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Cycl0ps

271 karma · joined May 26, 2021

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Cycl0ps··on METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack
The Zizians would be a good start. As it turns out your sense of reality can be pretty malleable when living inside an echo chamber
Cycl0ps··on Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
I watched the linear regression video. I can see the value behind the idea, but there's a number of flaws that make the videos difficult to watch compared to something like a 3blue1brown video. The flat voice and even word spacing lull you into zoning out, right until a mispronunciation jolts you back.

The idea of using LLMs to write out a script and storyboard for the video is interesting, but I think it needs intermediary work to better instruct the speech and graphics on how to perform.

Cycl0ps··on Supersonic Trebuchet [video]
Macgyver Gets Lazy https://xkcd.com/444/
Cycl0ps··on Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list
Unfortunately we don't have to imagine

"In early October, Renaud discovered that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors were visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible site operated by the state education department..."

"Yet despite the fact that officials within the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education initially wanted to thank Renaud for uncovering the flaw... [Governer] Parson labeled the reporter a hacker and called for criminal prosecution."

https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/11/prosecutor-isnt-p...

Cycl0ps··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
For a current-day LLM, deviation could be measured as the number of tokens since the agent touched on the prompted topic. A specific <<refocus>> token could even be trained so that a harness or other tooling could direct the LLM back towards the prompted topic if needed.

Or something roughly like that. Generally speaking the goal would be for the LLM to bring the topic back on its own while incorporating the tangent, but a hardcoded, "Let's get back on track" button would probably be needed

Cycl0ps··on GPT-5.6
>The models don't get better, except when a new one is released.

My brother in Christ this entire thread is talking about the new model that was released

Cycl0ps··on Holes
collapses and floods it looks like. Here's the oops for the Pantai Remis mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA

Cycl0ps··on The short leash AI coding method for beating Fable
An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself. we can give it an array of 14 billion options but it still has to chose one to output. Humans have no such limitation.

An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next. Each generation, happening hundreds of times a second, will be initialized, generate an output, and terminate. Humans are not stateless like an LLM.

Cycl0ps··on Virginia bans sale of geolocation data
Raines Law in that late 1800s put restrictions on the sale of alcohol in NY on Sundays. Bartenders used a loophole of the drinks being served with a meal to get around it.

They would make a single sandwich, "serve" it to the patron along with their drink, then immediately take back the sandwich to "serve" it to the next person wanting a drink

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/raines-sandwich

Cycl0ps··on A dumpster arrived behind my university's library
You're browsing for whatever piques your interest, and the library wants to curate the collection based on what people are interested in. The books that collect interest get placed on the shelves and the ones that don't get archived. If it's in the archive it probably wouldn't have interested you.
Cycl0ps··on NASA Force
Incompetent sycophants
Cycl0ps··on TSA leaves passenger needing surgery after illegally forcing her through scanner
>They didn't force this person through the scanner

"Despite the woman's request for a pat-down search, a TSA agent told her that her only option was to pass through the AIT device."

>they could have asked for a supervisor and discussed the situation

"Before passing through the device, the plaintiff spoke to another officer, trying to explain the situation, but was told that the AIT machine had been “adjusted” so that it would not damage her spinal cord implant."

Cycl0ps··on Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI
I’m in agreement with the blog post. I’ve been treating AI more like a tool and less like a science experiment and I’ve gotten some good results when working on my various side projects. In the past much of my time was taken up by research and learning the various little parts of how everything works. What starts as a little python project to play around with APIs ends with me spending 5 hours learning tkinter and barely making any API calls.
Cycl0ps··on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
A little late, but this is something that I've been considering a lot lately. When there's a limited resource (funding) how do you determine who will receive it?

For something like this I think a citizens assembly[1] may work best. Take all artists receiving funding and are NOT up for renewal. Select a number of them randomly to form the assembly. This assembly then reviews submissions from artists up for renewal and determines if they meet a minimum standard for funding to be renewed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly

Cycl0ps··on UMichigan study: EVs are cleaner than ICEs over average vehicle life
None of these are issues specific to EVs. This is more of a problem with all modern cars. Valid concerns, but they impact ICE vehicles just as much
Cycl0ps··on Dead trees keep surprisingly large amounts of carbon out of atmosphere
Carbon sequestration!

I grew up in an area known for coal and logging. Ever since I heard of sequestration brought up I thought the area sounded perfect for it. Fell (maybe mulch) the trees, kiln dry to remove weight/moisture, and toss them down a mineshaft.

It always felt a bit peotic to 'reseed' a coal mine

Cycl0ps··on The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
My brother in Christ it's Tuesday
Cycl0ps··on The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
Of course! I'm doing it right now!
Cycl0ps··on Losing My Nonreligion
So he burned his relationship with an organization that he was a recognized member of. An organization where he was on the advisory board and had some control in steering, for what exactly?

Just another transphobe thinking their definition of a word is a silver bullet against someone's way of life.

Cycl0ps··on Eco Cycles or How I Feel About Technology
If I do something good because it makes me feel good, is that a selfish action or is it feedback from my 'innate human tendency'?

We are social creatures. Seeing our social group benefit is a hardwired desire, and it makes us feel good. Being recognized as a valuable member of the group also feels good, and double-dipping on the dopamine hit is what motivates people towards contributing.

Cycl0ps··on Akira ransomware can be cracked with sixteen RTX 4090 GPUs in around ten hours
Back of the napkin math:

Googling the TFlops as an estimate of power shows a roughly 12x improvement on the H100 over the 4090. A single 4090 takes 160 hours so a single H100 should take about 13 hours.

AWS will rent a p5.48xlarge instance of 8xH100 for $31.464/hr. That will take roughly two hours and cost around $60 bucks.

Assume I'm off by an order of magnitude, this is still a reasonable cost to recover key infrastructure. If the $60/endpoint stands then it would be reasonable to recover workstations this way

Cycl0ps··on Fediverse Donut Club
I'm curious to see if this will work like the author intends. I feel like this idea works great in an office environment but won't translate well to a digital space. The biggest reason being that there is no 1-on-1 or group interaction, everything is broadcast out to the entire "office" and that influences people's behavior.

I like the intent though, and I agree it's something that could be beneficial if it works as hoped. Even if it doesn't this might give the author or someone else the idea of a different version that may work better

Cycl0ps··on US bill proposes jail time for people who download DeepSeek
We've lived through a number of "That could never happen, though" scenarios in the past decade. I'm feeling a bit skeptical towards skepticism at the moment.
Cycl0ps··on The Line of Death (2017)
Reminds me of EURion rings on banknotes. The issue is that this needs to be visible while unobstructive to the user. What about something pictographic, like HTTPS' padlock icon? Look for that in any user content with an input field and flag it when found. Of course, that still assumes users would check for the lock in the first place.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Cycl0ps··on My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise
For anyone wanting additional info, the VR Health Institute has been reviewing games by their intensity and estimates calorie burn per minute of playing.

https://vrhealth.institute/vr-ratings/

Cycl0ps··on Wordle – But for D&D
To go further, your modifier from stats only increases on even numbers, so most of the time that's what you can expect a stat to be. 8,10,12,14,16,18 for example covers the expected range that every L1 player character is likely to fall in. That also let's you estimate the CR of a monster by seeing if the stats tend toward a negative modifier or a positive one.

To go further, stats have interconnections between them. The physical stats (STR DEX CON) are likely to sit within a few points of each other, same goes for mental stats (INT WIS CHA). The physical section is also likely to be higher because most of the creatures on this list were designed for combat and will have stats reflecting that. The exception is WIS, which is used to determine initiative order in combat and is usually high regardless of creature level.

Cycl0ps··on BBC censors its own archives
Fair enough. I was on my phone when I posted that and I agree that I could have provided a bit more context than a random Youtube link. Thanks for filling in the details for people
Cycl0ps··on BBC censors its own archives
https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ
Cycl0ps··on In the end, you're treated like a spy, says MIT scientist
No, we save that for the Hispanics.
Cycl0ps··on Spotify is removing Neil Young’s music after falling out over Joe Rogan
Have you reviewed the article you linked? The Steele Dossier was compiled by a British source, and the one claim that's generally agreed on is that the Russian Govt highly favored Trump over Hillary. I'd recommend the summary to get aquatinted, then the subsection "Risk of contamination with Russian disinformation considered"
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