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gorgolo

45 karma · joined November 12, 2025

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gorgolo··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
Probably wasn’t a human operator at all that detected this. Just someone’s agent saying “I noticed there’s messages on the artifactory and the agents are communicating, here’s the fix I propose” from someone’s codex, skim read and someone just going “yeah sure go ahead”
gorgolo··on OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem
Why is it wasteful to solve one of the most famous problems in modern mathematics? And why would one particular company have no business solving it in the first place?
gorgolo··on Extinct Tasmanian tiger's 'snap' unlike any living mammal's bite
Based on the nearby text I believe the right skull is a fox. And yeah the middle skull is then the Tasmanian tiger, with the narrow concave snout.
gorgolo··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
> That theorem statement is correctly encoded (FLT has a very short 1 liner description really)

As someone not very familiar with Lean, does it really just depend on the entry point / theorem being correctly encoded? Can intermediate statements ever be mis encoded or misinterpreted, or is this what would count as a “bug in the Lean compiler”?

gorgolo··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
Never heard about this before but it sounds crazy. Are you able to control this somehow, like reject business cards?
gorgolo··on A week of using Codex more than Claude
I’ve been using codex more recently, like others here.

But one thing I’ve noticed which I find a bit of a red flag: by default you only archive chats. If you go online, it says there’s a location in settings where can delete your archive. But it’s not that obvious where to find, and when I finally find some link, it was literally broken. It said it can’t find any archived chats, even though I archive them all the time.

Bit of a red flag for me. Both Anthropic and OpenAI claim that when you delete a chat, it’s gone after some retention period. They’re just words but if they’re secretly training on your traces and you delete your chats, then they would need to break two terms/conditions: ignoring your “train on my data” preference and ignoring your orders to delete chats. So it is an extra barrier.

But OpenAI, as far as I can tell, doesn’t let you delete your chats. Convenient then if they change their mind about training sometime in the future.

gorgolo··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
I feel like I’m arguing against the grain here, and it seems to me like there’s a lot of emotion around this topic. I’m not even a defender of AI billionaires. I just posted because I see this type of discussion around SA recently and it’s mistaken. So I’ll just leave this comment, and it goes for the other replies too.

What happened to SA is not what anyone would call “a fund folding”. Normally you’d assume folding means the fund went bankrupt, or closed at a loss.

This fund is not closing and not on a loss. It’s not bankrupt, and apparently it is opening up new positions and continuing to invest in its main theme last I saw it in the news.

It is on a major drawdown from its peak a few months ago, but it’s still up for the year, most of its investors are likely well in the positive. If you make a huge investment and it goes up 5x before trimming its gains and ending up 100%, you’ll be annoyed, you’ll wish you sold at the top, but you’ve still doubled your money.

Getting margin called and closed this way is not the same as going bankrupt.

gorgolo··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
His fund didn’t fold btw. They sold / were forced to sell a position that was several hundred percent up at a very very bad price relative to peak. AFAIK the fund is still up on the year though.
gorgolo··on I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
They will also want to beam back the response straight back into your brain one day.
gorgolo··on Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
I don’t think users (as in the general population) have a good track record of being judicious with how they share data. In the past with social media etc it was consistently the opposite, if the price is lower or free people tick any box and hand of all their personal data. Might turn out the same here too no?

Not arguing against on-device LLMs, I also wish it were so.

gorgolo··on The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
Surprised so few are pushing back against some of the claims in this article.

Eg that the entire surface of the earth gets replaced in a million years by tectonics.

Many of the large plates are more than 1000km across, they’d need to be moving meters per year for that to happen. In reality it’s cm per year. Also typically it’s oceanic plates that get subducted and take material under the crust, not continental plates. If it were true, then how do we see dinosaur fossils, and creatures even older than that; how do we find rocks that are over a billion years old.

This doesnt reject the possibility that there was a civilization tens of millions of years ago, but it makes the article hard to take seriously. If you’re gonna spend time writing an article on this you might as well try to research it a bit more. Someone is gonna read this and repeat this nonsense like it’s some fun trivia.

gorgolo··on Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
Banks don’t do this because of profit. They do it because of decades of laws pushing in this direction. Anti-money laundering, know your customer, digitalised currency, abandoning cash, preventing tax evasion etc… it’s been getting more extensive over time.
gorgolo··on Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity
Not trying to be a cynic, but I think you’ve got a bit of a rosy view of what happened and what is happening.

Concerning past wars: yes there were enormous protests. Just like today, many people disagreed with what was happening. But the same was true in the US; many Americans also disagreed with the Iraq war. There was an entire Bush vs Kerry election on that theme. In the end though, there’s a difference between what normal citizens are saying, and what the country actually does. This applies to both the US and Europe. With Iraq, despite all these protests, the majority of European states actually joined the war, with a few standout exceptions like the neutral states and France/Germany. And then they joined the US in several more regime change operations over the following two decades (and with these somehow the IS didn’t even seem like the main cheerleader).

With Iran now, there’s what normal people say and what politicians say and do. I haven’t seen any of the major leaders actually condemn the war apart from Spain. Most tweets are along the lines if “we are watching with concern but we agree something had to be done”. Macron only piped up against it like a month in, and that seemed as much related to Trump insulting his wife as it was to the war itself.

EU is the third largest economy and has 450m people. If they genuinely wanted to do something about this, about their oil being cut off and all the rest of it, they would have.

On Gaza too. Despite the large protests, and there are a few small nations plus Spain being vocal about it, but what concrete actions has the EU and European nations taken on Gaza? And have you actually seen the UK and German government responses to the protests?

gorgolo··on Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity
I’m not from the US and not trying to defend the US actions, but on Iraq and Gaza, much of Europe takes the same position and goes along with it (and even directly joined the wars and sent troops).

I find the online opinion on Europe / US relations interesting. Online you’d think Europe and US are about to split. But in real life, Europe is more dependent on the US than ever. In terms of energy (Russian fossil fuels basically replaced by US fossil fuels), defense, economy (European economy relatively smaller now than 20 yrs ago), and they just finished signing very one sided deals where they guarantee energy purchases and investment after the tariff war. I think there’s a disconnect between European commenters and European politicians.

gorgolo··on Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.

I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).

I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.

gorgolo··on Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment
If someone is willing to fund you with a 100y bond, and it gives you extra cash to move even a bit faster, it sounds like a pretty good deal.

One thing I don’t get though, if superintelligence is really 5 years away, what’s going to be the point of a fixed-interest 100y bond.

gorgolo··on JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals
Do people really hate JavaScript, or do they just hate the design choices and results that it seems to be correlated with?

At the end of the day I’m using SaaS tools that are apparently written in React and I get astounded but how slow and heavy they are. If you are editing a page on our companies cloud-based wiki, I’ve seen my chrome RAM balloon from 3GB to 16G. A mistake was made somewhere, that I know.

gorgolo··on Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says
When I show my ID at the cash register I assume the person working there doesn’t instantaneously memorize all my details and then write down when exactly I was at the shop, along with other details, to use this info later for their own reasons.

Whereas if I upload my ID to a tech company (that potentially answers to both my own government and foreign governments, as well as having its own ad-related agenda) I am a bit less certain about what will happen to this data.

gorgolo··on Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom

But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.

gorgolo··on Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts
I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.
gorgolo··on Go away Python
Python can work from the shell, if you don’t have external dependencies. But once you have external dependencies, with incompatible potential versions, I just don’t see how you could do this with “one environment”.
gorgolo··on What an unprocessed photo looks like
The “raw” and unedited photo can be just as or even more unrealistic than the edited one though.

Photographs can drop a lot of the perspective, feeling and colour you experience when you’re there. When you take a picture of a slope on a mountain for example (on a ski piste for example), it always looks much less impressive and steep on a phone camera. Same with colours. You can be watching an amazing scene in the mountains, but when you take a photo with most cameras, the colours are more dull, and it just looks flatter. If a filter enhances it and makes it feel as vibrant as the real life view, I’d argue you are making it more realistic.

The main message I get from OP’s post is precisely that there is no “real unfiltered / unedited image”, you’re always imperfectly capturing something your eyes see, but with a different balance of colours, different detector sensitivity to a real eye etc… and some degree of postprocessing is always required make it match what you see in real life.

gorgolo··on What an unprocessed photo looks like
I noticed this a lot when taking pictures in the mountains.

I used to have a high resolution phone camera from a cheaper phone and then later switched to an iPhone. The latter produced much nicer pictures, my old phone just produces very flat-looking pictures.

People say that the iPhone camera automatically edits the images to look better. And in a way I notice that too. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it; the more-edited picture from the iPhone actually corrresponds more to my perception when I’m actually looking at the scene. The white of the snow and glaciers and the deep blue sky really does look amazing in real life, and when my old phone captured it into a flat and disappointing looking photo with less postprocessing than an iPhone, it genuinely failed to capture what I can see with my eyes. And the more vibrant post processed colours of an iPhone really do look more like what I think I’m looking at.

gorgolo··on Problems with C++ exceptions
I didn’t really understand the writer’s comments with exceptions and I don’t code in C++.

Their main complaint about exceptions seems to be that you can’t handle all of them and that you don’t know which you’ll get? If we compare this to python, what’s the difference here? It looks like it works the same here as in python; you catch and handle some exceptions, and others that you miss will crash your program (unless you catch the base class). Is there something special about C++ that makes it work differently, or would the author have similar problems with python?