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ted_dunning

938 karma · joined April 17, 2014

Fellow at HPE
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ted_dunning··on What a Massive New 728-Foot-Wide Crater Means for Future Moon Bases
But the rate for milligram sized particles hitting a 100m x 100m patch is 2-3 per month.

At 20km/s, that's plenty big enough to ruin your day.

ted_dunning··on Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics
In normal English usage, "with extreme prejudice" is commonly understood to mean that you advocate killing the person in question.

Either you don't know what you are saying and should improve your language skills

Or you do and should be dropped from this site for advocating violence.

ted_dunning··on Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine
It would be nice to be able to back up in the sequence. There were a few times where I realized I had not fully understood a previous step and would have like to be able to review some previous steps.

Otherwise this is completely excellent!

ted_dunning··on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric
The average one way commute distance in the US is only 14.4 miles and the median is around 9 [1]. The one way average commute time is about 27 minutes.

As such, I don't think that "most" commutes in US cities are 30+ miles and 45 minutes or more.

[1] https://truedrivingcost.com/articles/average-commute-distanc... Data sourced from US census data.

ted_dunning··on Coulomb's law remains tricky to test at home
Charge splitting being equal depends on capacitance which can be hard to make equal.
ted_dunning··on Solving for faster SHA-1 collision detection
Fuzz tests with tailored random distributions and good logical property tests are excellent tests.

What would you do better?

Also, the author didn't say that there were no other tests. They just said that they use fuzz + property tests a fair bit.

ted_dunning··on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead
It's worse than weak. It is an argument that works better the stupider you are.

Seriously.

The stupider you are, the more likely it is that there is something valuable that you don't know about.

But sophistry on that level doesn't actually change the minimal economic value of putting people on Mars.

ted_dunning··on How good are frontier models at physics?
I tried Opus first. It figured out that there had to be tangential frictional forces on the lower balls, but asserted that there was no frictional forces on the upper ball "by symmetry". From this, it deduced that the lower balls would have a torque and would thus start spinning at higher and higher angular velocity. It noted that this would violate conservation of energy, but didn't seem much bothered.

Fable 5.1 did a much better job and paid attention to warnings about tangential friction. It correctly noted that the critical coefficient for friction was at the contact points with the upper ball. It also pointed out that a ring around the balls at center height would hold them together even without ball-ball or ball-table friction.

ted_dunning··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Unnecessary is a very realistic world.

For lots of people in cities or large portions of Europe, going without a car is much better.

ted_dunning··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
The form of the data pretty much forces this kind of analysis because fault is not reliably recorded (or even known, to be fair).
ted_dunning··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Not only that, it's going to happen every year. Most achievements only happen once.
ted_dunning··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
According to the data, not very many.
ted_dunning··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Not really.

We have lots of examples now of their model doing what they say is impossible.

Now we have another example of something that they say is impossible or very unlikely. Do we take their word for it this time? Really?

ted_dunning··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
In fact, the entire outline of the proof is very similar to the external team's proof.

Details may be different, but the use of a very similar tack is very suspicious. Combined with thuggish comments "why would you ruin your career" and "I don't have to be nice" take away pretty much any credibility the OpenAI team's statements might have had.

ted_dunning··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
And the third time it happens, is that still just an accident?
ted_dunning··on Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM
Attested TLS has had some rough patches lately which can be attributed to making big changes to a complex protocol.

It really better to separate the attestation, the check against policy and then the TLS stuff. Solve one problem at a time, sign that progress and move on.

ted_dunning··on Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM
The link between attestation and the key is nicely made with TAS. TAS gives you a cert and Spiffe then requires a cert like that to give a SVID that you use as a certificate for mTLS.

This means that the root of trust threads through software (TAS) that verified that your attestation evidence matches the live policy. This works with no changes to Spiffe.

This doesn't really meet your requirements to keep the key out of memory since the resulting SVID lasts for several minutes in memory, but it does meet most people's needs.

https://github.com/TEE-Attestation/tas

ted_dunning··on Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
I think that is the terms and conditions of the web site, not the hardware product.
ted_dunning··on Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
It's a nit. They made a typo.
ted_dunning··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
How do you decide who gets to roll the single die?

Gee, you need a way to rank the players to decide.

ted_dunning··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
You can take the product of the permutations as the result.

The only problem with that is that you need to pick an order to roll the dice in order to pick the order to rank the players.

But happily, we have a set of dice that pick the order to roll the dice. Now we only need to pick an order to roll the dice to pick the order to roll the dice to pick the order to play.

But ...

ted_dunning··on Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit
In legal speak "please forgive me" is pronounced "so sue me!"
ted_dunning··on Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit
It's not nearly that simple. Apple used Google frontier models in training Siri, but Siri is not just a pass-through to Gemini.
ted_dunning··on Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit
It also depends on your law. In California, some companies still try to put these restrictions into contracts, but that contradicts state law so it has no legal effect. The intended effect is intimidation, however, which may work with some people.
ted_dunning··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
It's not clickbait, it's automated empathy!

/s

ted_dunning··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
It may well become a safeguard that all bots must speak in a much less inflected voice to remind us not to particularly trust them.
ted_dunning··on Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)
More correctly, the insight is that this computation is trivial after you expand it.
ted_dunning··on Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)
The hydraulic analog is that you can weigh a volume of water (which is the same as computing its volume) by adding up the forces on the surface surrounding the water.

This looks like it requires a dot product with the normal vector for each triangle, but you can expand it into the same form as the article.

ted_dunning··on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise
Coal is particularly bad about large scale contamination. Nuclear has historically involved substantial contamination in processing plants (Hanford, Paducah, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats and so on).

Solar, wind, and battery do not have comparable large scale contamination risks.

ted_dunning··on C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality
And their video was C2PA signed.
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