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ameliaquining

4,004 karma · joined July 6, 2016

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ameliaquining··on A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals
Third-party cybersecurity evaluations. See, e.g., https://www.irregular.com/research/assessing-gpt-5.6-sol, which was published around the same time.
ameliaquining··on A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals
We know for certain. The involvement of Irregular in the other cases was never a secret, they were quite open about what they were working on and the results of the evaluations were being published on their website.
ameliaquining··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
I might try Searchlight Cyber first (it's their service doing this, presumably without their knowledge), and then if that doesn't work go to AWS.
ameliaquining··on A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await
Zig doesn't currently have async/await in the sense that this post is about (i.e., async/await based on stackless coroutines). It previously had this, but it was removed last year (https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#async...).

The 0.16 release earlier this year introduced a much-heralded userland API (https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io) that can be used to implement various asynchrony and concurrency patterns, including green threads, but it can't do stackless coroutines because support for those has to be baked into the compiler.

There is currently an open proposal to bring back stackless coroutines without dedicated syntax (instead offering low-level bring-your-own-buffer APIs for interacting with suspended coroutines), which could be combined with the aforementioned userland API to produce something more like how async/await works in other languages (https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23446).

ameliaquining··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
Well, they could ask frontier labs to stop publishing math results. I find it telling that they stop short of explicitly doing this.
ameliaquining··on Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]
Scott Aaronson wrote a good post last week on how Hofstadter's theories of intelligence have held up: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10046

(The post primarily emphasizes self-referentiality rather than analogy, but I suspect similar things could be said about analogy.)

ameliaquining··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49614484.
ameliaquining··on Who People Talk to When They're Struggling
I feel like "large language model" should be on these graphs. For better or for worse, it's the answer to these questions for an increasing number of people.
ameliaquining··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Certainly, but the key word there is "somewhat". Progress is now happening so incredibly fast that I no longer know what to consider implausible.
ameliaquining··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Elaborate?
ameliaquining··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
If you're alleging that they don't actually have a highly capable model and the work they're attributing to it was actually plagiarized from human mathematicians, well, that would be big if true, but I'd be inclined to take the other side of that bet. With most previous splashy AI results, others have subsequently used the model to do other things around the same difficulty level. Also, it would still be necessary to explain why all these famous open problems are suddenly falling like dominoes, if it's not AI solving them.

If you're saying that the question of whether they actually have a highly capable model is less important than the question of whether there's a plagiarism scandal, I continue to disagree.

ameliaquining··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
There were also some people talking about the Hodge conjecture, because it has some similarities to some LLM-assisted breakthroughs that were considered impressive in the distant past of [checks notes] July 2026. See, e.g., https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/07/20/human-mathemati...
ameliaquining··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
I don't know what anyone's been saying on Twitter and I don't care. If it's really true that there's a model out there that's that capable two weeks after the start of training, then that's objectively a much bigger deal than a priority dispute, even if the latter involves juicy allegations of espionage and skulduggery.
ameliaquining··on Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory
I'm not a C++ expert. Why does C++ want all objects to have identities? Presumably it has some feature or something Rust doesn't have that requires this?
ameliaquining··on Xanadu was waiting for agents
This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing).

In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporated into the World Wide Web either solved problems no one actually had, or couldn't have constituted a stable equilibrium between users and publishers (i.e., even if it'd been magically willed into existence, it'd have quickly fallen apart). https://gwern.net/xanadu

ameliaquining··on We are rebuilding Monica
LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.
ameliaquining··on California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
GNU is not particularly relevant here either; age verification rules were never going to affect glibc, bash, coreutils, GCC, Emacs, or any other GNU packages that I'm aware of, and would have equally affected Linux distributions built without any of them. (You could imagine that in the future there's a mandate to somehow tie age verification into boot integrity mechanisms such that GRUB would be affected, but I don't think that was contemplated for the current round of regulations.) The projects I'm aware of that were affected were systemd and D-Bus, and even these didn't contemplate adding any actual age-verification stuff, just adding age-category fields to data schemas in case something else needed to use them.
ameliaquining··on The Twelve-Factor App (2025)
What updates were these?
ameliaquining··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
I'm looking at originality.ai and I'm suspicious. Their roundup of studies is largely ones from 2023 (and I don't think any AI detectors from 2023 actually worked), with a few newer ones that nonetheless don't include Pangram among the detectors that they're comparing (which I consider highly suspicious and possible evidence of cherry-picking). A quick internet search surfaces various anecdotes suggesting that originality.ai has a high rate of false positives compared to other detectors (and in particular doesn't highly prioritize making false positives rare).

I'm open to the idea of different norms for citing AI detectors, but someone needs to propose what they should be and they need to make sense.

ameliaquining··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
STT models just turn audio into text, though; they don't interpret what the text means or figure out how to translate it into other representations like function calls. You would use a general-purpose model for that.
ameliaquining··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/BFI_WP_2...
ameliaquining··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
Pangram says human: https://www.pangram.com/history/a69f9b74-eb46-44b9-a087-7822...
ameliaquining··on Gemini-3.5-Transcribe
"Function calling: The model can delegate complex tasks (such as image generation and file analysis) to other Gemini models via function calls. Currently available in the Gemini macOS app."

This confused the heck out of me because it makes it sound like the STT model can make function calls in order to execute arbitrary tasks, which wouldn't make any sense. The developer docs (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-tran...) confirm that the Gemini 3.5 Transcribe model cannot in fact make function calls. I guess the blog post is just using very confusing wording to describe how their consumer assistant/chatbot app can both take audio input via Gemini 3.5 Transcribe and then call other things as needed. Or maybe that bullet point was meant to be for a different model announcement and somebody made an editing error.

ameliaquining··on Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash
My objection has always been that advocates either can't or don't care to explain how such a thing would actually work from the perspective of a unionized engineer.
ameliaquining··on Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash
Are the employees supposed to front the capital themselves?
ameliaquining··on The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall
Yes, if the tech works but in a way that doesn't let the labs command premium prices for inference, then that also means a crash. But that's a fundamentals-based argument like Marcus's (despite being based in economics rather than ML science), so distinct from the one the article's mostly making.
ameliaquining··on The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall
Pangram confirms: https://www.pangram.com/history/9ccdf6ed-5016-4325-b1ac-b3b0...

I find it amusing that even the AI skeptic articles are written with AI these days.

ameliaquining··on The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall
Marcus believes that the underlying technology doesn't work. If that's true, then of course the whole thing will crash as soon as everyone realizes this.

This article is mostly making a different argument (though it contradicts itself in some places), which is that even if the underlying technology does work, and is ultimately going to create quadrillions of dollars of value and transform society, if it takes more than another 1–2 years for that to happen, then there'll still be a crash, because that's when the data center construction bills come due and the labs (especially OpenAI) don't yet have the money to pay them.

It argues primarily against a hypothetical optimist who believes that everything is fine because the cash flow numbers currently work out, on the grounds that this hypothetical optimist hasn't realized that the labs' recurring expenses are scheduled to spike in 1–2 years when the data centers come online and the labs have to start paying for them. It also spends a lot of words comparing the situation to the 2008 financial crisis, because that's everyone's favorite morality tale.

I am not sure that anyone is actually making this mistake (i.e., trying to predict the future by looking at labs' present cash flows). The better counterargument is what Matt Levine used to call "Netflix Theory": if the large capital investors who own stakes in the labs still believe in their valuations (which they should, if the technology works and the quadrillions are coming, which we're assuming here for the sake of argument), then they will be very highly motivated not to let their investment be seized by the labs' creditors. So the labs will not have too much difficulty raising or borrowing enough money to pay the bills.

ameliaquining··on The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
I consider it basically an accident of history that the first non-research languages to support ADTs were functional. (The first language to have them was actually CLU, which was imperative, but it was a research language.) There isn't really anything about ADTs that makes them incompatible with imperative languages.
ameliaquining··on Stop Making TUIs
The article anticipates and responds to this: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/08/20/stop-making-tuis/#:~:...
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