MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zmmmmm | 2025-06-16 02:49:26+00:00
It's important to note the way it was measured:

> the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time

As I understand it, it means if you prompt it with some actual context from a specific subset that is 42% of the book, it completes it with 50 tokens from the book, 50% of the time.

So 50 tokens is not really very much, it's basically a sentence or two. Such a small amount would probably generally fall under fair use on its own. To allege a true copyright violation you'd still need to show that you can chain those together or use some other method to build actual substantial portions of the book. And if it only gets it right 50% of the time, that seems like it would be very hard to do with high fidelity.

Having said all that, what is really interesting is how different the latest Llama 70b is from previous versions. It does suggest that Meta maybe got a bit desperate and started over-training on certain materials that greatly increased its direct recall behaviour.
by mightyham | 2025-06-16 02:50:07+00:00
I didn't say poetry has to have all of those things, but it has to contain some of them or it simply isn't poetry. I would challenge you to find me one good example of poetry that has none of the features I listed.

This whole poetry topic is really besides the point anyways.

> English - or any other natural language - is much more variable than Lisp.

I don't feel like you are actually addressing what I'm saying, so let me reiterate it more clearly. I'm not making any assetions about the absolute creative power of lisp or writing. It is the author of the article who points out that lisp's distinguishing feature, compared to other programming languages, is it's ability to specialize and mutate its own verbiage/syntax to better fit certain problems or modes of thinking. I am simply pointing out the irony that this charactistic of lisp also distinguishes it significantly from natural language, even though the author is attempting to argue that programming lisp and writing literature are similar.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-06-16 02:50:15+00:00
The downgrade attacks on TLS are only really present in the case of client behaviour where, on failing to achieve one version, they retry a new connection without it.

This was necessary to bypass various broken server side implementations, and broken middleboxes, but wasn’t necessarily a flaw in TLS itself.

But from the learnings of this issue preventing 1.2 deployment, TLS 1.3 goes out of its way to look very similar on the wire to 1.2
by gwbas1c | 2025-06-16 02:50:53+00:00
Not really, because it was a single person and the spaceship was a vehicle. The other race was still in a vehicle.

Think more about the difference between single celled organisms versus a multicellular organism: IE, the spaceship itself is alive and has a lifespan where interstellar travel is a fraction of its life. The people inside are like cells inside our body.
by cardanome | 2025-06-16 02:50:55+00:00
Oh, the police is gonna show up if I verb something that isn't a verb? People only ever use grammatical constructs and vocabulary that they have learned in school?

It is super common for authors to introduce new words or bend the grammar. Again, bloodydamn Shakespeare invented so many new words! Oh, and bloodydamn is such an invented word from a very contemporary and popular book series called the Red Rising series. You don't even need to be high brow to invent new words and get away with it.

I urge you to explore more literature and poetry. There is more to English than what they teach you at school.
by csmantle | 2025-06-16 02:51:10+00:00
This approach tries to combine pixels stream with metadata stream, but from my opinion that's not a very elegant solution.

Being consistent when perceived and being lossless in information are different things. https://github.com/Kuberwastaken/meow/blob/60339a764a2365c4a... shows that the library simply truncates the lower bits of the pixel, doing a lossy transformation to the carrier. This could lead to (at best) inconsistencies in later sample processing, or (at worst) the sample being pulled away far from the original location in the sample/embedding space.

Steganography is generally used to covertly carry information -- you try to keep your extra bits in-band with the carrier. That's why anti-piracies use that to carry identifiers, watermarks or so, without disrupting the perceived consistency/quality of the carrier.

Metadata, on the other hand, does not need to be transmitted covertly. They are public information can be included in the container format itself. Many image formats already have facilities for these out-of-band data streams. So I think it's reinventing the wheels, but in a crude and complicated way.
by dvt | 2025-06-16 02:51:46+00:00
> the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation

First of all, we don't really know how the brain works. I get that you're being a snarky physicalist, but there's plenty of substance dualists, panpsychsts, etc. out there. So, some might say, this is a reductive description of what happens in our brains.

Second of all, yes, if you tried to publish Harry Potter (even if it was from memory), you would get in trouble for copyright violation.
by yashwanthnandam | 2025-06-16 02:51:57+00:00
The real problem: In my daily work, I found myself repeatedly spending too much time gathering runtime context just to explain bugs to AI tools like GitHub Copilot. Manually copying variables, tracing paths, and filtering noise is bit time taking.

So I built Co Debugger AI(VSCode Extension): Smart algorithms that instantly generate attachable, intelligent debugging context using Symbolic Analysis, Path Sensitivity Analyzer, and Smart Filtering Algorithm from your runtime state along with the runtime variables.

What it does: Transforms a runtime debugging session into AI-consumable context in one click.

Example - The Workflow

Before: Hit breakpoint Manually copy variable values Screenshot call stack Type context into Copilot chat Lose focus, forget details Get generic AI response

With Co Debugger AI: Hit breakpoint → Click status bar Select context type (10 options) File auto-opens in side panel Attach to Copilot → Ask intelligent questions

How smart analysis makes context AI-ready: • Path Sensitivity Analysis = Shows variable relationships across execution paths • Symbolic Execution Engine = Computes "what-if" branches without running code • Smart Filtering Algorithm = Identifies only the relevant variables for your case • AI-Optimized Formatting = Structures context for maximum AI comprehension

Perfect for AI assistance: Ask Copilot: "Why is my payment processing failing intermittently?" — with full context.
by kragen | 2025-06-16 02:53:11+00:00
> Unless we manage to make massive cost reductions for atmospheric CO2 sequestration,

We will. The main reason atmospheric carbon capture is expensive is that it requires a lot of energy, and the cost of energy is falling through the floor because of cheap renewables. Expensive high-efficiency chemistries for carbon capture will cede to simpler, energy-hungrier chemistries, the ultimate reductio ad absurdum being something like soda lime. Soon enough synfuel from atmospheric carbon capture will be an attractive alternative to fossil fuels for transport (within 15 years), and then it's just a question of capturing the combustion products from the fuel. We may need to start adding high-multiple GHGs to the atmosphere to compensate for carbon dioxide we remove to make plastic. Hopefully shorter-half-life GHGs than sulfur hexafluoride, though.

The US has taken a very aggressive policy stance against renewables and in favor of fossil fuels, but ultimately it can't prevent the inevitable. If it continues to punish the importation of renewable energy equipment, US subjects will import cheap synfuel, or, failing that, they'll import electrolytic iron, zinc, or magnesium to use as fuel, from countries like Chile, China, and Dubai.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-16 02:54:12+00:00
> So 50 tokens is not really very much, it's basically a sentence or two. Such a small amount would probably generally fall under fair use on its own.

That’s what I was thinking as I read the methodology.

If they dropped the same prompt fragment into Google (or any search engine) how often would they get the next 50 tokens worth of text returned in the search results summaries?
by astnai | 2025-06-16 02:56:24+00:00
i don’t think studio ghibli should shut down just because miyazaki retires. great studios outlive their founders—their spirit and vision can be passed on, refined, and kept alive through new talent.

look at apple: steve jobs defined it, but the company kept going and still carries his legacy. ghibli could do the same. miyazaki shaped its soul, but that soul doesn’t have to vanish with him.

it’d be a real loss to the world to never see anything new from ghibli again.
by cshimmin | 2025-06-16 02:56:50+00:00
It’s not unreasonable to suspect they are doing the same. The article starts with a description of a lawsuit NY Times brought against OpenAI for similar reasons. The big difference is that research presented here is only possible with open weight models. OAI and Anthropic don’t make the base models available, so it’s easier to hide the fact that you’ve used copyrighted material by instruction post-training. And I’m not sure you can get the logprobs for specific tokens from their APIs either (which is what the researchers did to make the figures and come up with a concrete number like 42%)
by asciisnowman | 2025-06-16 02:57:52+00:00
On the other hand, it’s surprising that Llama memorized so much of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

It's sold 120 million copies over 30 years. I've gotta think literally every passage is quoted online somewhere else a bunch of times. You could probably stitch together the full book quote-by-quote.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-06-16 02:58:14+00:00
The main difference is in the padding. When the POODLE attack was pre-announced as only affecting SSL3 and not TLS1.0, that was enough to predict it was going to be a padding oracle.

I think it’s fair to say they’re very similar, with a few “bug fixes”. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about either though, and might be forgetting a few things. I’ve only ever implemented SSL3 and TLS1.0 together, so there may be some details I’m forgetting.
by globnomulous | 2025-06-16 02:58:36+00:00
> One could say this about absolutely any technology.

What do I become worse at when I learn metallurgy, woodworking, optics, painting, or cooking?

> But as with everything else, you can take technology to do more, things that might be impossible for you to do without it, and that's ok.

Whether LLMs are helpful or enable anybody to do 'more' is beside the point.

I don't care about doing more -- or the 'more' I care about is only tangentially related to my actual output as an engineer. I care about developing my skill as an SWE and deepening my understanding. LLMs stand in the way of that. They poison it. Anybody who loves and values the skill as I do does themselves a disservice by letting an LLM do the work, particularly the thinking and problem solving. And even if you don't care about the skill, and are delighted to find that LLMs increase your output while you're using them, I'd wager you'll pay a hefty long-term intellectual and personal cost, in that you'll become a worse, lazier, less engaged engineer.

That's what this guy's post is about: losing the ability to do the work, or finding yourself bewildered by it, because you're no longer practicing it.

If code is just an obstacle to your goals but also the means of reaching them, and LLMs help you reach your goals, great, more power to you. My goal is to program. I just want to continue to do what I love and, day by day, problem by problem, become better at it. When I can no longer do that as an SWE, and I'm expected (let alone required) to let an obnoxious, chipper chatbot do the work, while I line the pockets of some charlatan 'thought leader,' I'll retire or blow my brains out.
by DrillShopper | 2025-06-16 02:59:33+00:00
The claim is that self driving is mundane - something everyone can have if they want. A standard feature, so entwined in the background of life that it is unremarkable.

Given that there is no system out there that I can own, jump in the back of in no condition to drive, and get to my destination safely defeats that claim. It's not even so mundane that everyone has the anemic Tesla self-driving feature that runs over kids and slams into highway barriers.

It may also be a matter of laws, but the underlying tech is also still not there given all the warnings any current "self driving car" systems give about having to pay attention to the road and keep your hands on the wheel even if the laws weren't there.

Could I get behind the wheel of my self driving car, drunk, and make it there safely? No, I definitely couldn't, and I understand why those laws exist with all of the existing failure modes of self driving cars.

People have called the current state of LLMs "sparkling AutoComplete". The current state of "self-driving cars" is "sparkling lane assist" with a chaser of adaptive cruise control.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-16 02:59:33+00:00
> Hey CO2 is still greenhouse

SF6 has 25,000 times the 100-year global warming potential as CO2.

You’d have to accidentally vent thousands of these breakers to equal the same global warming potential as one SF6 breaker

When it comes to topics like this, reducing it to a binary is-or-isn’t greenhouse gas is the wrong way to look at it.
by Grimblewald | 2025-06-16 03:00:42+00:00
How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc.

We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil to create such a level of private capital. I would go as far as to argue such wealth disparity is not natural and is only possible through severe perversion of the natural order.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2025-06-16 03:01:25+00:00
Modern computers do not have integrated sound synthesis hardware whatsoever, there has been no point in shipping that since the start of the 21st century. Unfortunately, that does mean that for playing legacy General MIDI content, users are stuck with poor quality software implementations like Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth and the (modern successor of the) QuickTime synthesizer, which were designed for slow computers with little memory in the late 1990's, and were trying not to compete with the high-end hardware of the time (because both license samples from Roland, who made such hardware).

General MIDI as a format basically died for serious computer use in the early 2000's. It's still a feature of some home keyboards and things, but it is a case where they genuinely do not “make them like they used to”. If you want the greatest possible GM support, you have to buy old hardware from e.g. the Roland Sound Canvas or Yamaha MU series, or obtain old software (no longer sold) like Roland Sound Canvas VA or Yamaha S-YXG50.
by gotenjbz | 2025-06-16 03:02:53+00:00
Hi all, I just released safe-math-rs, a Rust library that lets you write normal arithmetic expressions (a + b * c / d) while automatically checking all operations for overflow and underflow.

It uses a simple procedural macro: #[safe_math], which rewrites standard math into its checked_* equivalents behind the scenes.

Example: use safe_math_rs::safe_math;

#[safe_math] fn calculate(a: u8, b: u8) -> Result<u8, ()> { Ok((a + b * 2) / 3) }

assert_eq!(calculate(9, 3), Ok(5)); assert!(calculate(255, 1).is_err()); // overflow Under the hood: Your code:

#[safe_math] fn add(a: u8, b: u8) -> Result<u8, ()> { Ok(a + b) } Becomes:

fn add(a: u8, b: u8) -> Result<u8, ()> { Ok(self.checked_add(rhs).ok_or(())?) } Looking for: Feedback on the macro's usability, syntax, and integration into real-world code

Bug reports

GitHub: https://github.com/GotenJBZ/safe-math-rs

So long, and thanks for all the fish
by heigh | 2025-06-16 03:02:57+00:00
I think you answered my question, although indirectly. I thought there was competing standards (if that's even the right word, I don't know) for note-taking.

YAML is more for configuration and meta-data, so my original question didn't make a lot of sense.

You've helped clear my confusions so for that, thanks so much!

As for Obsidian, I just wasn't super keen having a whole extra app just for my note-taking. I like simple Notepad++ (or Geany, now that I'm moved to nix), as it can work on any files, not just text/MD/note docs.
by btilly | 2025-06-16 03:03:53+00:00
My apologies for having missed this request.

I don't have good suggestions for a good set theory textbook. Grad school was 30 years ago, and I didn't specialize in logic.

The best set theory book that I read was https://www.amazon.com/Naive-Theory-Undergraduate-Texts-Math.... But that one is aimed at people who want to go into math but do not wish to specialize in set theory, and not at people who want to actually learn set theory.
by Kranar | 2025-06-16 03:04:19+00:00
>The only thing that the optimizer does is unrolls the loop that advances the state.

The idea that you'd dismiss loop unrolling as some kind of non-issue is incredibly baffling, you need only compare the benchmark built without optimizations enabled to the one with optimizations enabled, and you'll see that the unoptimized build is about half as fast!

Speaking of Python the most recent Python release has some significant performance increases in some scenarios because of some additional loop unrolling that has been exploited.

>That's why I said "well-optimized regex." Most regexes, in practice, are not well-optimized!

So then what exactly is the point of your argument? I point out that using regex's are slow, which almost anyone would reasonably assume means that using regex libraries tend to be slow.

Is the entire point of your comment that you can take a regex and then manually implement a special purpose algorithm for it that isn't slow? Was that the point of your comment, because if so you could have made that clear initially and saved both of us a lot of time.

>I think that's perfectly reasonable here, as the given problem is finding the fastest algorithm that decides whether a string is in the language generated by ASCII characters without the vowels.

No it's not reasonable at all because if you take your definition then there is nothing to use. Being a regular language is not something you can "use" or "not use", it's a property of a set of strings, you don't get to use it. The language consisting of all strings that have at least one vowel in them is a regular language, case closed, usage has nothing to do with it. In the sense that you're using it, any algorithm whatsoever that returns true or false for a string that matches some arbitrary regular language can be considered an implementation of a regex, for some fixed regular language. But of course this is a completely trivial argument which is why there's absolutely no point in discussing it.

In the non-trivial sense that everyone else uses it... regex's are libraries that people use that let them write a string representing a pattern and then the library returns an object that can be used to test whether or not a string matches that pattern, or can be used to search for a substring that matches a pattern along with a host of functionality. The claim in my original post is that these libraries, including the one used by the blog post, tend to be slow. They are, as you point out, designed for ergonomics and convenience, not for performance.

It is not at all reasonable to argue that some arbitrary implementation you divined for a particular regular language constitutes some argument that regular expressions are a high performance means of performing string matching, but at least you have clarified your position and shown it to be absolutely trivial and meaningless, and hopefully anyone who has read your post won't be misled into thinking you meant that regex libraries that are commonly used by actual engineers like Python's, or PCRE2, or boost or the standard library are fast... but I have my doubts about that.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-16 03:07:39+00:00
Right but the physical encoding already exists in my brain or how can I reproduce it in the first place? We may not know how the encoding works but we do know that an encoding exists because a decoding is possible.

My question is… is that in itself a violation of copyright?

If not then as long as LLMs don’t make a publication it shouldn’t be a copyright violation right? Because we don’t understand how it’s encoded in LLMs either. It is literally the same concept.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2025-06-16 03:07:47+00:00
Windows and macOS have both bundled similar low-quality licensed versions of a Roland GS sample set and low-quality software synthesisers since the late 1990's. Neither of them are as good as even the lowest-end dedicated hardware General MIDI synth from Roland was, but they're still better than nothing. You're unlucky because you happen to be using Linux. unfortunately the best in that field was and remains proprietary so this will probably never be solved on that platform.
by lambda | 2025-06-16 03:07:53+00:00
Psychosis is not necessarily something that you are or aren't; you can be prone to it, without it having manifested, and there can be external things that trigger it.

It isn't hard to imagine that a chatbot that seems to know a lot, and which can easily be convinced to produce text about any arbitrary subject with no grounding in reality, and which is prone to just making up plausible sounding text which is written in an authoritative tone, could be something that could easily trigger such psychotic episodes.

And it doesn't seem improbable that the interactivity of it, the fact that it responds to what is going on in someone's mind, could make it even more prone to triggering certain types of psychosis more easily than traditional unidirectional media like writing, TV, or radio.

Now, that's all supposition. For now, we just have a few anecdotes, not a rigorous study. But I definitely think it is worth looking into whether chatbots are more likely to trigger psychotic episodes, and if there are any safety measures that could be put in place to avoid that.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-06-16 03:08:02+00:00
Probably not?

Sure there are just ~75,000 words in HP1, and there are probably many times that amount in direct quotes online. However the quotes aren’t even distributed across the entire text. For every quote of charming the snake in a zoo there will be a thousand “you’re a wizard harry”, and those are two prominent plot points.

I suspect the least popular of all direct quotes from HP1 aren’t using the quotes in fair use, and are just replicating large sections of the novel.

Or maybe it really is just so popular that super nerds have quoted the entire novel arguing about the aspects of wand making, or the contents of every lecture.
by comp_throw7 | 2025-06-16 03:08:31+00:00
Someone pointed this out in the comments section of the original post, but this was entirely missing the point Eliezer was trying to make, which was that these incidents serve as a narrow refutation of alignment-by-default claims, because either these LLMs aren't coherent enough to be meaningfully "aligned" at all, or they are, and are nevertheless feeding the delusions of many people who talk to them in ways we'd consider grossly immoral if done by a human. (One can quibble with whether these two possibilities cover all the available options, but that would be the argument to engage with, not with whatever the author understood EY to be saying.)