News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ceroxylon

Re:If you love a website, back it up on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:05PM (#50339917)
I learned this the hard way by getting too casual with Angelfire keeping an old website running for 20 years after I stopped updating it.

It had lots of photos that I hand-scanned from printed film, back in the day when it took a good bit of time to scan photos manually.

The site was a running joke, where I would open it to show people that it still existed... until it didn't, and I couldn't find my backup of all of the photos. The archive sites have the 'bones' of the website, but not the photos. It was easily avoidable, which is why it is painful.

Re:LLM Voice on Thursday October 29, 2026 @03:10PM (#50294281)
The voice is one thing, but I have encountered multiple 'tech support' teams and platforms that will respond to me in pure, unedited LLM output.

I know this because the topic is usually an obscure issue, and I have already gone back-and-forth with multiple LLMs to see where their boundary of knowledge is on it, and it will often include hallucinations along the way (e.g. pointing to old/nonexistent settings pathways)

So when the first reply from the official 'support' channel contains the exact same nonexistent settings pathways, it is easy to conclude they are sending me the LLM output without doing the verification steps that I have already done on my end. When I point out what doesn't exist, the reply is always a similar flavor of the usual LLM "you're absolutely right" response after being corrected.

If a permanent injunction is granted in the Wolff case, does that mean Anthropic would have to re-train all of their available models, but explicitly exclude those books from the dataset?
Re:Alan Watts Predicted LLM Usage in 1951 on Monday October 26, 2026 @06:02PM (#50251717)
While reading Alan Watts' book The Wisdom of Insecurity (published in 1951), I noticed that he predicted the rise of something akin to large language models with eerie accuracy.

It is interesting to me that the same feeling of societal dread (the first chapter is called "The Age of Anxiety") is still relevant 75 years later, with the very issue that Watts predicted on p. 69 being front and center in our news cycles.

Re:GPT-6.1 Terra on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:21PM (#50249492)
It would be interesting to know which model is internally viewed as being best at jokes, I have a personal humor benchmark and so far models will either steal jokes (from comedians like Maria Bamford), or write something very unfunny.
There is a lot of money involved in getting Bolsonaro back in power:

> Brazil’s government announced Friday that annual deforestation in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988 [. . .] During Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60% [0]

This highlights the greatest difference between these two candidates (imo), one wants to preserve the 'lungs of the Earth', the other wants to rip them out for profit and give the world a middle finger on their way out.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/brazil-amazon-deforestation-lula-...

Re:How does Fable 5.1 hide messages in images? on Friday October 23, 2026 @01:05PM (#50212172)
Re:eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:44PM (#50200076)
-20% is today's movement, it is -37% on the 5 day (which includes the data from yesterday).

It looks like them explaining that certs are only a small part of their business did not fly with shareholders.

Re:What's Getting Pwned on Thursday October 22, 2026 @02:13PM (#50199047)
This was the most concerning part of that report for me:

>Some banks also saw agents contact call centers or take actions that appeared independent of user instructions, and executives say they often can't tell a human from an agent, or an authorized agent from a rogue one.

Re:The fire retardant in the seafood chain on Monday October 19, 2026 @07:25PM (#50159363)
There is a safety standard for managing flour dust in places like bakeries for spontaneous combustion reasons: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-654-standard/p0654code
>Weirdly, members of a field of size pn are equivalent to polynomials of degree up to n

Wouldn't it be equivalent to polynomials of degree less than n (up to n−1)?

Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:25PM (#50134238)
From the article:

>That’s not just because the price of gold reached record high prices. In February 2026, the tons of gold exported may have set an all-time record.

Re:I know why Mathematicians weep on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:59PM (#50127795)
I felt the article deeply, but I don't think learning anything is a waste of time. You contribute to the world by helping everyone around you in any way you can, the river is beautiful because it flows.
Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:50PM (#50127744)
Thank you!
Re:Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:55PM (#50126361)
Kudos to Anthropic for choosing the higher bounty and donating it to ISRG, that is a very nice gesture.
Re:Tesla Roadster on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:40PM (#50113292)
The rocket flip part looks like CGI, in my opinion. I get the same feeling as when I see CGI on some random B movie. Would be happy to be proven wrong if there was a crowd of people filming from their angle though.

Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?

Re:Muse Spark Open on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:55PM (#50108499)
It appears to already be far beyond that, they are working with each other[0]:

>ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Le Chat de Mistral and Meta AI filter your data to Google, Meta, and several of the main data brokers.

[0] https://jorgegarciaherrero.com/en/prompt-like-a-butterfly-st...

https://jorgegarciaherrero.com/wp-content/interactivos/20260... [PDF]

Re:Muse Spark Open on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:48PM (#50108402)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/08/17/anthropic...

Anthropic themselves claim to be profitable, fwiw.

Re:I know why Mathematicians weep on Thursday October 15, 2026 @12:13PM (#50105825)
I am not quite saying "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", but I know more math now than in any point in my life because I want to understand how LLMs work.

I understand there are many types of math and the mathematicians don't all want to sit around and do KV cache and gradient descent things, but surely a percentage are as interested as I am and can contribute to this new emerging field? I would wager that Xl+1=Bl Xl+Cl ℱl (Al Xl) makes much more sense in their mind than mine.

Re:Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @10:58PM (#50098597)
Really beautiful, I was tearing up reading all of the positivity, from simple to complex. A lot of tech stuff, a lot of "dog / my dog", a lot of spouses, kids, food... all so wonderful.
Re:Why do LLM pelicans look like this? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:38PM (#50091667)
I still have all of my old Dall-E and early Midjourney images that I generated, the ability to generate chaotic, surreal images was most of the fun for me.

Now the images look like polished, generic things you would see in an airplane magazine, which is what most people want, I suppose (?)

Very cool, the "arp" function was a little buggy for me, it either wont let me activate it before strumming a chord, or it will lock itself to "on" until I refresh the page.
Someone probably walked by or went to plug in an HDMI and noticed the stark contrast of white toilet paper against a black TV shell, it would be difficult not to notice.
Concealed in toilet paper? We are definitely not dealing with James Bond, that is a pretty hilariously backwards way of going about things. Did he really think that would be less suspicious looking than the dongle itself?
Re:AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:30AM (#50066741)
Yes! Thank you, that is exactly what I mean.
Re:AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:29AM (#50066739)
>how does one “build in” an agent inside a model

That is the subject of the paper in the post we are commenting on. "Agent" may have been a confusing term in my comment, I was referring to a 'sleeper cell', but what I mean is behavior trained into the model that is undetectable until it is activated by chosen words.

Re:AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:01AM (#50066514)
This has always been my worry with open source models... give them away for free, but with a sleeper agent built in that some arbitrary string can activate. Local deployments will still have web search connectors the majority of the time.
Re:The Screaming Toaster on Monday October 12, 2026 @05:35PM (#50063373)
A fictional conversation between a Senior Engineer and an Executive at the company ToastMaxxing, a smart toaster manufacturer.

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