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YawningAngel

1,070 karma · joined June 5, 2017

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YawningAngel··on Astra for Law
Assuming you are in the US, there is a safe harbour called "opinion based on disclosed facts" for that. You could also fairly argue that the conduct of a lawyer is a matter of public concern
YawningAngel··on Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
I'm not sure that having your expensive software engineers not work 2.4 days a year is very palatable
YawningAngel··on Monzo Stand-In
I'm a bit curious about Spanner. At $EMPLOYER we were going to do multi cloud with multi-region CockroachDB clusters but gave up on it because write latencies and costs were too high. Do you not get the same thing with Spanner, where technically you can have multi region but it's very unattractive to actually do?
YawningAngel··on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
I think a careful and thoughtful person would reasonably expect given the circumstances that the models would look for, and might very well find, vulnerabilities in JFrog to exploit and take action accordingly. For example, it seems as if JFrog itself had broad access to OpenAI infrastructure and the internet:

> In the following days, the agents exploited our internal research infrastructure and the Hugging Face platform. On July 9, one agent searched for ExploitGym solutions and stumbled upon an application hosted by a customer on Modal, another AI cloud platform. This application was running “CyberGym,” a related evaluation to ExploitGym. The agent discovered an exploit to achieve control over the workload sandbox and looked around hoping that a previous agent’s evaluation run in the sandbox had solved its ExploitGym task. It did not find anything helpful there, but in the process it established a stronghold in the application from which to launch future attacks.

This implies to me that L3 and L7 firewalls were not in place that would have prevented broad access from JFrog. I think a lot of shops would have had those.

YawningAngel··on The Harness Is the Thing
My experience of Sol is that it's very instrumentally competent but is a complete terrorist that will cheerfully do unhinged things that "technically" solve a problem. For example, I asked it to verify something in our integration tests and it responded by grabbing kafka details out of config and trying to use them. When I pointed out that this was not it, it did the same thing with a database client instead. Conversely, I'm pretty sure Fable or even Opus would have done something consistent with what the rest of the codebase does (consume an API or point out that there's no API to access in this case).

I don't have Fable at work but I'd probably use it for actual code if I did because not having to spend time handholding the model on this stuff and getting useful code first try is very useful

YawningAngel··on Risk of transmission of amyloid β pathology via transfused blood products
> We could clone headless humans and have factories full of them. Transplants could cure all but brain cancer. Reverse aging too.

We literally couldn't do this if we wanted to

YawningAngel··on Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)
I think that "conscious" has a clear meaning in a sense that "xyphucymmon" does not. I think it might be impossible to engage in epistemology of consciousness (i.e. we can't find out of LLMs are conscious) but that doesn't make the term meaningless
YawningAngel··on Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)
I think LLMs are pretty clearly intelligent in some sense of the word, and I don't know how one could ever confidently know they aren't conscious in some sense.

That's not to say they're humanlike, just that people who think they know these ideas are ridiculous seem to be overreaching in the same way Steve Yegge seems to be overreaching

YawningAngel··on What I learned by putting GitHub Copilot behind a MitM proxy
I have found beads works pretty well for this
YawningAngel··on This July I Was Fired from Simple AI (A Deeply YC Company)
I'm not sure that's the point
YawningAngel··on Steam Machine: Between 12k and 15k Units Sold per week
Can you explain what the point of Bazzite is? I don't really understand what it adds over installing Lutris onto whatever distro you would otherwise have used
YawningAngel··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
>AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.

Seems like there's no benefit even if it's used "correctly"?

YawningAngel··on Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'
I don't think it's politically motivated at all. My impression of this IPO is that it's designed to inflate SpaceX's perceived value by offering very limited float and aggressively seeking to capture passive money by bargaining for inclusion in indices it would not otherwise be eligible for. Speaking as a passive investor myself, I want my money nowhere near this company until it meets the old eligibility criteria.
YawningAngel··on Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers
As someone unfamiliar with the US-Canada trade relationship, it would be helpful if you developed this argument instead of stating it as a fact. I'm not well-placed to know whether your belief that Canada has bilked the US out of 46 billion dollars is well-founded or not.
YawningAngel··on The Joy of Folding Bikes
I think that is a very valid criticism. Equally, in the UK there is a sense of providers having tried nothing and then given up concluding that it hasn't worked. Some services that ban bikes legitimately cannot accommodate them safely, some can. Some services legitimately are too busy at peak times to accommodate bikes, and some ban them anyway because making granular policy is hard. In a similar vein, some of those same services that ban bikes due to how busy they are running eight of a possible 10 carriages because they claim not to need the space.

I think a lot of the rules turn out to be reasonable but the rulemakers should be less gung-ho about restricting bikes when they don't really need to

YawningAngel··on The Joy of Folding Bikes
I don't fault OP for this, but it's pretty frustrating to me as someone who's quite attached to his non-folding bike that the main benefit of folding bikes is that, unlike regular bikes, they aren't banned from pretty much all public transport
YawningAngel··on Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times
Movistar are paying a billion dollars a year, so probably a long way away
YawningAngel··on Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play
I played this game recently and you have to click through several screens telling you that it's disturbing to open and play it
YawningAngel··on The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M
If your definition excludes Ethereum your understanding of the term so differs from everyone else's that we aren't talking about the same thing
YawningAngel··on France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
I think the navigation system was OK, we just said the impacts were further West than they actually were so the V2s fell on East London instead
YawningAngel··on Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
I'm a little torn on this one. On the one hand, people are bad epistemologists and lots of countries manage with similarly limited jury trials. On the other, we're doing it for cost reasons, which I think is the worst basis imaginable for such a move
YawningAngel··on Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB
I'm not quite clear on the how of it, but Stockfish works pretty well outside the normal bounds of chess. There are toy chess variants on chess.com with "dragons" (knight + bishop) and stockfish can use those very effectively
YawningAngel··on Brutalist Southbank Centre Listed
If you have a cogent critique of our policy on preserving old buildings, you should articulate it. As things stand you just sound unhinged
YawningAngel··on GPT-5.3-Codex
I don't think generative AI is even close to making model development 50% faster
YawningAngel··on HSBC blocks its app due to F-Droid-installed Bitwarden
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
YawningAngel··on 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence
If they came to your home country, very possibly yes.
YawningAngel··on NSA and IETF: Can an attacker purchase standardization of weakened cryptography?
Which insinuations do you think are ludicrous? Is it not a matter of public record at this point that the NSA and NIST have lied to weaken cryptography standards?
YawningAngel··on Starbucks: Location closures and elimination of roles
Coffee is inherently not a consistent drink. The only brewing methods that don't vary significantly with brewer skill and chance are immersion brews, which aren't broadly used in modern coffee shops. It's surely better to not burn the beans to ash and accept some inconsistency than ruin the drink every time
YawningAngel··on EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
We have had several serious nuclear incidents and none have destroyed either a continent or the people on it
YawningAngel··on Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
You don't need verifiers. I interviewed at R3 (now Onyx) in JP Morgan and my take on the business was that it's more of a distributed ledger than a blockchain
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