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0x3f

1,204 karma · joined August 26, 2025

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0x3f··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
If it works as AA seems to theorize, you'd need to:

  (a) work out how Google books exposes fragments of books, and see if there's a systematic way of using this to get whole books.  For example, a naive approach might be to find any fragment of the book by searching some exact phrase.  Then, you can search for an exact phrase from the start or end of the fragment it gave you, hoping it will show you the previous or next part of the book.  You can then just loop that to get the whole book.

  (b) once you have (a), you need a way of bypassing Google's bot detection/rate limiting.  I don't know what current state of the art is, but there may be a solution for sale out there.  E.g. you pay to receive a cookie or browser state, and use that to fetch the URLs from (a).  Or if you're good/already in the scene, you could do this part yourself.
0x3f··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
Consumer hardware over the internet is not really suitable for this, AFAIK.
0x3f··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
Aren't a lot of these purchases (a) locked in from contracts made pre-admin; and (b) otherwise largely related to anxiety over Russia? There are too many confounding variables here.
0x3f··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
This assumes the same reward ratio also continues, but that's not the case. A cutting edge LLM is something much more valuable than a cracked copy of Word. Just like the LLM providers themselves decided violating copyright was an acceptable risk, it entirely depends on how people see the tradeoffs, rather than being a categorical decision.
0x3f··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
Hm, can't really have engaging discussions with people who just don't understand what's being said. Can't force the information into their brains so we can do that either. Not sure which action you'd like me to take to improve this situation, then.
0x3f··on Identity verification on Claude
You seem to be saying that it's not a problem because you can just cancel your subscription if you don't like it. The fact remains that it's true. It's bad for goodwill in the same way Apple flipping $ -> £/€ is.
0x3f··on Identity verification on Claude
Fable seemed pretty good, but the thing is, even having access to test the next model _and see if it's worth switching to it_ is worth the marginal hassle/risk of doing the ID flow. A lot of things now do KYC, so we're not really talking about a categorical shift in me sharing ID info with any company vs not. It's just one more app.
0x3f··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
I think you've failed to understand the words in question, rather than them being meaningless
0x3f··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
Who said that words are meaningless?
0x3f··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
I grew up on the internet, I doubt there's any level of textual depravity I haven't seen.
0x3f··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
> call your wife a fat sow everyday in earnest for a year and see if she isn’t granted a divorce for maltreatment.

Is this an appeal to the law or something? It's not a very good argument. Many things which are harmful are not illegal. Many things which are illegal are not harmful.

Also, that's not even how divorce works!

> no one is claiming words are physically harmful

"speech is violence" is a position that some people hold.

> if words had no power, we wouldn’t fight so hard to protect them from government abuse.

People fight hard for all kinds of nonsense. Historically, people have fought hard for things that didn't matter at all.

0x3f··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
I get the desire to moderate your game, but how are words 'harmful' exactly? Especially random, throwaway internet spew. Harmful to your game's reputation, maybe. But to the people?
0x3f··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.

Key factors for me:

  - Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs.  Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
  - Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them.  Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
  - Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.

Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.

0x3f··on Anthropic's Safety Superpower
Yes, the EU is a bit of a strange half-measure. I understand why the cultural barriers are resistant to change. But standardization of regulations across the single market has been incredibly slow. I'm not sure it will ever happen.

I wonder if the incumbents in each country actively lobby against it. I suppose it's easier for massive corporations to deal with cross border issues. The onerous regulatory boundaries are a nice price of entry for them that keeps out upstarts.

0x3f··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Europe lost religion and gained this instead.
0x3f··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
> And YannLeCun decided to build in Europe as well

AMI has offices across the world. Fact is, companies often have at least an office where the CEO lives. Same when Musk kicked up a stink about 'leaving California'. It wasn't really anything of substance.

0x3f··on Anthropic's Safety Superpower
> the EU is hardly buzzing with AI innovation

Depends what you mean. The academic work seems largely... fine? Plenty of good work came out of Europe or European researchers. It seems the problem is more "trying to build a trillion-dollar company of any kind".

It's an interesting question: does the EU seek only to regulate successful modern American companies to death, or home grown ones too? Probably not a gamble worth taking.

0x3f··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
You can find Chinese sayings for almost any position. It's orientalism to reduce modern Chinese society/culture/economy to proverbs and sayings.

You say that you're Chinese so there's no such stereotyping involved, but actually Chinese people commit this sin against themselves all the time.

己欲立而立人,己欲达而达人

"wishing to stand, one helps others stand; wishing to succeed, one helps others succeed"

> that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open

But the AI labs _are_ often being open. And cloning stuff more generally doesn't really require OSS anyway. Product features are easily cloned in most cases, without any secret knowledge.

0x3f··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
> being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.

Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world. Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc. No real restrictions on duping products, so execution often becomes the winning ticket. That's all pretty open and good for consumers.

You could argue they won't allow SOTA models to be exported but it doesn't really have anything to do with Chinese culture not being compatible with openness.

0x3f··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
I don't use gmail but often get an LLM to write certain emails. The benefit is that it can pull in context and typically one-shot the email without me prompting it at all.

For example, a tenant emails me about some issue relating to a specific property. It can go through my leases, find the right one, check other emails to see I ordered a new appliance to that specific address, track shipping/install, all that, then reply appropriately.

0x3f··on The current AI pricing was always going to go away
This... is not a reliable AI detection method at all.
0x3f··on America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen
It's hard to say how much it contributed to the pre-eminence of modern-day China. But overall the rise of China surely dominates anything that's happened in the last year. No other nation even comes close to vying for hegemony with the US. We could have another full-on Vietnam-esque quagmire in Iran and it wouldn't even be a blip in comparison.
0x3f··on America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen
> Why would anyone spend the time to read something so long that's been generated by an LLM?

What diference does it make as long as the content is interesting and the tone not grating?

It's possible for a human being to use an LLM but guide it to a well-written piece that's worth consuming.

0x3f··on Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit
Really depends on your background doesn't it? You could have convictions, be sanctioned, have visa problems, or all kinds of things that are not easily solvable.
0x3f··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
> Whether these were unsolved due to being seriously untried by humanity, or because of their difficulty, isn't relevant

That seems very relevant to my evaluation. I can pull out my calculator right now and solve a problem no human ever has.

0x3f··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
Ok well enjoy your thought-terminating cliches in the meantime
0x3f··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
> quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer.

Such as?

0x3f··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
Hardly, I can trivially find Fortune 500 websites without accessibility.
0x3f··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
Picking subsets of customers to focus on is a totally standard part of running a startup or company in general, so this is not really news or any kind of threat.

You might as well tell me the suburban moms are not going to buy my developer tool because I've personally slighted them with the branding. Why would I care? I made my decisions knowing this.

In fact ditching low RoI customers is incredibly common and good startup advice.

0x3f··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
You're just expressing a normative view here, it's not very interesting or informationally-dense. You care about accessibility more than I do. That doesn't make not doing it 'crap'.
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