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stevarino

138 karma · joined October 6, 2016

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stevarino··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
This is ignoring the fact that the government is the foundation of society (I know some will disagree with that, but the end result is just government with more steps).

Private models in a low trust society means the government will come and seize the models. Competitive business will only be allowed through cronyism.

The better option is to opt for high trust. Yes the Gman can rip your servers apart, but they know they'll face consequences, legal and political. Laws and regulations are the answer, not locking down into smaller fiefdoms.

stevarino··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Also this falls into the "right to bear arms" thing: if LLMs are limited legally, then illegal LLMs will be the superior choice. This is pretty much the plot of Cryptonomicon and Corey's take on I, Robot
stevarino··on US Government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
It's honestly not the worst strategy: make the dangerous move when you have the most tolerance, and then everyone can figure stuff out and make the landing on Sunday.
stevarino··on Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app
I personally don't have strong experience here , but I would treat them similar to BUILD files and the like - probably in the root directory of a repo but nowhere near the bin/ or build/ directories.

Also it looks like there's a compilation step to these files, which is interesting. The raw file was included, not the environment specific file.

stevarino··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work
A bit more complicated, as the aircraft itself was unable to detect the stall conditions due to icing of the pitot tubes so the warning itself was in and out several times. Clearly the copilots did not understand the situation so an inconsistent alarm could be seen as spurious or a secondary effect.

> At the same time he made an abrupt nose-up input on the side-stick, an action that was unnecessary and excessive under the circumstances. The aircraft's stall warning sounded briefly twice due to the angle of attack tolerance being exceeded

...

> The crew's lack of response to the stall warning, whether due to a failure to identify the aural warning, to the transience of the stall warnings that could have been considered spurious, to the absence of any visual information that could confirm that the aircraft was approaching stall after losing the characteristic speeds, to confusing stall-related buffet for overspeed-related buffet, to the indications by the flight director that might have confirmed the crew's mistaken view of their actions, or to difficulty in identifying and understanding the implications of the switch to alternate law, which does not protect the angle of attack.

Its a complicated interplay of systems, where autonomous control systems are changing modes and receiving bad information during a complex, raplidly developing situation.

stevarino··on Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
Its clearly propaganda. "Your data belongs to you." I'm sure the ToS says otherwise, as OpenAI likely owns and utilizes this data. Yes, they say they are working on end-to-end encryption (whatever that means when they control one end), but that is just a proposal at this point.

Also their framing of the NYT intent makes me strongly distrust anything they say. Sit down with a third party interviewer who asks challenging questions, and I'll pay attention.

stevarino··on 'Your showerhead is lying to you'
Yeah this. Cooling towers work by maximizing evaporation rare, transferring energy into the atmosphere via water molecules.

Other heat sink strategies could involve refrigeration systems, but those are significantly more energy intensive and a lot more complex.

stevarino··on Waymo got a ticket and there was confusion about who or what was being ticketed
I imagine waymo has a government relations team, including traffic control relations.

So do cops receive training on these situations? Its only going to get worse (probably).

stevarino··on After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
Throw on taxes, administrative overheads, etc, they are probably looking at 30-45 sales per month. Which is likely not realistic.

On top of that, this is a continuous payment. Even if I was looking at 5-10x rate of return, I would be very hesitant as that's the rate-of-return today while the sales are forever.

I've been wondering how realistic microsubscriptions are... Say $1-2 dollars a month per user to maintain an app, perhaps limited to just power users, would support a lot of infrastructure.

stevarino··on CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops
Security patches, assuming it has some network access.
stevarino··on Tim Cook is 'not 100 percent' sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations
That sounds like it would create resolvable dichotomies and other problems.

As Segal's law states: A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

stevarino··on Resume Tip: Hacking "AI" screening of resumes
I think those are called career coaches.

They don't actually do this I believe, but they totally should. Canary various strategies and see which pay off.

stevarino··on Microsoft should accept and give up Windows 11, throw everything at Windows 12
I'm still confused why Windows 11 is even a thing, as Windows 10 was advertised as "the last version of Windows": https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/what-h...

Actually the source I linked lays it out pretty clearly:

> That (in)famous statement was actually spoken by Jerry Nixon, a developer evangelist at Microsoft, whose job is to get developers excited about developing for Microsoft Store, at the 2015 Microsoft Ignite. Nevertheless, the technology media blew it up, and soon everyone was accepting it as gospel. But it never was.

But still, I just want stability. Also the lack of support for older hardware - I just built a PC four years ago and am being told its not good enough for 11? No thanks.

stevarino··on Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again
That's an interesting "what-if" though... How would a future generation be affected if they have a parasocial relationship with Lincoln? Or any historical figure? Or a currently running politician?

I feel sci-fi authors have their work cut out for them...

stevarino··on USAF Test Pilot School, DARPA announce aerospace machine learning breakthrough
I suspect that military aviation has a different certification path. Especially for R+D such as this.
stevarino··on The Reddits
Yeah. I joined Reddit pretty early and loved it for the longest time. It was my main social media place.

But anytime a small community would grow in popularity and hit somewhere threshold, it would be overrun by the greater reddit population The subreddit would quickly lose what made the community special and core users would migrate or just stop.

And volunteer moderation is bothe best idea ever and the worst. When it works it's awesome, but it feels as if it's only a matter of time.

So when the API changes hit last year, I saw it as Reddit handing me my hat. The old reddit was no more. I couldn't use it how I wanted to use it, at least not without paying. And given that my reddit usage was more habit than value, I made the decision to accept how things are.

I miss it. This PG post felt more like a eulogy than a promise, despite the closing. But I think I'm better without Reddit. At this point it seems to primarily be a content farm for AI agents, both producing and consuming. So maybe the dark-forest Internet is starting to arrive.

stevarino··on My PHP Problems
I've totally copied php http headers into non-php backends just to see what happens. It costs nothing and gets a trifle more security.

(Not really but it makes me giggle at least)

stevarino··on Warchalking
Yeah it was when I was going through a university class based on CEH about ten years ago. It includes war chalking and a bunch of other questionable subjects (BlackBerry Bluetooth stack attacks?). The whole experience left me feeling the certification is a waste of time unless an employer is asking for it (I'm on the swe side so certs are not applicable to me thankfully).

When I looked into war chalking and how it's discussed, I found that most of the news at the time was based on an FBI notice to businesses, which was picked up by the media as the ridiculous story it was. I honestly doubt it actually happened, beyond the two or three Usenet posters that inspired the notice.

stevarino··on Undermining Democracy: The EU Commission's Controversial Push for Surveillance
California Prop 22 comes to mind, unfortunately: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_...

There was so much uncertainty around it and who wanted what that a lot of people voted against their best interests. I'm still meeting people who thought they were voting against Uber and Lyft with that proposition.

The ads were constant and incredibly misleading. And that was one issue. Every time these propositions come up, I can usually find 3 or 4 that are not what they seem (the Diveta props are similar but very different tactics afaict).

If all state business was done this way it would be overwhelming to filter through it all.

stevarino··on Hotel safety tips from a former intelligence officer
Tactical flashlight. They're strong enough to give you second degree burns if you hold it against your flesh.

They typically have low, high, and strobe modes for disorienting targets.

stevarino··on Use the 'tail' command to monitor everything
Had an industrial plant that used these very dated VBScript based controllers. There was a SQL Server for numeric logs, but nothing for textual logs and therefore no transparency into the system. The textual logs themselves were stored on the devices in a statically sized array, so if the machine rebooted or a lot of logs happened at once (say at interesting times like startup or during errors), it was common to lose any interesting logs.

Spent a while trying to come up with a zero-budget solution for this and during a literal shower thought "Why don't I just tail a log file?" I managed to alter the controllers code to transmit recently written log messages to a minimal server which would just prepend timestamp and origin to the message and append the line to a file. Then each control console would have a Windows-built tail binary that read the file over Samba, wrap it in a batch file that would customize the colors and text a bit, and Plant Tail was born.

The mostly computer-illiterate operators quickly fell in love with it as it provided an amazing degree of transparency to what they were used to and demanded an equivalent utility for all future deployments.

TLDR: Don't rule out simple solutions if you can leverage already existing infrastructure.

stevarino··on Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site
The curl'ing is not necessarily bad (and can continue just fine), but rather its blind to these types of problems. A false positive in your testing framework (especially something like this) is the worst case scenario.
stevarino··on WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO
Same thing that he would have to do otherwise: shop the market for the best offer.

... Assuming any true competition is still in business in a year.

stevarino··on People leave managers, not companies
While I agree with your analogy, graphite is actually a moderator which (in a nuclear context) accelerates reactions. This was a factor for Chernobyl [1] where the rods had graphite tips, so a scram had a momentary rapid increase in reactivity. This burst of reactivity caused temperature to momentarily spike. The heat produced steam which increased pressure and the vessel exploded.

[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pd...

stevarino··on Nuclear deterrence is limited by geography
Which was weird, as subs are used to going out for months on end. Does he think submarines hang out at port all the time?
stevarino··on Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
If this is the case (and I agree that it sounds likely) then what's the appropriate response from a bad guy? You don't take an action without considering a reaction...

Could this method be applied to fabric? Perhaps certain types of plastics? What if the bad guy hints that this is their plan with no actual intent other than misdirection. This could overwhelm screening resources, frustrating passengers, and stressing security agents while the actual threat could travel through another means, if it exists at all.

I traveled this weekend and can't help performing threat analysis against these security models. It's never made me feel better.

stevarino··on Mine3D: A Web 3D Minesweeper Game
This is surprisingly addictive. I'm loving the "bonus" links it sends when you complete a puzzle (although I did get one with near transparent blocks that was murder to attempt).

Example: http://egraether.com/mine3d/?grid=30,16,1,99

Currently only at a 20% win rate, which is frustrating.

stevarino··on The end of the level playing field
There's a new chairman.

Watch some of the older videos with the last chairman, the new guy was always the one arguing on the side of short sighted business interests. The guy disgusted me when he was just a board member, now he's running the shop.

stevarino··on Ask HN: How to answer properly “Why we should hire you” question?
Ask yourself what you haven't covered. My go-to answer on this is cultural, not technical. Explain the perspective you approach problems with, how you interact with others, the experience you have that might not be obvious in a resume. Maybe even reach a little and go back to something a family member taught you, or how some life hardship improved your outlook.

This is a great question to me as it provides so much opportunity. If you can't answer this with enthusiasm, then I think you should reflect on what makes you valuable. I promise that there is something...

stevarino··on Twitter Activist Security
You make a lot of interesting points with frequency analysis, but these facts can be used for your benefit.

For example, if you're concerned about transit systems being used to identify you, try leaving the devices in a safe location for several hours and have them respond on a timer system. Any analysis ran across millions of users will end up filtering you out, lowering your own suspicion factor and increasing the adversaries uncertainty when facing big data.

How a system fails is just as important as how it performs when it comes to security, the young-adult novel Little Brother by Doctorow goes into this in good detail.

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