bbor

  People might think I'm a dick, I don't care, my tools, my knowledge, my job security.

If you're feeling ponderous, I'd ask you to consider the outlandish hypothetical that this doesn't win you meaningful[1] job security, and you end up in the same bucket o' crabs as the rest of us. Would you regret your current actions?

[1]: anywhere from the fathomable "my harness didn't come up in my layoff email nor in any of my failed interviews following that" to the realistic "the entire concept of employment shifted under our feet so quickly and so profoundly that a dash of solidarity & luck outweighed even the shrewdest preparations".

You should check the provenance and licenses of your dependencies -- I bet there's a few irrational gifts in there from the nerds in the "open source" community ;)

Or, in SVese: are you a taker or a maker?

This is quite interesting and a very important side effect of AI if we survive long enough for it to matter, but am I reading the layperson prose right that the "Resy Wasn't having it"/"Resy suspends"/"Resy... shut down" language ultimately was just a bog-standard REST API rate limiter, in this case?

That's kinda funny if so, and captures the 2026H1 AI discourse beautifully: so many of the safety stories that broke through the vague rumble of datacenter & IP vitriol were ultimately just apps making extremely elementary mistakes. The guy who went viral because he claimed Railway's AI deleted his whole company, when the actual truth was that he had unencrypted keys on disk and was using snapshots as backups -- and they recovered the snapshot within 24h, anyway!

Similarly, the first sentence in this article becomes false as soon as someone implements a sane, intuitively-devious polling service that checks in irregular periods around 5-30 minutes rather than whatever this was, which was presumably over 60 requests an hour. So I wouldn't consider this solved. Hell, someone will probably read this comment and make it into the next YC batch with a company called NgtvXtrnlTs!

Apologies for distracting from the topic at hand, but as it's always on the mind: I already miss the days where unattended agents were liable to make such fundamental software engineering mistakes...

Replying to everyone to hack HackerNews' Gish Gallop feature (nulla poena sine lege!):

  Alignment is meaningless; as you've noticed, humans aren't all that "morally aligned".

Moral relativism is an attractive proposition when you first examine the topic, but it quickly falls apart; there's a reason it's not even a coherent camp in contemporary philosophy beyond some vagueities from radical post-modernists. Just to go over some of the greatest hits:

- Is what [DICTATOR/MURDERER/CRIMINAL] bad, or merely not to your taste? If the latter, then you have no coherent reason to argue they should be punished. We would never imprison people who don't like vanilla ice cream because 51% of the population does like it.

- If another culture had a deeply held belief to [HORRIBLE_THING] to, say, children, would you just shrug and say "different strokes for different folks"? What if [MURDERER] just had a different culture?

- No, the fact that nature is red in tooth and claw does not disprove morality; we are very, very, very far from our pre-rational, animalistic roots, and to go back now would be unthinkable.

  If the tool needs safety measures it should be kept in a safe enclosure like we do with CNC machines, furnaces, and so on.

Thousands of scientists have been studying this problem for 76 years now, going on 77; your hunch about physical machines does not overrule their findings about the capabilities and tendencies of minds wrought from sand.

  You didn't explain why it's illegal or why distillation is bad.

I think this is just blatantly false, likely based in a misunderstanding of criminal law vs. civil law. Civil courts still deal with legality.

The broader discussion of why distillation is bad and dangerous and immoral is left as an exercise for the reader, as it was above with the parenthetical. It's not a complex argument; I guarantee you understand it if you're reading this.

  Nulla poena sine lege?

The same thing as above -- the fact that laypeople can not think of a criminal charge that they've heard on Law & Order that corresponds to this behavior does not mean that it's legal. It's textbook fraud, regardless of what particular detail you focus on.

  I'm always wondering when "distillation" comes up how feasible it is, or if it's just BS... Or am I missing something here that makes real "distillation" feasible?

I think the fact that it's happening at such a large scale is proof that very smart, well-resourced labs in China (the producers of the world's best OS models, including the incredible GLM-5.3-Flash) think it's feasible. I'm not sure it's productive to question them in the absense of any indication to the contrary.

This is a great question still, not trying to shut you down. But I think the fundamental issue is a misunderstanding of what distillation is -- it's not directly stealing literal atomic parameters and piling them up. They might try to focus on substructures within these massive networks, but even that isn't strictly necessary for a distillation attack.

  Source for 1? Are we sure those aren't hallucinations?

Sorry, I never linked it! This is from the latest Anthropic safety report (of "Anthropic Houtis build missile" fame), and no, these cannot be hallucinated -- the leaked secrets were inputs, not ouputs. https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb...

  Like Anthropic and OpenAI are? After all, didn't they distill all the information in the world into their model(s)?

This is just blatant word games, sorry. I'm sure intended in good faith, and I understand the impulse -- I consider myself a radical anti-IP slacktivist, after all. But "both things involve information transfer" is just not a coherent point; lots of things fit that description.

  I mean, if they get to distill other's IP, why can't others distill their IP?

These are cyberattacks. Yes, anyone can cyberattack cyberattackers. But, y'know... an eye for an eye...

  Yes, wont somebody please think of the shareholders whose IP had been stolen...

I am not at all concerned with the value of the resulting artifacts as assessed by the (already totally unhinged) NYSE et. al. I am concerned about user respect, law following, truth telling, blatant cyber warfare at a time of rising tensions, accidental data leakages at a scale that'd be hard to fathom 5 years ago, bad-faith public postures, and a general distaste for fraud.

Replying to a massive, blatant cyberattack with "lol America would prolly do the same" is not helpful nor rational. I am under no illusions about the exceptionalism of my state, especially considering the ongoing fascist self-coup. That's not the end of this discussion, not by a long shot.

Well 1. GitHub is the broken & bad one, and 2. isn't that kind of on them? If they're getting a ton of requests that read data awkwardly, the fix seems like the quintessential data engineering task.

Are you joking...? Sorry if so! Just in case: It's illegal in both the PRC and the USA.

In the PRC, they[1] leaked tons of national secrets on the PRC's latest AI campaigns, the inner workings of their "opinion monitoring" (read: performative panopticon) and "stability" (read: violent oppression) departments, Chengdu's whole CCTV network, direct-energy weapons plans, espionage activities in Syria to hunt down Uyghur refugees, and god knows what else that Anthropic didn't divulge to us common folk.

In the US, it's very clearly an attempt to rip off a competitor. I'm not sure how else you could possibly see it. Even if you're a distillation fan in general (which A. why and B. plz don't), they did this through a network of Japanese and Signaporean shell accounts, presumably at least some of which were abusing Anthropic's subscription service in a ToS double-whammy, as it would be exorbitantly expensive otherwise. They also had to hack around Anthropic's API to get CoT traces, which seems impossible to explain away as anything innocent.

I've been beating the "China isn't necessarily an enemy, it's gonna take us all to handle AI" drum for literally years, but this attack was just... gross. Gross in scale and gross in arrogance. Not a good sign for the dawning alignment crisis, to say the least :(

TL;DR: Use these services if you want, but know that you're supporting aggressive escalations and companies that very clearly don't give a flying fuck about violating the law, much less your ToS. So... buyer beware, I guess.

[1]: For clarity, Z.ai was not alone in this, nor were they most egregious attack -- Moonshot.ai (kimi) took that coveted prize. DeepSeek was involved, too.

It's hard to know, since no one advertises the actual token limits (partially cause they're prolly complex / adaptive). So it seems much more likely that they just offer different pricing tiers than you're used to. Like, the $80 plan is still ~$80 of subscription quota, regardless of what else is offered.

For [API usage](https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3-flash#providers) they charge a bit more than the very cheapest providers of GLM-5.3-Flash, but not so much that a big price difference would make sense.

Well, other than the infrastructure they got from illegally routing millions of paying customers' requests through Anthropic's Opus 4.8 in a distillation attack...

ctrl+f 'safe'

ctrl+f 'danger'

Yup, we're all gonna die :(

ctrl+f for "distill" is pretty enlightening as to the bent of this publication, for better or worse. They do cover the idea to some extent, but mostly to dismiss threats from DC.

If the creator wanders through here: this is a fantastic presentation from a dataviz perspective, but next time it'd very much be worth the money to pay someone to rewrite 100% of the copy. The Claudisms are just impossible to ignore, and makes you constantly wonder "is this sentence hallucinated, or real?"

I originall clicked this to see discussion of safety, but I guess I'm not sure what I was expecting. Not sure what to say, either. I guess I just hope the mass casualty event that changes everyone's minds on this topic is in the thousands or tens of thousands instead of the millions or billions :(

You should try it out! There should be local stores around you, and many libraries set up an oculus corner.

Although IDK... "3D games" is a shockingly low bar. Can you watch movies...?

Please leave HN. Reddit misses you.

The exact same thing can be said of climate science though, and that one turned out to be very, very real.

The choice to teach the "opinion" vs. "fact" heuristic in middle school --and its consequences-- have been a disaster for human discourse

Your opinion is contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus. Hearing a plausible assertion should not be enough to believe it, friend.

Source? Just "that's a plausible motivation"? Cause that's pretty terrible proof.

Yeah it's either that or the scientists are right about their field of study. Absolutely shocking and depressing how many people are willing to trust this Capitalist Realism hunch over the world in front of their eyes.

Kagi is such an amazing team, building a truly next-level product. It's hard to realize what you're missing until you experience a real search engine for the first time in decades. It's wonderful.

As someone who has worked for Google Ads, I should say that they do review ads with both AI and humans, and do spend quite a bit of money and energy on finding and stopping both bad-faith advertisers ("buy side", what we see) and bad-faith publishers ("sell side", more of a scam on the advertisers/google itself).

Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.

Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)

I don't think it's related to AI, at least not originally. To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. The arms race of ad blockers and ad blocker blockers and such has created a world where people hate display ads, especially because they require so much creepy data to even work in the first place.

AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.

Sad to see such smart people with such small visions for the future.

  In mathematics, it is more natural to treat AI as an assistant rather than as a competitor. As Jeremy Avigad (2026) puts it, “We should keep in mind that AI is nothing more than technology, designed to serve our purposes. It is misguided to think of mathematicians as competing with AI; when we drive a car, we aren’t competing to see who can go faster, and when we use a phone, we aren’t competing to see who can speak louder.”

Like… surely I don’t need to explain why artificial minds are a unique invention?

That is the definition of an existential crisis, btw. I like the neologism too, tho

Ok but the first point is just not based in reality whatsoever, sorry.

No one points to that because there’s no evidence whatsoever that that’s happening. Meanwhile, there’s a ton of evidence for the simple explanation that the experts think AGI is dangerous.

Who would even execute such a plan? Steven Miller? Our “AI Czar”? Hegseth??

Also, continuing to develop models would mean using billions in compute. That seems hard to hide, especially if either company IPOs in the coming months.

The reactions here baffle me. How are we more concerned with being too harsh on Distillation attacks rather than the INSANE security news?

In brief: Anthropic casually relates that Kimi (Moonshot.ai), Alibaba, and DeepSeek used shared infra to route millions of their users requests through Claude Opus in order to distill the CoT transcripts, but they forgot to tell any other state corporations.

So, just from what Anthropic readily admits/has found, we know that the US military now has:

1. The full contents of a "Russian government database" from their "Ministry of Defense".

2. "internal code and live credentials from multiple major PRC companies, including high-profile technology companies".

3. "sensitive information, including, for example, the full specifications, organizational structure, and strategic objectives of a flagship [PRC] AI program"

4. A glimpse inside China's CCTV surveillence network, covering "hundreds of cameras in Chengdu".

5. "State-grade tradecraft" on the casual topic of "direct energy weapons", which is OSINT but still bound for "restricted internal circulation to senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP), military, or state security leadership."

6. Extensive information on Chinese spy networks in Syria, targeting Uyghurs.

7. Deep looks inside China's "stability maintenance" and "public opinion monitoring" operations, seemingly including quite a few specifics on both form and content.

And that's not even all of it. Isn't this the biggest AI-related foreign policy occurence since... well, ever? What am I missing?

Oh sorry I was unclear -- this 100% looks like a good faith blogger to me. The reddit posts are much, much lazier, and all using basically fresh accounts.

Yes, I read the 5-7 paragraph article :). I'm not sure what part of it you could possibly consider a rebuttal...? It's just talking about one devs decision to keep working on their purist software despite their anxiety; basically no broader points are made at all, and certainly none are made with any sort of rigor. It didn't seem like that was his goal.

This is a real blogger, right? Cause the iLands guy has also been spamming his screenshots with exactly this kind of "what's this weird thing?" framing all over Reddit the past 2-5 days -- I have the misfortune of being subscribed to basically every AI sub, and my god is it bad.

Sooo if you see iLands mentioned anywhere, please pass it along: it's trying to engagement hack you, in that exact moment.

So, I say to the creator: fuck off and stop doing so much harm for such a dumb, pointless idea. At best you're going to cause a major alignment incident, and at worst you're going to muddy the waters and cause tons of unnecessary suffering so that you can feel famous for a minute.

Hell... I wonder if this might be litigable (sp?) in ths US...? This would be a kinda awesome first test for applying existing laws to people trying to stand up ""persistent"" swarms while blatantly disregarding both AI safety principles and basic human decency. Anyone know one of the people about to testify in front of the senate? Or perhaps an ambitious state AG?

  Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments?

I'm sorry... I'm trying to be respectful, but I find this comment highly combative and disrespectful beneath a professional veneer. Implying that the opposition --people who also use deep neural networks to make games instead of just using the huge set of tools that no one human could ever understand in full but aren't usually called "AI" anymore-- is lacking in intrinsic value, deep thinking, or soul is typical, but the accusation that they're just bad-faith jerks who only care about being complimented is new and frankly absurd.

  Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?

I think it should be obvious in hindsight that this is a false dichotomy, to say the very least.

  Did you enjoy the code itself or the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life?

This part is also leaning hard on vague terms, on top of being another false dichotomy. Do I enjoy typing? Not particularly, tho vim is fun. Do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of "I would still love to make software even if I never got to run it"? Probably not, but who does? And finally, do I enjoy "coding" in the sense of engineering software? Yes of course, but isn't engineering intrinsically tied to specifications and their verification, AKA "the accomplishment of seeing your ideas brought to life"?

  it is worth it to throw large amount of human hours at proper code vs AI generated code if the quality is better.

This exact same argument applies to writing in assembly; just like in that historical case, the rebuttal is to point out how fleeting this situation is.

That is, how long at the current rate of progress until it's undeniable that properly-engineered agential code is as good or better than hand-written stuff? Is all code made exactly the same because of heavenly decree, or can agents help write unit tests n such? If you insist that regularly writing C++ files directly is something special that can never be effectively automated, isn't it a little weird that you just happened to be born just in time to pick up on the very last iteration of software engineering?

*TL;DR:* you're inventing an imagined enemy who hates thinking and joy, unlike the noble, serene folk who choose the hard, true, right way. And that's a really antisocial and isolating thing to do, when it's based on nothing.