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ailef

821 karma · joined April 18, 2020

https://ailef.tech/
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ailef··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
Just like North Stream 2? /s
ailef··on We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer
> I wonder if it's a bug/issue with specific browsers.

Seems like it. It loaded near instantly as well from my Android smartphone using Firefox.

ailef··on Show HN: Before Upload – check files locally before sending them to AI tools
Hi HN!

I built Before Upload, a small browser-based tool that checks files before you upload them, in general, or specifically to AI tools.

The tool tries to identify mostly PII leaks (personal info, VAT codes, API keys/secrets) and prompt injection attacks and runs locally in the browser. There is no backend analysis, no account, and the file is not uploaded anywhere.

Right now it supports:

- DOCX

- XLSX

- PPTX

- PDF

- JPG / PNG

- TXT / Markdown / HTML

It's still early and definitely not perfect. Right now, I'm building an internal dataset as I go, with several examples of prompt injection attacks hidden in PDFs and other Office file formats and I'm working to improve detection against it. I'm also looking at the next possible features like OCR, bulk analysis, and others, but it's still not clear what direction to take.

Known limitations:

- no OCR yet;

- PDF hidden text detection is incomplete;

- prompt injection detection is rule-based and can be noisy;

- it can produce false positives, especially on AI/security documents;

The current version is more of a warning tool than a cleaner. There are a few toggles in the advanced settings to customize the search behaviour and e.g. disable prompt injection detection on visible text because it can generate a lot of false positives, especially if the text is technical and naturally contains instructions/code.

I'd really like feedback to understand whether people could find such a tool useful and in which environments.

Thanks!

ailef··on Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable
> Hitting companies with monetary fines does not work. Hitting the employees with jail time will make sure they don't sign on dangerous or known problematic systems.

What!? So, when you can't switch jobs because the market is bad or for any other reason, your choices are: 1) quit and lose the income (which you can't afford) or 2) sign on whatever and accept the risk of jail time?

ailef··on Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]
He didn't imply it's morally dubious, I just read it as "people have more pressing matters to direct their attention to than this".
ailef··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Notice the hypocrisy of the "explosions reported" title instead of "US bombs Venezuela".
ailef··on Ask HN: What are some comfy/stress-free jobs a SWE can do? (LCOL country)
Not paying rent is kind of a problem for most people.
ailef··on Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding
> We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss

Spring Boot is definitely opinionated (this is taken from their home page). Maybe not as much as RoR, but saying it isn't at all sounds very strange to me, having worked with it for a few years too...

ailef··on The Fulbright Program: Chock Full of Bright Ideas
To me it seems out of step with US foreign policy.
ailef··on Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good for democracy
The difference is you need a lot of training data to do that. Instead, now you can just tweak a system prompt and adapt it to whatever new policy you want to implement.
ailef··on Best place for small remote gigs?
Isn't it "hustle"? But since it's a hassle to hustle it kinda makes sense too.
ailef··on Ask HN: Thoughts on an AI agent that must make money to stay alive?
Prophetic bitcointalk thread from 2011:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53855.0

ailef··on Tell HN: Sites are bluffing with their cookie pop-ups
The cookies are for showing you targeted advertising. They are not related to the functioning of the website (except the necessary cookies).
ailef··on Ask HN: Is LLMs.txt a REAL thing now?
filetype:txt should do the trick!
ailef··on It doesn't cost much to improve someone's life
> The assessment that the US is more likely to invade another country than china is not ridiculous anymore

When was it ever?

ailef··on WikiTok
I've built something similar a few years ago, combining Wikipedia content and open domain pictures/videos to create long form videos automatically. Uploaded a bunch on YouTube as well. Wrote a blog post in case anyone is interested: http://ailef.tech/2020/04/29/turn-any-wikipedia-article-into...
ailef··on U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
ailef··on Ask HN: LLM agent to firewall vulnerable FOSS libs?
How would an LLM agent "block these security bugs at runtime" exactly?
ailef··on School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules
And your colleagues really spent a few days trying to figure this out?
ailef··on Ask HN: Kotlin SpringBoot vs. Python Django for Min Viable Product
Thanks! I think the Django one allows more stuff like e.g. layout customization. I haven't used it extensively so it was more of an assumption honestly! It's been around a long time and I just spent a couple months on my project instead.
ailef··on Ask HN: Kotlin SpringBoot vs. Python Django for Min Viable Product
For the admin part, check out http://snapadmin.dev

It's my open source project which provides similar functionality, although not nearly as complete (and as well maintained) as the Django alternative.

ailef··on LLMs for structured input validation
What would be the advantage of using an LLM here? As opposed to parsing/validating the input using any other technique (of it's a well defined format, where you have e.g. a grammar).
ailef··on The Untold Story of How US Spies Sabotaged Soviet Technology
Yes, because with all the history of coups, invasion and illegal wars the US is definitely the side that wants "peace and prosperity"...
ailef··on France high-speed rail traffic disrupted by 'malicious acts' on Olympic ceremony
If there's something you can easily say on HN without the slightest piece of evidence and without fear of being called out is implicating Russia in any situation like this.

This thread reads like a propaganda fair sponsored by Western governments.

ailef··on Ask HN: Any companies that are objectively trying to make the world better?
*in a perfect world with no monopolies, no information asymmetry and probably a dozen other caveats.
ailef··on Musk: "EU offered secret censorship deal to X. We didnt accept
There's no need to define it as hate speech, since the DSA purposely mentions a very vague "harmful speech/content" (not "hateful") which can in turn applied to whatever the EU sees fits.

For example, any objection to the current policies w.r.t the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be censored due to the DSA and this has happened recently to a prominent Italian YouTube influencer (Andrea Lombardi). His tweets were censored for his opinions about the Ukraine war.

How many other tweets are being removed which we don't know of because they are not coming from famous people who have channels to make themselves heard anyway?

ailef··on Ask HN: Are there ways to harvest FB group and subreddit content?
Reddit used to be really easy to scrape. I haven't really had the need to do it after the API changes drama, but the trick of appending `.json` to the URL apparently still works, example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWire/comments/1aqvtoz/every_year...

Not sure if this only works on posts or also entire subreddits.

ailef··on Ask HN: Retrieve full author names for a large volume of medical papers?
You write a text containing the JSON with all the data and instructions on how to analyze it and you instruct the LLM to extract what you're looking for (the "prompt"). The easiest way to start is probably the OpenAI API, or you can try one of the self-hosted LLM although I've never interacted with them programmatically.
ailef··on Ask HN: How can AI help as a shopping assistant?
These are all fair points I agree with. Let's just say I might've started writing code without thinking too deeply about the problem...

About the last point (slowness), this is definitely a problem right now. In my case, also retrieving the information from Amazon takes a sizeable amount of time; for the LLM part I think it can be optimized with finetuned models and performance will generally get better in the future. So maybe overall slowness is the easiest problem to solve.

ailef··on Show HN: An AI-Generated Encyclopedia
You can build stuff just for fun...
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