby breaking much of the web.
But realistically, given the increasing rarity and value of true zero click browser exploits (and the subsequent OS exploit to get the malware installed), you're unlikely to ever be exposed to a working one if you use a mainstream OS and browser and keep then updated.
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Comment on Anthropic says revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion in third quarter in ~tech
post_below Link ParentWhen they release more complete accounting, prior to their IPO, if it invalidates these numbers that they gave to investors... that would be bad for them. Is the implication that they're that stupid?When they release more complete accounting, prior to their IPO, if it invalidates these numbers that they gave to investors... that would be bad for them.
Is the implication that they're that stupid?
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Comment on AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter in ~tech
post_below LinkWait what? You can't run a 9B model on the types of devices they listed. If you somehow could the tokens/second would be hilariously low, you could outrun it using semaphore. And there is no...- Exemplary
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.
Wait what? You can't run a 9B model on the types of devices they listed. If you somehow could the tokens/second would be hilariously low, you could outrun it using semaphore. And there is no evidence that a 9B model could do anything useful in cyber anyway.
They go on to essentially cover all of that, and in fact their research could be read as a strong case that this won't be a concern any time soon. They never justify the quoted paragraph existing. It's hard not to read it as an attempt to make open weight models seem scary to regulators.
They didn't even test on smart ovens. They got models running on other devices by, for example, buying 15 of them, wiring them together on their local network, and then running them as a swarm. And in that scenario the tokens per second would be (napkin math) somewhere around 0.05.
Even in their idealized experiments, using a bigger 26B model, they didn't show self replication.
There's no way that "self replicating agents" on IoT devices will be threat by the end of 2026, or anywhere near that. It would be far more interesting and scary for a small deterministic worm to call out to a smart model for instructions. There's no value in trying to do local inference on devices with low memory bandwidth. They're connected to the internet, you can use the internet! Otherwise how is the worm spreading?
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Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech
post_below LinkThis project has gotten a lot of attention. I don't know if the developers will succeed in getting it to something like parity, let alone stability. But eventually someone will. Probably a small...This project has gotten a lot of attention. I don't know if the developers will succeed in getting it to something like parity, let alone stability.
But eventually someone will. Probably a small team of someones. And when that happens, regardless of what you think about AI, it will be great for creatives.
Adobe was an enshittification pioneer but their products have remained the de-facto standards in photo editing and vector illustration and no alternative has yet managed to be enough like the originals to be a mass market replacement.
And then there are PDFs, a format seemingly designed by demons to test the sanity of the human race. And still, the defacto standard we can't ever seem to leave behind.
Even just being able to reliably open and save Adobe file formats without losing anything would be a huge win for creatives that can't, or don't want to, pay Adobe's absurdly high prices.
I don't love vibecoding, but a viable, open source, Adobe alternative would still be a net benefit for the world.
Note: I know about the existing alternatives, I use some of them. They aren't good enough. GIMP, for example, has stayed niche for decades for good reasons.
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Comment on OpenAI releases findings on 377 math problems, further roiling field in ~science
post_below Link ParentI think there's value in the comparison to coding: People have been saying software engineering as a profession will be dead by next tuesday for a number of years now. So far they've been...I think there's value in the comparison to coding:
- People have been saying software engineering as a profession will be dead by next tuesday for a number of years now. So far they've been profoundly wrong about that. The profession is changing rather than dying. A future leap could change the course but wild speculation has proven to be the opposite of useful up to this point.
- The people making the wild speculations generally fall onto a handful of camps: People who have something to gain from the hype, people who know next to nothing about software engineering, and software engineers who don't yet have a reasonable understanding of the technology and its limitations. Also a subset of the latter camp: software engineers who are terrified and reacting emotionally without sufficient information.
I think we're seeing something similar in mathematics. The people who are saying that mathematics as a profession is dead are just making wild claims. Mathematics as a profession is changing. We don't know what that change will look like yet and we should take the opinions of even professional mathematicians with a grain of salt unless they've had extensive experience with agent assisted math, deeply understand the strengths and limitations, and have had time to get past the heady, overexcited, period following the initial mind blown moment and had time to come back down to earth. Those are the people who will be able to offer useful insights into how things might evolve.
IMO those are also the people who would ideally be pushing the frontier forward, as opposed to anonymous OAI employees running an unreleased proprietary model for the sole purpose of generating hype that can be parlayed into future funding rounds.
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Comment on Protests spread across France, growing from school demonstrations (gifted link) in ~society
post_below Link ParentCharitably, it's to deter bots. Alternatively, free user data.Someone unlocked this story for you.
Log in to read for free.
Charitably, it's to deter bots. Alternatively, free user data.
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Comment on Why do we find Tildes (and Lobsters) more interesting than the alternatives? in ~tech
post_below Link ParentEdit: I see that someone linked the original post, but I'll leave this here anyway. To give a different reading of Daniel's post: "Tildes can go on forever as far as I'm concerned, but I'm not...Edit: I see that someone linked the original post, but I'll leave this here anyway.
To give a different reading of Daniel's post: "Tildes can go on forever as far as I'm concerned, but I'm not planning to add new features, which has been true for years".
In a different post he said that accepting code changes contributed by others wasn't off the table.
I didn't get the impression that Tildes was going anywhere.
I don't know how many people left, didn't seem like a lot to me but that's entirely subjective. Maybe it's a little quieter? If so, at any point Tildes members can choose to invite more people. The site has never been actively seeking members, that's sort of the point, new members arrive by invite only
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Comment on Why do we find Tildes (and Lobsters) more interesting than the alternatives? in ~tech
post_below Link ParentOr more accurately the Fediverse is what people, left to their own devices, make it. And that's the problem. In a vacuum, the majority of people will tend towards being reasonably rational and...The Fediverse is what you make it
Or more accurately the Fediverse is what people, left to their own devices, make it.
And that's the problem. In a vacuum, the majority of people will tend towards being reasonably rational and kind. But it only takes a handful of people, in a given space, to change the vibe. Once people start getting triggered, reasonable and kind are the first things to go. It's just biology.
In addition to that, even a fairly low percentage of negativity and triggers is enough to put off most of the first timers you actually want to keep. So it becomes self selecting, over time you end up with a higher and higher percentage of people who are just there for the drama. Trolls and troll feeders essentially.
So any space that doesn't actively work to discourage people's worst instincts eventually succumbs to them. Not because people generally suck, but because people have built in systems that make them suck temporarily when they're in triggering environments.
The fediverse has the reputation it does for a reason and I think anyone who's interested in supporting and improving it should be taking it seriously, because what you're seeing is a selective process pushing away a lot of the people you probably want to stick around.
Which is why self moderation and "free speech" ethos have never really worked on the internet.
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Comment on Digital Detox (formerly Screenless Day) discussion: October 2026 in ~life
post_below LinkI've never done a digital detox on purpose, but I often go backpacking or camping in places with no signal. Maybe the most interesting thing, for me, about going days without internet access...What "digital detox" steps have you tried in the past?
I've never done a digital detox on purpose, but I often go backpacking or camping in places with no signal.
Maybe the most interesting thing, for me, about going days without internet access (weeks if you add it up over a typical year) is that it's not a big deal. I don't think it's ever felt weird or uncomfortable.
Maybe that means I'm not psychologically dependent on being network connected. Or maybe it's that the profound connectedness of the natural world is a far better kind of connection.
Loosely related: If I'm talking to a human, I put my phone down and leave it there. It may not be a "detox" but I think it's valuable to intentionally not use devices in some amount of everyday situations.
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
post_below Link ParentNot sure what you mean, Amazon's first profitable year was 2003, Amazon S3 didn't launch until 2006. They'd be less of a behemoth without it, but far from fucked. Almost half of their profit came...Not sure what you mean, Amazon's first profitable year was 2003, Amazon S3 didn't launch until 2006.
They'd be less of a behemoth without it, but far from fucked. Almost half of their profit came from ecommerce related activity in 2025.
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Comment on Visitor activity tracking for B2B in ~tech
post_below LinkIt sounds like all you want to do is see what people are doing on the site yes? In that case privacy concerns aren't as relevant as you might think. Standard request logging, which is already...It sounds like all you want to do is see what people are doing on the site yes?
In that case privacy concerns aren't as relevant as you might think. Standard request logging, which is already happening at virtually every site on the internet, already covers the majority of what you need. Essentially you need an identifier (ip address for guests, session ID for logged in users), the URI requested, and a timestamp. After that it's pretty simple code to construct a particular visitors path through the site. If you want to know what they requested via a form (like a search box) then you maybe need POST request logging too, though only if the results landing page doesn't include the term in the URL.
The only other thing you might consider adding is a JS beacon of some sort so you can more accurately tell when a session or pageview ends. With JS you can of course track other things, like scrolling and mouse/pointer activity, but that's not likely to be useful in your case.
The privacy concerns come in not from collecting basic visitor data, that's table stakes, but from storing it in a non-anonymized way for a long period of time. Especially if it can be linked to additional PII. You fix that by not storing it for very long. That way it limits the impact of a breach, and your ability to share the data with others. If you really want to influence the privacy practices of the company, get it in writing in a published data retention policy.
Note that you can store aggregate stats with identifiers stripped for as long as you want, no privacy concerns there.
The other potential privacy issue is profile building for use in marketing. If you're collecting data about users and then uploading it to, say, Google Ads for targeting purposes... well it may be legal but it means you don't actually care about privacy, you're funneling data to the digital overlords. Even if it's pseudo-anonymous, they have enough additional data to link it to individuals if they want to.
It's actually pretty easy to make a practical case against that: The minute you share data with a 3rd party you move into a new category under laws like the GDPR. Your liability goes up and the number of rules you have to conform to (and build for) under a host of laws in various jurisdictions go up too. A public privacy policy that excludes sharing data with third parties sidesteps all of that. And you don't lose much as long as you're not relying on third parties for things like analytics. The truth is ad targeting based on uploaded user data isn't really that effective. They push it because of an insatiable hunger for data, not because it's better than context or behavioral targeting in most cases.
If time allows, it's simple enough to build that it's worth considering rolling your own. You'll learn a lot!
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Comment on Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet in ~tech
post_below Link ParentJust when I was thinking the popularity of the vibes motivated "ok so we understand the technology and that tells us that it's not conscious or alive but we don't understand everything so we can't...Just when I was thinking the popularity of the vibes motivated "ok so we understand the technology and that tells us that it's not conscious or alive but we don't understand everything so we can't know anything so maybe it's actually conscious, prove me wrong. You see? Gotcha!" is waning, someone comes along and rekindles it with a silly clickbait experiment.
As you say, it's essentially statistics. Tokens are not expressing actual feelings or sensations.
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
post_below Link ParentAmazon didn't make a net profit until 6 years after a (very successful) IPO they went into with heavy yearly losses. Their pitch was that they were building infrastructure and it would pay off...Amazon didn't make a net profit until 6 years after a (very successful) IPO they went into with heavy yearly losses. Their pitch was that they were building infrastructure and it would pay off later. They turned out to be right.
I don't think that's comparable to AI labs, it's hard to imagine their profits ever justifying their valuations. Once a warehouse is built, you have the warehouse forever and eventually your distribution network is good enough and you can dramatically reduce spending. With model training you can't ever stop and, so far, each new generation costs more to train than the last. And if a plateau happens the big labs are screwed. Like, dead in the water while everyone else catches up, prices tank and inference becomes a commodity.
But I'm not sure the market will agree with all of that. At least not right now.
In any case, Amazon is just the most famous example of a market trend that's been going on for some time now. Companies losing money and still having hugely profitable IPOs is pretty normal.
A lot will depend on perception though, right now the capital class believes the potential of AI is largely untapped and nearly unlimited, that could change. Anthropic is smart to IPO asap while the sentiment is positive.
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Comment on Do you think you're special? in ~talk
post_below LinkEventually I lived long enough to have better context for how big a number 8 billion is. Realizing you're not particlarly important in the scheme of things is freeing, I highly recommend it. But...Probably a common feeling that many eventually "grow out of". So I guess the follow-up question is if that happened to you, what made you change
Eventually I lived long enough to have better context for how big a number 8 billion is.
Realizing you're not particlarly important in the scheme of things is freeing, I highly recommend it. But that truth doesn't take away from the importance you have to the people who matter in your life. That's entirely real.
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Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech
post_below Link ParentIf you expand it to wealth and power consolidation, and capital otherwise corrupting systems and contributing to the destruction of our ecosystems, I'm right there with you. If it's just about...If you expand it to wealth and power consolidation, and capital otherwise corrupting systems and contributing to the destruction of our ecosystems, I'm right there with you.
If it's just about AI... It would be wonderful if that was the biggest of our problems. Or even a big enough part that erasing it could change the trajectory.
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Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech
post_below Link ParentOk then! That's not true. It began work after training was complete. It was fully cooked. I don't know if it was cheaper, but it was definitely faster. Mathematics is ever so very different from...Ok then!
The model that helped solve the millenium prize problem began work four days after beginning training
That's not true. It began work after training was complete. It was fully cooked.
Compared to the decades of human PhDs working on this, it seems both faster and cheaper.
I don't know if it was cheaper, but it was definitely faster. Mathematics is ever so very different from recursive self improvement though. You changed the framing and then replied to your own version.
This is a weaker form of recursive self improvement, but it is one.
If that's what we're calling recursive self improvement, I don't think it's all that scary. No argument that agents are involved in various parts of the process, model labs have been talking about that for some time.
For LLMs to get out of hand they'd need to run the pre and post training process autonomously and accelerate it dramatically. Currently velocity is constrained to a significant degree by compute, so the agents would need to solve that first. Even if LLMs that smart and reliable existed (they absolutely do not), they'd still need to be given the resources to do it. It's like not these companies aren't paying attention to what's using the compute they're spending historically unprecedented amounts of money on.
If the other sort of recursive self improvement were achieved (the sort where a human just pressed go and the rest ran itself and resulted in a better model, faster, than a human led process), they'd say something. They would have just won one of the most important races in the field. It would be invaluable pre-IPO hype potentially worth billions of dollars. And, if it actually worked, they'd sell access to the resulting model (which would be both the smartest and most compute efficient model on earth). Not selling it would be equivalent to setting the 100's of millions+ they spent on training on fire. The biggest problem they'd have, with the best model on earth, would be figuring out how to handle the demand.
So we won't need to speculate, we'll be able to read the headlines. If they were smart they'd also announce a pause on recursive training while they assessed the risks. Otherwise governments would force them to take a beat just to quell the worldwide panic. People are freaking out about the possibility with no evidence that it can even be done, imagine the response to the thing itself.
It sounds extremely shortsighted and reckless to say "it's just hype, I'll panic when 10% of the world population is infected". Even 1% there would be far too late.
In this comparison, what is the pathogen? You'd need something self replicating and with a troubling mortality rate. Something observable. Otherwise it seems to me that you're just picking something scary and arbitrarily comparing it to the topic to inject emotion.
It sounds like what you're describing is how you feel about AI, which is fine, but you're framing it like a conversation about what is. So concrete, in fact, that by having a different perspective I'm shortsighted and reckless. Which is quite an accusation to make against an internet stranger.
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Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech
post_below Link ParentI agree with this, but I think the situation is nuanced. The public mouth pieces of the big AI companies (Altman, Amodei, various engineers and project leads) have an established history of...Yea, I find it rather off putting that there is large group of people who seem rather quick to conclude that the people closest to this technology don't know it the best or can't be trusted to give observations
I agree with this, but I think the situation is nuanced. The public mouth pieces of the big AI companies (Altman, Amodei, various engineers and project leads) have an established history of predictions that turned out to be wrong, exaggerations and general hype.
It makes sense to question what they say, even if they genuinely believe it, it might still be wrong.
Personally I have yet to see anything close to the capability to be truly, autonomously, dangerous in the frontier models. They can do dangerous things when directed or misused or deployed badly, but so can a lot of technology.
The current wave of fear seems to be based in the idea that, any time now, they will achieve recursive self improvement and then they will make themselves dangerous really quickly. Except there's no evidence of recursive self improvement either. I mean, put an agent in charge of its own memory system and watch how long it takes before it writes bad judgement to the record and then compounds it by building more bad judgement on top, and and so on. If you give it enough time, it will make itself worse, not better.
That's of course not how recursive self improvement would work, instead it would be agents fully in charge of the training pipeline, but the point is that their judgement isn't good enough. They would make bad decisions, which would compound over time. They'd also make good ones, and maybe end up improving themselves on average, but not faster or cheaper than a human led process.
The doomsday fear all rests on the idea that this will change, and maybe it will, but we don't appear to be close to that yet.
It gets a lot of engagement though.
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Comment on Jakob Ingebrigtsen pipped to victory by Dawit Seare in the men's 5km in a thrilling finish at the 2026 World Road Running Championships in Copenhagen in ~sports
post_below LinkNever head the term pipped before, turns out it's because it's regional: It comes from "pipped on/at the post" an idiom from horse racing. Or alternatively: Kind of a weird way to describe a human...Never head the term pipped before, turns out it's because it's regional:
It appears the expression is mostly used by those who live in England, Ireland, and Australia as nearly all of the published instances were found in newspapers and books from England, Ireland, and Australia.
It comes from "pipped on/at the post" an idiom from horse racing. Or alternatively:
In the 19th century Britain, to pip someone meant you wounded or killed that person, usually with a gun.
Kind of a weird way to describe a human running race but there you go.
There's maybe more reason for optimism than you think. People are pretty strongly wired to be sensitive to societal and cultural expectations. It doesn't take running up against a consequence that many times for the majority of people to change their behavior. Often once is enough if the boundary is clear.
If we use leaving dog poop rather than picking it up as an example, it would only take a small cultural shift to change that behavior. Depictions in media, gentle reminders from strangers, internet memes etc.. People leave the poop because they don't perceive a social consequence, either negative from doing it or positive from not doing it. They don't feel like it will significantly hurt or benefit their place in society one way or the other.
Smoking is a great example. It's one of the hardest behaviors to change, but after the tobacco industry reckoning in the late 90's/early 2000s smoking rates started to tank shockingly quickly. Cultural perception of smoking changed and behavior started to change almost immediately.
I agree that sometimes norms change slowly, especially norms that are deeply imbedded, but there are also a lot of examples of norms changing pretty quickly. It might not be as far away as it seems.
Personally I find comfort in the concept of "be the change". I can't control what other people do, but I can l do my part to live the ideals of the world I want to exist. It's more constructive to focus on contributing than it is to focus on how people are failing to contribute.