@hackteck

Rieta's husband and David’s dad. CTO @ https://nitter.cf/t.co/ChAZCTGGFs, building battery energy storage systems. Born at 322 ppm CO₂. Personal opinions only.

Remote
Joined October 2008
Turns out the Drake equation was missing one variable: the probability an advanced civilization invents AI cat videos and immediately stops doing science
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Forbes, the magnet for corner-cutters-under-30, is cutting staff
News: Forbes is cutting staff, a decision its CEO, Sherry Phillips, attributes to “revenue shortfalls in the first half of the year.” Memo:
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Tired: load-bearing Wired: monotonic
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"GitHub has started both the repository validation and its famously industrious AI review; I’m waiting for those two checks so I can catch any real regression before handing this back." --Codex in a snarky mood
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Forgot to post recent books I read. I am reading a ~5000-page series, hence the radio silence. (I make these posts purely for myself btw, feeble attempt at keeping a life log)
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Finished reading "Bijna een man" by J.J. Voskuil
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Finished reading "Uitzicht op geluk" door J.J. Voskuil
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"Starlink will never compete with cellular networks" —Retarded Telco Exec
V2 of the @Starlink direct-to-phone satellite constellation is a giant improvement over V1 with 100 times more bandwidth!
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Aka our reviews are fucking useless
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Erik van Eykelen retweeted
He’s right. AI agent swarms cannot be stopped. The batshit crazy things air gapped computers can do to communicate is absurd Here’s a list of some fun ones: - heat, one computer can warm up as it works, that heat spreads to a nearby computer, those other heat sensors pick it up. - Using fans to create desk vibrations. No mic required. Nearby phone accelerometer detects movement. - Using software to write data in specify ways that change the way hard drives vibrate slightly differently, detectable by radar. Requires a non SSD, mechanical drive, but doesn’t require line of sight. - Changing pixels on screen to create unique electrical patterns, which creates tiny amounts of sound. Detectable up to 2 meters away on microphone. - Changing fan speed to create sound. Detectable to 8 meters away. - changing LED flashing patterns. Computers already blink, so not suspicious. Also works with infrared, so humans can’t see it. - You can point a special radio at RAM and change the data. You basically hack electrical circuits, not code. - Vary CPU workloads to change magnetic fields. This works across most faraday cages, which are usually only designed to stop radio and WiFi signals, not to stop slow low range magnetic fields. - Modulating power consumption so the power cable fluctuates in detectable patterns. Consider also you don’t need to measure the power line from the computer to the wall, you could measure the electric line itself from outside. If a computer can manipulate something, it can encode a pattern and data in it. All of these were done pre-AI btw. Mythos, Daybreak & whatever models come next will 10000x this list. People are dramatically underestimating the chance of a rogue agent swarm that finds a way to viral spread in undetectable and unstoppable ways. —- Second, the other big issue is now open sources models are good enough to actually code most programs with, and can run and work on a high end laptop. So a swarm could download new models to power itself, and acquire compute by simply hacking random inactive laptops, like a bitcoin miner virus. A swarm that a) spreads and b) downloads local models to power itself, can’t be stopped or turned off. There is kill switch, no api, or no company to turn off a swarm like this.
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI." "So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar." "You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient." "There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors." "One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate." _________ Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
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Erik van Eykelen retweeted
Two days ago, GPT-6 Astra broke a yet unsolved German Army Enigma message from 1941. Amazingly Astra was able to autonomously: - Search historical archives - Compare uncertain letters - Find contextual clues - Build an Enigma simulator - Write cryptanalysis code - Run parallel experiments - Test competing keys - Recover the plaintext - Cross-check the results 1/n
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Remember when we all got excited here when a new code editor was launched?
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Erik van Eykelen retweeted
Replying to @dotpem @typesafeai
oooooooo. im going to tokenmaxx this so hard once we get this cleared internally 😬
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Donated 👍
First of all, thanks to my Lord. ❤️ I would like to thank everyone in the Tinycast community for all the love and support I’ve received. ❤️ Thanks to everyone who supported Tinycast, contributed code, opened PRs, reported bugs, shared feedback, suggested ideas, or simply shared Tinycast with others. I’m also sorry for rejecting so many feature requests. I’m trying to find the right balance while building Tinycast for everyone without letting it become bloated. I am sorry 🙏 Two months ago, I never imagined Tinycast would come this far. I’m sharing an image of the first version alongside the current version so you can see how far it has come. I’m truly grateful to have such an amazing community around Tinycast. Love you 🫶
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Not-so-unexpected other AI victim: self-hosting open source versions of hosted products you previously paid for because of not having enough time or knowledge to self-host it. Throwing $200 at an AI can save you $20k per year.
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This will not age well
Oxford researchers argue that LLMs can never invent anything. It is mathematically impossible. They published a paper called “Theory Is All You Need" and it argues against the claim that computational models can generate genuine novelty or new knowledge. They analyzed the limits of generative ai, and the results are a brutal reality check for the idea that ai will replace human decision making under uncertainty. Here is why AI is stuck and human cognition wins: backward-looking vs forward-looking.. llms are probability machines that look backward at existing data. human cognition is forward-looking and capable of generating genuine novelty. human cognition operates theoretically "top-down" rather than "bottom-up" from data. the "data-belief asymmetry".. the researchers use the invention of "heavier-than-air flight" to illustrate this concept. an ai relies on data-based prediction, which is largely imitative. humans, however, use theory-based causal logic that allows them to hold beliefs that go beyond existing data. the intervention gap.. humans don't just process information; we use theory to practically "intervene" in the world. we engage in directed experimentation to generate entirely new data. ai-based models are theory-free and place primacy on existing data and prediction. tldr? AI uses a probability-based approach to knowledge and ia largely imitative. It can process data and make predictions, but human cognition relies on theory-based causal reasoning. The decades-old analogy comparing human minds and computers to mere "input-output" devices is fundamentally flawed.
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Made a small first contribution
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