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bryant

10,294 karma · joined June 30, 2015

Security/AI. Occasionally consult on films. he/him

If you have a specific question about r/relationship_advice, message me on Reddit instead.

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bryant··on Asbestosis
> Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.

I wonder how much of this is because folks in the supply chain might not be aware of what asbestos looks like.

bryant··on TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
For those who don't intuitively think in base 2,

2¹⁹ bytes, or 512KiB.

bryant··on Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients
Yeah fair enough. lol
bryant··on Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients
It's a pretty sad reflection of the times that there's a need to create a throwaway account to talk about long COVID symptoms, but this is a good personal anecdote to draw attention to what's likely happening. In my case, I only caught covid once - somepoint last year just before I would've gotten the updated booster. It took me well over a year to stop having acute pulmonary issues, and my lung performance is down year over year (measured during high intensity training) even though I finally feel no differently at baseline than I did before I caught it.

Most people don't exploit the full capacity of their bodies and so would never notice, which is essentially the point OP is making. This disease very likely ravaged the 20% claimed, but the vast majority may never know because they're just never pushing their bodies hard enough.

bryant··on U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report
> This is another article in a long tail of anti-American and anti-Western content that has been cropping up online for about two years now. It's getting to be a very popular subject.

1. Finland

2. Denmark

3. Iceland

4. Sweden

5. Netherlands

It's just an interesting assertion you're making, I suppose.

bryant··on Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
Imperialist here. Freedom fries was funny.
bryant··on Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
for what it's worth: add 9 degrees F (or 18 if it's easier to remember) for every 5 degrees C (10 C, easier), and peg 32F to 0C. You get:

-40F=-40C

-22F=-30C

-4F =-20C

14F =-10C

32F = 0C

50F = 10C

68F = 20C

86F = 30C

104F= 40C

and then approximate in between from there. It's quick enough for me now that I skip the 2x+30.

bryant··on Meta Ray-Ban Display
The biggest thing stopping me from getting these is knowing that a derivative of Meta's Orion AR prototype will release to manufacturing in the next few years, and this just feels like a stop-gap.

But the wrist/hand control is the thing that impressed me the most in today's release. I'd hope for this to go far beyond just the glasses.

bryant··on Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig
I don't think many people would mind a 1b acquihire to be honest.
bryant··on Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs
Probably an area for Cloudflare to offer it as a service. Content type X, blocked in [locales]. Advertised as a liability mitigation.
bryant··on Lab-grown salmon hits the menu
can you clarify your specific concerns around lab-grown salmon that you feel have not been accounted for with the regulatory review that was performed?

Referring to your "poisons the populace" comment. Do you have evidence substantiating your suggestion that lab-grown salmon will "poison" people? I'm substantially curious because as I understand it, the risk of heavy metal poisoning and parasites commonly found in wild salmon are eliminated when lab grown.

bryant··on OpenAI Progress
> to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others

This is a globally unique phrase, with nothing coming close other than this comment on the indexed web. It's also seemingly an original idea as I haven't heard anyone come close to describing a feeling (love or anything else) quite like this.

Food for thought. I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean.

bryant··on Mexico to US livestock trade halted due to screwworm spread
I misspelled "defunded" so that could be why.

I tease. Folks have strong opinions on the topic.

bryant··on Mexico to US livestock trade halted due to screwworm spread
https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/22636-bird-flu-screwworm...

> Among the GHS projects killed were some dedicated to *monitoring and containing avian flu and New World Screwworm in Central America, monitoring* avian flu outbreaks in Asia and improving the detection of new strains, and efforts to combat swine fever, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak frankly.

you might not have intended to mislead, but the cited source indicates that at least some were defined and thus halted, in partial contradiction to your line "Screwworm detection and prevention was not halted because of the USAID shutdown"

bryant··on Apple announces American Manufacturing Program
The comment below yours by njovin represents the likely truth: that this is another empty promise designed to carry Apple through to the end of this term before they can call the whole thing off with only mild losses.
bryant··on Wired Called Our AirGradient Monitor 'Not Recommended' over a Broken Display
> But they are never based upon any objective criteria, and are never (nor ever were intended to be) reproducible in any scientific fashion.

This is also why review aggregators exist: if I'm just getting into a thing, such as watching movies or buying appliances, I probably need a general sense of how people collectively feel about a thing. But if I'm keenly aware of my preferences, it helps me to find reviewers who align with how I think. People routinely seek out specific reviewers or specific publications for this reason.

For instance, someone reading this review might conclude "I really appreciate that ease of use is a topic that's front of mind with this reviewer." Another reviewer's focus might be customizability, and they might recommend AirGradient. And that reviewer's audience follows that person likely because those concerns are front of mind.

...to be honest, if AirGradient had responded more along those lines ("we prioritized X and Y. We understand if this isn't the best fit for customers looking for Z, but we're working on it"), it would've felt more empathetic and less combative to me.

bryant··on Wired Called Our AirGradient Monitor 'Not Recommended' over a Broken Display
This feels best summarized as:

• Product A has limited features but does them well. If the customer is okay with the features the product has, the reviewer can recommend it for this customer.

• Product B has more features but is impacted by QA issues as well as product design decisions that make those features harder to use. This impacts the ability of the customer to use features they might've paid for to use the product, and it may even impact their ability to use features core to other products. This potentially makes Product B less desirable for comparable use cases.

With this in mind, I'm inclined to agree with Wired's decision.

bryant··on Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says
If there's an argument to be made that the damages are too high (I'm not making this argument, to be clear), it might be with the compensatory damages prescribed by the jury at $129 million, but then that begs the question of what the cost of a human life is. Money won't bring someone back, but if you're in a courtroom and forced to calculate this figure, it's better to just overestimate IMO.

But the punitive damages at $200 million are appropriate — it's what the jury thought would be appropriate to discourage Tesla's behaviors.

bryant··on Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says
Do cars normally allow people to prevent emergency braking with the throttle depressed? I haven't actually tried this for obvious reasons, but if their defense is that the safety mechanisms were disengaged with the throttle being fully depressed...

(Clarified my comment to "prevent" from "override" since overrides broadly exist - per jeroenhd's comment - but it seems in this case the argument was that the feature never engaged)

bryant··on Tesla must pay portion of $329M damages after fatal Autopilot crash, jury says
This is by far the correct outcome. Given how long Tesla has been giving users the impression that the software would be superhuman (since 2013 with "Autopilot", and unrelatedly since 2016 with "full self driving"), they're overdue for the consequences, even if in this case they were only found partially liable.

The driver took the fair share of the blame for actually making the decision, but the driver's defense that a feature called "autopilot" would supposedly intervene is exactly the kind of marketing gimmick that needs to be penalized.

It shouldn't have taken injury and death to get to this point.

bryant··on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny
> This, eventually, woudl lead to lower prices for consumers...

What incentive would Amazon have to drop prices after vertical integration is done?

bryant··on AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
> And the people using it multiple times a year delete it afterwards?

The people wouldn't, but in the environments I'm thinking of, security policies might.

What you're leaning into is a high-risk backup strategy that would rely mostly on luck to get something remotely close to the current version back online. It's pretty reckless.

bryant··on AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
> If nobody has the repo checked out, what are the odds it's important?

Oh boy.

Tons of apps in maintenance mode run critical infrastructure and see few commits in a year.

bryant··on Online Collection of Keygen Music
> I've always wondered why that behaviour emerged..

Speculating: there may be parallels between this and other fields with entirely unnecessary artistic expression. Think watchmaking where watch movements with superlative finishing are celebrated and often command premium pay (e.g watches with the Geneva Seal). Beyond a certain point, the finishing adds absolutely nothing to the watch aside from showcasing talent.

There's something to the idea that if someone spent a ton of effort building something, even if it's superfluous, it garners a level of trust in the end product.

bryant··on Claude Jailbroken to Mint Unlimited Stripe Coupons
Companies are rushing or skipping a lot of required underlying security controls in a quest to be first or quick to market with what they think is transformative applications of AI. And so far, probably very few have gotten it right and generally only with serious spend.

For instance, how many companies do you think have played with dedicated identities for each instance of their agents? Let alone hard-restricting those identities (not via system prompts but with good old fashioned access controls) to only the data and functions they're supposed to be entitled to for just that session?

It's a pretty slim number. Only reason I'm not guessing zero is because it wouldn't surprise me if maybe one company got it right. But if there was a way to prove that nobody's doing this right, I'd bet money on it for laughs. These are things that in theory we should've been doing before AI happened, and yet it's all technical debt alongside every "low" or "medium" risk for most companies because up until now, no one could rationalize the spend.

bryant··on GLP-1s are breaking life insurance
People grew up making fun of others for being overweight. Suddenly a medication making it treatable (and possibly providing an explanation for why the prevalence of obesity skyrockets in developed countries) validates the idea that it's a medical condition.

Relatedly: it validates that people are assholes for making fun of others who are overweight. And not many people like feeling like an asshole.

Edit: starlevel004 is right.

bryant··on Grok 4 Heavy Protects it's System prompt
The 21st century has, among all the other craziness that's happened, proven that people do need to be told what to believe and why to believe it. Doing otherwise leaves a vacuum someone else will fill, often with assertions in an opposite direction.
bryant··on Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks
> It's most needed in areas with patchy or no internet, but those areas are likely to be the opposite of the areas with lots of participating devices.

In fairness to op, the proposed solution seems best intended for comms blackouts in densely populated areas rather than areas with persistently limited access.

bryant··on Vitamin C Boosts Epidermal Growth via DNA Demethylation
For those who don't want to Google:

• https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/jphy...

• https://www.pnas.org/content/106/21/8665

bryant··on Small language models are the future of agentic AI
A few weeks ago, I processed a product refund with Amazon via agent. It was simple, straightforward, and surprisingly obvious that it was backed by a language model based on how it responded to my frustration about it asking tons of questions. But in the end, it processed my refund without ever connecting me with a human being.

I don't know whether Amazon relies on LLMs or SLMs for this and for similar interactions, but it makes tons of financial sense to use SLMs for narrowly scoped agents. In use cases like customer service, the intelligence behind LLMs is all wasted on the task the agents are trained for.

Wouldn't surprise me if down the road we start suggesting role-specific SLMs rather than general LLMs as both an ethics- and security-risk mitigation too.

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