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JoshTripletton Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?

Limiting the flood wouldn't mean necessarily omitting stories like "new model released" (within reason); it'd mean omitting "check out my new vibecoded slop" or "check out this article that's obviously LLM-written and provides very little value" (what we once would have called "blogspam", or dismissed as SEO-bait).

JoshTripletton Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

FWIW, I wouldn't recommend turning on all of `clippy::pedantic` as a unit. It's a category of lints, but some of them have much more value than others, and turning them all on may make your experience of Rust feel unpleasant and nitpicky.

JoshTripletton Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]

> This is true if the arguer is hostile, but as I've gotten older, if I get the sense that someone is entering an argument with the primary goal of "winning", I'll try to avoid that framing or just look for an offramp entirely.

Absolutely. The best kinds of arguments are those where you both have the shared goal of reaching consensus, and treat reaching consensus as a collaborative activity of finding the correct answer, even though you disagree with the starting point. There are a few techniques for this, which work well when operating in good faith, and can backfire when dealing with hostile counterparties. Most things work badly when arguing with hostile counterparties.

JoshTripletton Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

That's fair; when all is said and done, more is said than done. That is much, much better than the more common thing that leads to comments like yours; I think some comments and downvotes come from the assumption that your comments come from a place of "I don't like it when people make decisions based on their ethics, because I don't like their ethics". That is, unfortunately, very common.

JoshTripletton Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

LLMs are unusually good at Rust; it's an optimization target. And the constraints provided by "successfully compile with the Rust compiler" make it work well for agent iteration.

(I have mixed feelings about that, but empirically it holds true.)

JoshTripletton What if this is why humanity goes extinct?

It's a wryly amusing thought, but in practice, it's not going to matter if writings about unaligned AI are present in the data set or not. In practice, instrumental convergence means that bad outcomes overlap with the natural subgoals of any sufficiently advanced system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

AI doesn't have to have a goal of causing a problem. AI doesn't have to have had a human enabler (beyond having been built). Nothing in particular is required in order to fail catastrophically; it's the default if you don't thread the very small needle.

JoshTripletton Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

By all means use borrowing if it's straightforward. But don't necessarily upend your whole codebase to avoid one clone, either.

JoshTripletton Silicon Valley Is Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex

You are dismissing people as superficial or performative when they are taking action according to their ethics. Have you considered the possibility that people are not, in fact, performing, and are just trying to be ethical?

I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.

JoshTripletton Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

If you shame people for acting now rather than earlier, you discourage them from acting at all.

Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.

Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.

(Also, OP is not even an instance of what you're decrying; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647687 .)

JoshTripletton Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

https://github.com/luser/keep-calm-and-call-clone

"Keep calm and call clone" is a good strategy for getting things working. Don't prematurely optimize code until you know it's the bottleneck.

JoshTripletton Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit

We can absolutely say that, for instance, taking pictures in public is legal but surveilling is not. We could say that recording public spaces systematically, for the purposes of surveillance, is not permitted. That does not require us to say that individuals cannot record in a public place. We can even say that individuals or companies are not allowed to collude to effectively turn individual recordings into systematic public surveillance (e.g. you can't build a product that searches everyone's personal videos of spaces and turns them into a spotty surveillance network).

JoshTripletton Ask HN: 3.5 inch diskette read errors, would a period correct drive do better?

If you have something that's not already archived on archive.org, you might consider reaching out to Archive Team, who may be able to help you figure out the best way to read it accurately and avoid any errors.

(If you have something that is already archived on archive.org, the best way to get an accurate image of it would be to download it from there.)

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Spellbound_1...

JoshTripletton Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

> These responses seem to me to make it abundantly clear who's telling the truth here. I wonder who this fools.

Anyone who just reads headlines, if the lie gets around to more headlines than the truth does.

JoshTripletton Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

> Can you explain the difficulty in engineering a search apparatus over a corpus of text data?

My guess: "If we ever imply that's possible, people might start asking questions about all the other work we've ripped off, so the official answer is that it's impossible".

JoshTripletton I resigned from Anthropic today

We can work on multiple things at once. Defeatism doesn't solve anything. We just have a lot of work to do in many different areas.

JoshTripletton I resigned from Anthropic today

What evidence, short of an actual apocalypse happening, would invalidate that belief of yours?

JoshTripletton Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?

Please don't. I find such services obnoxious, especially when they aggressively log you back out. Chasing down a link in your email is much slower than having your password manager fill in the long unique random password and hitting "log in".

JoshTripletton Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?

> How do you prevent credential stuffing attacks?

CAPTCHAs don't work anymore, at this point. AI can trivially solve them.

Rate-limit the number of attempts, test accounts against known-password lists like HIBP, and support 2FA.

JoshTripletton 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

In the context of a company doing something like this, intent does not matter in the slightest.

JoshTripletton 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

Excellent. Sign me up, instantly. Would buy on launch day.

JoshTripletton 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

> I think it's usually not malice, it's incompetence.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and should be treated accordingly.

JoshTripletton Smartphone makers don't bother to comply with EU repairability requirements

> If they go out of business the world can move on with

substantial improvement to quality of life. Goals: build a company such that people don't think the world would be better off if you don't exist.

JoshTripletton 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

Literally my current computer monitor, but no, does not work as a living room TV. (Also, would not recommend as a monitor; aggressive ABL and persistent messages about turning off for maintenance.)

When I said 55+ I was talking about the whole size category larger than that, including 65, 77, etc.

JoshTripletton 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

That would be lovely. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, nobody sells (for instance) high-quality 65"+ OLED non-"smart" TVs. "dumb TV" options are limited to older display technology.

JoshTripletton It took a year to ship WebAssembly in Anubis

> Weirdly, the response from the rustc side (IIRC we also talked with one of the devs of wasm component on discord a bit) has contained a lot of (paraphrasing) "in retrospect we think wasm32-unknown-unknown target was designed badly, so we'd prefer if you either dealt with it or switched to another wasm target <with its different set of downsides> than us fixing it". (I acknowledge that the way std was implemented on that target was unusual and "not clean", but it works _really well_ for a lot of people.)

That's about right. Specifically, wasm32-unknown-unknown is serving multiple targets, which aren't very compatible, and it implements std by panicking in all the bits that can't work.

One target is "you truly have absolutely nothing, and don't really have much of `std` at all". Another target is "you're in a browser, and can do anything a typical browser can provide" (ideally targeting the future where wasm has full browser APIs without going through javascript). Another target is "hosted environment that isn't a browser, and which capabilities you have depends on the environment". Those are three very different things.

I would argue that we need at least two new targets, possibly three:

- `wasm32-none` or similar (by analogy with `x86_64-unknown-none`), a target where you don't have anything except for what you bring with you. The equivalent of writing kernel code.

- `wasm32-wasi-hosted` (or pick another name), where you the hoster of the wasm can supply whatever capabilities you have available.

- `wasm32-wasi-browser`.

It's possible that `none` could be a special case of `hosted`, where the services you provide are "none".

JoshTripletton Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

There is subtext to my argument, namely that you're the one standing in front of the bus, and trying to pull the rest of us in front of the bus, while shouting at the people standing safely out of the road. I'll continue to reject the replacement of humanity. (That doesn't mean remaining ignorant of AI as a technology. It means rejecting the idea that we should be thrilled to be replaced by AI.)

JoshTripletton A/I shuts down

HN can't put you in jail.

Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.

JoshTripletton Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

You seem to be not picking up on the subtext here. Others are, though.

JoshTripletton Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Yes, it is. But the important question is, which person is the one standing in front of the bus?

JoshTripletton Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions

> We shouldn't look to the black market as cost discovery for these vulnerabilities

We absolutely should. One of the points of bug bounties is to discourage people from selling to the black market.