kortex

NASA just dropped 12,000 photos from the Artemis II mission. But which ones are the best ones?

I know Jeff Geerling linked the site a few days ago, but Hank just unveiled the vote feature in response to the big photo drop to sift through.

This should be immediately intuitive to anyone who spends more than 5 minutes looking at firewall traffic of something public. 99.9% of the bots' requests aren't doing sophisticated penetration attacks, they are blasting all the low hanging fruit: the common ports, the common wordpress endpoints, the common bobby tables style sql injections and xss attacks.

Eh, the problem with that reasoning is one of extreme degree. The "obscurity metric" would be the surprisal associated with discovering the critical piece of info. Using a random port confers brute force resistance of 2^16. At 1ms that's about a minute. Brute forcing at the same rate a 128 bit key takes like 10^28 years.

It's like hiding your key under the mat, vs hanging on a tree limb of a specific tree only you know the gps coordinate of. Both are "obscure". Huge difference in difficulty.

And AI agents reliably-ish do tasks billions of times a day that humans struggle with, namely regurgitating information at incredible rates across wide breadths of topics. I see it as merely a matter of degree, not category.

How do you measure "deeper understanding" in humans? You usually do it by asking them to show their work, show how the dots connect. Reasoning models are getting there, and when they do, I'm sure the goalposts will move yet again.

We don't have a way of measuring "cognitive awareness" though. We have a way of measuring electrical impulses, and how they behave in response to various treatments (eg anaesthetics or magnetic fields), but we can't objectively measure whether the system is aware at all.

We can measure electrical spikes, and we can ask the system to reply what it experiences when various spikes occur. Guess what: we can do that with ANNs now too.

It'd be one thing if this were all a philosophical discussion, but in this thread so many folks are making very firm statements about the nature of reality we have no means to back up.

Ya, I seem to largely agree with your comments on this article. I was replying to brookst, did you mean to reply on a differnt thread?

Is someone tripped out on mushrooms experience ego death and total disruption of sense of self still conscious? They may even contend they are more conscious than normal life, what with all the communing with the universe and whatnot.

Trees react to the world around them in many ways.

Humans can't reliably subitize more than five-ish objects, while chimps can actually do this task better than us. That's our "cant count the R's in strawberry" (which flagship models can reliably do now, general letter counting).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

They stopped being autocomplete years ago with RLHF

How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?

I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

They need to make an example out of these companies. If your whole business model is built around handling sensitive data, and you are caught shipping off that data to brokers, you should be liquidated or at least fined to within an inch of bankruptcy, as basically all of your profits are a sham.

I actually dont think it's that obvious at all (unless you are a senior engineer). It's like the classic joke:

A QA engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer. She orders 2 beers.

She orders 0 beers.

She orders -1 beers.

She orders a lizard.

She orders a NULLPTR.

She tries to leave without paying.

Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.

The bar explodes.

It's usually not obvious when starting to write an API just how malformed the data could be. It's kind of a subconscious bias to sort of assume that the input is going to be well-formed, or at least malformed in predictable ways.

I think the cure for this is another "law"/maxim: "Parse, don't validate." The first step in handling external input is try to squeeze it into as strict of a structure with as many invariants as possible, and failing to do so, return an error.

It's not about perfection, but it is predictable.

I go by a philosophy that Liskov Substitution is reeeally about referential transparency. I don't care about parent/child classes, I care about interfaces and implementations, and structural subtyping. Fix that, and it's great.

Carbon + helium fusion is rather favorable, vs carbon production by the triple alpha process (3He), so it's just reaction kinetics essentially.

I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible.

A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.

Super fun! But the text does get in the way mid-combo.

Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3's popularity. Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other than just being really weirded out by the dude.

Not an EE, but if transformers are at all like smaller scale power supplies, the issue with using multiple smaller components is it works right up until it doesn't. If you lose one or it gets overloaded, it puts more strain the rest, increasing the failure risk. Then another one pops, and the load shifts to the smaller pool, in a cascade failure.

To an extent, you can do this, as long as you have systems in place to shed load and prevent the components from failing in quick succession by circuit breaking.

Also i believe transformers are much more graceful handling overcurrent than silicon. But everything has its limits.

for one, it's one tool, that does the job of all three.

it just works. i'm not sure how else to describe it other than less faffing about. it just does the right thing, every time. there's a tiny learning curve (mostly unlearning bad or redundant habits), but once you know how to wield it, it's a one stop shop.

and as mentioned, it's crazy fast.

Usually lack of knowledge that such a thing exists, or just plain ol' momentum. Changing something long in production at established companies, even if there is a tangible benefit, can be a real challenge.

Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much pronounced /ŋgopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the bounds of the dialect/language distinction.

That's one example, from a language with ~70M native speakers, in a geographically tight region.

Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very compact geographically with small speaker bases. And Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced standardization and dialect extinction.

English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.

> I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 origami folds once, but I fear the man who has practiced one fold 10,000 times

Literally the second section:

> Here is the central claim: the unit of correctness in production is not the program. It is the set of deployments.

The thesis essentially boils down to: functional programing paradigm, type systems, strong interfaces, etc, are all fantastic tools for ensuring the correctness of a program, but the system is not a program, and so these tools are necessary but not sufficient to ensure the correctness of a distributed application.

Well, I didn't get LLM vibes from it at all, and the article is deeply relevant to the engineering I am working on at the present (migrating a monolith to a highly event-sourced workflow-based distributed application), and I deeply appreciated this work!

I mean, I am dealing with much of the same problems mentioned in the article, and I found it super enlightening. It was neat to read about undecidability of the general problem of version updates, about the two-version window, and some of the solutions folks have come up with.

Almost certainly referring to a software forge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

Why are folks seemingly so averse to sending an email / hopping on a channel to actually talk to maintainers before just firing off code? I've been on both sides of this; I have been young and green and just fired off contributions without stopping to think, do they event want this?. Codebases are rarely built primarily out of zillions of shotgunned patches, they are more like a garden that needs tending over time, and the ones that are the best tenders are usually the ones that spend the most amount of time in the garden.

Here's the most alarming part:

> Host: OK, so you have the software, it raises the alarm, and then… what does the Manhattan DA specifically want?

> John Amin: They want to activate it nationwide across the United States.

> Host: Nationwide? But wouldn’t that require a federal resolution?

> John Amin: Or it can go through the manufacturers. The strategy is to approach different 3D printer manufacturers so their printers have this security layer built in, or they won’t be accepted for installation. These are parallel tracks to federal legislation, which takes a long time to implement.

They want to use states with large markets like NY, CA, and WA, to put pressure on manufacturers to implement this software on all of their systems, instead of having state-specific market.

> I’m a little puzzled. How are you getting dependency deadlocks if you’re not creating circular dependencies?

> Also, exports in CloudFormation are explicit. I don’t see how this automatic pruning would occur.

I explained that. It's a quirk of how it tree-shakes, if nothing dereferences the attribute, it deletes the export. And yes it'll automatically create an export if you do something like

    environment={"table": parent_stack.table.table_arn}

> CDK tries to prevent this antipattern from happening by default. You have to explicitly make it name something. The best practice is to use tags to name things, not resource names.

I'm well aware but i'm fighting a ton of institutional inertia at my work.