skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
skybrian LinkMy mother is staying with us again for the winter and I was a bit embarrassed that I couldn't really explain how to use the TV so she would understand it. We inherited a Bose surround sound system...My mother is staying with us again for the winter and I was a bit embarrassed that I couldn't really explain how to use the TV so she would understand it. We inherited a Bose surround sound system from the previous owners and added a Google TV streamer, so there are three remotes. It's complicated. But my wife and I rarely watch TV, so we didn't do anything about it before.
So, I'm on a quest to build a simple, old-fashioned TV user interface that only requires a single remote. I'm calling it MomTV and you can try out the web version here. The UI is inspired by Channel Surfer and cable TV user interfaces in general. On the upside, there are no ads, thanks to YouTube premium. The downside is that it can only play YouTube videos and live feeds that allow embedding. But I think I can find enough content. (Some channels are placeholders and I'll be improving them.)
It turns out that building an Android TV app is not difficult with AI assistance. There is a Tailscale app for Android TV that can be used to set up a private network connection to a Linux VM in the cloud. (In this case, running on exe.dev.) The AI installed the Android command-line tools and walked me through setting it up. I can ask for features and it will build them and reinstall the app on Google TV.
Also, I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like Google TV will support a kiosk mode so I can replace the entire UI with my own app. I was disappointed with Google TV when I first tried it, because the default UI is an ad-ridden monstrosity, unlike the original Chromecast device. But it does seem to be a decent platform to build your own TV user interface.
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentEvaporative cooling is common for data centers and really does "consume" water. (Although it will come back somewhere as rainfall.) They could run air conditioning instead but it uses more power...Evaporative cooling is common for data centers and really does "consume" water. (Although it will come back somewhere as rainfall.)
They could run air conditioning instead but it uses more power so it's a tradeoff.
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Comment on 2026 United States midterm elections megathread in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentIt's a side point, but this got me wondering how water usage compares between farmland and data centers. Apparently about half the farmland in Illinois is irrigated and there's certainly a lot...It's a side point, but this got me wondering how water usage compares between farmland and data centers. Apparently about half the farmland in Illinois is irrigated and there's certainly a lot more of it. But for farmland that depends on rainfall, they wouldn't be competing at all.
It gets complicated fast because water withdrawal and consumption are different. Power plants withdraw lots of water for cooling but also put much of it back, somewhat warmer. And the numbers aren't all available for Illinois, so after a while I abandoned my ChatGPT analysis.
I'm not sure facts matter much for anti-datacenter vibes, though. If it weren't water usage, it would be something else. (Generally true of NIMBY activism.)
For the local election here, a candidate was trying to make data centers an issue even though nobody is going to build data centers here. California land and electricity are too expensive. He tried to make something of a permit approval process for what turned out to be a warehouse when I looked into it. Pretty brazen.
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Comment on How malware and a bogus job interview let attackers nab $6.3B from Binance in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
In September, a software engineer for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance got an interview offer for a new opportunity.
The first interview, live by video, seemed above board. So did the second, conducted on a popular social chat app, where the Binance engineer spoke with his prospective new employer’s purported CEO. Then came time for a test — a standard feature in technical interviews — where the engineer was asked to download code onto his work computer.
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That code, Binance said Tuesday, included malware that wormed its way into the exchange’s systems, evaded its security tools and eventually led to a record-breaking $6.3 billion hack last week that sent the exchange scrambling to cover users’ losses.
Binance released the first concrete details of how hackers breached its systems Tuesday after several days of investigation, describing the bogus job interview as one of several components.
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The job interview technique has been used by North Korean hackers in the past. In September, the FBI and government agencies in Japan, Germany and Australia issued an advisory that North Korean actors were targeting software developers and IT professionals and had infected at least 30,000 devices in more than 100 countries.
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How malware and a bogus job interview let attackers nab $6.3B from Binance
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Comment on fxgl/steamac: Valve's official ARM64 SteamOS in a lightweight VM on Apple Silicon in ~games
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Comment on LLMs can natively read and write neural network weights in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]- Exemplary
From the article:
We find that frontier LLMs are surprisingly good at natively reading and writing neural network weights, well past what we’d expect from humans or conventional algorithms. This might be a big deal for both optimization and interpretability.
Just by looking at the raw weights, GPT-6 Astra can tell what a network was trained to do. And without any environment feedback, it has no trouble writing, from scratch, small game-playing networks that outplay networks trained with PPO for 100 million steps.
Likewise, asked to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math without gradients, Astra identifies an issue in its weights causing reasoning loops that Qwen’s own model card warns about, and fixes this by natively editing 0.016% of the weights. With the same sampling settings, this weight correction raises MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1% and generalizes out of the box to instruction following, raising IFEval by 3x.
All of this is possible without allowing Astra to write training loops. It uses its reasoning to figure out what each part of a neural network computes, or should compute, and changes the weights accordingly. We call this Weight-Space Programming.
Throughout the history of deep learning, we encoded our simplistic inductive biases into tiny symbolic optimizers like Adam or Muon. This is changing: our neural network weights will soon be natively optimized by LLMs that deliberately reason about their weights.
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We are currently building a benchmark and a harness for LLMs’ capability on Weight-Space Programming. We believe this will provide a standardized evaluation to measure and accelerate progress in Weight-Space Programming, turning what currently seems like black magic into a rigorous, reproducible engineering discipline.
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We release the complete logs of every experiment in this post at github.com/RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs. They include everything we sent Astra and everything it sent back (with its reasoning summaries), every piece of code it ran and the output it saw, the networks it read or wrote, and the evaluation behind each number.
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LLMs can natively read and write neural network weights
44 votes -
Comment on The American suburbs are better than you think in ~life
skybrian Link ParentDo urban neighborhoods count as suburbs, though? I guess it depends. We would have to drive to BART or the local downtown, but our neighborhood is still quite nice, with several restaurants in...Do urban neighborhoods count as suburbs, though? I guess it depends. We would have to drive to BART or the local downtown, but our neighborhood is still quite nice, with several restaurants in walking distance.
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A website for comparing endorsements in California elections
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Comment on Mystery of sixty-second fluctuations in power grids solved in ~science
skybrian Link ParentYep, pretty much. Wait a random amount of time before starting the loop, and also don’t wait exactly 60 seconds between checks.Yep, pretty much. Wait a random amount of time before starting the loop, and also don’t wait exactly 60 seconds between checks.
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Comment on The American suburbs are better than you think in ~life
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Again and again, I hear urbanists declare that the suburbs are lonely and isolating. It certainly sounds logical. In a city, you’re walking past other people constantly — on the street, on the train, in cafes and restaurants. In suburbia, you’re shut at home inside your giant house or alone in the metal shell of your car. How could suburbia not be more lonely than the big city?
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Why doesn’t the simple intuition work here? Probably because people aren’t just like particles bouncing around in a chemistry experiment — they don’t simply form human connections and bonds just because they happen to walk past each other. A few relationships form from random urban conversations, but most form through work, or friends-of-friends, or shared hobbies, etc.
And while meeting a ton of new people is fun, what really gets rid of loneliness is repeated interaction with people you know and care about. Imagine going to ten parties filled with strangers versus having two close friends over for dinner. Which of those is more likely to leave you feeling lonely? What about 100 Hinge dates versus having a relationship? Remember that Japan has the world’s best cities, but struggles with widespread loneliness.
In fact, suburbs have some features that make it easier to interact with the people you really care about. Those big houses aren’t just for walking around all alone and going “Wow my house is so huge”. They’re for entertaining guests. It’s harder to have a dinner party or a TV night or a game night at a tiny little Manhattan apartment than at a big suburban McMansion. Cars help too; those short travel times make it easier to just pop over and hang.
This doesn’t mean cities are socially inferior to suburbs. Constantly meeting new people is exciting. There’s more fun stuff to go out and do with your friends in a city — restaurants, parties, and so on. It’s just a different lifestyle.
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Why are Millennials moving out? Part of it — the part that urbanists and YIMBYs will emphasize — is that they’re being pushed out by higher rents, which are a result of cities failing to build more housing. But that’s not the whole story. Millennials are also being pulled to the suburbs, because suburbs are generally better for raising kids.
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Anyone with kids can easily rattle off the reasons why suburbs make it easier to raise kids. A big house means more room for kids to have their own bedrooms, space to play, and a back yard to run around in safety. A car makes it a lot easier to ferry kids around to school, or soccer practice, or wherever. Cars also make it much easier to do large grocery shopping trips — try taking a week’s worth of food for a family of four home from the store on foot or on a bike and you’ll quickly understand.
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But it’s simply a mistake to frame the question of urban form as “Which is better, cities or suburbs?”. The answer is that they’re good for different things, and they appeal to different sets of people. Instead of fighting flame wars over whether the whole country should look like Manhattan or the Inland Empire, we should aim for a country that has room for everyone. We should build great city centers for the same reason we should build great suburbs — because Americans deserve to have great places to live, no matter what kind of place they want to live in.
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The American suburbs are better than you think
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Comment on Mystery of sixty-second fluctuations in power grids solved in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Tennet Germany, the largest transmission system operator in Germany, has observed over several years that the frequency in the European power grid dips briefly every 60 seconds. While these deviations were not critical to grid security, they were clearly measurable and unusually regular. The cause of this phenomenon was initially unclear.
A team from Jülich led by Dirk Witthaut, together with researchers from the University of Cologne and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, set out to investigate – and found the answer: the cause appears to be the many large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge every minute. This leads to measurable fluctuations in electricity consumption, which can contribute to turbine wear and tear, for example. The battery storage systems ensure an uninterrupted power supply, and their numbers have increased significantly worldwide in recent years. The researchers found that this was not a European phenomenon, but a global one.
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“It quickly became clear to us that the cause must be something controlled by the clock,” says Witthaut. There was no other way to explain the precise 60-second cycle. It was also clear that: “The observed effect can only be produced if many devices are consuming electricity at the same time.” A single consumer or generator could therefore be ruled out.
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But how do all these devices synchronize their consumption? The researchers finally found the crucial clues with the help of the Living Lab Energy Campus. This research infrastructure on the Jülich campus is primarily used to develop and test highly integrated energy supply systems. The team installed measuring points on end devices at a total of 80 locations – and sure enough, the same periodic pattern in electricity consumption was observed precisely at the locations where large-scale battery storage systems are designed to ensure an uninterrupted power supply. “We took a closer look at one of them and found a spike in electricity consumption at the start of every minute due to the power check,” explains Witthaut.
As there are no binding standards for such power checks, Witthaut suspects that most battery manufacturers assumed that a 60-second interval would be sensible. The start of every minute was simply chosen as the test time. “It is entirely possible, however, that battery storage systems are only part of the problem here,” says Witthaut. “It cannot be ruled out that other digitally controlled appliances – such as air-conditioning systems, heat pumps, washing machines, and dishwashers – may also exhibit similar patterns.”
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Mystery of sixty-second fluctuations in power grids solved
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Comment on Any tips for improving personal cybersecurity in 2026? (I'm concerned about rogue AI agents) in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYeah, it’s still just getting started, but for example, I’ve seen it at a brokerage, an insurance company, and a health care provider, so it seems to be spreading beyond tech companies. Strong,...Yeah, it’s still just getting started, but for example, I’ve seen it at a brokerage, an insurance company, and a health care provider, so it seems to be spreading beyond tech companies.
Strong, random passwords in a password manager are almost as good.
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Comment on Binance suspends withdrawals after crypto hackers steal $6.3 billion in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIf you’re just investing, maybe an buy an ETF, or even split it between multiple ETFs, through a traditional brokerage? Or better, choose other investments. I guess that applies to exchanges. You...If you’re just investing, maybe an buy an ETF, or even split it between multiple ETFs, through a traditional brokerage? Or better, choose other investments.
I guess that applies to exchanges. You could use more than one.
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Comment on Any tips for improving personal cybersecurity in 2026? (I'm concerned about rogue AI agents) in ~tech
skybrian LinkI’m not going to make a comprehensive guide, but here are a few tips: For important websites that support them, I recommend starting to use passkeys to log in. They aren’t always easy to use in...I’m not going to make a comprehensive guide, but here are a few tips:
For important websites that support them, I recommend starting to use passkeys to log in. They aren’t always easy to use in every way, but they’re convenient and do avoid phishing attacks.
As with any kind of authentication, you will want another way to log in to avoid getting locked out, for example if your phone breaks. As an example, for some websites, I have separate passkeys saved for Apple (using an iPad) and Chrome (phone and laptop). You need to test logging in both ways to be sure they work. Printing out backup codes that you could use to log in can be a good idea, but they won’t help if they’re not with you while traveling.
Look for ways to avoid being too dependent on any one service. For example, it might be good to have money in more than one bank or credit union. I have been affected by a credit union being hacked and no money was lost, but they were offline for a while and that would have been inconvenient if we depended on them.
Learning to make offline backups regularly could be useful, but you also need to test restoring from backup. The best backup is something you use regularly, so you’re testing it and remember how it works.
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Comment on Any tips for improving personal cybersecurity in 2026? (I'm concerned about rogue AI agents) in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThe problem is mostly not AI doing anything on its own, but hackers can use AI to find and exploit security holes and that’s just as bad. I am half-expecting swarms of AI worms in coming years,...The problem is mostly not AI doing anything on its own, but hackers can use AI to find and exploit security holes and that’s just as bad.
I am half-expecting swarms of AI worms in coming years, though. They don’t have to be smart in every way to be a threat.
If there's better research out there, I'm willing to read it. I don't think a web search is going to cut it.