demosthanos

5 ms·

1.
by demosthanos 3d ago
Surveillance cameras (not Flock, sounds like) are what allowed the police to spend ridiculous amounts of the city's time chasing (checks notes) $295 of damage to a swing from totally normal use by a couple of pre-teens. Swings have alw
2.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
There isn't, but everything that they said above is absolutely true and people who try to fight it will suffer. There is lots of flexibility within those constraints, but the constraints aren't imaginary.
3.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
For what it's worth, I totally understand the motivating use case here. There were absolutely times where I walked away from what I was hoping would be an hours-long project that would run to completion and came back to find that Claud
4.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Yes, the problem with comparing open models to open source is that open source requires humans to volunteer their time. Open models requires humans to volunteer their money. These two types of contributions have very different behavioral pr
5.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
The myth is that Roman concrete was 'better' and that we don't know how to recreate it. The facts are that it was not better in any way than what we can do now and we have always known how to replicate it. Grady addresses bot
6.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Yes, you, too, can have two-thousand-year-old buildings if you're willing to make that longevity be the primary thing you pay for, assuming that your successors don't tear the thing down and replace it with something else, like ha
7.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Related, Grady Hillhouse on the myth of Roman concrete. > The miracle of modern chemistry has given us a wide variety of admixtures like superplasticizers to improve the characteristics of concrete beyond a Roman engineer’s wildest dream
8.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
First: This is the general privacy policy, not the enterprise contract. I don't know what goes into the enterprise contract, but I do know that our legal department spent a very long time making sure it was satisfactory before we got a
9.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
I'd like to see you try using mental calisthenics against a well-funded legal department. Let me know what the judge says.
10.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
There is a world of difference between: * A company following suit with their entire industry in choosing a very generous definition of fair use. * A company being the first to defect and actually break their signed contracts with enormous
11.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
You truly see no difference between having a perhaps-overly-generous definition of fair use and flagrantly breaking contracts that you signed with your customers?
12.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
There is an enormous difference between: * Exploiting ambiguity around fair use at a large scale before the law catches up and then jointly lobbying with your competition to make sure your interpretation of the law becomes reality. * Explic
13.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
First, I think people should buy from GoG for exactly this reason. But also, the difference is that Steam has as far as I can tell never yanked a game from someone's account and failed to refund them for it. Games either get delisted a
14.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Because: 1. There are lots of things that compilers load into their memory that aren't actually source code. A memory exploit turns non-source data into executing-in-the-compiler code. 2. Depending on the language semantics, a memory e
15.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
I don't think transitive definitionally means we can ignore it. Any input that I give to my direct dependencies could theoretically end up inside of its dependencies and I can't know that it doesn't without auditing the sourc
16.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Recent and very related: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation (797 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456 So Sony is simultaneously announcing that all purchases will be
17.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
> Compilers are not security sensitive, usually. The compiler is one of the most significant trust boundaries we have. Its decisions can intentionally or unintentionally create vulnerabilities in programs compiled by the compiler, which
18.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
In context that's clearly not what he's saying, the next sentence is this: > Zig has more features than Rust for making memory-unsafe code work correctly, and that was the area where we wanted the most help. Zig definitely does
19.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
It's great that you can make your own independent apps on atproto, and you're right that I overstated the "anything on the protocol" in the analogy. Analogies are always lossy, but that was worse than necessary. But noti
20.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
I don't think the Google comparison is doing you any favors in resolving the concern behind the category error, though. What I'm hearing is that AT is like the web if Google had started the web themselves and designed it around th
21.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
> I feel like we've done full circle. Languages are back to being (mostly) procedural. I'm not sure I like it, but it seems that this is what people prefer. Is this an actual shift, or is this just what happens when LLMs make i
22.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Not formally, but we do informally recognize names and prioritize researchers who reliably turn up good results.
23.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
In theory, yes, but are you actually seeing clearly-garbage lower-bound reports like this? The ones we're seeing show clear evidence of being AI-generated, are often incorrect or duplicated, but they also show clear evidence of the AI
24.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
As someone on the company response side of the HackerOne brokenness, I can confirm that this effect is real but would also note that the difficulty of distinguishing is not as severe as all that, because the companies have access to the sou
25.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
I don't know if all ecosystems are as bad as node is, but the node ecosystem has terrible issue severity ranking which makes infosec squeamish for no reason. Every week or so there's a new High+ "vulnerability" that gets
26.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
The biggest consistent tell for LLM writing is when the conversation leaks through into the final prose. You read along with the text and things seem to be going fine until all of the sudden it starts arguing against a position that no one
27.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Fair enough, I didn't realize Norwegian law had this provision. EU-wide and US law do not, so this is pretty specific to the Nordic countries from what I can tell.
28.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
No, Dell will not give you a refund for something purchased at a retailer. For general returns and refunds, the retailer is on the hook because they're the ones who actually took your money. What Dell will do is repair or replace a com
29.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Apple is the analog to the local electronics store. They're the ones with the direct relationship with you, they're the ones you paid, they took a 30% cut off the app developer's top line explicitly under the pretext that t
30.
by demosthanos 2mo ago
Claude's "honest" is an interesting example because we can trace it to a specific document that it was trained on extensively: the "Constitution" is identified to Claude in its training as the core of what it is, an

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