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fortenforge

769 karma · joined March 12, 2015

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fortenforge··on Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MIT
Note that it seems increasingly unlikely that it was actually synthesized.

> Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized.

> while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury.

Taken from https://emergency.mit.edu/

fortenforge··on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs
Perhaps not the best example to choose given that the president managed to fully ignore that law. Tik-Tok remains unbanned to this day despite there being no sale.
fortenforge··on Slouching towards San Francisco
The absolute gall of this person, who is a 2 year transplant from Chicago, to cast aspersions on the tech industry. Their evidence of our wrongdoing?

* We own the wrong books

* We pay both too much and too little in taxes

* We support "right wing" pressure groups like GrowSF and "right wing" politicians like Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood

* We are eager to extend technical expertise to societal problems

SF has its problems, but they are largely problems of success. It is much, much better off than cities like Detroit whose main industries are experiencing slow declines.

fortenforge··on Codeium launches Windsurf – the first agentic IDE
One of the cooler features in Windsurf is Cascade, sort of an agent powered by an LLM that you can talk to and can make changes to your codebase.

Here's an example of me using Cascade to solve a CTF challenge: https://youtu.be/LbYepFmVB20

fortenforge··on Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
Eh not quite. Famously, you can fork VSCode, but you can't use the VSCode Extension Marketplace if you do, which loses a lot of the network effect benefits of the VSCode ecosystem. (As far as I know Cursor is flat out violating Microsoft's terms of service with respect to the extension marketplace).
fortenforge··on Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT
Codeium has extensions for all the major IDEs, including IDEA.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-codeium-ai-autoco...

fortenforge··on Microsoft CTO: Thoughts on OpenAI (2019)
How would Google have access to Microsoft's emails?
fortenforge··on Microsoft CTO: Thoughts on OpenAI (2019)
These emails were released as part of the antitrust lawsuit against Google currently being pursued by the FTC. It seems to me that contrary to the FTC's claims about how Google's monopoly power leads it to stop innovating, exactly the opposite is true. If Google had stopped innovating it's clear that Bing eventually would have caught up in terms of quality. As these emails make clear though, Google kept its lead by continuing to invest in cutting-edge AI research.

Indeed, if anything it's Microsoft who should be scrutinized.

fortenforge··on Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight
I think this airplane is not the best way to experience full totality—especially if it's your first time seeing a total solar eclipse. There still should be plenty of opportunities to see the eclipse from the ground in April!
fortenforge··on Math Team
The author mentions at one point that he was unable to solve a problem because he didn't memorize the formula for the Euler totient function in order to count the number of numbers relatively prime to 9999.

...but its actually an interesting (and not super difficult) exercise in its own right to figure this out even if you don't know the formula. Encourage you all to give it a shot.

SPOILERS: 9999 = 3^2 * 11 * 101, so first subtract out the multiples of 3 (3333 of them), the multiples of 11 (909 of them), the multiples of 101 (99 of them). Note that we've now double-subtracted multiples of 33 (303 of them), multiples of 303 (33 of them), multiples of 1111 (9 of them) so add these back. Finally subtract 1 to not count 9999 itself.

phi(9999) = 9999 - 3333 - 909 - 101 + 33 + 303 + 9 - 1 = 6000

I guess my point is that the purpose of these problems is not to separate out people who know specific tricks from people who don't—its to separate out people who can reason their way through difficult mathematical problems and people who can't.

fortenforge··on Crockford on JSON license (2011)
Cryptographers often tell software engineers that they shouldn't roll their own crypto. I think lawyers would tell software engineers that they shouldn't roll their own license. If you really intend or want other people to be able to use the software you wrote, for the love of god please pick a sane, well-known license so that people can use your software with full knowledge of the legal implications.
fortenforge··on Proof you can do hard things
I don't want to be overly rude, but this is nonsense. The reason to learn calculus is that it's incredibly useful in several domains and never learning it prevents you from become a skilled practitioner in those domains which in turn reduces your future earning potential.

Basically: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...

fortenforge··on UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation
If you make it harder for startups to achieve profitable exits does that incentivize or disincentivize innovation?
fortenforge··on Aspartame sweetener to be declared possible cancer risk by WHO, say reports
Actually "working overnight" is "probably carcinogenic" which is a higher evidentiary standard than Aspartame which is "possibly carcinogenic".

Basically these WHO cancer guidelines are entirely useless in terms of public health and have probably done as much harm as Prop 65 has in California.

fortenforge··on The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
I came away with the exact same takeaway. If you really want to convince people that content moderation is a hard problem, just ask them to listen to this Radiolab episode about Facebook's struggle: https://radiolab.org/podcast/post-no-evil

It's much more convincing.

fortenforge··on The Geomagnetic Storm Continues
Is it actually feasible to see the Northern Lights within driving distance of the bay area or should I not bother?
fortenforge··on Vesuvius Challenge
This was the outcome of https://nat.org/puzzle

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33735503

Some did guess correctly that it was about decoding the Herculaneum papyri

fortenforge··on Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC
There is some sense in which this is true, but the systemic risk exception which they are invoking was always on the books.
fortenforge··on The US Supreme Court doesn’t understand the internet
I encourage anyone who thinks the Supreme Court is composed of 9 wordcel idiots who can't possibly understand anything about computers to read their opinion in Google v. Oracle [1]. It's very readable and well-argued. It's like a reverse Gell-Mann amnesia—clearly the author of the draft understands the issues at play quite well.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

fortenforge··on Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
Does PG ever think it's a bad time to start a startup?
fortenforge··on Copilot Internals
Their JetBrains plugin is written in Kotlin / Java but it spins up a agent server written in node.js which handles the business logic (building the prompt, caching, making completion requests to their API). I assume most of the code is shared between the VSCode extension and this javascript agent.
fortenforge··on Show HN: Codeium – a free, fast AI codegen extension
If you start the function you're trying to write (just by writing `def` on a new line), you should usually be able to get it to start implementing it.

You can see alternate suggestions on VSCode by hitting Option + [. We don't currently support seeing alternate suggestions on JetBrains IDEs, but we're working on it!

fortenforge··on “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
Further reading on this subject: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/05/16/agility.html
fortenforge··on ImageNet contains naturally occurring Apple NeuralHash collisions
The hashes sent to the client are cryptographically blinded, making it impossible for the client to determine the original CSAM hashes.
fortenforge··on Hash collision in Apple NeuralHash model
I don't think that's true. This was a second pre-image attack.
fortenforge··on Hash collision in Apple NeuralHash model
No, I don't think that's what we're witnessing. No one has yet demonstrated that they can take a hash alone and produce an image that matches the hash. It's true that that would be bad, but right now you still need the original colliding image.
fortenforge··on The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
Where does the constitution come into play here? This is a private company scanning content uploaded to its own servers.
fortenforge··on The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
> How will Apple know whether a hash is for non-CSAM content? Spoiler alert: they won’t.

As I said, the flagged content is reviewed by an Apple employee before it actually triggers an external report. If the flagged material is not in fact CSAM, it will not be reported.

> And Apple claims it will be reviewed by a human. Sure, just like YouTube copyright claims? Or will it get automated in the near future? And what about in China? Or Saudi Arabia or other countries with less human rights?

First of all, the volume of flagged CSAM content is much, much smaller than the volume of YouTube copyright claims. It's entirely plausible to ensure that a human reviews all flags. Second, Apple is actually constitutionally-barred from automating this step entirely. You can thank Neil Gorsuch's decision in United States v. Ackerman for this. [1] The crux is that since NCMEC is a qausi-governmental entity, automatically sending CSAM-matched content to NCMEC without an Apple employee first inspecting the content would constitute an unreasonable search and seizure and would violate the 4th amendment.

[1] https://library.law.virginia.edu/gorsuchproject/united-state...

fortenforge··on The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
If a small circle of people only share not-already-known CSAM content among themselves and never share known CSAM material then there is no way that Apple's scheme can catch them.

However, if at any point one of them screws up and shares a known CSAM image, the entire ring can be caught. This is not actually an implausible scenario. See for example: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1424037132201431045?s=...

fortenforge··on The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
This is untrue. The same photos being used by Apple for this scheme are already in use for CSAM scanning by many major platforms (Google, Facebook, Microsoft).

If someone wanted to generate a false positive image, they could already leverage it on these other platforms.

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