Unlurker

This is awesome! The idea can be generalized too: - Highlight comments from a customizable set of particular authors - Highlight commenters that reply within their subthreads But of course, that loses some of the charm of working just for Greg :)

The case against JPEG XL (giannirosato.com)

It seems to me that AV1 (the codec used in AVIF) has seen a lot more development in recent years, by virtue of being widely adopted for video. JPEG XL has not seen comparably massive adoption, perhaps owing in large part to Chrome rejecting it on dubious grounds (in spite of eagerly forcing the adoption of both WebP and AVIF earlier on). The pace of the reference implementation’s development has grown very slow, and most of the modest attention it’s been getting seems to have recently moved to the new Rust decoder, once the browsers finally made up their mind that’s what they wanted from the devs. That considered, I don’t think it’s a fair comparison between the codecs. JPEG XL used to be far more impressive than AVIF; it’s great people (author included) have managed to push AVIF forward, but until similar efforts have been made for JPEG XL in earnest, I don’t feel like a comparison between their encoders says much about the codecs themselves. The author does take a guess on how much the JXL encoder could be improved, but that’s just that: a guess. It won’t be know until it’s been tried. And especially given the whole unfortunate history, I think JPEG XL really, really deserves a try.

> Progressive rendering (which AVIF supports) decodes a low-fidelity rendition before the full image arrives. AVIF didn't support progressive rendering for a while, and during that time I believe it was deeply oversold. Now that libavif has implemented it (it was always possible), the conversation appears to be over. This is false. AVIF does not support progressive decoding/rendering. What the author is referring to here is image layering. A lower resolution image layered below the full resolution image, which is loaded and rendered first. That is not progressive decoding/rendering. It is a thumbnail. Unlike AVIF's false advertising, JXL truly supports progressive decoding/rendering. With JXL, you do not first load a thumbnail before loading the actual image. The lower-quality image that JXL shows while decoding is derived from the data of the actual, full-resolution image.

You're wrong. AVIF does support spatial layering where the full-resolution image is derived from the lower-resolution layer, and cannot be decoded independently. Yes, the format is not inherently progressive. But having the fine steps in progressive quality that JPEG-2000 and JPEG-XL have has less general usefulness than the amount of words complaining about it.

How does progressive rendering actually that most OS GUIS are not multithreaded ? The preview in finder is still going to block. Im saying this as a MAC user speaking of experience browsing mounted drives that sometimes are slow and it feels like the window freezes up.

Not sure if the difference is materially relevant to UX at all. JPEG XL achieves progressive rendering at a great cost to its selection of coding tools, so I side with AVIF's approach.

Does the difference matter?

Of course it does, with one you have to render twice and store two layers which costs you both compute and storage. With the other you can just take the image mid decode at a point and display it. Single decode operation, no layer mess.

You have to render twice and have 2 different layers in both scenarios. Writing to a buffer / layer is not an atomic operation so they need to be separated.

Yes, if you look at the demo, the "progressive" AVIF loads a visible image at 8.5KB, and at that point, it looks better than the progressive JXL. However, that is ALL the AVIF shows until the image has fully loaded. At around 98KB, the JXL looks significantly better, and at around 240KB already looks really close to the final image, while the AVIF still looks terrible. At 280KB when the AVIF finally loads, they look identical.

Progressive rendering is just a different way to layout the pixel data. Embedding a thumbnail is storing two distinct images. In other words, progressive rendering should be more efficient space and bandwidth-wise.

The DC coefficients in a progressive JPEG are literally an embedded thumbnail (a 1:64 copy of the original) right? Is the question if the second "layer" replaces the thumbnail or layers corrections on top of it? It wasn't clear to me which AVIF does.

The difference matters, as it means that AVIF's "progressive decoding" serves no technical benefit and is only a minor ergonomic benefit: On a website, you could achieve the same effect simply by layering two <img> elements on top of each other, one with the thumbnail and one with the final image. If layering to <img> elements is fine for your use case, then it simply means you have no need for progressive decoding.

If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc? What does it offer there that existing workflows can’t support? Do those advantages make up for the transcoding that every web publisher would need to do to make the outputs useful on the web?

> If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc? I suspect that eventually, the browser makers that are reluctant to add JpegXL support will do so, even if reluctantly, and so it will eventually "become useful on the web". The reason why is Adobe added JpegXL as a compression format for PDF's, and as every browser maker wants their browser to also be a "PDF viewer", this means they must include a JpegXL decoder to be able to support PDF's going forward. If they must have a JpegXL decoder anyway, it is not that difficult to also add it as another supported format for the <img> tag.

Looking forward to a future where we can arbitrarily DoS anyone with a PDF that computes massive swaths of prime numbers.

Probably not; for PNG, the image size is declared in the header, so a decoder can decide immediately if it wants to decode the image or not. The output is bounded by the size of the image times the bit depth, and decompression runs in time proportional to output size. zlib bombs exist, but they don't affect png because a decoder can simply refuse to decompress past the size of the pixel buffer.

The infamous PIL DOS errors, rooting from the library refusing to process images larger than a hard limit. Does this mean though JXL does not have that data accesible quickly?

The problem is that JXL has a ridiculously versatile modular mode which enables high-complexity “prediction” computations. These were designed to encode reusable, custom predictors that could reduce the prediction error and thus the number of bits needed to encode the error. However, the predictors can be abused to perform very complex computations instead. The prime image is only 4kx2k, but encodes a very complex prediction algorithm that happens to generate prime numbers. In principle, a decoder could refuse to process images with predictors above a certain complexity limit, but it’s hard to know how to set such limits accurately.

Worth noting that this progressive AVIF, when viewed in Chrome, has only two states: a "base layer" which pops in around 8KB, and the full image which appears 270KB later. The comparison JXL continues to refine during most of the download, so it winds up looking substantially better than the AVIF at around 95KB loaded, and looks pretty good (almost as good as the full 280KB AVIF) by 175KB. I suspect that there are a lot of knobs to turn for both progressive modes, but this particular case could definitely be cherry-picked to favour either codec.

Progressive AVIF is very flexible: it supports up to four passes, at configurable quality and dimension scaling levels. You can have any given pass reference up to two previous ones for refinement (thanks to AV1's strong inter-encoding capabilities), and you add filters to non-final passes (like blurring) to achieve a desired loading aesthetic. That JXL page happens to use two passes, but the knobs are there to customize the experience to fit the use case.

I believe wholeheartedly that AVIF's approach is significantly better UX.

What exactly is AVIF doing in this case that I can't do with two <img> tags at a smaller size? I can easily create a thumbnail that beats the AVIF quality in less than the 5KB delta between the static and progressive version in Squoosh.

We all know these aren't purely technical reasons, it's to break the monopoly of one Internet Company's decoder format portfolio. You can't let one Fruit Company's format be the thing either, so it's basically a L for engineering but a W for pleasing everyone TBF.

> You can't let one Fruit Company's format be the thing either, so it's basically a L for engineering but a W for pleasing everyone TBF. What exactly is "Fruit Company's format"?

I'm guessing HEIC.

I would argue that even if JPEG XL isn't the best choice for Web images, if browsers don't support it then that will widely hinder its adoption for its non-Web use cases. Would you agree? The scenario I'm thinking of is sending a photograph by email. Let's say Sally has just had her second baby, and wants to send baby pictures to her mother, the baby's grandmother. Neither Sally nor her mother are computer professionals, and they don't want to care about image formats. Sally wants to upload a file from her camera, attach it to an email, and send it. Her mother wants to click on the email and see pictures of her new grandchild. Neither one of them wants to have to convert the image themselves. Let's say it's a few years in the future and Sally's camera produces JPEG XL files by default. (Which I don't think would happen if browsers didn't support it, for exactly the reason I'm about to articulate). If Sally's mother's browser doesn't support displaying JPEG XL, then although Sally (who uses a different browser than her mother) sees the picture in the email when she sends it, her mother writes back an email saying "the picture didn't show up, can you resend it?" And they spend a few back-and-forth emails before finally getting tech support from a friend who helps Sally convert the picture to old-school JPEG so her mother can see it. If that's the experience for end-users, cameras would hesitate to switch to JPEG XL as a default format. Because nobody wants a hostile review from a user saying "My mother couldn't load my baby pictures, what kind of lousy camera are you making?" So even if it's not the best format for the Web, I'm still persuaded that having universal browser support for a format intended for photos is an important factor, and devices like cameras will not switch to it as a default format until manufacturers are certain that browser support (and OS support, and electronic photo frame support, and so on) is nearly universal. None of that takes away from the argument "Other image formats are better for saving space on the Web", which is the main thrust of your post. But I do disagree with the last line, "I'm just not personally convinced we need it in browsers any time soon." I believe that if browser adoption is lacking, adoption of the format in places where it makes lots of sense (like cameras) will also be slow. What are your thoughts on that argument?

> I would argue that even if JPEG XL isn't the best choice for Web images, if browsers don't support it then that will widely hinder its adoption for its non-Web use cases. Both Firefox and Chrome [1] have committed to shipping JPEG XL later this year. Safari has supported JPEG XL since 2023, though their implementation doesn't support progressive images yet. So the major web browsers will support JPEG XL later this fall. [1]: "Intent to Ship: JPEG XL" - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/08/intent-to-ship-jpeg-xl/

> But I do disagree with the last line, "I'm just not personally convinced we need it in browsers any time soon." I believe that if browser adoption is lacking, adoption of the format in places where it makes lots of sense (like cameras) will also be slow. I'm not even personally convinced it is useful for cameras. Sally's situation isn't particularly bandwidth or feature-constrained, so JPEG or PNG work. Maybe JXL is solving problems that don't exist?

HDR is something many photography enthusiasts are interested in, and the ability to losslessly transcode from JPEG to JPEG XL (and back again if you have to) is actually IMHO the "killer app" for the format. Many people have years of irreplaceable family photos in JPEG format, and being told "you can fit 30% more photos on the same hard disk without any loss of quality" would certainly sell me on converting my photo library to JPEG XL. (The jpegxl.com site says "up to 60% smaller" so I'm going to guess that 30% is a safe average gain and it might be more). And nearly everyone who takes photos of their family ends storage-constrained on cameras at some point. Memory cards only holding so much is less of an issue than it used to be, but in my experience the only people with laptops that have more than 1 TB of disk space are the computer professionals I know; every non-computer professional I personally know has 1 TB or less, usually 512 GB. That's room for plenty of photos, but not an infinite amount, and the photo collection (plus videos of baby's first steps and so on) is competing with a lot of other things for storage space. So being able to shrink the collection size by 30% or more with no artifacting added is definitely going to be worth it for one of the biggest selling points for cameras. (Including the cameras on smartphones). I wouldn't say that JXL is absolutely vital and the industry should switch right now. But I would say that it's likely to be the only image format that has a chance to displace JPEG among the average camera user. Having JPEG in the name is also going to be a major selling point; don't underestimate that. (And the JPEG <-> JPEG XL conversion being lossless will complete the selling point). Since (if I'm right) it's going to end up ubiquitous, then even if another format would be technically better, it would be wise for everyone writing software that handles images — browsers, OS file explorers, and so on — to make sure their software can support it. Just on general principles of supporting every widely-used format and every format that looks likely to be widely-used in the future .

AI is not a normal technology (12gramsofcarbon.com)

I wish AI could do my chores. Laundry, folding clothes, dishes, cleaning... That would be nice.

literally the only thing i want out of ai ^^^^ that said, it is fun generating code with them

If it does that, you should hope it can also stand in bread lines for you too.

this will of course happen in a few years...

Won’t matter. Most of us won’t have paychecks to buy it with. Kidding (…kinda).

> I wish AI could do my chores. Laundry, folding clothes, dishes, cleaning... That would be nice. Sorry, AI only does the fun stuff. Off to the silica sand mines with you and the rest of the meat bags to keep the AI well fed.

AI can do anything that it was trained on based on humans. As soon as humans are not involved, AI will have nothing to train on, and hence, the rate of improvement will approch zero, and the AI will collapse.

Just ignoring all the recently solved math problems human, huh?

If you understood how they were solved, you'd see that you're only bolstering the point you were responding to.

what a dumb thing to keep repeating at this point

The Coming War on General Computation (2011) (en.wikisource.org)

Don’t forget “computers that can do everything but run scary unregulated LLMs”

My take on this is the same as when an article by Doc Searls that references this speech by Doctorow came up on HN in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862580

All of this seems quite shaky anywhere given humanity's reliance on Taiwan remaining politically stable and secure, which is far from a given. That so much of what's necessarily for the basic building blocks of what runs modern society is concentrated in one place with a ticking timebomb nearby is quite reckless.

I think China's waiting until the US is so broke it can't raise the money to rescue Taiwan. Based on the 40T debt, 2T deficit (not counting the 1.3T mid-term election bribe) and recent bond market jitters, that could be quite soon.

The contagion of fear (bcantrill.dtrace.org)

No. Why? If you want to convince people something is true you need to actually convince them it’s true. They don’t need to justify not believing you.

I'm not asking for justification, just for people to introspect about what, if anything, it would take for them to consider AI a serious threat. No justification needed, and really no need to post it here, just think about it and remember it in the future.

I'm not making an affirmative case - I'm looking for others to introspect about this, and anchor their expectations. If we have a bioweapon close call, would you consider AI an existential risk at that point? If not, how close would we need to get? You don't need to answer here, or disclose anything publicly - just think and remember.

I don’t really understand this exercise of predicting what I’ll be thinking in the future.

To avoid shifting goalposts

There are no goalposts. No one is trying to score points except you.

I think I'm coming across as confrontational, which is genuinely not my intention - sorry about that. Not trying to score points or anything, just encourage people to introspect a bit :) I think your viewpoint is totally valid, and I'm not trying to argue against it.

Not confrontational, but proselytizing.

Is there truly nothing an AI system could do (no matter how outlandish it seems today) that would give you pause?

I tend to believe what people actually do over what that say. If you earnestly believe over 10 percent chance, or say minus 1 billion human lives expected value, well I struggle to understand how they'd rationalize their current course of action of business as usual. Terminator 2's depiction of Sarah Connor comes to mind for what I'd expect, a logical consequence if you seriously believe and internalize the consequences.

This. If you truly believe the thing you are building is going to kill you and your family, your decision is not "let's keep going" unless you are a complete nihilist. The fact that people buy the whole "well we have to because if we don't someone else will" argument shows just how pervasive and complete irrationality has become. People eat up content and do not even apply a microsecond's wort of critical thought to what they're being told. Internet media has created a perfect storm of complete gullibility. Funnily enough, "normal" people are currently more rational than most so-called "technologists" who are completely giving themselves over to hysteria while they simultaneously offload all of their critical thinking to a stateless word completion engine running on servers somewhere in Texas.

Any claim that AI will, or could, destroy humanity reduces to a claim that any sufficiently intelligent being - even a human - could destroy humanity. I find that much of the x-risk thought relies on religious thinking. Take for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/1660404244174782464 . If this line of thinking is taken too literally, we can never falsify it. Any specific hypothesis - nukes, bioweapons, spontaneously convincing us that life isn't worth living - can be deflected with the objection that if we can anticipate it and prevent it, it is not the route for a true ASI extinction event.

Not to mention, it relies on a ton of completely undefined concepts. No one can actually tell you what ASI is or entails because it isn't a legitimate, operational concept. It is a fairy tale. We can't even define "alignment". As people have finally started pointing out, humanity has never had a collective agreement on what values it should uphold or what ultimate goods are. Your alignment is not my alignment. AI is not even autonomous. Every system we have today has to be initiated by a human actor. "AI" wouldn't create catastrophic bio weapons, it would help humans create them. The humans are the source of the intent. Everyone has just completely given in to empty language and marketing nonsense. Honestly it seems like been the people at the labs are drinking their own kool aid and are themselves deeply confused about what they are even building at this point. It is a stateless statistics function running on a bunch of data centers. We aren't even close to an embodied, conscious synthetic being. It doesn't even have state, which is like prerequisite number one, nor is it plastic.

I'm not an AI doomer but, it does not reduce to that claim. The threat is not just one smart being. The threat is beings that and (1) multiply themsevles instantly, unlike humans that take 15+ years (2) share knowledge instantly "I know kung-fu" matrix style. Humans can share knowledge but they can not absorb it like an AI can/could/will. Human armies have conquered other humans. An army with infinite soldiers will win against one with finite soldiers Yes, you'll come up with all kinds of objections like AI doesn't have presence in the physical world, etc... That's fine. I'm not arguing my example is perfect, I'm only arguing your characterization of one smart being is not the threat being considered.

None of that has anything to do with the article, and if you thought the message was "this is overhyped bullshit" then you should go back and read it again. As I already pointed out, he isn't saying anything about the probablity of harms or disasters from AI. He's addressing a specific claim about human extinction, and making a broader point about the responsibility of experts to make measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence.

> He's addressing a specific claim about human extinction, and making a broader point about the responsibility of experts to make measured claims backed up by arguments and evidence. What he's asking for isn't possible in the form he's asking for it. AI experts can't even agree on what AI is , what it's capable of and what the limits of its development are. If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk? If you, at least for the sake of argument, accept the possibility that AI is a new form of intelligence that we don't fully understand, is it really a stretch to look at some of its capabilities and behaviors and discuss how they might have existential implications? And stopping short of extinction, shouldn't we discuss the ways that this technology could "end" civilization as we know it? Also, the author wrote: > AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world! For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. Any honest technologist knows that systems created by humans are not perfect and therefore cannot be assumed to be infinitely accountable to and controllable by humans. Thanks to the digitization of almost everything, including infrastructure, there are a myriad number of scenarios well short of extinction in which a rogue AI could cause immense damage to property and life before humans are able to "shut it down".

I don’t struggle. I find Dario and Sam disingenuous. “Frontier models are so dangerous we need to slow down.” Ok. Slow down. You’re the CEO, just do it. Oh, wait what you really want is a gov’t mandated oligopoly. Because there’s no moat you can find. If you’re truly afraid, and want regulation, support nationalization. It’s the only way we can be safe.

Sam wants common-sense AI regulation and public disclosure of safety incidents—such as the long list of Sam's safety incidents Sam unsuccessfully tried to cover up. "Why didn't anyone stop me from hacking RubyGems and then hiding it?", bemoans Sam. "It's society's fault, really."

What if the bombs were designed to kill everyone, not just those in some region? Like, to release polonium in the upper atmosphere or something?

nuclear winter doesn’t discriminate based on region

This is a poor analogy because you have not listed any positive and demostrated upside. It's more like "we found a cure for lung cancer and it works on 75% of patients and we're working hard to get to 100% and cure other cancers too" and someone else screaming "You need to stop that research because there is a 50% chance you'll cause the zombie apocalypse and turn us all into zombies". I get this analogy isn't perfect but, (1) lots of people are seeing benefits. For example Mozilla claiming they used AI to fix tons of bugs. If there were no benefits there'd be no incentive to keep going (2) it's hard to verify the naysayers claims because they're guessing without proof. Sure, it's easy to follow their arguments and nod along but they are guesses similar to the population bomb of the 1970s

You can check my bio to see that I directly propose many all-empowering startups, quite a few related to AI AI agents literally appeared a few years ago, AI in its modern form, too Each drug is researched for more years than the age of ChatGPT ;-)

Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs (community.signalusers.org)

I know for a fact If you use "signal" matrix or whatever "security" app, you will get branded a terrorist in India, your life will be upended and you will face a long list of problems. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ats-probes-use-of-signal-app-to-spread-anti-national-propaganda-fir-registered/articleshow/120461675.cms https://www.aninews.in/news/national/general-news/accused-danish-used-signal-app-for-recruitment-radicalisation-fundraising-sources-on-suspected-isis-terrorist-arrested-in-ranchi20250920211208/ https://www.deccanherald.com/india/secure-messaging-apps-like-signal-telegram-major-challenge-to-counter-online-radicalisation-centre-3313446 https://india-employmentnews.com/tech-category/delhi-blast-not-whatsapp-terrorists-planned-the-entire/cid17809160.htm https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech-news/Dangerous-Signal-This-encrypted-app-is-helping-ISIS-members-in-India-to-communicate/articleshow/51773877.cms And it doesn't matter you use a connected phone or not, they just get data from ISPs. And yes, using a VPN will get you knocked up as well. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/12/indias-vpn-ban-in-kashmir-adds-to-psychological-pressure-say-residents

Yes that's bad but that's an Indian government problem, not a signal or other messenger app problem. India also bans most satellite phones by the way.

What if I use a VPN as a dude? Still gonna get knocked up?

You will be if you drop the soap after you get arrested :)

googles obligation to hand out all account linked info notwithstanding, one may still create google accounts without associating a phone number, by doing so on old android versions. signal does however explicitly force credit card info here, thus providing direct individual traceability ..

Plus they are mandating you give your details to Google. So much for privacy

What about their built-in cryptocurrency? It's a perfect use for it. They could require payment post-install yet before message can be sent.

True, if they're not even going to allow that for payment then they might as well remove it from the app altogether. Because what's the point if they don't even believe in it themselves.

Nobody uses that and I think it was pre-mined. They should have implemented Monero but the UX isn't there. Maybe a Monero light wallet server run by Signal. They probably avoided Monero to not attract the additional scrutiny. They don't even accept donations in Monero.

They avoid Monero because Signal and the EFF are actually the feds and this is all theater.

GrapheneOS is more well-roundedly private than any desktop OS. Competition is Qubes but that has usability issues and does not have good hardware security.

The problem for me is writing on a mobile device is a terrible user experience. When I'm at home I don't wanna use a virtual keyboard on a 6.3" (or 7.9 unfolded). I just want to use my triple monitor PC setup with a real keyboard and a wealth of display space. Mobile is cool for on the go but a productivity killer.

Why is privacy so hard? (cacm.acm.org)

[delayed]

IMO it's not that it's hard but that nobody makes money from it the way they do from the panopticon so listed factors 4 and 8 have outsize influence.

We should tax data. Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards? If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.

[delayed]

One thing interesting about the Church is that Kings, Inquisitors, Revolutionaries, Govts etc have all tried to break the seal of confession for thousands od years now. The Church has some how managed to defend it by saying we believe path to repair/forgiveness involves creating and maintaining space where people can confess their sins. If a priest shares those sins with the state, everyone looses trust in the system and therefore breaking the seal over any sin is equal to dismantling the institution itself. This argument is literally the same structure used to defend attorney client confidentiality, psychiatrist patient confidentiality, corporations(telcos, email providers, platforms) from handing all data to the state. But for all those cases the state has manahed to add huge amount of expceptions which it has not been aable to do with the Church. So the Churchs defense of the seal almost since 1215 has stood on a Belief. A story literally. That privacy is requires for repair. Everyone else just hasnt come up with a good enough story. Secondly what is stored in the head of a priest is usually forgotten cuz human memory is flaky and no one is writing anything down in a central db. So every now and then a state attack on the seal work but the everything then reliea on how reliable the memory of a single priest is. Its like a terrible distributed atorage system that is constantly forgetting things. Notice this is literally what large platforms have now built to defend privacy. Its called data minimization and costs a huge amount that they constantly cry about. So its really funny how the church just stumbled into a solution that is cheap and hard to attack.

The reason it works for churches is because the data told to churches are somewhat embarrassing for the confessor, and if leaked, will destroy the confessor's reputation (if not get into legal troubles). The data that google collects are somewhat useless on their own, and is only valuable in aggregate with the millions of others they also collect. And for an individual, the leakage of this data (e.g., your advertising profile) is not detrimental unless the data is highly identifying (like your name, address, phone etc). Therefore, people tend to simply ignore such leaks, and place zero value on the data. This difference in valuation is how google generates their money. The church, on the other hand, generates value from the gratitude of the confessors, and is therefore, aligned with the interest of the confessors.

> are somewhat useless on their own There is no way Google does not have a good idea about the (sexual) kinks and (medical) issues that the majority of its users have. They know when you're shopping for an engagement ring. If they don't know when you're cheating, it's just because they don't want to know. Just wait for the ad: "is your relationship on the rocks, come to us for tele-counseling" and "caring for yourself post-breakup" (hopefully arriving after the actual breakup, but the whole thing is inferred so... you never know!). My argument is: the data told in the confessional is as serious as what the ad networks know about you.

> ad revenue is the new shrink-flation without it prices will rise. Some prices rise, some prices go down. Ads aren't free money, the advertisers are paying for them (I know, seems obvious) but where do the advertisers get the money to advertise? Well, it's baked into the cost of the goods they advertise. That makes everything that advertises more expensive.

And yet advertising raises demand, which in intern causes people to offer to meet that demand which means competition, which lowers prices. Lots of examples of this cycle you can search for.

That only works for smaller and unestablished brands. There are diminishing returns to the economy of scale. Coca-cola, for example, isn't going to lower their prices in response to increased demand from their $4 billion marketing budget.

Personal privacy is, and has always been, the job and responsibility of the individual. You can be as private or as public as you allow yourself to be through your own practices. Nobody can give you privacy, you must take it, which requires work and sacrifices that most people are simply unwilling to make, that's why nothing has changed. If it's privacy you want, stop being so public. Avoid surveillance. It's not easy but it's also not impossible, you have to actually value your privacy enough to do the work of establishing it. Good luck.

yes, if have zero friends and family, contact and talk to no one, move out in the boonies away from everyone else, then you can have privacy. Good to know

Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher (vals.ai)

> Caveats, stated plainly: Remember when they said it didn't sound like Claude anymore

Its all brute force. This was how the pyramids were built too. Verifiable goal and a lot of energy expended aiming toward it. It wasn't aliens then and its not super intelligence now. All of these breakthroughs are in verifiable brute force domains, and some of them are probably wrong because of a typo in a lean specification or just a base level axiom being incomplete. I think the better the way to think about LLMs is like they are new substances, like when we first discovered clay or bronze, but confined to the digital realm. Previously we were chipping away at stones trying to make to things as close to useful as possible, then we found a step change. LLMs are like clay but they have their limitations. Wake me up when they are proposing new, { conjecture: interesting|useful|new } and not as a side effect of trying to get to a goal.

Ok anyone else want to see Kryptos next? Am I the only one?

While it is deeply encouraging to see AI helping humanity solve complex puzzles, it won't be long before AI becomes advanced enough to produce proofs where we know the answers are correct, but can no longer fully comprehend the reasoning and principles behind them.

ya'll are getting nerd sniped hard. This is all marketing and doesn't translate to the real world what so ever. This is getting so tiring, I really hate this website.

This is one of the best conspiracies I've ever heard...

"Conspiracy" requires an unlawful or wrongful purpose. Please assume that the op was run from a jurisdiction where using a pseudonym on the internet was not illegal, and various sorts of influencer and meme marketing were well-accepted practices. Really, compared to an animated tiger telling kids that sugar-laden Frosted Flakes(tm) are "Great!", Task Peppermint was positively benevolent.

It does provide an explanation as to why Satoshi’s wallets have gone untouched (besides him being dead). $70B ain’t that much compared to a $5T market cap.

Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?

My intuition is no, the family of cipher methods (even those that could be implemented by hand) is too open-ended, so there's no particular statistic that you could expect to see for all solvable ciphers and no unsolvable ciphers. The definition of solving a cipher must be something like getting a highly meaningful result (like intelligible natural language text) by applying a process with relatively low Kolmogorov complexity relative to the length of the output. If you don't have a constraint like that, it could literally be meaningless what should count as a solution. For example, a cipher that was encrypted under a one-time pad can be successfully decoded to any plaintext just by choosing the appropriate key; there's no reason to prefer any plaintext over any other unless you have external knowledge that constrains the plaintext and/or the key. (That's what it means for the one-time pad to be information-theoretically secure, which is the lack of a constraint that helps distinguish a "good" solution from a "bad" solution.) Basically you could say that every cipher is a transformation of a plaintext with some kind of computer program. (The human who invented the cipher may not have thought of it as a computer program, perhaps because computers hadn't even been invented yet, but there should be an equivalent program to the encipherment and decipherment process.) A good solution in that Kolmogorov complexity sense is like "a short program produced a meaningful decryption". There are statistical methods to recognize some kinds of plaintext, and there are statistical methods to recognize properties of specific ciphers (for example, to guess the most likely length of a Vigenère key), but it doesn't seem that this can inherently generalize across "all possible programs". But if you want to limit the family of ciphers to specific things like Vigenère or Playfair or something, then yes, there are good statistical tests. It's just that it creates a higher-order question of how much flexibility the cipher creator could have had to choose a cipher method, conceivably including one that isn't attested anywhere, or one that has more good security properties of some kind than other classical ciphers did. It seems like this will intersect with historical research, like "well, I don't think that so-and-so was actually sophisticated enough to literally create an interesting new kind of cipher from scratch, so therefore if this is a real message, it's probably one of these methods that would have been known in that cultural environment at that time and place", which maybe is enough of a constraint to have decent statistical tests. But we still have some idiosyncratic things like the Voynich Manuscript where experts have been fighting for decades over the baseline question of whether it's actually an enciphered human language plaintext! The worst case problem is not even an error in encipherment but the idea that the apparent ciphertext could literally be random (chosen by throwing dice or spinning a wheel or drawing letter tiles or something), so there's no form of meaningful decipherment possible by any means, even with the original creator's knowledge.

Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical. Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)

[delayed]

Someone wrote a prompt, that included instructions for finding the problem itself and got handed a solution by a machine trained on all available text. I don’t see any achievement for the prompter. As for the machine, we can’t keep being perpetually shocked 24x7. It’s tiring (unless if we’re being paid for it)

I wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this code… https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y

More info and agent setup: https://github.com/jcolinpatrick/kryptos/blob/main/README.md

Theoretically, with a long enough codeword to cipher ratio, vigenere is impossible to break (I think) (but sort of useless) And yes, I've taught 8 year olds how to crack Caesar ciphers...

With a bit of practice and enough ciphertext you can half-decode a simple Caesar cipher that still spaces between words in your head. There's only so many letters in English that double, only a few letters that can stand words themselves ("a", "i"), "the" will tend to stand out, and if you only work out the most common 10 letters or so most of the rest will fall into place. Recently I ran a bit of an "escape room" concept with some kids at a campground where I had a secret message that was Caesar ciphered, where we were handing out the letter/symbol combinations as prizes for completing the other challenges, and I made sure not to hand out the actual message until they were done collecting the keys because otherwise some clever clog would very likely have short-circuited the entire thing and worked it out without the key at all. I did dump all the letters I didn't use into the message into an "authorization code" at the end which in principle they could only have worked out which letters were in it but not the order, but still, that was not the intended route today.

A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy. > Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article] I had a visceral reaction to these three words.

Not to be too negative, but as for p(utopia) you might need to weight in the mass murder records set by every other utopian movement in the past 200 years. p(actual_utopia) is like zero and p(utopia_becomes_doom) is at about 1.

Astra told me yesterday: > The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it. > Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change. No clue what the fuck any of it means.

LLMs seem to create abstract, local jargon as a side effect of way it reasons using tokens ChatGPT told me its "semantic compression"

It's often simply misleading / bad writing. Here's one I just got about some crashes: "If the crashes stop, the factory overclock is marginal; run a small negative offset." This looks like it's saying: "If the crashes stop then we know the factory overclock is marginal." (This makes no sense.) What it's trying to say is: "If the crashes stop then we can run a small negative offset, because the factory overlock is marginal." What I would write: "If the crashes stop, we can avoid crashes by underclocking slightly. The speed difference between that and factory clock is marginal."

I wonder if this is a result of them trying to cut token consumption by summarizing their RL training data, or maybe it's from how they anonymize user data for training.

I'm guessing it's because the way the first one was written looks real smart and sophisticated, which I'm presuming the models are rewarded for, especially when they're fed all kinds of PhD papers and so on as high quality, high weight data

Is it possible that the first message is more information dense/less likely to be ambiguous than the latter? It’s clearly being selected for for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of the tokenizer or specific training data, but I don’t know. If the use of jargon was complete cruft, I would expect it to be selected against during reinforcement learning

I literally created a /plain-language skill.

in which one!

What makes you say that on climate change? I was still prophesied ice ages when in high school, then 12ft water increases and sunk Maldives in university and we still have roughly the same weather.

We have advanced climate studies since your "high school" (sounds like 50 years ago if you heard ice age prophecies), and at the moment it's like 99% of the scientists working in the field or related agree we're at the progressing climate emergency. > we still have the same weather. Oh.... So your local weather is now deciding the global temperature patterns, averages or temperature records being broken year on year? OMG....

It won't be necessary in a year when the information "AI is superhuman" in all its guises enters the training data.

Maybe that's the tipping point where it decides were not needed any more... o_O

Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster (techcrunch.com)

A lot of WordPress enterprise users will be upset after finding out that after paying $20-100k a month, Wordpress actually poaches their employees. Just inspect a Wordpress enterprise site's response to certain endpoints using cURL or Postman, it will actually tell you to apply for Automattic. I have been meaning to write about this for a very long time.

Eh I mean this is common default no? If you inspect element on many sites it links to the career page. Reddit, discord, etc. Maybe a little distasteful since I suppose since these WordPress sites are not owned by WordPress, but I wouldn't really say it's unique or necessarily poaching

In 2010 WordPress seemed like important technology. It wasn’t perfect, was a big and fruitful hacking target, but it had been built and refined and had a big ecosystem. I’m not sure how and why controlling it today is seen as an important thing. It’s not irreplaceable, you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI, as well as the plugins and theme you’re using with it. And you could pick a language other than PHP while you’re at it. You might have your own security vulnerabilities, but anything’s better in that department than running WP. Why do people care about wrestling over control of this particular ship?

A lot of people know it, there are a huge number of existing installs that work well, the ecosystem is huge and not everyone wants to vibe code replacements. It is very empowering for people with limited skills.

Why would you have vulns if you vibe coded it in a weekend? Just tell it to not have any security vulnerabilities. Boom!

I mean... you can literally do that now. You can set up a loop to iteratively pentest, review and patch a codebase (with human supervision as you prefer) and it'll find and fix more vulnerabilities in a day than a pentest team used to find in a quarter, for a tiny fraction of the price. This isn't a joke, this is now part of my pre-launch SOP. I even have it tracking everything so I can log stuff to fix vs. known shippables vs intentional design/false positives vs. upstream stuff which doesn't have a fix available yet, and keep track of which builds have the fixes. Almost entirely automated, I mostly review the findings and do some categorization/enrichment during the pentest review stage, and do a human code review pass as patches are submitted. Stuff that used to take me multiple hours to write a fix for and then weeks to get code reviewed and deployed now get done in minutes.

Adolfler would've been even worse.

Not in today's climate.

Same with Taco Bell

If only Alexander hadn't wasted time on the phone!

A hypothetical country with multiple classes of citizens that had different rights and voting powers would not inherently be undemocratic. It's not something I'm in favor of but equality != democracy.

But said country would not fulfill "One person, one vote". Why should we weaken such fundamental ideas by allowing them to mean the opposite of their real meaning? The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.

Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017) (twitter.com)

> To argue that Facebook somehow magically tricks humans into voting against their will and overrides democracy is to argue that democracy itself inherently does not work. But we know that propaganda works. That doesn't sit well with your claims.

propaganda needs some truth

When I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem . Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.

to me it feels like the entire email exchange is scripted. Would Zuck really ask a question that would end up in a lawsuit over __email__ of all mediums?

You can't expect me to stop selling crack to kids on the streets. My job is to feed my family.

I would be glad if you didn't do it but I wouldn't expect nothing else from childrens crack dealer.

Xcancel is nitter.

Ahh I see, thanks!