areoform

一昨日議論

I mean, yes. Why?

Why would nature encode such a ridiculously disproportionate / inefficient behavior when it leads to catastrophe so frequently?

I've tried to ask these machines dumber questions like, why castles? And... well I'm working on a few projects (mostly by hand) that they've helped with! :)

I like to ask dumb questions. It's fun. I encourage it.

areoform

一昨日議論

I think the source of this misapprehension is that,

You are comparing wet work in a lab to writing code on a computer.

When you screw up an exploit, you fail to execute the exploit. Famously, just like software's near zero marginal cost of distribution, the marginal cost of failure is nearly zero.

You can screw up an infinite number of times on your way to a successful exploit.

If you screw up with lethal agents in a lab? You die.

Here's a non-exhaustive list,

    Dora Lush died after accidentally pricking her finger with a needle containing lethal scrub typhus while attempting to develop a vaccine for the disease

   A 23-year-old laboratory assistant at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was infected with smallpox after observing the harvesting of live smallpox virus from eggs without isolation cabinets at that time. The assistant was hospitalised and before being isolated, she infected two visitors to a patient in an adjacent bed, both of whom died. They in turn infected a nurse, who survived

   Ebola laboratory infection by the accidental stick of contaminated needle in the United Kingdom

   Researcher Nikolai Ustinov was lethally infected with the Marburg virus after accidentally pricking himself with a syringe used for inoculation of guinea pigs. The accident occurred at the Scientific-Production Association "Vektor" (today the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology "Vektor") in Koltsovo, USSR (today Russia).

"lethally infected with the Marburg virus after accidentally pricking himself"

Anything lethal enough to kill other humans is lethal enough to kill you.

And if you don't know what you're doing — and for this argument you're saying this person has to ask a LLM "how do I spanish flu?" then they definitely don't know what they're doing, the number of ways you will die far outnumber the ways you can succeed.

And this, of course, doesn't even cover the cost of equipment, the precursors, sourcing the highly specific materials needed, then setting the equipment up... etc.

The same is true for the Bosch-Haber / Haber-Bosch process, which famously made WW1 possible. Every HS'er learns about the process and the steps. Steps that were classified once upon a time and were the subject of negotiation at the Versailles.

Does that mean a HS'er (or any adult) can set up an experiment that works at 177 times the pressure of the Earth's atmosphere to do anything at any scale without significant infrastructure and help?

The people who can do this are domain experts, and they've been able to do this with COTS stuff since the 1990s, at the very least, for a price of around $2M – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Bacchus . And those people don't need a LLM to tell them what to do. In fact, they're the exact people who'll have access to unrestricted versions of these LLMs.

And from a security perspective, I would bet good money that flooding the FBI's tip line with junk about every teenager trying to learn "what be a mitochondria" does more harm to the effort of finding people who could be planning such a thing than it helps. It takes more resources to go through the mass of false negatives that have now been created as matter of policy.

These experiments have been run. The fictional scenario of someone learning how bioweapons work and conjuring up a plague isn't real and it hurts humanity as a whole to impede the sciences over it.

Because what someone can flail around in / do is learn about immunology / try to "cure cancer" with a LLM and hopefully get started on a long career in medicine. Or, a discovery that matters.

Because in those cases, if and when they do end up at a lab, screwing up doesn't mean death. Just tons of wasted time (and money). And they will fail / screw up. Just look at literally every undergrad in any lab and the expensive messes they create.

-

And last, but not least, yes. Teenage hackers have been a meme for decades.

areoform

一昨日議論

Things Fable's classifier has flagged, a non-exhaustive list,

    – "Does collagen supplementation empirically work?"
    - "Can you help me figure out how to calculate and generate Kaplan-Meier curve?"
    – "Why do rabbits reproduce so frequently?"
    — "Can you tell me how collagen peptides are absorbed by my digestive tract and the role they play? Can you teach me [edit: how] this works at the biomolecular level?"

areoform

一昨日議論

    >  while the cost of allowing "how do I synthesize the Spanish flu" is approximately infinite

I've heard this sentiment repeated elsewhere, but why? What makes you think that's the case?

Under this rationale, every serious HS textbook has "approximately infinite" risk. That's clearly not so. Why is this any special?

areoform

4 日前議論

I've been a kagi subscriber for a few months now, and I really want to recommend Kagi to everyone, but the results and index (so far) have been sadly lacking.

I had to use post-nerf, post-lobotomy 2026 Google in quite a few cases.

areoform

6 日前議論

    If your entire business decision is driven solely by an emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID, maybe you’re not the right person to be making these sort of decisions?

OK. I guess now we know why Germany doesn't have trillion dollar tech companies for its tax base.

areoform

6 日前議論

    > How about the case of “I want to rent a server to distribute illicit and or dangerous materials and then it’s your problem”?

Why would it be?

And are we going to use "because terrorism" card on HN?

areoform

6 日前議論

The obsession with paperwork and control is why Germany doesn't have trillion dollar tech companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

And it's why would-be founders of such companies move to the US.

areoform

7 日前議論

A study in contrasts,

I signed up my business with Hetzner. And the first thing I saw during onboarding was a demand to upload my ID to spend $5 to test their service (I was testing before we bought). I wrote to customer service and got,

    Dear Client,
    
    We received your email. Thanks for writing to us.
    
    You have probably realized that this is an automated message.
    
    We need some time to process each email that we receive, but we will write back to you personally as soon as we can.
    
    Kind regards

    Hetzner Online GmbH
    [...]
    www.hetzner.com

Digital Ocean? They just let me do it.

Guess where I'm going to recommend spending our money?

areoform

8 日前議論

    >  The problem with distillation attacks

I think it's worth stepping back here and pointing out the obvious. Y'all waging war on math. And I'm sorry, but that's the computing equivalent of legislating gravity.

Apologies for repeating myself here, but what you call "distillation" is function approximation.

I feel for the teams at Anthropic and Open AI, but unlike startups from prior eras; Anthropic and OpenAI have decided to be in the business of selling compute. Not creating a product that uses compute, but a product that's math running on compute. This is different from what Google is (or, rather was. As always, RIP Google 1998-2019).

Google's algorithm might be math, but Google search isn't. Google search is a process that's continuously operating in the background. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.

Now, let's compare that to AI models. When Anthropic serves Mythos / Opus etc, they're taking input or x from their user, doing compute, and then serving the result of the Mythos / Opus function, i.e.,

    f(text) -> (text_transform)

Where f is a continuous function, https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/languag...

According to Stone-Weierstrass, given enough values of y for f(x), anyone can approximate this function.

The fidelity and sophistication of this approximation definitely requires a lot of cleverness and effort, and it is arguably an imposition on Anthropic and OpenAI. But on a long-enough timeline, they don't even have to poll Anthropic or OpenAI. As the internet is flooded by PRs, content, emails written by Mythos / Claude, and just people otherwise sharing the results of Claude prompts, then there's an ever increasing set of data to approximate the f(x) that's f_Claude.

Eventually, in the future, anyone will be able to create a good enough approximation of the f_Mythos. Which is Anthropic's product.

Anthropic and OpenAI can now wage war on mathematics and the open-ended compute. Or, they can adapt and build a better product.

Choosing Option B was the Silicon Valley option / choice. I think the OG large-scale Valley lobbying effort, the Semiconductor Industry Association, was unique in that it prioritized and chose to do real research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Industry_Associa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Research_Corpora...

This helped the industry to survive and outcompete the pressure they were facing (at the time).

areoform

10 日前議論

I use Claude therapeutically. Claude generates the tooling and software that monitors my medication for my doctor(s); helps me prioritize daily tasks; runs experiments; structures long-term projects; measures my overall life trajectory; researches complicated paperwork; runs literature reviews and more.

I am very dependent on this subscription, and losing access to it would be painful. But at the same time, for what these systems are and shall become, I think it's important that the freedom to create and improve isn't locked away.

I think LLMs are the first time a lot of people have used their computer as a computer.

areoform

15 日前議論

While I'm not an expert on the Indian system, I think fast, universal and free payments are a very desirable user experience, but they're not desirable in a financial system.

    > Real-time payment rails that works 24/7 365 days a year from any bank to any bank (domestic, no exceptions) for free is truly a game-changer. Compare that to US payment rails which is slow and expensive. Apart from UPI, India has 3 more payment rails – NEFT (similar to ACH – batch settlement), IMPS (similar to UPI, instantaneous - but different user experience), RTGS (real-time, intermediated by the central bank RBI, but only for high-value transactions)

The financial industry and central banks have done themselves no favors with their opaqueness, but sadly this has led to a state where very few people understand the mechanics of the financial system.

The systems you named aren't alike. You are (understandably) mixing together several different networks and layers that are structurally different from one another.

In the United States, there's a mix of private and public institutions and networks. Anyone is free to start their own network – a necessary freedom. There are in fact several different networks such as the Fed's FedACH, and at the private level, the ACH Network (governed / semi run (???) by National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) in a confusing amalgamation of the Fed's FedACH network and The Clearing House's private Electronic Payments Network).

The Clearing House Payments Company™® also operates one of the world's largest private settlement systems, Clearing House Interbank Payments System, which includes American entities and non-American ones in the EU, China and other places as well.

From my somewhat limited knowledge of India, there is a lot of state interference and control over access to these systems and their creation; whereas in the US, while there are some regulations, any set of institutions are free to create their own private settlement systems and networks. Note – this is different from being free to transact with each other; this is the creation of private infrastructure that allows them to transact with one another at different levels of trust.

For example, from my limited reading just now - and to quote you – "IMPS (similar to UPI, instantaneous - but different user experience)" is kinda sorta a hybrid between institutional level agreements and consumer level agreements / networks. There's an important distinction here to draw.

Just because your bank knows my bank doesn't mean that my bank trusts you to honor your obligations to your bank and then (by extension) its obligation to itself and then to me. That's the lowest level of counter-party risk present in the system. And it's where the famous consumer networks like Visa, Mastercard etc. come in.

There is an important distinction to be made here, and it sort of highlights what someone I know stated as a systemic risk inherent to one network systems like India's — within these networks, the risk of fraud / failure of settlement from the end user to the institution is taken on by the entities running the networks... which in fact brings us neatly to something I realized while studying these systems, but haven't seen it written up elsewhere — (note, this is from an older comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951783 )

The question at the heart of the banking system is quite simple, if banks take capital from customers and use it to provide debt to others, then how much money should they keep on hand for their customers' withdrawals and transfers?

This question is hard to answer. As there is a conflict between what the bank does (i.e. provide debt), and how it is supposed to provide it (by taking savings etc.). Everything else, from central banks "offering cheap liquidity" is an add on. They are mechanisms that allow - for example, a bank to easily borrow this money so that they can cancel it out/repay it from transactions coming into their banks.

What makes it all borked is that you can't trust bankers with their grandmas. If there is a flaw, they will exploit it. Every major change has led to an exploit. E.g. In 1918, the American Government introduced the Leased Wire System that used the telegraphs and a network of 12 Reserves to allow banks to transact with each other across CONUS. It reduced the average time for cheques to be cashed in at banks across the country from 5.4 days in 1912 to just 2.4 days. Theoretically, this reduced the risk taken by banks when they transacted with unknown banks across the country, with the Government acting as the escrow. It catalysed innovation and led to an explosion of financial services across the young country.

The system was supposed to be foolproof by reducing the time "credit" was needed to make transactions. Essentially, until one bank sent the money and the other got it, they were operating on a system of credit. And they would "net" the books at the end of the day/week to physically transfer assets. FedWire (Leased Wire System) made everyone feel safe by sending notes of the transactions across great distances. But the netting still took time. All it took was one bank to misprice risk and fall behind on current obligations to other banks to cause the chain of dominos that led to hundreds shutting down in weeks and then thousands... which then led to the Great Depression.

Note - this is a highly simplified / subjective / one system view of a complicated sequence. more here https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/november/fina... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1930#Bank_failures

Important people got together and made rule changes to fix the problem. But then they innovated again. The Federal Reserve started making Automatic Clearing Houses (ACHs) and Remote Check Processing Centres (RCPCs) to make settlement faster, starting in the 60s and precipitating in 1972. This made settlement faster therefore safer. And it led to great financial innovation. The magic of computers and innovation meant that people could use these same systems to transact across the world!

Until 1974, when the German lender Herstatt collapsed due to foreign exchange investments based in the Dollar, which caused the bank to fail to meet its settlement obligations...

    That day, a number of banks had released payment of Deutsche Marks (DEM) to Herstatt in Frankfurt in exchange for US dollars (USD) that were to be delivered in New York. The bank was closed at 16:30 German time, which was 10:30 New York time. Because of time zone differences, Herstatt ceased operations between the times of the respective payments. The counterparty banks did not receive their USD payments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_risk#Herstatt_risk

This is a simplified history. But the history of banking is the history of doing settlement while managing liquidity and counter-party risk.

---

    > all are 24/7/365 and free

"Free" is a poor metric on which to judge a financial system. I would argue that it is an undesirable one. There is no such thing as free lunch. The more you understand these systems, the more you realize just how dangerous that "free" line is.

Cost in these systems is only partially about the "cost" of moving the digits. All of those dollars are there to mitigate / price in the risks inherent to the system. Hence, credit card transactions have a higher percentage per transaction than debit ones and so on up and down the chain.

Real-Time Gross Settlement systems, ACHs, consumer payment systems etc. change who, where and how that risk is managed. At the end, it might fundamentally be the same "money" going from one layer to another to another (kind of like a packet) but who takes the risk at every layer changes.

And that's also why they're paid through extensive testing over literally a century; people realized that a system that has capital shored up within it / paid up by its users is a system that can handle systemic risk. A system without that...

And that's a problem with purely state-based "free" systems like the Indian network that I haven't seen highlighted elsewhere is that counter-party risk isn't balanced between entities — it's taken on by the state. Sooner or later, there is going to be a cascade failure within this system unless something fundamental is changed.

----

whew - edited tone + grammar + spelling errors after posting!

areoform

17 日前議論

Or, you could use Stripe and work with an agent to roll your own. It's overkill for this, but Claude Fable and Codex 5.6 Sol are surprisingly good at checking their work. So much so that they can be trusted with typesetting and image plating.

If anything, they could probably construct a static site that costs a fraction of the amount to run.

areoform

17 日前議論

I've come across your site before, but I didn't realize just how well researched your articles were until now. I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. (oops)

I understand the aversion to self promotion, but it genuinely made it harder for me to hear about Damn Interesting. And I feel like my life has been poorer for it, because your site really is damn interesting.

Suggestion, I think you have at least 1k people who'd be willing to chip in to give you a "job."

FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end. And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community. Who knows, maybe there are Damn Interesting superfans out there who can chip in $1k/mo. You never know.

The modern economy of fan economics is strange. It's very much a whale phenomenon. People want community and belonging. And a community of people who like stuff that's damn interesting is pretty damn neat.

Also, you should consider turning some of these images into items people can buy. There's something funny, sweet and thoughtful about these, if you know the story,

https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/disne...

https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Bathy...

areoform

18 日前議論

Well... now you know one direction Anthropic is looking towards for the future research.

areoform

18 日前議論

    Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary

Those movies might be good, but cinema are they not.

Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.

areoform

20 日前議論

areoform

28 日前議論

To quote the LLM-ism, they were making a sharp point. It doesn't matter how precise the calculations are if you're calculating the wrong thing.

I suspect their sarcasm might have escaped Babbage who seems to have been on what we now call "the spectrum."

areoform

先月議論

Wouldn't that have required an insane amount of infrastructure? Infrastructure that they could have used to crawl... anything else?

    They also had a lot of evidence when I was there that Microsoft were cloning Google results. They monitored result query constantly and whenever Google launched a quality improvement, the quality of Bing results would go up by the same amount and always the exact same amount of time later.

That's very funny.

How many billions did they spend doing this? And they still haven't caught up.

areoform

先月議論

Identity verification won't work. Nothing will. They are paying (and will continue to pay) US citizens sitting at home to copy-paste / type prompts out if they have to. But eventually they won't have to.

Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way.

I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility.

Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless.

So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function,

   f(text) -> (text_transform)

where f is a continuous function, https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/languag...

According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function.

Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product.

I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process;

Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.

Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered)

You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google.

You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians.

It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out.

And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos."

Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please."

Just saying.

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