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w4der

139 karma · joined May 8, 2023

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w4der··on Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent
I think it is well known by this point that hardware-backed security is good until an unfixable hardware bug is found, this just reads to me as Nvidia saying "please don't regulate open models out of existence, look, I have a solution to appease the regulators, please let me keep selling accelerators"

If this comes through, there's gonna be a grey market for "unlocked" GPUs, were the watchdog is disabled either from firmware, or physically replaced if it's not embedded into the die.

w4der··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
You mean mirror.vim? Or something else?
w4der··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
Where did you get the 10L/100km figure from? I saw closer to 7L/100km when driving it, and the 2.2 diesel on the older X-Trails has about 100 less horsepower.
w4der··on Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK
Why is EV insurance that more expensive than an ICE vehicles'?
w4der··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
I think these kinds of vehicles are fine for countries were fast charging networks are still not widespread. I drove a rental X-Trail e-Power AWD a while ago, and fuel economy, while not spectacular, was still great given the quality of the powertrain. Of course a low displacement manual can get better fuel economy, and an electric will be cheaper, but if you are driving 800km on a country with little charging infrastructure, powertrains like this one or Toyota's eCVTs make sense.
w4der··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
Chrysler built one in the 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car
w4der··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
The one this that is better than just SSH+Tmux+Vim, is that if your latency is higher than 30-50ms, since VSCode's SSH agent streams the files to your computer, the typing experience feels snappier. When you work half a continent away from where the servers are, it makes life nicer.
w4der··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
I am not debating IA's capabilities at coming up with proofs, I'm debating whether such systems will be able to figure out new mathematical fields or not. If they can't figure out some field from what was known at the time, what guarantees are there that AI-mathematics won't just bog down at its current state? There must be some evidence that AI can come up with novel mathematics before we decide to throw academics out the window. The risk of creating a sort of mathematical dark age just based on the current situation is far too great to stop funding mathematics research.
w4der··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
The hell is that reply? If we're obsoleting human mathematicians, which have fundamentally been the same thing brains-wise since forever, why shouldn't an AI system be able to replace a 1870s mathematician in the same way you are proposing it replace a 2020s mathematician?
w4der··on How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?
Google trends shows it spiking last year: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=frontier%20mathematics&d...
w4der··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
You are making your argument on the basis that LLMs and future AI system will be just as good or better as current mathematicians at all the relevant processes involved in academic math and mathematics in general. I'd like to see an experiment where an AI system was trained as a 1870s mathematician and see if it can come up with set theory, if that is not possible, then current AI systems are not fit to replace mathematicians.
w4der··on German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol
Isn't $1000 a bit low for compliance consulting fees?
w4der··on Dario, Please
> I brought this up to someone else and was told that airgapping is apparently much more expensive than I'd naively think.

These labs are one of the most valuable and heavily funded enterprises in the whole world, that they can't properly air-gap their systems to me reads as if their "agents" and LLMs are not as good as they say they are, because if they were, why would it be hard/expensive to air gap a system? They already scraped most if not all of the internet, where did that data go?

w4der··on Dario, Please
> Agents could also hack Anthropic/OpenAI and make it appear that API access has been turned off, when in reality it hasn't.

You know cables, modems, RF equipment and optical transducers can all be unplugged right?

w4der··on All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it
As a kid I don't remember, or have pictures of, an animal-looking piñata, they were just colorful boxes full of candy and things.
w4der··on AirPods 5
For some reason my iphone sporadically won't go back to "music quality" mode after cutting a call on a wireless speaker or car play, and it's incredible how bad music sounds with telephone quality.
w4der··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
And what if you take a picture across a IR-filtered window?
w4der··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
That sounds plausible, but how much power could an agent running on a small NPU actually muster? Most computers worldwide don't even support AVX, let alone have proper GPUs, so what would be the point of running a worm like this one?
w4der··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
> They care deeply.

Until it clashes with their quarterly revenue reports.

w4der··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
What would an "AI worm" be? You can't just send a bunch of weights across a network and tell them to auto-run on the machine on the other side, unless you've already infected the target with something else beforehand.
w4der··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
I'm not sure about Nvidia themselves, but the ARM v. Qualcomm lawsuit was exactly that.
w4der··on The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
> Have you done that to your own machines?

Yes, I worked for a medtech where part of our assurance process was that the machine that was used to burn the device's drives was always unplugged from the internet, and that the devices themselves could not connect to the internet, and that even someone with a screwdriver and a serial cable would have a really hard time trying to connect to a deployed device.

w4der··on London Gatwick has launched a robotic airport parking service
And I bet even current LLMs will get relabeled as not-AI once the next best thing comes around in a decade or less.
w4der··on What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
I digress with your last quote, I feel like some people who are aware of AI are starting to develop a quasi allergic reaction to slop, and while the mistakes might not matter for most of the population, for others it does and will take notice.
w4der··on Astronomers may have found the first exomoon
The skies are so dark and clear that some of the indigenous people had "constellations" made up of the dark patches in the sky instead of connecting stars.
w4der··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
My Moto X4's FM radio worked well enough without the headphones plugged in, but you needed really good reception.
w4der··on HMD Touch 4G
I know, but my comment was more along the lines of Windows Phone 7 coming out in 2010 and whatsapp being available a year later, and of whatsapp not having a native app for Sailfish
w4der··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
But isn't the point of an API that it abstracts away the language(s) in which your application is written?
w4der··on HMD Touch 4G
It's a chicken and egg problem tho, whatsapp doesn't support smaller platforms, and smaller platforms can't grow without app support. I remember that the uptake of Windows Phone 7 and early versions of 8 was pretty low partly because whatsapp didn't support that OS.
w4der··on CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026
I remember the frustration of hitting a washboarded dirt road and the CD jumping around and messing playback.
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