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EliRivers

Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @04:29AM (#50301175)
While I can't speak for other places, in the UK, if you haven't been careless and report quickly enough, your refund is not dependent on anyone being caught.
Re:Challenge Is Gone on Sunday October 25, 2026 @10:11AM (#50231795)
Indeed; but for the author, the challenge was not to produce a good translation of anything, or to develop a good automated process for doing so. It was to bash together a website that churns out translations, without even a specified level of quality. For the author, these are all challenges of making a process to do something; not to produce any actual artifacts of quality.
Re:Challenge Is Gone on Sunday October 25, 2026 @10:07AM (#50231754)
I can solve any engineering problem (that I can come up with) with the help of artificial intelligence.

Great. Practical nuclear fusion power, please.

One might almost say evolutionary. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31163155/ , for example
"I thought there was a big need for turbine reactors to keep the pace of AC."

I understand it can also be done with battery powered systems, which respond an order of magnitude faster than gas turbine stabilisers.

Indeed. Turns out the doorman is doing a number of additional tasks, not just opening the door, and thus cannot be identically replaced with an automatic door opener. And here we are, right back at the start of the conversation.
Re:The cost of getting a job today on Thursday October 15, 2026 @06:53AM (#50101895)
I have worked with some who believe everything it says, copy paste code without thought no matter how bad a solution it is, spend hours in pathological loops iterating in circles and getting nowhere, and various other ways to generate a lot of code that kind of works so long as you don't go beyond limits and constraints that the software engineer committing it has no understanding of.

I would definitely like some way to know if they can be trusted with an LLM or if someone is going to be hard reviewing everything they submit forever. Don't know quite how to test that but asking them to use an LLM must be part of it.

sound an alarm if a stove burner is on but no person is detected in the room

Can you turn that off or do you just have to put up with the noise?

They are fundamentally suited to everything not proven to be outside their modelling ability.

This doesn't seem to make much sense. Surely us being able to prove that something is outside their modelling ability doesn't affect whether it is or not. If I prove something true tomorrow, whatever I proved was also true today.

Or do we have a proof that everything beyond them has already been proved and there are no more proofs left to find?

Re:LinkedIn Larpmaxxing on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @02:12PM (#49912392)
Apropos, some of the most wholesome community spirit I've seen in recent years has been amongst the degenerate gamblers of wallstreetbets.
Well what if rather than a Tesla+, one bought a cheaper EV instead? In the UK, the Leapmotor T03 seems to go for around 16000 GBP new. That's actually not much more than an equivalent petrol car.
Re:Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:01PM (#49835357)
It was going to be celebrity meat. As in, genetically identical to celebrities. In some circles, it would become de rigueur to host dinner parties at which one served meat cultured from the people throwing the dinner party. I wanted to see that future.
Re:Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:16PM (#49818361)
That's not the definition of socialism in any case.

In many cases it very much is the definition of socialism.

Yes, it is. Beyond simple examples, I've fixed segfaults by identifying the assembly where it happens, tracing that back to the lump of source where it happens, guessed which piece is accessing memory and deducing from surrounding code how it was meant to be protected against.

In that case, the pattern matching was against every segfault I've ever fixed, which is a lot, and traipsing through assembly, which is also a lot. Lots of experience in tracing back to source code. So did that. Matching patterns. Didn't understand the language, don't know what it's trying to do, but I know what memory access is (because I've seen the pattern "access memory" a lot in my life) and this piece of code must be matching that pattern; whatever this code is, it must be touching memory. Now scroll up and down to look for similar code in other places, that I also cannot read but I can see when things look the same; match the pattern of pieces that work with this piece that doesn't. Oh, this looks the same but it has this extra piece; part of the pattern matches, part does not. Matching patterns. What if I copy it, paste into the bad place, apply a single change to match the symbols I see in the bad place, and see what happens... fixed.

It's not something I do every day and it's not nearly as good as actually understanding it, but the problem was solved and I did not know what the code was trying to do or how to read it.

All the above aside, surely it must be possible, because we have machines that do exactly that. They're made of statistics and patterns and they're doing it. Right in front of us. There is nothing else in there and they're doing it right now.

Done it myself.

The fact that you have a long history in the business makes me think we're either talking about wildly different things and this is a mismatch of language and context, or you're deliberately trolling me.

It can take a good few years to get to the point that one no longer has to think and understand in a concrete language. There are whole sets of common mistakes that get made across languages and tools. I've fixed errors in Pascal, which I do not read, because the person writing it was clearly thinking in C and made a mistake in their C thinking which they then translated into Pascal. Luckily for me they used common C naming and layout for that piece so I matched the whole thing up to C patterns.

Copy paste errors are easier ones to see; cases where replicated code is clearly meant to be different in a few keys places or values, and whoever did it just missed one. Array errors are common, no matter how the array notation works in language du jour. The list goes on.

All that aside, we know it's possible because there are machines doing it right now. They are made of stats and patterns. There is nothing else in there.

Re:AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:29AM (#49738329)
But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for

Sure, but the realm of fictional problems is so huge that we just can't come up with solutions to all of them. I like watching the Terminator movies (well, the first couple) as much as the next person but I can't be spending my time imagining how we could defeat skynet.

the entity needs to be able to solve your problem.

People have fixed software bugs with zero knowledge of what the code is doing and no knowledge of the programming language at hand, purely by statistical pattern matching. Solving the problem with no understanding of it beyond the idea that whatever it was, the right answer was probably something that kind of matched the kind of patterns found in things they'd seen before.

So what does it mean, "to be able to solve your problem"?

Re:U.S. State Department Pauses Immigrant Visa Applications on Thursday August 27, 2026 @07:42AM (#49463179)
They sure do. US law presupposes that a tourist is secretly planning to stay in the US, and must demonstrate otherwise to the satisfaction of the assessor. There are a number of factors assessed, including things like ties to the applicant's home country - an existing job, ownership of property, family demands; basically, clearly having a life in that country that the applicant wants and needs to get back to.

Someone applying for a tourist visa, who recently had an immigration renewal denied, who has no life to get back to in their country of origin (because they built a life in the US) but clearly has a life in the US (owns property in the US, has family in the US, has work ties -maybe even still has a job in the US); that applicant is an enhanced overstayer risk and this increases the chances of being denied a tourist visa.

Re:U.S. State Department Pauses Immigrant Visa Applications on Thursday August 27, 2026 @07:33AM (#49463089)
Is that true? Immigrants into Ireland hold an Irish Residence Permit, which is renewed in Ireland, at the office in Ireland. No need to leave Ireland.
Re:Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:14AM (#49432632)
I've heard such people referred to as deadbeats.
I suspect but cannot prove that a lot of the issues the US is experiencing right now exerting itself around the globe, such as lack of regional logistics ports and long supply lines and less enthusiasm from allies to join in, would apply in spades to anyone who decided to have a serious pop at the continental USA (barring globe-spanning nuclear missiles, but nobody wants to start that war right now).

Looking like a big man in your near waters, no more than a few days away from a home port, is one achievement (and it is an achievement - many nations can't do this). Sustaining a war on the other side of a serious ocean or two is a game very few countries in the world can manage right now.

The US would look extraordinarily strong to anyone bringing a war to the US.

To a degree, this is Australia in this case, no? Resources are extracted from Australia, exported to China, turned into high value goods and sold back to them. In this case, it's exactly what OP is happy about!
Re:AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users on Thursday August 13, 2026 @02:44PM (#49290268)
It's that which is still there even when we stop believing in it.

If every living creature on earth ended tomorrow there would be no individual realities, yet actual reality would continue.

Re:All memory manufactured in 2027 has been sold out on Thursday August 13, 2026 @03:44AM (#49282862)
I believe you are applying an excessively simplistic model to GPUs that do not match reality.
Re:Toxic underground fires spreading at California landfills on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @06:12AM (#49270086)
Fines? The business pays the fine, I want personal responsibility. Prison time.
Re:All memory manufactured in 2027 has been sold out on Saturday August 08, 2026 @07:18AM (#49220744)
This all sounds very hypothetical economic universe. In the real world, rich people do buy expensive things and do nothing with them.
In some places it is. Some people can indeed be "prescribed" (it's not a prescription, it's a referral) exercise and a low-cost arrangement is made with a local gym and appropriate fitness coach. In the UK, such schemes have historically been 12 to 16 weeks and the costs are jointly met by the NHS and the participant (much as with prescribed drugs).
Re:Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source on Thursday July 16, 2026 @02:48PM (#48938595)
A google search for the creator of the Comic Sans font, Vincent Connare, triggers a fun google Easter egg.
Re:Australia is offering free daytime electricity on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @06:50AM (#48904783)
"If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless."

Yet people frequently don't. This assertion and reality disagree.

A rebase that can't just fast-forward?

That you know what that is makes you the right kind of person to be delegating it to an LLM; you can be trusted to use the LLM for this sort of thing because you understand what the problem is, what the right outcome should be, and how to know when it's been done correctly.

It's the person sitting behind you who doesn't understand any of those words who is going to do something dangerous at LLM-accelerated speed I'm concerned about.

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