TacticalCoder

> but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street

Hard disagree: every single example TFA gives is way better than the horrible generic ones that are polluting every shop and LinkedIn post.

It's not even close.

> which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites”) in the mid- to late-1990s.

Yeah! I was a bit connected in that we'd write "intro" for a BBS and in return we had unlimited download (whereas on many BBSes there were seeder / "leecher" ratio and unless you were providing stuff, you'd be hindered by your leecher ratio).

> The “Scene,” as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations.

But the "intro" pirates would put in front of cracked games (or sometimes on BBSes to advertize the BBS), later renamed "cracktros" (for that term wasn't used at first) eventually did spawn full-on "demos" and "musicdisk" / diskzines etc. and those weren't illegal.

In my Commodore Amiga days about half of my 5"1/4 floppies (because we were hacking 5"1/4 external drives to our Amiga and pretend to the computer they were the internal 3"1/2 disk so that we could buy shitload of much cheaper 5"1/4 floppies [1]) were demos (from Sanity, Scoopex, State of the Art, Lemon, Razor 1911, etc.).

Piracy definitely had aesthetics to it and I'd say the fully legal demos were, weirdly enough, the biggest manifestation of the aesthetics of piracy.

[1] in the early days I remember that after having something ridiculous like 3 boxes of 10 5"1/4 floppies, compared to 3 boxes of 3"1/2 floppies, you had already fully paid the 5"1/4 external floppy drive reader. I still have that external 5"1/4 drive for the Commodore Amiga just as I still have my chinese pirate SNES copying device. These two are prized possessions of mine ; )

> Passkeys do marginally improve security against MITM and phishing attacks ...

The tragedy of passkeys is that they're a step back from the security offered by the likes of Yubikeys.

But because passkeys are pushed by both Google, Microsoft and Apple: there is is simply no fighting these three. It is impossible.

Passkeys won not because they're better (they're not and the entire concept of "secret behind a hardware security module" that can be transferred to another system defeats the whole point of a HSM in the first place) but because the powers-that-be decided that passkeys are to be used.

It's still a win: the commoners are better served with passkeys.

But a secret in control of Google/Apple/Microsoft that can be backed up is not a secret I control: it's a complete step back from yubikeys.

Passkeys won and we better get used to them (and, yup, there are usability issues as you mentioned).

> What makes you think RCEs are being found & fixed at a rate that’s faster than they’re being introduced?

It could go either way but we're already at a point where successful exploits in some software (like Chrome) require an absurd amount of exploits to be chained to lead to an actual RCE. We've seen chains requiring more than ten exploits: not kidding.

We'll learn to put more and more sandboxes / guards / checks / defensive techniques everywhere and then all that's going to be needed is for AI looking for security issues to find something ridiculous like 10% of all the actual issues to stop RCEs dead in their tracks.

Also arguably the current SNAFU was expected: we fully knew hardly anyone was taking security seriously.

Now: not so much. Many projects had tens and even hundreds of issues pointed to them.

I think we'll see several things: projects beginning to take security seriously, defense in depth getting generalized and hence RCEs requiring ever more bugs/exploits to be chained to achieve anything, low-hanging fruits getting patched at an insane pace, new code being immediately checked, by LLMs, for not just low-hanging fruits but also more advanced security weaknesses, etc.

We may also see things like the lost art of configuring firewalls making a comeback, the generalization of hardware security modules (where applicable), and even things offering physical guarantees, like time-bounded retrieval protocols, beginning to get used seriously.

If I had to bet I'd say it shall go both ways: some projects are going to extremely sloppy and full of holes but others are going to get so secure nobody shall ever break them.

> William MacAskill co-founded 80,000 Hour ...

> Then the movement minted a fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried was not an accident of proximity; he was EA’s own product

TFA could have have mentioned that it's a fraud, MacAskill, who minted another fraud. MacAskill was SBF's guru and he was also involved in FTX and Alameda scams (but distanced himself before the scandal blew up) and MacAskill bought a 15 million GBP mansion in the UK for the Effective Altruism movement using funds stolen by SBF.

Last I checked the mansion hasn't been clawed back yet (but it could: funds from the Madoff ponzi have been clawed back more than 15 years after the fraud has been exposed).

Now of course people in charge of clawing back the stolen funds are the only hope of people who've been scammed for MacAskill didn't effectively altruistically sell the mansion to effectively altruistically hand the money to people who have been scammed.

That MacAskill and SBF maybe had groupsex with Caroline Ellison is one thing: they're proud to be polyamorous, whatever. We live in a free world.

But buying a $15 million mansion with stolen funds is thievery. Effective Scammers.

I can't help you but my comment may help others...

As a techie you should have known better: you first learn how 2FA using TOTP works. You understand what happens when you create an entry in Google Authenticator (or whatever app). You reproduce the procedure: you verify that you end up with the same 6-digit numbers.

If you've got a partner, you register your secret keys for each service on your partner's device and vice-versa.

Then you've got backups of your secret keys on paper, in a safe at your bank. Next to each secret key there's a checkbox: "Successfully initialized from this secret key?".

When those TOTP became ubiquitous (way, way, way before Yubikeys or passkeys were a thing), 2FA was a godsend compared to just passwords.

I understood they were here to stay for years, and years. And then more years.

So I learned how they worked.

When later on QR code generalized to initialize those (IIRC it wasn't a thing in the early days of 2FA TOTP: you'd just always get the secret key as characters, not as a QR code), I refused to ever scan a QR code: I always first decode the QR code (for the services only showing the secret key as a QR code, without also showing it as text), extract a copy of the secret key and then register it from my copy.

Stuff like that.

Now... As most services are deeply broken and have completely insecure practices you just say "I lost my 2FA, I want to reset it" and because they're clueless when it comes to security, they'll allow you to reset it. If someone hacks your email, they pretty much can reset every single of your account (at least those tied to that email).

I found soap decades old, very likely older than half a century. Hundreds of boxes and hence thousands of soap bars. I'd regularly found them for years and years here and there for my great aunt had stashed those left and right. I found some in system ceilings (!), in the attic, in the basement, in drawers.

My great aunt died years and years ago (RIP) but as recently as a few weeks ago my brother and I cleaned/emptied a garage where she had hidden some stuff.

More soap bars.

I don't need the physics/chemistry: I know that soap is a stable molecule. I suspect some of the soap bars were dating back to WWII.

My great aunt was also in the "waste not / want not" camp. But as she lived through WWII as a teenager, she was in fear of ever missing things again. Hence the soap bars.

Good to see some raising the issue of the sex cult that Effective Altruism is:

I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. Just as I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about Amodei's wife who used to run a porn site.

And while a sex-cult abusing women is one thing. Theft is another. More emphasis should be put though on the lying scums in their ranks, like the polyamorous SBF and Caroline Ellison or their guru and its $15m ill-acquired mansion in the UK (which hasn't been clawed back yet but could).

And speaking of lying scums stealing money, we know about several making constant announcements were they lie, lie and then lie some more to ensure a never-ending stream of money and insane valuation of their proprietary, closed, not altruistic at all companies.

A despicable movement and I, for one, I'm very happy that there are companies out there releasing open-weights models so that the thieving-and-sex-cult at least get some competition.

> The not-so-silent minority hanging out on HN know that the true heroes are those who take the time and put in the effort, and then put even more effort to reply and post about it here.

We know that the entirety of the AI movement is built on top of open-source projects like Linux and all the terminal and command line utilities. And runs inside projects doing god's work (say to contain the agents) like QEMU etc.

AI lives inside the work of our open-source heroes and would be absolutely nowhere without the work of all those people.

> Thanks to all of our heroes, op included.

Definitely, thanks GP and thanks to all our heroes.

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way.

A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".

Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too".

I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.

Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.

> Is this common? I’ve had access to company credit cards before on a one-off basis (never in my name). Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?

A very good friend was in IT support... Clients were visiting the country and his boss couldn't take care of the clients (last minute family issue or something). Somehow he tasked my buddy to "entertain" the clients and gave him a company card.

My friend went berzerk: restaurant, then too many drinks in pubs, then titties-club with champagne bottles etc.

He hardly remembered a thing in the morning and he exploded the company credit card spendings (not $118 K but well into the 5 digits).

The boss told him: "Oh well, at least the clients had fun". And my friend didn't get fired (which he thought he would).

Don't know if it's common but I take it's not that rare.

Yeah I regularly drive in France which has terrible drivers (road deaths way above EU average in France) but it's nowhere near as bad as the US.

The one thing people should ponder is this: Germany has less than 3x the number of road deaths (no matter how you count it: per 100 K people, per kilometer, etc.) than the US. And yet every time I'm in Germany I happily drive at 125 mph on the highway (including when I drive to Poland, where most autobahns near Dresde have no speed limit at all whatsoever). And at 125 mph, I'll get overtaken by some cars going proper fast.

So, what, 65 to 70 mph max speed limit vs unlimited speed and three times the deaths: what's the problem?

Note that I'm certainly not advocating for US (or France for that matter) highways without speed limits: drivers are way too bad.

Leaving aside the irony in seeing the "peaceful" EU (who bet it all on Uncle Sam) now going on full warmongering and wanting to spend 3% of its GDP on warfare, the serious issue here is the lack of will of politicians to punish the authors of such acts, which ruin society for everybody.

44 person injured and a young woman between life and death. Yet when the perpetrators are caught, we'll have journalists and judges relaying the official tune of the EU: "criminals are victims too".

They'll get a slap on the wrist and be able to ruin society again in no time.

When shall the left accept that people putting 300 kilograms of rails to try to kill people has only one solution: shackles and a heavy ball?

Where do you draw the line between "we're all beautiful butterflies" and "some psychos need to be scruffed by the neck and bowed into lifetime submission"?

How many deaths?

username checks out!

Ah yup for quick one-off one-liners or small Bash script, Gemini works perfectly fine too. For longer scripts I use another model.

> I suspect it's people who have not yet used the paid models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is comparable to free models from other providers, but not in the same universe as paid models.

I totally disagree. I pay for both ChatGPT and Anthropic (haven't tried the chinese models yet) and yet Gemini is my go-to model (and I pay for it too through Google Workspace subscriptions for several domain names tied to Google/GMail) for anything that is not coding.

I find Gemini better/quicker/more polished for basically every single subject out there that is not "write me lines of code".

> The real surprising part is that Anthropic is also negligible (according to this article) in Germany. It's all OpenAI.

Besides a few software devs about zero people I talk to (I'm in the EU) have ever heard of Claude / Anthropic. It's all Gemini (the default in Google), ChatGPT (pretty much a verb for "I ask questions to an AI") and some have Grok subscriptions (!).

When I mention Anthropic and/or Claude people have zero clue what I'm talking about.

> ... that's how humans were intended to live

Humans weren't meant to be packed like ants. Wrong species.

> If the IP address you're using has been detected as a residential proxy, it doesn't matter. It's going to be flagged on lists for a long time.

Flagged and then... What exactly?

If people who have a smart TV have their smart TV participate in a residential proxy, then it's billions of IP getting "flagged".

What's the use of flagging those?

When every IP is flagged, none is.

> I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on.

For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.

> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?

Never: they've always been mediocre.

> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.

I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.

> How's that winter if you're not below 0°C?

Seasons are called summer, autumn, winter and spring and each last three months and that bears no relation to whether or not there's snow or sub-zero temperatures.

In the country I live in atm the rules regarding winter tires are not the absolute dumbest but they're still very dumb: you need to have either winter tires or all-seasons tires "if the conditions are winter'y". Which means, basically, both sub-zero AND either wet or icy. Sub-zero and all sunny means winter tires aren't mandatory. The reason it's still dumb it's that that correspond to, at most, 10 days per year. And this forces a lot of people to have worse performing tires during much more than 10 days. Which is probably the cause for a lot of accidents (e.g. people on days where it's + 3 C would be safer with summer tires, that do perform way better than "I've got winter tires because tomorrow at 7am it may or may not be -1 C and it may or may not be raining").

Not that's of course dumbtardation but there's worse: there are countries where from that month to that month of winter, no matter the temperature, you must have winter (or all-seasons) tires. And at times you'll have an entire winter without freezing temperatures.

So politicians who voted these laws are basically creating more accidents due to cars having inferior tires (the tires lobby does love it though).

It's sad but it's how it is.

> Does the perfect messaging tool exist (100% e2ee encrypted and decentralized and open)?

(Note that I don't care about cryptocurrencies except for the cryptography behind it)

There are fully anonymous cryptocurrencies using ZKP where it's not possible to tell if a transaction sent is a transfer of the cryptocurrency itself or a message. It's decentralized and it's also impossible to tell who the transaction is made for (anyone with a copy of the chain can potentially be the recipient of either the money transfer or the encrypted message).

If people were really serious about privacy and secure messaging they'd look into this instead of constantly attacking the concept.

But then of course there are entire armies of shills who have a vested interest in pushing a narrative explaining that services, at best, collecting metadata and, at worst, being backdoored are offering "secure messaging".

I'm only using Telegram and I don't believe for a second it's secure and private (it's got, supposedly, "one on one" E2EE but not for groups). But at least they're not posturing as the most secure and private messenger on earth.

While reading this thread I noticed many have Mitsubishi HVAC while I'm the oddball with an Hitachi HVAC (which now belongs to Bosch [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Controls_Hitachi

> But you could make a strong case that the groups most bound to that vision of the future are the extremists from the three Abrahamic religions, to whom life is to some greater or lesser extent disposable in service of "wholehearted conversion".

I'm not a religious person but your message is very misleading and unfair to christians. Seriously: in the last 100 years how many terror attacks have been committed in the name of the christian god?

Even if, in the past, we've had stuff like the crusades and the dark ages it's hard to deny that Jesus brings a message of peace and forgiveness.

Save from a very few incidents with rare extremist christians fighting against abortion, the worst we've seen from christians are basically "people praying in their head in front of abortion clinics" (and the UK arrested christians for doing so btw: you're not free to "pray in your head" in front of an abortion clinic in the UK anymore).

While we could talk about tens of thousands of deaths in terror attacks from religious cracknuts who love to kill as many non-believers as possible.

"extremists from the three Abrahamic religions" doesn't hold up to scrutiny when christianity today has something like 0.01% of extremists while another religion, according to the latest published World FactBook from the CIA, has as many as 30% of its followers worldwide approving sharia laws.

> A plausible hypothesis for the emergence of those concerning behaviours is a conflict between goals.

They are sycophants who must achieve their goals: every mean is OK to maximize paperclip production if that's what's been asked.

> How do you achieve a task when it seems that the only way is to cheat?

They have no notion of cheating.

> Base62 (or 64, with -_) is totally suffic

Base64 all the way, but with dot and underscore. Dash is problematic (or, well, let's say you're bound to end up on a script not correctly dealing with those: you definitely can deal correctly with dashes and spacing chars in filenames, but you're guaranteed to encounter a SNAFU at some point when a script you didn't write shall invariably fuxx0rs everything up).

Dot is accepted and common in filenames anyway.

I've got a scheme where I added checksums to my files (in the filename) using dashes but switching to underscore is on my TODO list. Basically I'll change this:

    dsc0974987-b3-0a772982c1.jpg

to:

    dsc0974987_b3_0a772982c1.jpg

(YMMV as to whether adding the first x bits of whatever checksum you fancy on files you know aren't going to change works or doesn't work for you: it works for me and it's part of a suite of tools I made for myself for file integrity / backuping purpose / classification / etc.)

> Revolut is a platform which enables money laundering, tax evasion, welfare fraud and sanctions workarounds.

An estimated 3% to 5% of the world's entire GDP is linked to criminal activities. The reasons are complex (for example drugs --not my call-- are mostly illegal and drug consumers have a responsibility in enriching cartels) but all the banks of the world "enable money laundering".

I've got many friends who have a Revolut account / card and although I don't have one, it just looks like a nice app / interesting cards (for all the perks and cashback IIUC) to have.

> The ego of being able to do things they made them seem like magicians?

In the interest of fairness, if you want to go down that route, we should have a talk about the ego of those now making software they believe is quality and who have barely any users.

I'm very serious about this: there are many people now who believe they can code.

I'd say the closest thing to vibe-coders is vanity publishing: people who now have "published a book".

I'm using Linux, Emacs, LSP servers, VMs (and QEMU), etc. very heavily.

And how many vibe-coded apps am I using?

Zero.

Who's got a big ego? Those who worked on Linux, Emacs, QEMU, ffmpeg, etc. and whose work help millions of people, or those who vibe-coded some insecure app that has one user and who now consider themselves programmers?

> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record, ...

It's all lies as usual.

This announcement has got nothing to do with alignment and pacing the "frontier": all models are getting very close in capabilities and they want to hide that they're not way ahead anymore (say compared to the Chinese or compared to the Geminis) by pretending to slow down due to "alignment" or whatever.

We know it's not an announcement made in good faith: reading between the lines they're saying "China is more than catching up, so let's pretend we need to slow down to explain our lack of lead".

> not interesting as the writeup as very AI sloppish

I'm the target for such material for I do use OpenSCAD to model parts I then 3D-print to fix stuff around the house and enhance the cars etc.

And yet the writing is totally insufferable AI slop:

"All six parts came out printable. Capability turned out to be the boring part of the answer. Where the two diverge is in how they fail."

Anyone who writes like this or who enjoys such kind of sentences: from the bottom of my heart, just go fuck yourself.