MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by khaki54 | 2025-04-25 11:53:17+00:00
It's not like he called Comcast and had them run a line on the weekend and they snuck it in there with no one noticing. He told Comms what he needed and they gave security a business justification to set it up in a way that had an acceptable amount of risk. It's all documented and approved.

And no we don't call these a "dirty" line that's something someone made up for the purposes of the article. We call it "unattrib" and it's quite common, serving many useful legitimate purposes.

One thing that I find surprising about the Hegseth case is that most SecDef do not use the computer in their office it all. A couple recent ones still don't even have a computer in there. Normally staff handle 100% of communication and briefing outside of phone calls and video calls. He's clearly still adjusting to the reality of operating within the _confines_ of DoD headquarters.

Also the article's mention of using Wi-fi in the back of his office doesn't make sense to me, there isn't any Wi-fi available in the suite or anywhere nearby.
by cardanome | 2025-04-25 11:54:23+00:00
> Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.

I had management "strongly encourage" me to use AI for coding. It will absolutely be a requirement soon for many people.

The more generative AI you use the more dependent you become of it. Code bases need to be structured different to be friendly to LLM's. So even if you might work somewhere where you technically don't have to use AI, you will need it to even make sense of the code and be competitive.

The job of an software engineer for the most part will change fundamentally and there will be no going back. We didn't know how good we had it.
by ryandv | 2025-04-25 11:54:47+00:00
> This is the path we're on. You don't need to know how multiplication by hand works in order to be able to do multiplication - you use the tool available to you.

What tool exactly are you referring to? If you mean LLMs, I actually view them as a regression with respect to basically every one of the "characteristics of notation" desired by the article. There is a reason mathematics is no longer done with long-form prose and instead uses its own, more economical notation that is sufficiently precise as to even be evaluated and analyzed by computers.

Natural languages have a lot of ambiguity, and their grammars allow nonsense to be expressed in them ("colorless green ideas sleep furiously"). Moreover two people can read the same word and connect two different senses or ideas to them ("si duo idem faciunt, non est idem").

Practice with expressing thoughts in formal language is essential for actually patterning your thoughts against the structures of logic. You would not say that someone who is completely ignorant of Nihongo understands Japanese culture, and custom, and manner of expression; similarly, you cannot say that someone ignorant of the language of syllogism and modus tollens actually knows how to reason logically.

You can, of course, get a translator - and that is what maybe some people think the LLM can do for you, both with Nihongo, and with programming languages or formal mathematics.

Otherwise, if you already know how to express what you want with sufficient precision, you're going to just express your ideas in the symbolic, formal language itself; you're not going to just randomly throw in some nondeterminism at the end by leaving the output up to the caprice of some statistical model, or allow something to get "lost in translation."
by Applejinx | 2025-04-25 11:55:44+00:00
We've had that for years in the DAW and autotune and snapping to grid.

The result's pretty boring and interchangeable, and that's largely what AI music is trained on. Accuracy is not novel here. Ever since the 80s it's been increasingly possible to augment musical skill or lack of, with technology.

I don't think we're very close to correcting for sloppy intentionality. Only to correcting 'mistakes', or alternately adding them in the belief that doing stuff wrong is where the magic is.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-25 11:56:06+00:00
Eventually, you won't have a choice when fertiliser produced from oil runs out, becomes cost prohibitive, or is made illegal due to greenhouse gas problems; likewise, "pest control" has already resulted in a 40% decline in insect populations; it won't be good if it gets to 100%.

It would be best to find sustainable ways to grow food now, instead of continuing unsustainable ways (including supplying massive food aid to unsustainable populations so they can keep growing) until there is a precipitous crash.

The idea that only industrial scale farming can feed the planet is mostly a myth promoted by producers of industrial scale inputs and the oil/gas industry, by the way.
by sgerenser | 2025-04-25 11:56:12+00:00
That was one aspect of the auditing, but they also sent audit notices to random small and medium businesses who were not volume license customers. Basically fishing for license violations, which obviously were very common (and usually unintentional) back in the 90s and early 2000s. Things like installing windows XP or Office on multiple machines without buying extra licenses.

AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.
by nexo-v1 | 2025-04-25 11:56:17+00:00
This sounds a lot like structured logging with a fresh coat of paint. Wide events are nice conceptual model, but if you’ve been doing structured logs seriously, especially with something like Loki or ELK stack, you’re already capturing rich context per event — including things like user info, request paths, even DB queries if needed.

I’ve been using Loki recently and really like the approach: it stores log data in object storage and supports on-the-fly processing and extraction. You can build alerts and dashboards off it without needing to pre-aggregate or force everything into a metrics pipeline.

The real friction in all of these systems is instrumentation. You still need to get that structured event data out of your app code in a consistent way, and that part is rarely seamless unless your runtime or framework does most of it for free. So while wide events are a clean unification model, the dev overhead to emit them with enough fidelity is still very real.
by namaria | 2025-04-25 11:56:21+00:00
Pidgin and creole (language) are concepts that have some similarities but don't fully overlap.

"Creole" has colonial overtones. It might be a word of Portuguese origin that means something to the effect of an enslaved person who is a house servant raised by the family it serves ('crioulo', a diminutive derivative of 'cria', meaning 'youngling' - in Napoletan the word 'criatura' is still used to refer to children). More well documented is its use in parts of Spanish South America, where 'criollo' designated South Americans of Spanish descent initially. The meaning has since drifted in different South Americans countries. Nowadays it is used to refer, amongst other things, to languages that are formed by the contact between the languages of colonial powers and local populations.

As for the relationship of 'creole' and 'creosote' the only reference I could find is to 'creolin', a disinfectant derived from 'creosote' which are derivative from tars.

Pidgin is a term used for contact languages that develop between speakers of different languages and somewhat deriving from both, and is believed to be a word originated in 19th century Chinese port towns. The word itself is believed to be a 'pidgin' word, in fact!

Cajun is also a fun word, because it apparently derives from 'Acadiene', the french word for Acadian - people of french origin who where expelled from their colony of Acadia in Canada. Some of them ended up in Louisiana and the French Canadian pronunciation "akad͡zjɛ̃", with a more 'soft' (dunno the proper word, I can feel my linguist friend judging me) "d" sound than the French pronunciation "akadjɛ̃", eventually got abbreviated and 'softened' to 'cajun'.

Languages are fun!
by _heimdall | 2025-04-25 11:56:42+00:00
But how do others in DC use Signal while in federal buildings, or is Signal use way less common than I've understood it to be?

I'm not asking because what Hegseth did is excusable, the first offence likely would have led to his termination and charges if he was enlisted.

It is still interesting, though, whether this actually is an outlier or just an article pointing out one case of an individual they want to single out.
by gchamonlive | 2025-04-25 11:56:44+00:00
From Wikipedia

> Sontag argues that the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish within people a "chronic voyeuristic relation to the world."[1] Among the consequences of this practice of photography is that the meaning of all events is leveled and made equal.

This is the same with photography as with llms. The same with anything symbolic actually. It's just a representation of reality. If you trust a photograph fully that can give you a representation of reality that isn't grounded in reality. It's semiotics. Same with llm, if you trust it fully you are bound to get screwed by hallucination.

There are gaps in the logical jumps, I know. I'd recommend you take a look at Philosophize This' episodes about her work to fill them at least superficially.
by lobsterthief | 2025-04-25 11:57:06+00:00
This adds up perfectly to me.

* He could’ve gotten a death note because they suspected he might become a whistleblower, or simply because of what he knew. * This death note could have been the final straw. * Drones fly over my house all the time. If I witnessed what he did and received a death note, I may assign additional significance to it.

None of this is implausible at all.
by blagie | 2025-04-25 11:57:15+00:00
It's a little bit more complex than that.

My personal benchmark is to ask about myself. I was in a situation a little bit analogous to Musk v. Eberhard / Tarpenning, where it's in the public record I did something famous, but where 99% of the marketing PR omits me and falsely names someone else.

I ask the analogue to "Who founded Tesla." Then I can screen:

* Musk. [Fail]

* Eberhard / Tarpenning. [Success]

A lot of what I'm looking for next is the ability to verify information. The training set contains a lot of disinformation. The LLM, in this case, could easily tell truth from fiction from e.g. a git record. It could then notice the conspicuous absence of my name from any official literature, and figure out there was a fraud.

False information in the training set is a broad problem. It covers politics, academic publishing, and many other domains.

Right now, LLMs are a popularity contest; they (approximately) contain the opinion most common in the training set. Better ones might look for credible sources (e.g. a peer-reviewed paper). This is helpful.

However, a breakpoint for me is when the LLM can verify things in its training set. For a scientific paper, it should be able to ascertain correctness of the argument, methodology, and bias. For a newspaper article, it should be able to go back to primary sources like photographs and legal filings. Etc.

We're nowhere close to an LLM being able to do that. However, LLMs can do things today which they were nowhere close to doing a year ago.

I use myself as a litmus test not because I'm egocentric or narcissistic, but because using something personal means that it's highly unlikely to ever be gamed. That's what I also recommend: pick something personal enough to you that it can't be gamed. It might be a friend, a fact in a domain, or a company you've worked at.

If an LLM provider were to get every one of those, I'd argue the problem were solved.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-25 11:57:18+00:00
When it said it could be used anywhere C++ could be used, I was expecting something closer to Carp[0] or PreScheme[1] which have no runtime garbage collector. This lets you use these in contexts where runtime GC is not acceptable, like real time processing, or constrained hardware like microcontrollers.

[0] https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp

[1] https://prescheme.org
by api | 2025-04-25 11:57:43+00:00
An AI chatbot trained on massive amounts of knowledge about survival, farming, animal husbandry, small scale community management, home building, clothes making, etc would be immensely valuable.

“I have chickens and one has stopped laying eggs and become lethargic. What could be the cause?”

These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search, and being “jpegs for knowledge” you can pack a lot of knowledge into a small device. You have to check the results but having some old fashioned books on hand would help with that, as would some common sense.

I agree about a separate device. A durable laptop and a solar panel to charge it would be best.

A lot of special purpose devices are sold as a way to sell software since people won’t buy software. Sell a software and data bundle containing curated data and apps and such and nobody will buy it, but pair it with some e-waste and they will.

Same goes for a lot of digital assistants and other gadgets. They could just be apps but people don’t buy apps so they have to come bundled with e-waste.
by williamcotton | 2025-04-25 11:58:34+00:00
I've got a similar project that includes a React component for the search input. The React component is actually a Monaco text editor so you get syntax highlighting, error highlighting, tab completion and more.

Check it out here: https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query

There's an animated GIF of the demo so you can get a very quick idea of how it works!
by mosura | 2025-04-25 11:59:02+00:00
The all time stupidest episode of this type was https://www.cfr.org/cyber-operations/compromise-mobile-app-u...

“A threat actor compromised a mobile app that Ukrainian artillery units used to assist with targeting. The compromise of the app is believed to have allowed the threat actor to monitor the movements of Ukrainian units in order to facilitate military targeting by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine”

More details https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/22/android_malware_track...
by acdha | 2025-04-25 11:59:23+00:00
The point is that he intentionally broke policy to set up a communications system which doesn’t meet federal security standards for sensitive information and also doesn’t comply with the rules for retaining records. Think of it like hiring a new bank manager who decides that they need to start storing the money in a second location with a combo lock only they have the password to. They say they’re not doing it to commit fraud but it’s unambiguously more vulnerable and, far more importantly, there’s absolutely no reason to do that except if you’re planning to do something illegal because the existing system works fine for everything they officially need to do.
by cess11 | 2025-04-25 11:59:25+00:00
As someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, I find LLM:s profoundly hard to find a use for besides crude translations of mainly formal documents and severely unreliable transcriptions.

I like structured information and LLM:s output deliberately unstructured data that I then have to vet and sift out and structure information from. Sure, they can fake structure to some extent, I sometimes get XML or JSON that I want, but it's not really either of those and also common that they inject subtle, runny shit into the output that take longer to clean out than it would have to write a scraper against some structured data source.

I get that some people don't like reading documentation or talking to other people as much as having a fake conversation, or that their editors now suggest longer additions to their code, but for me it's like hanging out with my kids except the LLM is absolutely inhuman, disgustingly subservient and doesn't learn. I much prefer having interns and other juniors around that will also take time to correct but actually learn and grow from it.

As search engines I dislike them. When I ask for a subset of some data I want to be sure that the result is exhaustive without having to beg for it or make threats. Index and pattern matching can be understood, and come with guarantees that I don't just get some average or fleeting subset of a subset. If it's structured I can easily add another interactive filter that renders immediately. They're also too slow for the kind of non-exhaustive text search you might use e.g. Manticore or some vector database for, things like product recommendations where you only want fifteen results and it's fine if they're a little wonky.
by ploxiln | 2025-04-25 11:59:44+00:00
The real problem here was "-Werror", dogmatically fixing warnings, and using the position of privilege to push in last-minute commits without review.

Compilers will be updated, they will have new warnings, this has happened numerous times and will happen in the future. The linux kernel has always supported a wide range of compiler versions, from the very latest to 5+ years old.

I've ranted about "-Werror" in the past, but to try to keep it concise: it breaks builds that would and should otherwise work. It breaks older code with newer compiler and different-platform compiler. This is bad because then you can't, say, use the exact code specified/intended without modifications, or you can't test and compare different versions or different toolchains, etc. A good developer will absolutely not tolerate a deluge of warnings all the time, they will decide to fix the warnings to get a clean build, over a reasonable time with well-considered changes, rather than be forced to fix them immediately with brash disruptive code changes. And this is a perfect example why. New compiler fine, new warnings fine. Warnings are a useful feature, distinct from errors. "-Werror" is the real error.
by blagie | 2025-04-25 12:01:14+00:00
They probably don't, but it's still a good protection if you treat it as a more limited one. If you assume:

[ ] Don't use

Doesn't mean "don't use," but "don't get caught," it still limits a lot of types of uses and sharing (any with externalities sufficient they might get caught). For example, if personal data was being sold by a data broker and being used by hedge funds to trade, there would be a pretty solid legal case.
by myself248 | 2025-04-25 12:02:13+00:00
Replying to myself here. I just found myself shopping for a washer and dryer, and indeed, ran across one that takes manufacturer-branded detergent cartridges and offers to order more, right in the app, when they run low.

It can use third-party detergent by manually adding it at the start of the cycle, but adding some _during_ the cycle (which ultimately uses less) is only supported if using their cartridge.

I wish I was making this up.
by beklein | 2025-04-25 12:02:20+00:00
Great point, but you need to have a good understanding in how LLMs work to understand this limitation. If you don't have an intuitive understanding think like it's one of these draw on my back games, just each new token is a new human in the loop, known words are like simple shapes you felt before 100 times on your back and are easy for you to reproduce and change, random ASCII strings are harder to _grasp_ and will produce a fuzzy output... all models are wrong, but some are useful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA_DQHoxj34
by pasc1878 | 2025-04-25 12:03:32+00:00
Australian Radio Network’s CADA station, which broadcasts in Sydney and on the iHeartRadio app, created a host called Thy using artificial intelligence software developed by voice cloning firm ElevenLabs.

The Workdays with Thy show presented music for four hours a day from Monday to Friday, but did not mention on its website or promotional materials that Thy was not a real person.
by namaria | 2025-04-25 12:03:37+00:00
> It's just another skill you have to learn, by putting in the effort of extensively using LLMs.

I'd rather just skip the hassle and keep using known good sources for 'learning about' things.

It's fine to 'learn about' things, that is the extent of most of my knowledge. But from reading books, attending lectures, watching documentaries, science videos on youtube or, sure, even asking LLMs, you can at best 'learn about' things. And with various misconceptions at that. I am under no illusion that these sources can at best give me a very vague overview of subjects.

When I want to 'learn something', actually acquire skills, I don't think that there is any other way than tackling problems, solving them, being able to build solutions independently and being able to explain these solutions to people with no shared context. I know very few things. But I am sure to keep in mind that the many things I 'know about' are just vague apprehensions with lots of misconceptions mixed in. And I prefer to keep to published books and peer reviewed articles when possible. Entertaining myself with 'non-fiction' books, videos etc is to me just entertainment. I never mistake that for learning.
by metalman | 2025-04-25 12:03:37+00:00
this a phenominon of a niche group, tries to float something as a known thing, kind of cultic in the nasty response to any input from anyone blithly evaluating the "cannon" as distributed by the iluminati. VS, just invite people to take a look VS, groups that know they are fringe, and get on with there fun, like seeing a lifted truck, covered in stickers, and wierd accessories, plasterd with mud and debrits, and one sticker that says "if you have to ask, you wont understand" good enough!, live and let live but the line is, to posture as a universaly known and valued thing, and be no such thing at all
by tpoacher | 2025-04-25 12:04:25+00:00
A related thought, just leaving this here.

There's something great about old technology (though obviously one must be aware of survivorship bias when citing such technology), despite the fact that, logically speaking, new technology should have obviously been better.

Perhaps it's some variant of Jevons' paradox. The better / more efficient things get, the more of an impetus there is to use them in truly crappy ways. And this is how I'm starting to feel about programming with vs without an AI: you can either program manually to create truly creative, functional, elegant stuff, or use AI to produce garbage more efficiently. There just doesn't seem to be an in-between category, at least in terms of demand.

In case you haven't seen this video of a toaster from the 60s before, you're in for a treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

I'm also reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's quote on elegance: https://platosmirror.com/edsger-dijkstra-elegance-is-not-a-d...
by aaomidi | 2025-04-25 12:04:40+00:00
Signal without out of band verification is quite literally useless.

Maybe if the DoD forked signal, added a way for signal to piggyback off of an existing trust system, then sure.

But I would bet a lot of money that the folks in this signal chat never did the out of band verification.

If you do not do the verification, you’re not in fact e2ee.
by acdha | 2025-04-25 12:04:49+00:00
People don’t use Signal for official business. The federal government is required to keep records of how it operates, which Signal is not compliant with (deletion), and classified material is not allowed on unapproved systems. Most people take that seriously because it is a career-ending offense for a merit-hire which would effectively end their ability to get any job with the government or a contractor which requires a background check.
by sjamaan | 2025-04-25 12:06:21+00:00
> It's just an example, extrapolate python to everything tech that is needed for us to have a healthy relationship with tech.

Perhaps that's also a reason why - tech is so large, there's no time in a traditional curriculum to teach all of it. And only teaching what's essential is going to be tricky because who gets to decide what's essential? And won't this change over time?