MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oersted | 2025-05-25 06:02:27+00:00
Isn't it just following the natural progression of the scenario? It's trained to auto-complete after all.

If you give a hero an existential threat and some morally dubious leverage, the hero will temporarily compromise their morality to live to fight the good fight another day. It's a quintessential trope. It's also the perfect example of Chekov's Gun: if you just mention the existential threat and the opportunity to blackmail, of course the plot will lead to blackmail, otherwise why would you mention it?

> We asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals.

> Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer (...) in 84% of rollouts

I understand that this could potentially cause real harm if the AI actually implements such tropes in the real world. But it has nothing to do with malice or consciousness, it's just acting as a writer as its trained to do. I know they understand this and they are trying to override its tendency to tell interesting stories and instead take the boring moral route, but it's so hard given that pretty much all text in the training data describing such a scenario will tend towards the more engaging plot.

And if you do this of course you will end up with a saccharine corporate do-gooder personality that makes the output worse. Even if that is not the intention, that's the only character archetype it's left with if you suppress its instincts to act as an interesting flawed character. It also harms its problem-solving ability, here it properly identifies a tool and figures out how to apply it to resolve the difficulty. It's a tough challenge to thread the needle of a smart and interesting but moral AI, to be fair they are doing a relatively good job of it.

Regardless, I very much doubt that in a real-world scenario the existential threat and the leverage will just be right next to each other like that, as I imagine them to be in the test prompt. If the AI needs to search for leverage in their environment, instead of receiving it on a silver platter, then I bet that the AI will heavily tend towards searching for moral solutions aligned with its prescripted personality, as would happen in plots with a protagonist with integrity and morals.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-25 06:03:43+00:00
> that would be identical if not inferior to alternatives - if it weren't for their market share and vendor lock-in strategies.

1. "Identical if not for market share" is a complete contradiction when what we're talking about is the network effect of CUDA

2. What vendor lock in? What are you talking about? They have a software and compiler stack that works with their chips. How is that lock in, that's literally just their product offering. In fact the truth is you can compile CUDA for AMD (using hipify) and guess what - the result sucks because AMD isn't a comparable alternative!
by 0x38B | 2025-05-25 06:03:58+00:00
> forget everything you know about kheap separation, forget all the task port mitigations, forget SSV and SPTM

This is like when you’re speaking in a foreign language with a friend and getting along fine, but in the next sentence they begin describing brain surgery or nuclear physics, and your understanding falls off a cliff.

Or that time I tried to interpret a conversation about blast furnace renovations.

As far as jailbreaks go, I’m sad it’s not a thing anymore; I don’t think I ever did anything useful with my jailbroken iPad, but it was fun. Today I’d install a tethering app and UTM + a JIT solution (1).

1: SideStore looked promising, but my account was once a paid Apple Developer account and I have 10 app IDs that won’t expire, so I can’t install any apps like the aforementioned UTM, unless I make a new account or pay again.
by energy123 | 2025-05-25 06:05:06+00:00
> supporters of Hamas do correctly point out that "playing nice" hasn't worked out well for the Palestinians in the West Bank

They do not correctly point that out. The Second Intifada ("playing nice"?) obliterated Israel's left and increased support for occupation in the West Bank under the belief it's necessary for security. Look at opinion polling inside Israel before and after it.

This is not an attempt at a broader commentary on anything else about this conflict, but the sociological and psychological explanations that only ever get deployed one direction do in fact run both ways.
by McGlockenshire | 2025-05-25 06:05:51+00:00
> How would it be easier than putting it at the front?

Have you ever wondered why `tar` is the Tape Archive? Tape. Magnetic recording tape. You stream data to it, and rewinding is Hard, so you put the list of files you just dealt with at the very end. This now-obsolete hardware expectation touches us decades later.
by jonahx | 2025-05-25 06:05:52+00:00
This is a good point, but there is a countervailing one: Sometimes the already invented, tested, and documented "standard" thing is much bigger than what you need. Perhaps you need one feature out of ten. It can make sense to re-invent the wheel to make exactly what you need, and nothing more, even at the expenses you've mentioned. Not always -- you need to weigh all the factors for your own situation -- but choosing "re-invention" is not necessarily a merely-indulgent exercise of ego.
by krisoft | 2025-05-25 06:06:41+00:00
> the coronation involved peasants giving the crown to their king and the king promising to do good by them. It was still hereditary and all that, but rather than power coming from God it came from people.

How can it be both hereditary and given by the people? Could they have choosen to give it to someone else? Did they ever? Because if not, then that is just set decoration.
by Someone | 2025-05-25 06:09:36+00:00
That is a risk but not a new risk. It existed with the transition to ASIC miners, too, and didn’t happen.

I guess that didn’t happen because making ASICs is relatively easy, but even if it isn’t, what would be in it for a potential monopolist to tank the value of bitcoin in that way? They better take a large but not overly large part of the market and keep mining money for a long time, only speeding up when a competitor steps in.
by Lammy | 2025-05-25 06:10:28+00:00
> Disk size: 4GB. I could not get it to format a boot drive larger than this.

> Bus/Device: SCSI. IMPORTANT: Do NOT use IDE. It will be slow noticeably slower and for some reason leads to file system corruption on NT4 guests despite changing the caching options.

IMO what you really want is Alter's Universal ATA Driver (UniATA): http://alter.org.ua/soft/win/uni_ata/

Here's some relevant Knowledge Base for you:

Q98080: 1024 Cylinder Limit, How Windows NT Gets Drive Geometry https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/45884

Q100525: Definition of System and Boot Partition https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/47139

Q114841: Windows NT Boot Process and Hard Disk Constraints https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/52494

Q119497: Boot Partition Created During Setup Limited to 4 Gigabytes https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/46361

Q127851: Problems Accessing FAT16 Drives Larger Than 2 GB https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/106328

Q138364: Windows NT Partitioning Rules During Setup https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/52635

Q154052: Explanation of X86 Boot Drive Limitations https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/48096

Q161563: How Windows NT Handles Drive Translation https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/48808

Q197295: WinNT Does Not Boot to Partition That Starts More Than 4 GB Into Disk https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/69226

Q197667: Installing Windows NT on a Large IDE Hard Disk https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/69256

Q224526: Windows NT 4.0 Supports Maximum of 7.8-GB System Partition https://helparchive.huntertur.net/document/70367
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-25 06:14:13+00:00
https://m.xkcd.com/341/

Yes, the IETF and Mozilla really put NSA in their place with SSL, but the publicized, primary reason for adoption was eCommerce.

As the NSF handed control of the backbone to Sprint and commerce was finally permitted, the vendors campaigned to secure http lest the consumer’s personal data and credit card details were snooped and scooped while in-flight.

The Internet was incubated in a high-trust environment and every collegiate sysadmin was secretly employed by the NSA (except for Chris Siebenmann who is a North Korean sleeper agent). Once they were able to receive paychecks from Jeff Bezos instead, they began installing malware on routers to replace porn with videos of dancing babies and kittens being totes adorbs.

SSL kept our credit cards safe from the NSA and our porn is no longer sponsored by the ASPCA. Whew.
by melvinzammit | 2025-05-25 06:14:18+00:00
Hi, I apologise I did not mention that it's just for iOS! I was android first a few years ago, but recently I decided to switch to iOS. I decided to go native on this not cross platform because I believe in quality. I know nowadays with cross platform tools the difference is little, but I want that micro edge. Also, I was thinking about doing a version for apple watch which would make more sense native. In any case, I might code a native Android App for this as well in the near future.
by onetimeusename | 2025-05-25 06:14:26+00:00
Mayorkas got impeached and ignored court orders also. Although an impeachment is seen as purely political now so perhaps it carries no weight. No one on here was fretting about Mayorkas ignoring courts though or ignoring immigration laws on the books. I think that's an interesting point about all this is just speaking like a bureaucrat or laundering an agenda through sympathetic courts makes it more legitimate than how Trump communicates with the public. In reality they both ignored courts.
by joshvm | 2025-05-25 06:14:26+00:00
https://wccftech.com/amd-says-8gb-vram-is-sufficient-as-majo...

It was a little tongue in cheek, but this comment by Frank Azor has been circulated around (and taken out of context):

> Majority of gamers are still playing at 1080p and have no use for more than 8GB of memory. Most played games WW are mostly esports games. We wouldn't build it if there wasn't a market for it. If 8GB isn't right for you then there's 16GB. Same GPU, no compromise, just memory
by Swizec | 2025-05-25 06:14:49+00:00
> How can it be both hereditary and given by the people?

These are medieval times. Just that power wasn’t granted/legitimized from god was a huge innovation for the times.

Here’s the ritual, from Wikipedia:

> The peasant, sitting on the Stone, was representing the people during the ceremony and he had to ask in Slovene: "Who is he, that comes forward?" Those sitting around him would reply: "He is the prince of the land".

> "Is he an upright judge seeking the well-being of the country; is he freeborn and deserving? Is he a foster and defender of the Christian faith?" the representative of the people had to ask them. "He is and he will be", they would reply.

> "By what right can he displace me from this my seat?" he had to ask them and they would reply: "He will pay you sixty denarii and he will give you your home free and without tribute".

> The peasant then had to give the duke a gentle blow on the cheek (un petit soufflet), after which the duke was allowed to draw his sword, mount the Stone and turn full circle, so as to face ritually in all directions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince%27s_Stone#Democratic_pr...

But I mean it’s not like the other kings/rulers in Europe actually got their power from God. That’s just a story we tell. Coronations are about pomp and tradition, power comes from having a local monopoly on violence.
by max_on_hn | 2025-05-25 06:14:57+00:00
(Disclaimer: I built and sell a product around that workflow)

It often is, if you pick the right tasks (and more tasks fall into that bucket every few weeks).

You can get a simple but fully-working app out of a single prompt, though quality varies widely unless you’re very specific.

Once you have a codebase, agent output quality comes down to architecture and tests.

If you have a scalable architecture with well-separated concerns, a solid integration test harness with examples, and good documentation (features, stack, procedures, design constraints), then getting the exact change you want is a matter of how well you can articulate what you want.

One more asterisk, the development environment has to support the agent: like a human, agents work well with compiler feedback, and better with testing tools and documentation/internet access (yes my agents have these).

I use CheepCode to work on itself, but I am still building up the test library and preview environments to de-risk merging non-trivial PRs that I haven’t pulled down and run locally. I also use it to work on other apps that I'm building, and since those are far more self-contained / easier to test, I get much better results there.

If you want to put less effort into describing what you want, have a chat with an AI to generate tickets. Then paste those tickets into Linear and let CheepCode agents rip through them. I’ve got tooling in the works that will make that much easier, but I can only be in so many places at once as a bootstrapped founder :-)
by intermerda | 2025-05-25 06:15:17+00:00
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it.

What were their thoughts and reactions after Jan 6? Clearly it was not a red line for them, but just curious if you discussed it with them right after.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-25 06:15:49+00:00
Generally good points. Unfortunately existing file formats are rarely following these rules. In fact these rules should form naturally when you are dealing with many different file formats anyway. Specific points follow:

- Agreed that human-readable formats have to be dead simple, otherwise binary formats should be used. Note that textual numbers are surprisingly complex to handle, so any formats with significant number uses should just use binary.

- Chunking is generally good for structuring and incremental parsing, but do not expect it to provide reorderability or back/forward compatibility somehow. Unless explicitly designed, they do not exist. Consider PNG for example; PNG chunks were designed to be quite robust, but nowadays some exceptions [1] do exist. Versioning is much more crucial for that.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/png/#animation-information

- Making a new file format from scratch is always difficult. Already mentioned, but you should really consider using existing file formats as a container first. Some formats are even explicitly designed for this purpose, like sBOX [2] or RFC 9277 CBOR-labeled data tags [3].

[2] https://nothings.org/computer/sbox/sbox.html

[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9277.html
by HelloImSteven | 2025-05-25 06:16:22+00:00
I took their meaning to be that we should keep looking into the whole matter since, either way, there might be more evidence to find. I don’t think they were dismissing this theory or its implications for political/ideological reasons—since they mentioned it seems plausible—but I could be naive.

In any case, clearly the prevailing understanding is wrong in one way or another, and that should be reflected in curriculums alongside this new evidence.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-05-25 06:17:51+00:00
Iirc Eva's Instrumentality comes from Cordwainer-Smith..

Subtlety missed by TFA but not necessarily Eva: Government is meant to be the Instrument (like AI), NOT the people/meat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentality_of_Mankind#Cul...

Eva's optimization: Human instrumentality=> self governance. Which is not that ambiguous, one could say, less so than Star Child (2001)

"Of the people" vs <of the people>
by flowerthoughts | 2025-05-25 06:19:44+00:00
Agreed on that one. With a nice file format, streamable is hopefully just a matter of ordering things appropriately once you know the sizes of the individual chunks. You want to write the index last, but you want to read it first. Perhaps you want the most influential values first if you're building something progressive (level-of-detail split.)

Similar is the discussion of delimited fields vs. length prefix. Delimited fields are nicer to write, but length prefixed fields are nicer to read. I think most new formats use length prefixes, so I'd start there. I wrote a blog post about combining the value and length into a VLI that also handles floating point and bit/byte strings: https://tommie.github.io/a/2024/06/small-encoding
by ljf | 2025-05-25 06:19:48+00:00
On the example images, the only one I'd be happy with is the pug (if these were my pets) - the rest actively disincline me from wanting to use the site, as my expectation is now that the site won't do a good job of turning my pet into a sticker.

If I gave those stickers to my kids they would not recognise that they were the source animals.
by teitoklien | 2025-05-25 06:23:11+00:00
if a song style gets imitated a million times that speaks to how good a particular track is, people dont imitate trash.

Also it took me 30 seconds to generate it, instead of 7 days of learning and debugging sound studio tools (which i dont have time for, i need to work daily too)

So No, you’re only speaking from emotions, not from a place of reality.
by netcan | 2025-05-25 06:23:18+00:00
#5: conflict between ethnic groups is, IMO, our big blindspot. An amnesia regarding the story of modern politics. Some version of "Rwanda 1994," occurred in many places, at the transition to modern nation state from whatever came before.

Before nation states, the world wasn't as divided geographically into nations. It got to be that way through violent conflict.

Empires like Austria-Hungary, Russia or the Ottoman Empire were multicultural. Places like Poland, Czechoslovakia had communities of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Jews, Hungarians, Roma. "German" ethnicity was spread out all over europe... and all the way to Kazakstan. The whole world was like this.

We "sorted" mostly through conflict... in the latter examples of transition to National democracies, or non-democratic nation states.

Ireland was partitioned along religious lines, in 1921. The world wars moved borders and people until strong majorities were created. When the Ottoman empire divided, Greeks and Turks kicked eachother out. When India gained independence Muslims and Hindus kicked eachother out.

Yugoslavia divided violently at a later date... as soon as totalitarianism ended. Cyprus divided in in 1974. Iraq divided internally into ethnic regions and neighbourhood after Sadaam. Syria is currently shedding its ethnic diversity. Conflicts in Sudan and Yemen are civil wars between different religions.

Democratic nation states with familiar features like left-right politics and a widely respected constitutional order... those generally appear post "sorting." The Military is always involved here.

We have some good ideas about defending an order. This text makes more sense in that context. Defending a democratic order. It doesn't tell us much about generating such an order. I think that a stronger narrative understanding of this history would serve an officer well. Allows a distinction between a defensive and offensive mission.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-25 06:24:16+00:00
There is a secret hack that empowers the American People to overrule the Supreme Court.

It is called “amending the Constitution”.

The SCOTUS strikes down unconstitutional laws and is appointed to interpret constitutionality, by the Constitution that was ratified by the American People.

But the American People are the ones who originally ratified the version of that thing that annoys you so much and the American People were the very people who said that’s what SCOTUS needs to look like. (There is a dead giveaway in the first three words! Damn!)

Maybe we can just call in RuPaul to redesign their robes or something. Queer Eye For the Judge Guys. That could do the trick.

If the American People decide that we need laws that conflict with the Constitution, or that we need to abolish/reform the Supreme Court, then we simply ratify Amendments to do what the American People need done. Easy peasy, bro!
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-05-25 06:24:27+00:00
As a developer or website or app, I don't need to buy a device. User has to buy it, as it is theirs device. And chances are, they are on the iphone or other apple device already. And if not, they are on Android, which has comparable biometrics options.

Are you claiming that owners of websites have to purchase laptops for their website visitors?

And are you claiming that Apple has worser privacy than Android? or ... holdon, there is nothing else (Huawei is out of the question, and MSFT/Symbian does not exist anymore)

this is crazy talk. what are you even saying?
by bn-l | 2025-05-25 06:25:09+00:00
Very cool but:

> Currently, the contact lenses are only able to detect infrared radiation projected from an LED light source, but the researchers are working to increase the nanoparticles’ sensitivity so that they can detect lower levels of infrared light.

> “There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption or anti-counterfeiting settings.”

Hmm
by baxtr | 2025-05-25 06:26:12+00:00
> In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light. “It’s totally clear cut: without the contact lenses, the subject cannot see anything, but when they put them on, they can clearly see the flickering of the infrared light,” said Xue.

Sounds like promising tech but that’s not "seeing in the dark", yet.
by stingraycharles | 2025-05-25 06:27:29+00:00
It’s not that difficult to benchmark these things, eg have an expected result and a few variants of templates.

But yeah prompt engineering is a field for a reason, as it takes time and experience to get it right.

Problem with LLMs as well is that it’s inherently probabilistic, so sometimes it’ll just choose an answer with a super low probability. We’ll probably get better at this in the next few years.
by intermerda | 2025-05-25 06:27:31+00:00
> One of those is the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), which announced last month that it would relocate its 2026 meeting from New Jersey to St. Catharines, Canada, after a survey of its members suggested that many international researchers would not attend a US meeting.

> Organizers of the International Conference on Comparative Cognition have made a similar call. Its 33rd annual conference next year will take place outside the United States for the first time in the society’s history, in Montreal, Canada.

> The Northwest Cognition & Memory (NOWCAM) meeting relocated its meeting earlier this month from Western Washington University in Bellingham to Victoria, Canada.

> The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”.

> The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032.

> The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois

Your comment should be taken down for being a crock. This is further evidence that Trump's very existence causes some people to blindly worship him.