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brendoelfrendo

1,747 karma · joined April 5, 2020

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brendoelfrendo··on GrapheneOS in 2027 available on high-end Motorola phones
He's the head of Android ecosystem; who else is accountable?
brendoelfrendo··on Why tech bosses keep sharing their manifestos about AI
I think there's also a problem that some people -- even on here -- seem to think that there is no fundamental difference between how a human engages in conversation vs an LLM, and thus talking to humans doesn't provide much value. "How it feels" is starting to bleed into how some of us think about our interactions with each other.
brendoelfrendo··on Gloomberb
Yeah, I think a few of the widgets here are neat and useful. It's not a Bloomberg replacement, but it might be a good replacement for a few tabs? You could get the info elsewhere, but I like this presentation more.

Edit: Ah, they're offering a pro subscription. While I appreciate that cloud services aren't free, I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay to replace a few browser tabs. Not for me, but maybe for someone!

brendoelfrendo··on Gloomberb
I'm going to copy-paste one of the comments from ryukoposting higher up in the thread because I think it's relevant here:

> 2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"

You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.

brendoelfrendo··on U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
It did not, at least not for me. But that wasn't the question: the question was whether or not it was something I thought about as a freshman. It was, though I obviously can't prove one way or another if my concern for the future made a difference in my earnings out of school. I can only provide my own anecdata on the matter.
brendoelfrendo··on Mojo 1.0
Well, not really; people have long ignored overly corporate or low-effort news releases because. The presence of certain language or stock images is a signal (and I would argue a valid one) that the rest of the content is equally low-effort and not worthy of attention. AI images are just the newest version of that signal. I think it behooves the writers of these blog posts/news releases/community updates/etc. to reflect on why they continue to include these signals that their content is low-effort or low-value if they actually want their audience to read it.

Unless the idea is that, in 2026, you assume your audience is an LLM that is ingesting and summarizing your content for the end user and that no human will actually read what you wrote so you don't actually need to care about signals of quality or trustworthiness. The AI generated illustration seems kind of superfluous if that's the case, though.

brendoelfrendo··on Mojo 1.0
These AI illustrations are the nee "corporate Memphis." Images of flat, minimalist people in bold colors used to be the sign that whatever text accompanied them was low-value drivel. Nowadays, I associate the same with AI generated imagery. I'm not sure why the folks doing the writing (if, indeed, any of the writing was done by a human) don't seem to clock this when the audience seems to be able to catch on almost immediately.
brendoelfrendo··on U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
Yes? When I started college 16-ish years ago the '08 financial crisis was still fresh in my mind. Many of my peers were deeply concerned about the kinds of jobs and wages they could expect to find after graduation.
brendoelfrendo··on Show HN: Write.md – A free, open-source, themeable Markdown editor for macOS
It's funny that you say not many people outside of Linux/tech use that term when "ricing" started in car mod culture. It was used to describe the act of customizing your (typically Japanese import, hence the term "rice") car with an abundance of cosmetic mods, without investing in performance mods. So your car would look really sleek and custom on the surface, but it would still drive like a stock '94 Honda CR-X del Sol.

Before anyone asks: "race inspired cosmetic enhancement" is a backronym, not the origin of the phrase.

brendoelfrendo··on The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5
Ok, but why would we want that instead of a movie made by people?
brendoelfrendo··on Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs
I guess I'm confused; why would you, as an admin, want to allow your users to use less secure passwords? I get that your argument is that all traffic is local and so complex passwords are unnecessary (debatable, I would hold that a strong password policy would still be desirable for defense-in-depth, depending on the network and risk profile), but that doesn't make them undesirable.
brendoelfrendo··on Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation
Yes, the point being made is that poolside is able to train large models with limited resources, which means that Mistral should be able to compete in that space, as they have access to much greater resources than poolside. Mistral simply chooses not to.
brendoelfrendo··on Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion
Yes, you'll probably need to buy a specific tool or product to have secure key storage. If you're running infrastructure that requires long-lived secrets, then you either need to have a place to keep them and a plan for secrets lifecycle management, or you need to accept the risk that those secrets could be compromised.
brendoelfrendo··on Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion
I mean, they do happily explain the TailScale features that you can use to avoid this kind of issue, but the general advice of "don't leave long-lived keys lying around where they're accessible, do anything except for that" is pretty generic, good advice.
brendoelfrendo··on Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
I mean, I interpreted the comments to mean that it committed a felony based on research it performed after getting internet access. I don't want to attribute much agency to a machine here, but an AI agent is certainly capable of using tools and adjusting its behavior based on the outputs of those tools. Even if it was wrong, that wouldn't necessarily make it a hallucination.

Anyway, if you read TFA, you'd see that HF did actually have the answers: "While the intrusion did reach Hugging Face's internal infrastructure, the only customer content accessed was the set of ExploitGym/CyberGym challenge solutions stored in five datasets."

brendoelfrendo··on Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident
In OpenAI's writeup (https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-secur...) they explain that the model initially spent its efforts obtaining internet access in an attempt to cheat on the evaluation. Once it got that internet access, it was able to do research that lead it to believe that HuggingFace had infrastructure that hosted the evaluation and potentially had the answers.
brendoelfrendo··on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models
It's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.
brendoelfrendo··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
Which is kind of weird, imo. Shouldn't increased competition spur increased investment? If your competitor's product is approaching or beating yours on some metric, isn't the answer to improve your product to differentiate it from the competition? To say that open weight models will stop the flow of capital seems to indicate one of two things: 1) the frontier labs have no idea how to compete, so they are giving up; or 2) they figure that investors will eventually shrug and say "eh, the open weight stuff is good enough, no need to do more research," and retreat from the industry altogether. In the former case, it makes sense to lobby for regulation because the alternative is failure. In the latter, it's an admission that their product has no differentiating qualities from any other in the category and the product is more like a commodity or a utility and not a machine to print infinite wealth.
brendoelfrendo··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
I suppose it stands to reason: LLMs were trained on human writing, and overuse certain tropes and patterns because those patterns are commonly represented in human writing. But many people aren't particularly adept writers, and they're going to turn to AI to either do their writing or inform how they write. The trope ends up reinforcing itself as people just start to think that AI output is just what normal writing looks like.
brendoelfrendo··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
I might be a dog for all you know (though I neither confirm nor deny this), but I assure you I'm real.
brendoelfrendo··on I Built the Only 2026 WWII Jeep
Embarassed to say I didn't realize that Tracy had a new gig over at Autopian. Really pleased this article made it here because now I can see what he's been up to! This is a great place to start.
brendoelfrendo··on Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable
I think Oblivion's reception was mostly in relation to how people felt about Morrowind. Oblivion simplified a lot of what Morrowind did, which drew some ire. Atmospherically, though, people weren't happy that they moved from Morrowind's much more unique fantasy setting, full of massive fungi and swamp-striding bugs and weird demigods, and moved to a much more generic looking medieval countryside. That said, I also appreciate the game's reassessment, because I think some of the factions quest lines are among the best in the series.
brendoelfrendo··on Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming
Generally speaking, encyclopedias are tertiary sources, so that makes sense (though the line between secondary and tertiary sources is sometimes blurry)... but as you say, there are plenty of topics (a niche programming language under active development primarily by one guy is a good example) where the topic might be notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article but not widely discussed enough to have a good source other than the primary developer. I understand that "well the guy who made it said it" sounds like an obvious argument, but I also understand that Wikipedia is trying to maintain their role as an encyclopedia first and foremost. I'm not sure what the optimal path is.
brendoelfrendo··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
An NFT is superfluous here. If you buy a digital copy, and someone gives you DRM-free files that you can copy and run anywhere you'd like, you have about as much ownership as you can get over a digital good. In this case, an NFT would just serve as an entry in a crypto ledger that you bought the game... which is an alternative to running a digital storefront and tying game purchases to an account, but it doesn't really change the fact that you can only redownload something for so long as it is hosted at the place where you bought it.
brendoelfrendo··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
I don't buy every game on a physical disc—I don't see the point for live service games, for example—but I do have a fairly large collection of physical PS5 games because I like that assurance that I can continue to play that game forever. I guess what we see here is that after 2028 I have no reason to own a PlayStation ever again.
brendoelfrendo··on AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
You can only expand the economy so much by building yachts and bunkers.
brendoelfrendo··on AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
Unless that money is being spent on more tokens, it'll probably be used for stock buybacks.
brendoelfrendo··on Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers
They can buy a USB Fido token. I've had this argument with employers in the past; some states have laws that require the employer compensate employees for requiring the use of their personal mobile device, even for something as simple as MFA. There's no such thing as a free lunch: if you want to require an employee do something, you must be willing to pay for that capability. Ethically, I think all employers should be held to this standard. Legally, anyone who employs people in California, Montana, and I think Massachusetts must be aware of that standard.
brendoelfrendo··on The case for physical media ownership
I agree. I'm sure someone will try to split hairs and say that "well, buying a license is buying something, just maybe not the thing you wanted," to which I say, it should be disclosed up front. Simple as.
brendoelfrendo··on The case for physical media ownership
The legal reality is that you probably purchased a license, tied to your PlayStation account, and revocable at any time for any reason. You don't buy a movie, you buy access to watch it as many times as you want during the period in which it is licensed to you. This is, of course, bullshit; this doesn't or can't apply to a physical DVD, or even a DRM free digital copy, so it is a measurable step backwards for consumers.
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