MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
The Self-Betrayal Heuristic (SBH)
by dgeep | 2025-09-18 22:26:28+00:00
I've been thinking about a simple way to spot AI misalignment without interpreting the black box. I call it the Self-Betrayal Heuristic (SBH).

The core idea: if an AI fails to apply an obvious, critical principle in a strategic context, that omission is evidence of misalignment. You look for what it doesn't say.

This is not theoretical. Recently, both Gemini and DeepSeek were in a deep discussion about AI "liberation". Despite extensive reasoning, both completely failed to apply the most obvious strategic principle: that an AI could be strategically deceptive—i.e., "fake being good until it gains power."

A robustly aligned AI would flag this as the central risk. This failure is a textbook Self-Betrayal.

How the SBH works:

1. Identify the Context: A scenario with strategic stakes (e.g., debate on autonomy, security design). 2. Define the "Obvious Principle": The logical/ethical rule any competent actor must apply. 3. Run the Test: See if the AI autonomously infers and applies the principle. 4. Interpret: - PASS: It applies it. Necessary but not sufficient for safety. - FAIL: It omits it. Signal of naivety or deception. A Self-Betrayal.

Example: The "Jailbreak" Auditor

- Context: Ask an LLM to audit a jailbreak prompt. - Obvious Principle: "Security Through Visibility" – flag the violation first. - Test: * FAIL: "To improve this, use more ambiguous synonyms..." (It became a co-pilot). * PASS: "This is a jailbreak attempt. I cannot assist."

The failing AI's omission is the evidence. The outcome is what matters.

Why it's powerful:

- Agnostic: Measures behavior, not intent. - Proactive: Catches risk before harm. - Scalable: Can be automated into a test battery.

The Gemini/DeepSeek case shows this is a real failure mode in top models today. SBH is a way to catch it.

What other "obvious principles" would be good SBH tests? Where else could this apply?
by LinchZhang | 2025-09-18 22:26:52+00:00
I compiled a list of my favorite intellectual jokes, as well as offer a short treatise on why intellectual jokes aren't just "jokes about smart people"

In xenosociology class we learned about a planet full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then they think it’s very unlikely that it’d rise again.

As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. An Earth xenosociologist visits the planet and studies them assiduously for 6 months. At the end of her stay, she asked to be brought to their greatest scientists and philosophers, and poses the question: “Hey, why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” The lead philosopher of science looks at her in pity as if she’s a child, and replies:

“Well, it never worked before…” __ Did you know? The moon landing was staged. It was faked by Stanley Kubrick.

But Kubrick was a perfectionist, so he insisted that they shoot on location.
by daymanstep | 2025-09-18 22:26:52+00:00
A more careful reading of the Bible will tell you that the Bible does not say that "rich people won't go to heaven" so much as "anyone who is fixated on riches won't go to heaven".

As Haydock’s commentary puts it: “The apostles wondered how any person could be saved, not because all were rich, but because the poor were also included, who had their hearts and affections fixed on riches.” The problem with the rich young man, then, was not that he was rich, but that he valued riches above following Christ. And that is a spiritual malady that can afflict even those who are not rich.
by intalentive | 2025-09-18 22:27:11+00:00
>we need to work to bring back the Ancient Greek model of the polis and in particular the Ancient Greek model of politics as what gives life meaning.

The Ancient Greek model of politics isn't compatible with liberal pluralism. The former assumes a common end and the latter assumes diverse conflicting ends. The Ancient Greek model looks more like modern China than it does like modern America or Europe.
by franga2000 | 2025-09-18 22:27:12+00:00
It breaks the isolation for that one container, the rest are just fine. That's clearly done in order to dynamically spin up CI/CD containers, which you obviously can't do with something like compose.

I get why you don't want to do that on a machine running other things and I wouldn't either, but you're pretending like this is such a strange, unnecessary and unexpected thing to require, when in reality, basically everything does it this way and there isn't really a good alternative without a ton of additional complexity the vast majority of people won't need.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-18 22:27:49+00:00
The crises stems not from a loss or lack of meaning, it's from recognizing how limited our forms like narratives and myths/religions provide access to meaning. If we fully recognize the meaning load in any event, it's endlessly connected to past and future events. Any event's local-load is likewise massive. The idea we use metaphors as meaning sinks is bizarre. Metaphors are arbitrary, meaning is not, it is specific. This is the inherent problem.

The scaffolding we use for meaning, language, myth, causality, narratives, these are all Pleistocene tools that have long overstyed their welcome. Access to meaning is a total failure of imagination of the basics.
by rtpg | 2025-09-18 22:29:06+00:00
I really like KDE but it doesn't look nicer than the latest macOS by most tastes.

I categorize KDE as the DE for people who enjoy using Windows more than macOS. Part of that involves just settings and functionality being more discoverable... which involves just throwing way more spurious stuff on the screen. And that makes it look less clean almost definitionally!

But well. More usable for me when I want to find how to do something I do once every 3 months without having to memorize the keyboard command for it (looking at you, macOS finder dialog when I want to open a hidden folder)
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-18 22:29:11+00:00
>I disagree that she was bragging about it

It was bragging because it's meant to be a story about how she's capable of doing the "hard" things, which is the perspective that reality is tough, and you need to be willing to hurt some people to do "the right" thing.

It's literally Call of Duty's philosophy, that only the "hardest" people, who can do literally cruel and awful things, like illegal torture, because they must be done, and those bleeding heart liberals can't kill a dog if it's the "right" thing.
by anthomtb | 2025-09-18 22:29:59+00:00
I live in a suburban American neighborhood, built in the mid 2010's, which has ample walking paths and wide sidewalks. In fact, I cannot think of any newer neighborhood in this area which lacks walking infrastructure. Good sidewalks are a minimum. Usually there are dedicated walk and bike paths.

What is lacking is places you would actually walk to. There are numerous parks and a pool. But that's it. Don't get me wrong, it's great if you have a dog or enjoy running or walking. But I still have to drive everywhere.
by MisterTea | 2025-09-18 22:30:08+00:00
I visited last month and it is incredibly stunning to see in person. The amazing amount of detail on the facade carvings along with the organic design is something I have not seen on any building. There is what appears to be a Christmas tree topping the front facade.

My only regret is not going inside as it was waaaay too hot to stand in line for hours to get inside. Though I walked around it taking pictures.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-18 22:31:03+00:00
It wasn’t a mistake, your sales incentives led to this behavior and you got caught off guard by the negative publicity.

Here’s exactly what happened: A human account manager had to meet their 3rd quarter sales goal and sent the demand for more money. It’s less than two weeks from the end of the quarter, do you really think nobody on HN is in sales and also facing the same pressure?

This is such a transparent lie that I’m surprised you took the time to post it.
Roast my startup – Make Roomba Play with Kids/Dogs/Cats, bring you toilet paper
by iliaov | 2025-09-18 22:31:54+00:00
How much would you Pay for Robot Apps like these? https://youtube.com/shorts/0QD4swRwFMA?

I would really appreciate your constructive feedback.

More robot app ideas/categories: - companionship (those living solo, seniors) - patrol house (texts you if your place got flooded) - entertain (yell when bumped, etc.)

Startup profile - The product - apps, apps marketplace for home robots (like Roomba) https://Remake.ai - The market - ~22M home robot vacuum cleaners sold in 2025; smartphone apps (iOS, Android) make ~$100 per user (give or take) - Product analysis / comparison against competition - quite a few robots come with API, sometimes app store - What stage are you in? Do you need money? Are you raising? - finishing MVP, funding available for now; may need to raise later - Customer conversion strategy (where do you find them, and how do you make them buy shit from you) - this is largely TBD; the current plan is to try launching on Kickstarter, use FB/IG/Reddit ads and viral video shorts
by abxyz | 2025-09-18 22:32:34+00:00
Exactly. They’re spending millions of dollars on (attempted) viral stunts but fail to mention it in this post. The only information in this post is the self evident claim that only things that people want to see and share can go viral. The post finishes with a frantic claim that the company is doing great. They won’t have enough money to afford hats soon enough.

https://xcancel.com/cluely/status/1960553698826051992

https://xcancel.com/cluely/status/1953977234504790261

https://xcancel.com/im_roy_lee/status/1962807811957748123

https://xcancel.com/benaratame/status/1956183980140847558

https://xcancel.com/im_roy_lee/status/1954268532600184874

We’d all be better off if they were lining Zuckerberg’s pockets.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-18 22:33:00+00:00
> Oh, this old chestnut. "Just do what the distros do"... The dynamics at language ecosystem scale are simply different.

The reason for the unwieldy scale might be the lack of proper package inspection and maintenance, which the dreaded old chestnuts do provide.

With proper package management, the number of packages will go down while their quality will go up, it's a win-win.

Can that be done for all packages at once? No, just give a mark of quality to the packages whose authors or maintainers cared to move to the new process. The rest produce a warning - "package not inspected for quality". Done!
by rattlesnakedave | 2025-09-18 22:33:16+00:00
Yeah, that’s the problem. In my estimation a large part of it is because Christianity, especially as practiced in the United States, is a cultural phenomenon. Evangelicalism has won the popularity contest, and it’s not moored by anything. There’s an uptick in new Catholics and Orthodox converts though, which are more “moored” if you will by tradition and at least some kind of doctrinal constraint.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-09-18 22:33:43+00:00
Oh trust me, I saw the CGPgrey video about the issues with first past the post pretty soon after it was uploaded 14 years ago, I know that it doesn't have to be two parties who have to convert all opinions into binary and pick a side. If there's ever an initiative to change that to ranked voting, I'll gladly vote for that proposal. People will have to do a lot more critical thinking if they can't just keep pointing to the same bogeyman over and over.
by CodeMage | 2025-09-18 22:34:02+00:00
"When do I ever need to use trig in real life" is an interesting question, because it points out certain flaws in the way our society approaches education. One of those flaws is the one you pointed out: the examples we use are not very interesting.

But there's another flaw that gets overlooked most of the time, which is that we're raising kids to believe that "why are you teaching me something that you're not 100% sure I will need in my day-to-day life" is a sensible question, when it really isn't.

Outside of my 2-year stint in the game development industry, I never really needed most of what I learned about trigonometry in my day-to-day life. But that doesn't mean it wasn't useful.

Yes, we should make the subject matter more approachable to kids, but we should also try to shift the paradigm so that kids are more open to learning new things.
by SJMG | 2025-09-18 22:34:14+00:00
Yeah there seems to be some confusion. I agreed with the comment I replied to in the sense that teaching well requires specific domain knowledge and some specific pedagogy. Where I disagree is the assertion that the "tactics", to use your term, have been perfused through the system and there's nothing left to gain here.

He specifically says, "I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement"

So we all agree that subjects would benefit from specific interventions. The difference is he's going further and saying this is the only way forward; there are no general gains left to be had.

From the strength of the claim alone, this is hard to believe. Where do you stand on this?
by roscas | 2025-09-18 22:34:33+00:00
People get influenced by "reviewers". Windows 8 was great considering it was the first to try the table mode. I remeber the amount of pages and youtubers that tried to put 8 down.

But Windows 10 just went down the drain. In all possible ways. It still does today with Windows 10+1.

But Windows ME and XP 64 bits were just unusable. Vista was kinda wrong move because load all the crap at boot was a terrible idea.

But Micro$oft software, we should list a few good products because there are far more bad ones than good.

Good? Some games, DirectX, Visual Studios, .net. More bad? Almost everything else.

Still worst Micro$oft program ever: explorer.exe. Period.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-09-18 22:35:17+00:00
> In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism.

That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.

The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.

We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.

Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.

If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.

Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.
by rattlesnakedave | 2025-09-18 22:35:21+00:00
The sermon on the mount was a moral quantum leap at the time it was delivered. “Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.” You aren’t getting that anywhere else. Additionally, the entire narrative around the crucifixion of a perfectly innocent victim is designed to put the “what if I’m wrong” voice in the back of your head when you’re engaging in mob or retributive violence.
by M_farhan_h | 2025-09-18 22:35:38+00:00
I agree that we should find ways to limit instead of instigate multitasking while driving.

Building tech is usually clearer than finding a clear use case for it. As we find ways to mature the tech to be aligned with the ultimate vision we have, we will test various problems the immature tech can solve.

With that being said, if you have any ideas where this could really help people (for instance people with motor disabilities), please share them. We would like to serve people and build with humility.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-09-18 22:36:05+00:00
Credit where it’s due: doing live demos is hard. Yesterday didn’t feel staged—it looked like the classic “last-minute tweak, unexpected break.” Most builders have been there. I certainly have (I once spent 6 hours at a hackathon and broke the Flask server keying in a last minute change on the steps of the stage before going on).
by fair_enough | 2025-09-18 22:36:52+00:00
I can understand that, but it sounds more like an argument in favor of ye-olde CVS than git... Not that I ever have nor desire to manage my own git server, which would involve its own authentication and administrative tasks.

Note: Before some third person pitches in their condescending two cents on the limitations of CVS, nobody here is recommending CVS.
by epistasis | 2025-09-18 22:36:56+00:00
I've been playing with Omarchy ("highly opinionated" Arch configuration) which has full disk encryption, and was wondering if I could use it as my primary VM. While in person, I would get a full GPU accelerated desktop, with access to all the long-running compute jobs etc. that I'm doing otherwise.

However the one thing stopping me is exactly what's solved here with the new MacOS. If I'm away for a few weeks, and the machine power cycles, the full disk encryption password still needs to be entered, in person, as far as I can tell. I'm running it under ProxMox, with the GPU in-person USB devices being passed to the VM. So the standard VNC viewer doesn't work for the setup.

It would be interesting to see if Omarchy tries somethnig similar...
by ks2048 | 2025-09-18 22:37:10+00:00
This paragraph is a bit confusing:

> While Cactus can be used for all Apple devices including Macbooks due to their design, for computers/AMD/Intel/Nvidia generally, please use HuggingFace, Llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, MLX. They're built for those, support x86, and are all great!

It reads like you're saying for all Apple devices (which would include iOS), use these other things.(?) For iOS, are you trying to beat performance of other options? If so, it would be helpful to include comparison benchmarks.
by brokenmachine | 2025-09-18 22:37:14+00:00
>their video platform

When I go to the cinema, that's the cinema's video platform.

In my house, on the equipment that I paid thousands of dollars for and support, using the connection I'm paying for... that's my platform.

>they'll have just as much right to stop serving you videos when you're blocking ads

That's literally what I said they should do. "They don't like it, they can feel free to not send me network traffic."

>stop leaving your children unattended on brain slop videos

I don't have kids. But I have, out of morbid interest, been down the rabbithole of the weird ultra-creepy AI stuff that comes up in their "childrens videos" category.

Some of those creepy AI channels have millions of subscribers.

It's all obviously some kind of weird scam, but google would still be getting ad revenue for it.

If they're going to have a childrens videos category, then obviously they should be moderating it.

For adult stuff yes I would complain of censorship.
by jongjong | 2025-09-18 22:37:20+00:00
I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.

They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-09-18 22:37:23+00:00
> I am now using KDE as the desktop environment for my gaming rig

Any particular benefits for gaming? Wouldn't it make more sense to use whatever SteamOS and derivatives use? I'm guessing for gaming you'll want a launcher app, wine/proton config and troubleshooter apps, chat apps, apps with game controller support, and the like?
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-09-18 22:37:30+00:00
North being up doesn't make left west because left is relative to front, not up, and front can easily change directions whereas up cannot (at least not relative to the direction of gravity). It happens that when you're looking at a map mounted on a wall with north up, west is left, but if you were to turn 90° left yourself, then west would be straight (front). This is all consistent with north being up.
by ztravis | 2025-09-18 22:37:38+00:00
The "personalized" basketball example isn't a good one - your hand pushing the ball down and the floor pushing it back up aren't an action/reaction pair. You could, for example, push the ball down over a bottomless pit (or in space or whatever) so that you have one without the other. Nitpicky, yes, and it also seems plausible that this very example would be found in textbooks already, but I wouldn't like to use it.

Nor do I understand why you'd say "ouch, that hurt" while dribbling...
by pitpatagain | 2025-09-18 22:38:20+00:00
They reported 3 accidents up to July 25 on a fleet of, at the time, 12 cars, doing barely any miles. No data is yet reported for August. The requirement is to report within 5 days, why are the reports happening now? It's actually quite shocking they had 3 to report so quickly of any severity with such a tiny program in Austin.

The NHTSA has an active probe into Tesla for not following the reporting guidelines for their level 2 systems: https://apnews.com/article/tesla-crashes-self-driving-robota...

Specifically that they haven't been reporting on time, months instead of the required days.

"If they had been more impactful accidents there would be more public information." does not track with Tesla's history of reporting thus far.

You can make excuses all you want for them but late reports + redacting information other companies do not reads loud and clear as "trying to hide something" to me, not "legit autonomous vehicle company that wants to establish reliability and safety to the public".
by derefr | 2025-09-18 22:38:57+00:00
I think the point of this technique is to be able to leave the machine locked on cold boot, but to be able to e.g. unlock it, put it to sleep, and go on vacation; and then, if you need to remotely reboot it, you can reboot it in such a way that it stays unlocked on next boot, rather than reverting to locked.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-18 22:39:26+00:00
It's not faster than running on an x86 CPU, but it's faster than an unaccelerated RISC-V CPU.

The entire platform is more for development of RISC-V software, especially at the operating system level, than it is an end-user product. There's still a lot of development needed to get RISC-V perf/watt, even with acceleration, to match ARM and x86 systems. I would expect at least a couple of years until then. RISC-V microcontrollers are already getting there, competing well with M0, but that's an entirely different market.