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kdowns

75 karma · joined April 24, 2018

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kdowns··on Is A.I. Above the Law?
Yeah, its just gross negligence from the researchers. Running a cybersecurity eval for a highly capable AI, unattended, with no real monitoring on its activities, and at a huge scale.

I wouldn't have trusted one of those agents to run without me watching the session log, let alone thousands.

We already have laws for this. If I misconfigured a pentesting tool and it breached an unauthorized target I'm liable. Why is this different?

kdowns··on Creepy Crawlies
I made it to a third round interview at anthropic in 2024 and they had me build a web crawler as their programming test. Part way through I started on making it respect robots.txt and I could immediately tell they were no longer interested in me.
kdowns··on Microsoft's Rust guide for C#/.NET developers
Don't think that's quite right. `float` has 4 bytes, and `double` has 8. The `decimal` type has 16 bytes and does all it's arithmetic in base 10.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

kdowns··on In 1950, a U.S. troop plane vanished without a trace in the Yukon
When my grandfather finished his ROTC program for the army core of engineers him and one other classmate got assigned to go to France to rebuild destroyed bridges. I asked him once what his other classmates ended up doing and he had told me they all died in-route on a transport plane headed to Korea. I wonder if this is the one? I didn't ask for more details at the time because it was clearly something he didn't like dwelling on.
kdowns··on GitHub Spam
A one time administration fee for account creations would make most of these spam tactics unprofitable. People are probably too used to having everything for free online (paid for by ads) for anyone to try this right now.
kdowns··on Fintech engineering mistakes (2022)
Currency conversions are a transaction not an operation, the conversion rate fluctuates constantly and typically involves fees and involve tax liabilities. For a money type I’d go so far as to want it to either disallow or throw an exception if attempting an operation on two monies in different currencies.
kdowns··on Justice at Spotify
There is also the issue of fraud. Click/Stream farms are already soaking up the artists pool of revenue, and this change would incentivize it more. Justin Bieber recently asked his fans to go to sleep with his new song on repeat, and I'm sure other artists/labels are looking at ways to game the system as well. In my opinion there needs to be a way to pay artists based on first time streams from new accounts.
kdowns··on Shopify Is Joining Twitter in Permanent Work-from-Home Shift
I'm very happy seeing this trend. I live in the midwest, away from the tech hubs so my options for work have always been very limited here. The standard advice is to move to one of the coasts to advance your career but I have friends and family here that I've known all my life. Abandoning those relationships for a job... I just can't do it, they mean too much to me. I would wager that there are many other talented people in this position that are seeing these opportunities open up to them.
kdowns··on A video game that lets you make video games
Refactoring I don't know but you can keep all your logic for some task inside a microchip then create input and output handles to hide the inner workings. Then you can publish that microchip as a element for other people to use in their creations.
kdowns··on Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back
I'm really not surprised. The most interesting thing about your business shouldn't be your choice in data-store.