I won't argue it's a hacker mindset - it's about learning what matters and what's accidental.
If a article headlines saying "People who wake up early live 20 years longer than people who sleep in", and then it turns out it wasn't the act of waking up early at all, rather, early risers then went out for a run or a swim and people who slept in but did the same actually lived even longer than those early risers, it's important to know that.
Or for one of my favorites, 'a glass of wine a day is healthy' because of antioxidants... or something. Except it isn't, at all. But rather as people's health deteriorates to a sufficient degree they tend to stop drinking (even if not consciously because of their own health), and so when you study light drinkers versus non-drinkers, there was enough of an undetected bias in there to make it seem that drinkers were, on average, healthier. It's easy to see echoes of that possibility in near to any study, especially observational.
> 'a glass of wine a day is healthy' because of antioxidants... or something. Except it isn't, at all
Also, in America, the kind of people who have a glass of wine a day (but not more) strongly correlate with those who can afford healthcare.
Similar for mediterranean diets. Turns out it’s the universal healthcare available in all the mediterranean countries both on the european and the african sides.
Oh this is such a nice comment. It's like saying People who live on the 5th floor are healthier than those on the ground.
Of course, the root cause being people who are unfit, sick or elderly cannot literally make it up a flight of stairs.
but if people aren't paying attention, like the vast majority of population dont, you'll suddenly have an explosion of condos that start from the 5th floor with the first 4 floors turned into something else.
> Or for one of my favorites, 'a glass of wine a day is healthy'
There are a few reasons why this is false, my favorite one is, they didn't control for alcoholics who stopped drinking and thus reported as non-drinkers. So the group of completely sober ones had people with liver damage etc. while those with only moderate drinkers had barely any heavy-drinkers in it.
While I totally get why you say AI can make it for you based on the site in this case, I sense we slowly but surely are moving from "code is the foundation" to "who cares about the code, AI can rewrite it anyway", as if AI in the future will be the only source of truth and you just don't have to worry to know things
I wonder how much of their output is simple raw “superpositions” and how much is from far more generalized emergent structures as it is trained and has to learn latent representations.
Only the first layer is a “mashup” of the raw data, other layers start to recognize patterns across the data!
I think you are interpreting “mashup” to mean something like a collage where there’s snippets of a literal piece of this next to a literal piece of that.
But the language model captures not just literal patterns but also patterns of patterns and higher order structures. This is what is mashed up. The model itself doesn’t capture anything beyond what it was trained on but that’s quite enough, it is always a bigger training set than most humans have read on in a lifetime.
For those who can’t patch their PHP for a variety of reasons right now, here is a proxy I developed that can sit between nginx or apache and your PHP-FPM, to sanitize inputs and prevent this (and other) attacks:
I got downvoted heavily by other HNers for merely offering a solution to protect people’s legacy PHP servers. They said it should be deleted and “not worth working on”. The solution was free and open source but these downvoters commented as if it was worse than having your server PWNED. I still don’t understand why.
Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc.
With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free.
The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto.
Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.
What, Hetzner requires sending the image of a passport or other photo ID just to open an account (as a U.S. customer), unless they relaxed that in the past few years. They’re among the worst, or just the worst since I don’t recall another provider doing that.
That is how we get all those imports cheaper than most countries. Trump just made a deal w Putin for example to import Russia’s diesel … in exchange for USD.
This is huge. It means the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities can now confidently ship the opcodes and precompiled contracts to check ECDSA signatures on P-256 in addition to K-256 curves, and stop worrying about possible NSA backdoors based on the chosen seeds (quantum computers are another story).
Nobody conversant with elliptic curve cryptography research believed there was a backdoor based on these seeds; for a number of reasons, best articulated by Koblitz and Menezes (who took on the question directly).
But it's nice to be able to shut the whole unproductive debate down directly.
Taking the question seriously (when I wrote this there was no /s), since I think it is still a question some people legitimately have, it is still extremely implausible that such tight dates and such a small number of iterations are all backdoored. For backdoors to be that dense would indicate some sort of serious flaw in the algorithm as a whole as well, something so serious that it should be fairly obvious. If these were initialized from dates, each separated by some billions of years and with the iteration parameters also in the millions or billions or trillions for no apparent reason it would be time to be suspicious.
Is it impossible? It is hard to prove impossible. But this is not what I would expect backdoors to look like.
In fact this makes me think that the information about how these were generated must have been lost very early in the process, or over-compartmentalized away from the wrong people. It seems like the NSA should have been positively delighted to show that these were the origins of the seeds as they are decent "nothing up my sleeve" numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number Advertising that fact should have been advantageous to the NSA if that is indeed how they were generated, so my best guess is that the parts of the NSA that should have been showing us that must not have themselves known.
Why do people feel the need to announce that they stopped reading?
Hey guys! I know there are many comments on this forum. Stopped reading this particular comment four words in. I knew the rest sucked & just wanted you to know that
Yeah effective at creating irrelevant bikeshedding arguments and destroy any good will and good faith in the underlying project.
How do you measure its effectiveness in other areas — presumably you thought it would make the other person write all copy and design by hand or something? Did you follow a number of people around and see that they changed their ways and posted hand-designed websites from then on? Or is the claim about being “surprsingly effective” just rhetoric based on wishful thinking and at most anecdotal evidence?
(And btw how is using a template, stock media, or an open source library not a similar form of copout? I could shame people for using a template that’s been overused).
I for one am totally okay with documentation or even front-facing product sites being obviously done with AI. I would rather it be obvious than shame people into trying to make it look organic and fool us, or enter some uncanny valley. Generating AI content at scale is fine as long as you don’t lie about it and pass it off as being done by hand. If shaming people would be “surprisingly effective” at causing them to try to make their AI-generated stuff look more like it was done by hand, would actually be a huge net negative for me. Consider the effect your shaming is actually likely to have, even if it accomplished something!
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