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smitop

4,501 karma · joined August 21, 2018

Email: me[ a t ]iter.ca

Website: https://iter.ca

More ways to contact: https://iter.ca/p/accounts/

You may use the text of my comments under the terms of CC-BY-SA 4.0 (in addition to any other license you receive).

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smitop··on Poetry book that Anthropic tried to censor
The post's explanation for the content filtering policy 400 error isn't correct. Anthropic doesn't use that error for safety reasons ("These refusals do not reflect Anthropic’s judgments about the propriety of any content"[1]); content blocked by classifiers get a different kind of error.

The content filtering 400 is only for copyright blocks, where Anthropic detects when Claude is outputting copyrighted text and blocks it to prevent copyright infringement. The book in question is in the public domain in the US (but not all countries) as of January 1, 2026; Anthropic probably just doesn't automatically remove works from the copyright filter when their copyright expires.

[1]: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...

smitop··on Git Hash Chain Malleability
I don't think this is really a problem; I wrote about my thoughts at https://iter.ca/post/git-malleate/
smitop··on We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
Actions runs from external contributors aren't run with Actions secrets; if you are using Actions right (i.e. not using pull_request_target wrong) you don't need to trust external contributors. (eta: iirc the original point of the Actions approval flow was preventing cryptomining spam from abusing free compute)
smitop··on Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
There are other stablecoins that aren't scams though, like USDC. I think Stripe would probably either create their own USD stable or partner with Circle.
smitop··on AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
> if you fail to mention that something was made by AI as part of a compound work you could end up losing copyright over the whole thing

The source you linked says the opposite of that: "the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole"

smitop··on YouTube's new anti-adblock measures
YouTube is currently running an A/B test for server-side insertion according to what some other people have posted. I'm not getting SSAI ads so I can't really know much about them though.
smitop··on Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)
Most people searching for "elm" are researching elm trees, not the language - the highest search activity was in May 2010, before Elm existed.
smitop··on 3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down as copyright violation
Insurance companies could front the money, in exchange for a premium based on how legitimate the claim seems.
smitop··on Extracting AI models from mobile apps
tflite files can contain a ResizeOp that resizes the image: https://ai.google.dev/edge/api/tflite/java/org/tensorflow/li...

The file is only 7.7kb, so it couldn't contain many weights anyways.

smitop··on Electric cars produce twice as much CO₂ as trains, says rail group data
Your math is wrong - it's $4B ÷ 815k residents ÷ $27k = 0.18 used Tesla Model 3s per resident. (you accidentally used 27k as both the price and the population)
smitop··on JSTOR is Now Available in 1k Prisons
JSTOR doesn't get any tax benefit for doing this because they're already fully exempt from US income tax - their parent, Ithaka, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaka_Harbors).
smitop··on GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much
Author here, I removed the background.
smitop··on Samsung and other manufacturers disable phones bought on gray markets
Grey market phones aren't stolen. Samsung sells phones cheaper in some regions, so arbitrageurs buy them cheap in one region and resell them at a higher price in Mexico. Samsung wouldn't sell region-unlocked phones at the cheaper price because they want to make money.
smitop··on *(char*)0 = 0; – What does the C++ programmer intend with this code? [video]
Ah fuck, I grepped the YouTube transcript for WASM/WebAssembly but I guess youtube's automatic captions aren't very good. I feel silly now for not watching the video before commenting.
smitop··on *(char*)0 = 0; – What does the C++ programmer intend with this code? [video]
fun trivia: in WebAssembly it's valid to read/write to memory address 0.
smitop··on Bitcoin stolen from FTX being converted to cash via "mixer"
The FDIC almost only does bank closures on Friday (see https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/fai... - there were a few non-Friday closures after the SVB failure but none before), the guess that SVB would be closed on Friday wasn't that fortuitous.
smitop··on Lodash just declared issue bankruptcy and closed every issue and open PR
The bigger news is that Lodash is migrating from Node.js to Bun: https://github.com/lodash/lodash/commit/97d4a2fe193a66f5f96d...
smitop··on Canada demands Meta lift news ban to allow wildfire info sharing
The (relevant parts of the) legislation haven't come into force yet - most of the sections of the Online News Act don't come into force until the "a day to be fixed by order of the Governor in Council". Facebook is preemptively complying with the law before it's brought into force, but Google is waiting until it actually comes into effect (https://blog.google/intl/en-ca/company-news/outreach-initiat...).
smitop··on The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
In a legal context "highway" has a broader meaning than in everyday use. From the link above: highway "includes every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles"
smitop··on Document reasoning to block DNS to 127.0.0.1
Reverted: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/5deb8021949ef225...
smitop··on Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
What happens is you'll write a paper titled "The first SHA-256 collision: SHA-256 is broken in practice", since there are currently no known collisions (despite Bitcoin miners computing exahashes per second). The chances of you finding the first known collision by accident are overwhelming slim, and the benefits of showing that a widely used hash function is broken would greatly exceed the annoyance of a broken system.
smitop··on Show HN: Whole Git repo was made with ChatGPT
That's not ChatGPT, you were chatting with the plain GPT-3 model. You can't use ChatGPT from the playground, you have to use https://chat.openai.com/chat to chat. ChatGPT is better than just plain GPT-3 for chatting.
smitop··on Username cannot contain 'clyde'
This happens because Discord has a system bot also named Clyde that mostly tells users when their messages fail to send (among other system messages).
smitop··on Gen Z never learned to read cursive
Viable on-device speech recognition is becoming reality. Apple is apparently processing some speech recognition on-device now: https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-device-app-privacy-1...

So far there aren't any particularly good open source voice recognition models though, in large part due to a lack of training data. You can (and should!) contribute to Common Voice to help change that: https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en

smitop··on The spam on Twitter
I've seen impersonation bots that add random noise to the profile picture of the user they're impersonating, so it's possible that Twitter is already doing something like that (just with a similarity threshold too low).
smitop··on Ask HN: Any way to ban GPT-4 and others from harvesting my content and data?
It looks like that GUID is specific to training data for Google's BIG-bench model? I haven't seen any indication that it's supported anywhere else, it doesn't seem to be any sort of industry-wide standard.
smitop··on Visa, Mastercard suspend payments for ad purchases on PornHub, MindGeek
Decentralised stablecoins, such as Dai, do exist, and the price of Dai does manage to maintain its peg pretty well. Not all decentralised stablecoins have done as well (most notably TerraUSD) though, it's definitely hard to design an algorithmic stablecoin that maintains its peg.
smitop··on SMS phishing is way too easy
Android supports "verified SMS" wherein the sender proves their identity to Google, tells Google the hashes of messages they send, and Google can tell recipients if the message hash is legit or not: https://developers.google.com/business-communications/verifi...
smitop··on In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia
Note that Lsjbot is only active on certain language editions; it doesn't edit English Wikipedia. There are a lot less bot-created articles on enwiki.
smitop··on SF Conservancy now accepting copyright assignment for any GPL software
For anyone curious, Bradley made $141k in 2020 including benefits (the deadline for their 2021 return is yet to pass): https://sfconservancy.org/docs/software-freedom-conservancy_...
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