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soks86

53 karma · joined July 26, 2023

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soks86··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
I think it's a legal issue.

If you don't develop killer AI then no one will legislate against it and someone else will create it and do evil.

If you create killer AI you can try to instigate legislation, but the legislators may not agree to help.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or you know, all of our laws and regulations.

soks86··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
This appears to be proof that the guy who wrote the cipher, Sir Thomas Urquhart, did in fact laugh himself to death as legend has it.

He wrote the cipher, and then, upon hearing Charles II was Restored to the throne he laughed until he died. The cipher reads, "O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLES THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND" and so he was laughing because he just made an excellent joke that he can't tell anyone about until someone figures it out.

Someone needs to add this to Wikipedia. It will be necessary to first convince an academic to make the claim so there's a reasonable citation.

Oh, and haha. It was a nice one, Thomas.

soks86··on When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing
That's an interesting take I don't see anyone else bringing up.

It would also, I would think, make it easier for the 30% fewer engineers to earn a better living in the long run and reduce human management effort.

This makes the most sense to me. So far AI, being fallible, can only augment humans so you can have less humans to do the same work (or tasks where accuracy can be less than 100%, like lower level support calls/questions). Next comes the task of re-balancing the distribution of labor or teaching other departments to utilize AI.

To me that rings the most true because where AI saves me the most time is in never having a bug that takes more than a few hours to pinpoint, even if I'm looking in the wrong place, because with enough clues the AI will look in the right place before I think of doing so. Like finding a needle in a haystack. It doesn't suddenly make me 100x more productive, but it saves a lot of time on some time consuming tasks.

soks86··on Three Inverse Laws of AI
I still haven't read any of his work, but wasn't the point of the Three Laws of Robotics that they in fact _didn't_ work in the story presented in the book?
soks86··on Three Inverse Laws of AI
Checking AI citations and reading.

Critical thinking and reading comprehension and the primary tools in determining truth, AFAIK. Knowing facts beforehand helps too but a trustworthy source can provide false information as much as an untrustworthy source can provide true information.

This has always been an issue, and in the past it was a more difficult issue because your sources of knowledge were more limited. Nowadays its mostly about choosing the right source(s) rather than having to go out of your way to find them (like traveling to a regional/university library).

soks86··on Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients
Ah yes, you trust

https://www.newsonhealth.co.uk/

over research from Harvard.

One, maybe two non-research docs or... a team of research docs.

soks86··on What makes 5% of AI agents work in production?
I hope you don't take pride in that sentence because I'm still not sure what it means.

Also, automation and pride can go hand in hand. Pride doesn't mean "make it by hand," that would be silly.

soks86··on Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
Not if 100 companies did it and they all got away.

This is to teach a lesson because you cannot prosecute all thieves.

Yale Law Journal actually writes about this, the goal is to deter crime because in most cases damages cannot be recovered or the criminal will never be caught in the first place.

soks86··on Code Is Debt
This, there is always middle ground.

Personally, I have only used AI to write actual code when it is for Bash and Python scripts that are self contained. In my case self contained means they are interfaced to via command line so their boundaries are very well defined.

I have never returned to look at any of the code.

I would never use it to generate domain code for my codebase because then I'd have to code review it anyways. I mean, if I have an agentic AI solving an issue and generating a PR, great, I can review that and give it feedback on how to change the code before its accepted.

Unless I can either throw the code away or review it for maintainability rather than correctness then I have no need for a tool that write my code for me.

Oh, unless the AI can be the product owner and understand the financial ramifications of not doing its job correctly but I would be worried that the solution is to not have a product by reducing the users to ash.

soks86··on The Role of Blood Plasma Donation Centers in Crime Reduction
Working and not being able to live is not an "economic opportunity."

It's more likely the reason some of these folks aren't employed.

Lowering wages doesn't create anything except depravity on the part of employers.

soks86··on 'Profit-Enhancing Middlemen' Fuel $200B Health-Care Chaos
We'd still be waiting for healthcare with this kind of plan.

Before the ACA it simply was not a choice to be an independent professional and have health insurance.

If people could understand why it is unacceptable to force independent professionals and entrepreneurs to give up healthcare they would see the ACA was necessary in whatever form it could be passed.

soks86··on The $1.5B Bybit Hack
Usually you want to boot from a cryptographic-ally verified medium where a checksum can be verified before you execute the system.

The emphasis is on running the correct software. If you have to input cryptographic data every time you boot that's okay because you're offline and should be in a secure room (no internet connected devices).

But yeah, malware attack is still possible if you don't have a secure chain and that's a long one.

soks86··on The $1.5B Bybit Hack
Ditto.

The internet is adversarial, a cold wallet should only be reachable by a wrench attack.

soks86··on Alabama prisoners' organs vanish, and there's a whole lot of passing the buck
Medical students can't be learning for free now.
soks86··on Social engineering takeovers of open source projects
The comment was not sincere and is meant to amuse.

If you believe amusement is a disservice to the community then I believe many others disagree.

edit: For clarity, the "since inception" part is an absurd setup for the, equally absurd, "well funded open source" part.

soks86··on Wireproxy: WireGuard client that exposes itself as a HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy
WTF is _this_
soks86··on Plasticity through patterned ultrasound-induced brainwave entrainment in mice
We'll just have our trusty robot companions remember our entire lives and remind us as we go.

It'll be _perfect_.

soks86··on Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
How else can you possibly solve it?

Competition solves everything.

Who gets to mate with who has been answered by competition our entire existence.

Striving for non-violent, yet fair, competition is what advancing the world is about.

soks86··on The AI bullshit singularity
Only let baby see its own scribbles and scat.

Future world leader advisor.

Ahem, I hope not.

soks86··on The World Before Git
How dare you, for a good decade there I forgot that IBM Clearcase exists.

Now I'm ruined, again.

soks86··on Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
That absolutely sounds like it.

I opened several laptops with spudger tools. Now I can open random items I didn't watch videos for just because I have an idea of how it _might_ be assembled.

soks86··on Tacit Knowledge Is Dangerous
I've explained bugs and developed exploits just from noticing odd behavior in video games.

I know how a team is organized, I knew the multiplayer feature was tacked on (probably by interns), I know about network code edge cases, bada-bing bada-boom I can trigger a bug and understand why it happens without ever seeing their code.

Or sitting in a theater and just noticing the lighting setup and transitions rather than the performance itself.

soks86··on Shopify Ruby on Rails distributed monolith runs 19M queries per second on MySQL
or embarrassment and concern on the part of the people who created this system before him.

I've made similar improvements (40x speedup, 8x reduction in RAM footprint) and had been shown the door. This was for software that was a bit over 30 years old too so it was a bit involved.

The team winning does not help a narcissist feel better. You'd be better off getting nothing done while stroking their ego daily.

soks86··on Why TSA's Implementation of Facial Recognition Is More Dangerous Than You Think
My uncle got a passport and then a week later he vanished.
soks86··on SEC charges Kraken for operating as an unregistered securities exchange
Glad to see someone talk about this.

It's a bit of a pain. They limited your choices and now the limited choices are facing legal scrutiny.

The Japanese lawyer representing Mt. GOX customers is also collecting fees this entire time from the pool of customer funds.

soks86··on SEC charges Kraken for operating as an unregistered securities exchange
Fun fact! Stoner Cats 2, from the list of enforcement actions, paid a settlement that was about 10-20% of what they made from their sales!

NFTs as an investment offering are still a good way to make money it seems!

soks86··on SEC charges Kraken for operating as an unregistered securities exchange
Securities law is about disclosure. Registering is about filing disclosures.

This is all about disclosure, nothing at all with business function.

I'm sure there's some math behind calculating certain values for disclosure, super important. The importance of this is because the numbers have to reflect reality for the purposes of proper disclosure.

Disclosure.

If your business is to rob trains, not the SEC's business. So long as you disclose your finances you can sell shares of your train robbing business. The criminal conspiracy charges you'll face will have nothing to do with the SEC and everything to do with your state government or the FBI if you messed with interstate commerce.

soks86··on SEC charges Kraken for operating as an unregistered securities exchange
They absolutely are not banks or none of this would be happening.

This also is about unregistered securities and not interest bearing accounts although that too is an issue because they're not banks.

edit: They're Money Services Businesses and that's it. They might have some state-level lending licenses but I'm fuzzy on that.

soks86··on Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?
I'm not crying, you're crying!
soks86··on Blender 16yo winner of UK young animator of the year
Double agree on the robot strength. I watched someone use a rolling device recently and it was a struggle. The video makes sense for a robot.

That said, definitely a few items that can be improved. That said, in a real production there wouldn't be one person responsible for so much work to begin with.

This is phenomenal stuff.

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