skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Binance employees find $1.7 Billion in crypto was sent to Iranian entities in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    A group of internal investigators at the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance made a series of startling discoveries last year.

    People in Iran had gained access to more than 1,500 accounts on the Binance platform over the previous year. About $1.7 billion had flowed from two Binance accounts to Iranian entities with links to terrorist groups, a possible violation of global sanctions. And one of those accounts belonged to a Binance vendor.

    After uncovering the transactions, the investigators reported them to top executives, according to company records and other documents reviewed by The New York Times.

    Within weeks, Binance fired or suspended at least four employees involved in the investigation, according to the documents and three people with knowledge of the situation. The company cited issues such as “violations of company protocol” related to the handling of client data.

    [...]

    By analyzing crypto transactions, Binance investigators found that accounts on the exchange had moved funds to entities tied to Iran, a major foreign adversary that the Trump administration has been preparing to strike. When Binance pleaded guilty three years ago, it agreed to pay a $4.3 billion penalty and admitted that it had violated U.S. sanctions, including by allowing customers from Iran to use its platform. It also agreed to alert U.S. authorities to any lawbreaking detected on the exchange.

    [...]

    It’s unclear exactly why the investigators were disciplined. Over the last few months, more than half a dozen compliance officials have left Binance, including a sanctions manager and the leader of the enterprise compliance team. Binance’s chief compliance officer, Noah Perlman, has also discussed leaving, a person familiar with the matter said.

    [...]

    In the middle of last year, Binance’s compliance experts were contacted by law enforcement officials from Israel who wanted to discuss terror financing routes connected to Iran. Binance began an investigation that centered on a now-defunct business called Hexa Whale Trading Limited.

    Hexa Whale, based in Hong Kong, had used Binance to send $490 million to crypto wallets tied to Iranian entities, according to the documents. At one point, the documents said, an Israeli official told the investigators that Hexa Whale was financing terrorist organizations such as the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia that controls Yemen’s north.

  3. Comment on Why doesn’t Anthropic use Claude to make a good Claude desktop app? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think the Tildes web UI is pretty good though.

    I think the Tildes web UI is pretty good though.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Why doesn’t Anthropic use Claude to make a good Claude desktop app? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think that’s overly dismissive. Have you tried using a coding agent since December or so? True vibe-coding is more of a research project, but a coding agent that’s being directed by a software...

    I think that’s overly dismissive. Have you tried using a coding agent since December or so? True vibe-coding is more of a research project, but a coding agent that’s being directed by a software engineer is quite capable of writing the code for you, based on a series of prompts and code review. (You do have to take the lead.)

    I don’t think Electron is inherently bad, but if I were going to do a native rewrite, I would definitely find a coding agent useful.

    13 votes

  5. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 23 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Haven't read the article yet but that quote reminds me of this Twitter post by a historian:

    Haven't read the article yet but that quote reminds me of this Twitter post by a historian:

    But ALL armies of the WW2 era wore great coats. The men who FOUGHT the Nazis wore great coats.

    Wearing a great coat does not immediately make you a Nazi.

  6. Comment on The Claude C Compiler: what it reveals about the future of software in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    To be fair, this project wasn't trying to invent any new compiler techniques.

    To be fair, this project wasn't trying to invent any new compiler techniques.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on The Claude C Compiler: what it reveals about the future of software in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From a blog post by Chris Lattner, who (according to Wikipedia) was the creator of LLVM, the Clang compiler, and the Swift programming language: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From a blog post by Chris Lattner, who (according to Wikipedia) was the creator of LLVM, the Clang compiler, and the Swift programming language:

    The Claude C Compiler is a milestone, showing progress at a different level. It shows an AI system maintaining coherence across an entire engineering system that can coordinate multiple subsystems, preserve architectural structure, iterate toward correctness over time, and operate within a complex feedback loop of tests and failures. AI is beginning to move from code completion toward engineering participation.

    However, the deeper reason compilers align unusually well with modern AI systems is that compiler engineers build architectures that are highly legible and structured. Compilers have layered abstractions, consistent naming conventions, composable passes, and deterministic feedback (“it works” or “it doesn’t” - there is a clear success criteria). These properties make compilers unusually learnable for both humans and machine learning systems trained on large amounts of source code.

    Seen this way, CCC is validation of decades of software engineering practice. The abstractions developed by compiler engineers turned out to be structured enough that machines can now reason within them. That is a remarkable milestone. However, it also hints at an important limitation.

    [...]

    The design choices throughout the repository consistently reflect well-established compiler practice - things taught in a university class and widely used by existing compilers like LLVM and GCC. The intermediate representation includes concepts that will look immediately familiar to LLVM developers, including instructions like GetElementPtr, basic block “terminators” and Mem2Reg. It appears to have strong knowledge of widely-used compiler design techniques.

    LLVM and GCC code are clearly part of the training set - Claude effectively translated large swaths of them into Rust for CCC. The design docs show detailed knowledge of both systems, as well as considered takes on its implementation approach. Some have criticized CCC for learning from this prior art, but I find that ridiculous - I certainly learned from GCC when building Clang!

    [...]

    Taken together, CCC looks less like an experimental research compiler and more like a competent textbook implementation, the sort of system a strong undergraduate team might build early in a project before years of refinement. That alone is remarkable.

    [...]

    The most revealing parts of CCC are its mistakes. Several design choices suggest optimization toward passing tests rather than building general abstractions like a human would. A few examples:

    [...]

    Modern LLMs are extraordinarily powerful distribution followers. They learn patterns across vast bodies of existing work and generate solutions near the center of that collective experience. When trained on decades of compilers shaped by GCC, LLVM, and academic literature, it is entirely natural that the result reflects that lineage. This phenomenon closely aligns with Richard Sutton’s Bitter Lesson, where scalable methods rediscover broadly successful structures.

    [...]

    CCC shows that AI systems can internalize the textbook knowledge of a field and apply it coherently at scale. AI can now reliably operate within established engineering practice. This is a genuine milestone that removes much of the drudgery of repetition and allows engineers to start closer to the state of the art. But it also highlights an important limitation of this work:

    Implementing known abstractions is not the same as inventing new ones. I see nothing novel in this implementation.

    8 votes

  9. Comment on Slop and guilt in ~talk

    skybrian
    Link
    It's true that slop (or close to it) isn't new. I watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons as a kid that were slop. We kept watching them hoping that there would be an episode we hadn't seen...

    It's true that slop (or close to it) isn't new. I watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons as a kid that were slop. We kept watching them hoping that there would be an episode we hadn't seen before.

    Even in a lot of prime-time TV, they kept reusing footage of car chases and stuff.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era. in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't have access to this article, but looking at the Financial Times article (archive) that it's apparently based on, that doesn't seem right? It sounds like the "user error" was that of an...

    the outage was blamed on a customer's employee

    I don't have access to this article, but looking at the Financial Times article (archive) that it's apparently based on, that doesn't seem right? It sounds like the "user error" was that of an Amazon employee, so this is basically an Amazon self-own.

    Also, if a customer has any way to take out an Amazon service, using AI or not, that is definitely an Amazon bug and the outage would be worth doing a post-mortem on.

    7 votes

  11. Comment on Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era. in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Mature tech companies often have a "blameless postmortem" process where they create a full history of an incident and make recommendations at multiple zoom levels about how to fix the system so...

    Mature tech companies often have a "blameless postmortem" process where they create a full history of an incident and make recommendations at multiple zoom levels about how to fix the system so that nothing like that happens again. As the name indicates, the focus is on fixing the system, not blaming workers for mistakes. (That's reserved for situations where there is clear malice.)

    I expect that process will continue to work well with more AI automation. "Someone accidentally deleted the production database" isn't a new problem and the safeguards you need are similar.

    Legal liability isn't a good lens to use when fixing the system.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on The AI disruption has arrived, and it sure is fun (gifted link) in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, sometimes companies are in a position to impose decisions on their customers that they don't like, and that can be frustrating. I've experienced that too with software updates. But I still...

    Yes, sometimes companies are in a position to impose decisions on their customers that they don't like, and that can be frustrating. I've experienced that too with software updates.

    But I still think it's wrong to call "enshitification" when that's not true! That's pretending to be more helpless than you actually are. When building your own custom website, you have lots of choices.

  13. Comment on The AI disruption has arrived, and it sure is fun (gifted link) in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Again, I don't think this applies when you are making direct decisions about how much to spend on yourself. You can buy a fancy dinner or a cheap dinner, a fancy car or a used car. You can decide...

    Again, I don't think this applies when you are making direct decisions about how much to spend on yourself. You can buy a fancy dinner or a cheap dinner, a fancy car or a used car. You can decide how much you're spending on your house. If you're deciding yourself to buy the cheap stuff, it's not "corporations" imposing this on you.

  14. Comment on US imports more from Taiwan than China for first time in decades in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    The US imported more from Taiwan than China for the first time in decades as President Donald Trump’s tariffs reshape trade flows while a global boom in artificial intelligence fuels demand for tech products.

    US purchases of goods from China plunged almost 44% in December from a year earlier to $21.1 billion, Commerce Department data showed Thursday. By contrast, shipments from Taiwan more than doubled during the same period to $24.7 billion.

    The soaring Taiwanese shipments to the US reflect the huge expansion in supplies of chips and servers for AI companies, which has completely changed the self-ruled island’s trade profile and propelled its near $1 trillion economy into one of the world’s fastest growing.

    5 votes

  16. Comment on US Supreme Court strikes down Donald Trump's tariffs in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    Why the “Lesser Included Action” Argument for IEEPA Tariffs Fails [...]

    Why the “Lesser Included Action” Argument for IEEPA Tariffs Fails

    The dissent pushes back with an intuitively appealing argument: IEEPA authorizes the President to prohibit imports entirely, so surely it authorizes the lesser action of merely taxing them. If Congress handed over the nuclear option, why would it withhold the conventional weapon?

    [...]

    Not surprisingly, the same structure appears in real emergency services. A fire chief may have the authority to close roads during an emergency but that doesn’t imply that the fire chief has the authority to impose road tolls. Road closure is costly and self-limiting — it disrupts traffic, generates immediate complaints, and the chief has every incentive to lift it as soon as possible. Tolls are cheap, adjustable, and once in place tend to persist; they generate revenue that can fund the agency and create constituencies for their continuation. Nobody thinks granting a fire chief emergency closure authority implicitly grants them taxing authority, even if the latter is a lesser authority. The closure and toll instruments have completely different political economy properties despite operating on the same roads.

    10 votes

  17. Comment on AI is coming for culture in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The way I think about it is that you have to take the lead. While coding I’ve sometimes seen Claude Opus do some pretty sophisticated things, but only because I asked in the right way. It’s not...

    The way I think about it is that you have to take the lead. While coding I’ve sometimes seen Claude Opus do some pretty sophisticated things, but only because I asked in the right way. It’s not going to push you in any particular direction.

    6 votes

  18. Comment on What are your architectural hot takes? in ~design

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The kids will sell it and the new owner will tear it down and build a McMansion.

    The kids will sell it and the new owner will tear it down and build a McMansion.

    8 votes

  19. Comment on Wikipedia blacklists archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't know a good solution. I'm glad that I regularly extract quotes, so at least there's some context. Maybe I'll start archiving pages privately?

    I don't know a good solution. I'm glad that I regularly extract quotes, so at least there's some context. Maybe I'll start archiving pages privately?

    9 votes

  20. Comment on Wikipedia blacklists archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

    In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

    “There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

    More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site, which is facing an investigation in which the FBI is trying to uncover the identity of its founder, is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

    [...]

    Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

    [...]

    Evidence presented in the Wikipedia discussion showed that Archive.today replaced Nora’s name with Patokallio’s name in the aforementioned blog post. The Archive.today capture has since been reverted to what appears to be the original version. In other cases, Archive.today captures included a “Comment as: Jani Patokallio” string on captures that previously had a “Comment as: Nora [last name redacted]” string.

    Even if the snapshot alterations hadn’t helped convince Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to deprecate Archive.today, the Wikimedia Foundation itself might have stepped in. In its comments on the DDoS, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia said on February 10 that it had not ruled out intervening due to “the seriousness of the security concern for people who click the links that appear across many wikis.”

    29 votes