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pelican0on Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility

> ... SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship

Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?

pelican0on Ask HN: What are you reading?

Don't miss out on his "The blabber", a novella in that universe with an adorable character.

pelican0on Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games

Nice. The best part about this kind of development using models is when you have them write instructions for themselves / other models :).

pelican0on Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games

Makes sense, good use of the tools at hand. And the SKILL.md files, also generated similarly?

pelican0on Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games

Very cool work!

Did you write the skills (text, and code) all by hand, or are those prompt outputs?

pelican0on Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock

For someone who is not familiar with that person/channel, what is that way to understand circuits?

pelican0on Anthropic, OpenAI et al. face antitrust suit for agreeing to slow AI development

They slow down model releases, but don't slow down research and model development. They're not suddenly going to tell their army of researchers to go home. (In fact they can then focus/spend more on research, instead of the engineering needed to keep churning new models for production.)

This protects them from continuous model distillation by inferior models. So they only release a new model when a 3rd competitor catches up to their public production models' capabilities.

And the public gets a new model in 6 months or a year instead of every few months. But the new model would be a (1) gigantic leap in undisputed capabilities, (2) catastrophic in terms of job losses/replacements worldwide and they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it, and (3) the public would have access to the "tiny/medium/..." models while the big money/gov clients get the real super juice hidden behind the gates.

pelican0on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

> This is the coolest thing on HN that I've seen in a minute.

Off-topic, but what is up with the increased use of the phrase "in a minute", presumably to mean "in a long time", lately?

I've only started encountering it in the past year.

Did it get popularized by some celebrity, tv show, influencers, etc?

pelican0on An update on Wayback Machine access

Is it established that the scraping scourge of late is primarily driven by AI companies? Anyone aware of any relevant studies?

Beginning to think that the difficulty to browse most websites nowadays due to throttling, is yet another negative externality of AI development that society is forced to bear.

pelican0on Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025

Is there a clear definition of what Alignment is in OpenAI's perspective, and what the model user can expect of it?

It's one thing if to them it means "it will do what you want following your intentions to the best of its abilities" vs "we will not let you do something dangerous with it unless you're one of us, and that's it".

pelican0on Claude is only available to people over 18 years

> Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.

pelican0on A misalignment of AI in mathematics

Given the existence of this technology now and the incentives of the AI companies, both of which are not going away; what's a good future here?

A major part of the complaint is that there's no conceptual understanding and building of new ideas coming out of the AI proofs, thus defeating the purpose of the original pursuit.

If in 2027 the AI models start producing, with every mathematics or science breakthrough they make, well-written documents tailored for human understanding, with intermediate concepts, expositions of failed-but-once-promising paths, etc. Would that be good alignment with the mathematics community?