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biosboiii

294 karma · joined July 6, 2022

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biosboiii··on The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
My boss-boss asked me to do a presentation on a topic I actively research for quite a while now.

Scheduled a quick call to align me on what he expects - normally he wouldn't do that but he has attached a big agenda written by Claude what the presentation could show, and invited two other product colleagues of mine.

I came to a Miro board of the Claude Agenda, put into Miro using the MCP.

Honestly, just tiring. Asked my colleagues if they would just put the Claude agenda into Miro with Claude, what they need me for when an AI could just narrate it.

biosboiii··on Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Somebody should throw molotov cocktails at the contributors of CommonCrawl[1], for they have "stolen" from "the people". /s obv.

It never ceases to amaze me how people affirm the concept of intellectual property, enforced by states, while maintaining "exceptions" that are fundamentally incompatible with the very concept of what they are upholding.

Disney (big corp!) copies a small artist's work? The law shall strike them down!

A small artists uses some symbol of Disney, which claims copyright infringement? So mean! They are abusing the law!

Maybe the discontent people feel with AI companies is a more fundamental one: Corporations compete to cut costs and increase profits. You cannot outperform other corporations on the long-term by sourcing cheaper materials; the cost-cutting is mainly targeted towards the human labour; the commodity of human labour bears a cost, but you can also command them to perform more work, increasing the "performance"; so companies naturally want high-output employees that cost as little as possible, to compete and exist on the market.

AI companies now claim to be developing a product which can replace cognitive human labour on a massive scale; companies find the advent of hiring less humans that perform more work very advantageous, skyrocketing the expected returns of said AI companies. Capital flows en masse into these companies because they may be integrated into the value chain of virtually all companies.

This calculation is the ruling concept of the entire "free world". To exist in said world you must prove some utility to this societal process of turning money into more money, in some way or the other.

Many people that managed to score a "good" job, cognitive work, now feel threatened by the AI companies that are poised to develop models that enables their employers to fire them/reduce their salary.

Your material life (housing, food) depend on jobs, which only exist as a cost factor in the profit calculation of your employer. All research and development serves this principle, to recoup the spent funds.

When Andreessen claimed that "software will eat the world", he said that software companies will replace many/most other industries like manufacturing, real estate, taxi drivers.

Many HN'ers bought into the hype, loved "Big Data", millions started university degrees in something with "Data". They may have dreamed of that FAANG salary, six figures, live in SF, home office etc.

The entire promise of that silicon valley hype cycle was that they will be putting millions of people out of work, casting their daily work into inherently superior software applications, and gaining a advantage over all other competitors by "harnessing data". That did not work too well, see Zillow, now the tech industry eat's itself: The transformer will think for you, and therefore you must hire fewer thinkers.

If you refuse to criticize or even acknowledge that your job, that many people cling to, is only a product of competition that inherently produces winners and losers.

If you don't find that bad in any way shape or form, if you only complain about ending up with the losers (the permanent undercaste), I'll say: "No crying in the casino."

[1] https://commoncrawl.org/

biosboiii··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
If you run a rooted phone and download malware, that malware can gain root and do payments on your behalf. Then PayPal has to deal with you revoking payments etc., they don't want to so they forbid you from using PayPal on a rooted phone.
biosboiii··on As More Americans Turn to Cannabis, Problem Use Is Increasing
https://archive.is/ZMhSa

related thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40513127

biosboiii··on Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
https://archive.is/lAv5K
biosboiii··on LLMs won't break symmetric crypto
why break RSA or AES when you can just subpoena/hack Cloudflare?
biosboiii··on Linux on ESP32
>Espressif's radio firmware blobs are closed source, and must run within ESP-IDF's FreeRTOS framework. It's near impossible to reverse-engineer them (not to mention legal risks.)

It's not nearly impossible, it has already been done :)

Slides: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/media/...

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8IqkUTGjlA

biosboiii··on Blatant AI slop just won a 25k USD DeepMind Kaggle Grand Prize
LLM-as-a-judge?

Given that LLMs are trained with RL && LLM-as-a-judge, is it really cheating if real competitions use the same?

Maybe the real alignment is the slop we decoded along the way

biosboiii··on German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
There are agencies in Germany where you can buy review removals in a web shop for like 50 euros per review.

You just have to link the review and they will send Google a legal document to delete it.

biosboiii··on EY Canada published a cybersecurity report and most citations were hallucinated
I guess this is a great report, but the parallax landing page shenanigans disrupt my reading flow, you cannot easily scroll back to get a overview of the key facts, so I stopped.
biosboiii··on GeoJSON
I love GeoJSON :) You can bring any Geo/GIS from 0 to visualization by just parsing it into GeoJSON.

geojson.io is a great editor/viewer by Mapbox. Also https://kepler.gl/demo is great for additional filtering, visualizations like heatmaps, arcs etc.

A extension to GeoJSON that works with JSONL-like semantics would be great for huge files, but this could also be solved by tiling.

biosboiii··on Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?
fyi: modern vehicles are required to have a e(mergency)Call function (UNECE UN-R 144), therefore all of these cars have a modem with a unique IMEI (that is typically bound to a VIN), therefore you can track the movements of every car pretty precisely.

Disabling the eCall is not possible, and doing so (in the EU) would void your car's registration.

biosboiii··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
after 2+ years of non-engineers vibecoding applications, show me one startup/app without devs.
biosboiii··on Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?
TIL: Generally all plastics exposed to UV start to photodegrade. If you google why old computers turn particularly yellow most sources point to bromine-based flame retardant agents in the plastic, but some people make a convincing case[1] that ABS just naturally turns yellow in UV light.

Not much real research into that topic, interestingly.

[1] https://medium.com/@pueojit/a-look-into-the-yellowing-and-de...

biosboiii··on Open source ballistic simulator with NASA SRTM terrain masking (Python/C#)
Holy slop.

Not only is the README.md largely written by a LLM (:emoji: :emoji:), the repo does not contain a single folder but 25 files (.py, .csproj, .png ...) , many of them 0 bytes.

biosboiii··on GTFOBins
they should finetune the LLMs with this
biosboiii··on We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities
Tor on Chromium, when?

Seriously, I am saddened that Chromium dominates the browser market as much as it does, but at this point the herd-immunity of Chromium is necessary to keep users safe.

biosboiii··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
This feels a lot like X/Twitter nowadays lmao
biosboiii··on The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge
The most interesting takeaway from this project and the Mac touchpad actually measuring it's pressure in grams[1] is how Apple seems to prioritise it's ability to deliver new features in later software releases rather than their BOM.

I work in the automotive industry, and for volume products the price-cutting is really brutal. If you can save a cent somewhere you will, because that cent multiplied by 8 million cars a year is a sizeable amount of money.

This seems to be generally true for most OEMs of hardware products, but not for Apple. Apple could have cut costs by just using a magnet and a reed switch/hall effect sensor, because it is not using the exact angle of the screen anyway (afaik?), but they chose not to.

They could have implemented their "3d Touch" by using a simpler circuit which just indicates if the press was really hard or soft. But again they chose not too.

And they sell over 20 million Macs per year, so they really sacrifice a sizeable amount of profit

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44635808

biosboiii··on Anduril's product engineering machine
What is a cocaine-fueled "amusement park" to Silicon Valley techbros is another humans hell. I look forward to you guys joining it.

>I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.

>When the skies brighten, though, the drones return, and so too does the fear.

Zubair, 13 yrs old https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...

biosboiii··on iOS 18.6.1 0-click RCE POC
Also crashes my MacOS Sequoia 15.3.1 Preview App :) https://gist.github.com/AltayAkkus/524acec2b16d4536af0fcee2f...
biosboiii··on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels
Great work!

I was working on something similiar, using ReVanced(1) Framework, which allows you to distribute fuzzy tweaks to regular APKs with their ReVanced Manager(2) which can persist multiple version updates.

They have their own DSL (3), kinda.

My target was Instagram Reels, I did not come that far with JADX in finding the appropriate methods/attributes to overwrite because I kept getting stuck scrolling reels on my Android Emulator.

Novel obfuscation technique by Meta :/

(1) https://github.com/revanced

(2) https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager

(3) https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-patcher/blob/main/docs/...

biosboiii··on Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B
I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.

Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).

Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.

biosboiii··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
difficulty level: google search
biosboiii··on Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
2075 HN: Ask HN: Any active Java devs here? What LLM do you use?
biosboiii··on At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
I am sorry but this is insane cope, Amazon is still on-top everywhere, also in Europe.
biosboiii··on Hyperview – Native mobile apps, as easy as creating a website
As a reverse-engineer tinkering with iOS this reminded me of some system apps.

E.g. in the app store you click a button, send a request, receive the response which contains a xml-like structure describing the UI mutation to your action.

<Alert>

   <Header>iTunes Login</Header>

   <Body>We could not find a user with those credentials.</Body>
</Alert>

type stuff.

biosboiii··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
My profile is largely unused, I follow no one, and like 1/3 times I open up the front page I get straight holocaust denial threads suggested. Completely insane.
biosboiii··on Extracting AI models from mobile apps
Yeah, you can basically just unzip IPA files. Gaining them is hard though, I have a pathway if you are interested.

But the Objective C code is actually compiled, and decompilation is a lot harder than with the JVM languages on Android.

My next article will be about CoreML on iOS, doing the same exact thing :)

biosboiii··on Extracting AI models from mobile apps
You're right about the TPM, I won't get the key out of it. It's a special ASIC which doesn't even have the silicon gates to give me the key.

But is the TPM doing matrix-mulitiplication at 1.3 Petaflops?

Or are you just sending the encrypted file to the TPM, getting the unencrypted file back from it, which I can intercept, be it on SPI or by gaining higher privileges on the core itself? Just like with this app but down lower?

Whatever core executes the multiplications will be vulnerable by some way or the other, for an motivated attacker which has the proper resources. This is true for every hardware device, but the attack vector of someone jailbreaking a Nintendo Switch by using a electron microscope and a ion-beam miller is neglectable.

If you are that paranoid about AI models being stolen, they are worth it, so some attacker will have enough motivation to power through.

Stealing the private key out of a GPU which allows you steal a lot of valuable AI models is break-once-break-everywhere.

Apple trusted enclave is also just a TPM with other branding, or maybe a HSM dunno.

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