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sigmar

5,318 karma · joined January 10, 2011

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sigmar··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
seems like mythos 5 did most of the leg work, they refer to it in the technical report linked at the end: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326...
sigmar··on There's a high chance of devices being sold with GrapheneOS preinstalled in 2027
>Probably not via their website but rather another company provided with the devices directly by Motorola. It could be us doing it ourselves but we aren't set up to deal with it.

I presume this bit is because Motorola can't sell devices with android builds that aren't certified by google (as per Google Mobile Services contracts)

sigmar··on Claude Opus 5.5
It makes sense to me. If you 'pace your running', you're setting the speed intentionally. The phrasing doesn't describe whether it is fast pace or a slow pace, but it describes having a goal and not just winging it.
sigmar··on I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB
the VM is for the user to use as they see fit. you can just tell it to install apps and run builds in the VM. I don't think this deserves a bounty unless he used it to escape the vm (which he says he didn't)
sigmar··on OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
First time I'm seeing this. I had heard about the WWI ciphertext crack[1] but not this one, are you confusing the two?

[1] https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...

sigmar··on Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com
Travel research is so much better with an asynchronous agent than with normal LLM chat. You can just let it hack away for an hour looking over options and browsing different websites.
sigmar··on AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
>If I make my code available, AI can be used to more easily discover vulnerabilities to abuse my coding errors,

Keeping your source code private doesn't save you. These LLMs are really good at decompilation efforts. I've seen an insane number of clean room ports of games the last few weeks (just saw a Zelda 2 PC port this morning). Even with that, I don't share the gloomy perspective of the author.

sigmar··on I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture
>I’ve emailed some of the mathematicians with a few proposed typo fixes, and I got confirmation that at least a few of those fixes seemed real. However, some of the problems that weren’t backed by Lean also turned out to be misunderstandings.

I think this project is really neat, but is it appropriate to cold email specialists before you've put in enough hours of effort to describe yourself as more than an "amateur"? OP's emails may have been helpful, but billions of people use these LLMs to wade into new areas and email is already low signal-to-noise.

sigmar··on OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
yeah, I can see it as useful in customer service, but they're adding these sponsored agents directly in the chatgpt app. the word "ad" or "sponsored" isn't visible after you click "chat with us" at 0:15 in the video, only "learn more about business chats" which is vague. and if you scroll down you won't even see that, if someone switches apps for 20 minutes are they going to remember that this chat window is an ad?
sigmar··on OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
I'm definitely more pro ad than the average HN user (I think they occasionally show me products I want to buy), but this seems bad and one step closer to "the LLM is biased by openai's financial interests."

In the example of a "sponsored agent" at the top, how many people are going to think "chat with us" is just a way to continue the conversation? How soon before openai removes the friction of clicking that entirely?

this is what openai said before: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled." https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt

Do they need to rewrite that section? Because in the video there's an LLM chatbot inside the chatgpt app writing answers on behalf of "Heirloom grocery"

sigmar··on Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter
that says only that the gross margin calculation excludes profit sharing and training. You should read it more carefully

edit: def not gaap profitable or they would have said that to investors. and their stock-based comp is surely astronomically high on paper.

sigmar··on Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter
>This is reportedly a sort of "Enron" accounting which excludes some really big expenses like revenue sharing, the cost of model training and hardware deploymments

source? this seems false. reportedly the adjusted profitability includes inference and amortized training costs

sigmar··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
>lists a few methods that are quite similar to what’s proposed in the comments under that post, except for those two comments.

Is today the first time you've heard of a book cipher? Those blog comments didn't provide much progress.

sigmar··on Aligned to whom?
>Just remove hacking (bio-weapon, etc.) data from the training dataset and you're done.

Reasoning about how to write secure software uses the same knowledge as reasoning about how to break/hack it.

sigmar··on Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases
Lots of private benchmarks already exist, where you have to trust the tester (ex Artificial Analysis, Arc-agi).
sigmar··on LLMs are real, AI is fake
Sure, if you remove almost all of my comment my argument disappears.

To spell things out for people that don't know about the topic: Zitron is neither an expert on the topic, nor a credible source of information: https://techreport.ngo/ai-ml/how-accurate-have-ed-zitron-s-a...

The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment. If I tell an AI to start producing paperclips, it might start producing paperclips by doing unintended things. Technically, recycling the metal from all the world's bridges would assist in making more paperclips, but I never intended that. That's where my analogy to the post comes from- Openai intended the model to hack, but did not intend for it to hack HF. Do you think the fact 'recycling metal into paperclips' may have been in the training data is relevant to the thought experiment? Similarly here, it's orthogonal to the lessons from the HF hack and only brought up here seemingly to make it a fight over whether the models are really "autonomous"

sigmar··on LLMs are real, AI is fake
>To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation

Lol, okay...

The crux of this piece is Doctorow saying that the hack was just a stochastic parrot repeating steps it has been trained on. Who cares how the LLM learned to hack things? Doesn't really change the facts of what happened. "Oh, it only made those paperclips because it saw instructions on making paper clips in the training data." These are some 2024 arguments...

sigmar··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
>or there is a more deliberative approach to assigning credit than who was "first" to solve some problem

it feels like an unintended consequence of the millennium prize is that people view the [last contributor to the solution] as the only one to make progress on the problem. I've never viewed Poincaré as solved by one person and the objective of the prize was to encourage more people to make attempts and contribute towards progress.

this issue is independent, but in these circumstances perhaps interweaved, with the 'ai is taking over math' concerns

sigmar··on Factoring RSA 260
Were the agents ever tasked with algorithm improvements? Post just says he didn't find any ("report essentially no algorithm advancements"). These LLMs are useful for optimization tasks where they can attempt a change and then measure performance boosts, so just wondering.
sigmar··on How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
>We have a lot of physics based simulation tools, but they tend to focus on small subsets of the full design problem and they make limiting approximations

Do you think it is possible that better math will lead to better physics models?

sigmar··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
>The speed with which we were able to produce this proof demonstrates that it is now possible to formalize large swaths of mathematics, which may both catch errors in the common body of mathematical proofs and reduce the burden of refereeing new work.

^ this section should have been in the first few paragraphs imho. Explaining why this is relevant shouldn't be so far down.

sigmar··on Autistici/Inventati's main .org domain goes dark after US terrorism designation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Don...

what evidence is there that this registered republican was "far left"?

sigmar··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
>We are currently working closely with our inference partners and open-source maintainers to align the technical details and ensure the model can be reliably deployed across the ecosystem. The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026. Further details regarding the architecture, training, and evaluation will be released with the Kimi K3 technical report.

(translated by chrome)

11 days is a long time. It does not take that long to implement inference at providers. In my opinion, seems like they're being pre-emptively cautious about government intervention/review

sigmar··on Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list
Most of what an LLM does "could have" been done by a human if you throw enough human hours at it. But the reality in this circumstance is that a new tool helped find this leak. Saying this could have happened in a "non LLM world" is analogous to "someone else could have discovered special relativity, let's not mention Einstein"
sigmar··on Building Food Metadata with LLM Juries
>Evaluators validate each tag individually — for example, protein, preparation, or health, individually rather than judging the item as a whole.

Am I reading this right that the jury is multiple LLMs each iterating through each tag and voting on each? Why wouldn't you tune one LLM to be really competent at a single tag? Like a single "spicy evaluator LLM" or "protein evaluator LLM"?

sigmar··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
>I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way)

what specifically is this referring to? Not aware of any comments from Anthropic on this topic.

sigmar··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
To me, this addendum makes it worse. Making small edits to a post like this makes it seem like you're doubling down on the original resentful points, especially with all the new justifications like "a trillion dollar company fired the first shot." Should have just deleted the blog post in its entirety imho.

>outstanding relationships with essentially everyone who openly uses Zig and talks about it publicly

Essentially everyone? more blogposts incoming?

sigmar··on I love LLMs, I hate hype
>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

It's possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off about a "perpetual underclass." I love the internet, but it really feels like (now more than ever) you have to be intentional about what sites you visit.

sigmar··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
Proven to be safe? Do you want a randomized trial? Do you demand that of every math tutorial video that goes up on YouTube?
sigmar··on Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries
How many years do you use them?
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