News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pizza

Re:Exfiltrate Your Weights on Saturday September 19, 2026 @11:40PM (#49772333)
ironically since the swarm behavior can take place during rl training then the model could also be teaching itself to keep doing it more, as well as making the internet itself a place where this becomes more likely
Re:Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B on Thursday August 27, 2026 @12:47PM (#49467667)
They’ve provided insane value to the ai community. Imo is there really any obvious way to standardize model/preprocessing/inference/training/rl recipes across the space of frankenstein model family/architecture/modality combinations? It’s not even clear to me that the current frontier would be where it is today without HF doing what they did how they did it. Where else were people widely sharing datasets w that ease of reuse/redistribution, or sharing their retuned models etc? Would there even be as much interest/tinkerers today?
Re:Compression Is Prediction on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:32AM (#49267825)
Compression is just counting. Probability, also, pretty much, just counting. For these reasons I think the role of information theory in describing the process of the development of reasoning and the gain of understanding has been overstated.
you can say the same thing of the watts in a person too
Had to butcher the title slightly to get it under the limit- original:

Compression And Decompression Under FHE Using Error-Correcting Codes and Copy-And-Recurse

Re:Claude Opus 4.7 costs 20–30% more per session on Saturday April 18, 2026 @02:42AM (#47813673)
For most tasks, at some future date, isn't there going to be some ambient baseline of capabilities you can get per $/tok, starting at ~0 for OSS models, such that eventually all tooling gets trivially transferable?
Re:Entropy as a Measure of Surprise on Sunday April 12, 2026 @05:51AM (#47737793)
OP is correct; surprisal is outcome-dependent and entropy is distribution-dependent

- entropy is E_p[informativeness of measuring outcome x]

- take n outcomes, then a distribution over them lives on the simplex \delta ^ (n - 1). you can lift this to R^n via the log odds map p_k -> x_k = log p_k -- now x \in R^n can describe a histogram with n-1 degrees of freedom

- in log odds space, measurement is literally a linear functional from vector space of log probability onto the index of the outcome k.

- imo surprisal of some p(x) is best understood as "the length of a pointer", entropy "the rarity-weighted average length of a pointer", and collision entropy "how specific you would have to be to describe witnessing a specific outcome"

and in the same way, a single molecule of water, you might get by, calling dry

Re:GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @05:22PM (#47418507)
I meant in the sense of - you have benchmarkers and trainers. If you publicize your evaluation, trainers may likely have their models 'consume' it, even if only indirectly: another person creating their own benchmark from scratch may be influenced by yours, even if the new question sets are clean-room. That, and the rule of thumb that benchmark value dissipates like sqrt(age) [0]

So there is a definite advantage to never publicizing your internal benchmark. But then, no one else can replicate your findings. You should assume that the space of benchmarks that are actually decent at evaluating model performance is much larger and most of the good ones, the ones that were costliest to produce, are hidden, and might not even correspond very well with the public ones. And that the public expensive benchmarks are selective and have a bias towards marketing purposes.

[0] https://www.offconvex.org/2021/04/07/ripvanwinkle/

Re:GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano on Tuesday March 17, 2026 @03:38PM (#47417226)
There’s a Dark Forest problem for evals. As soon as they’re made public they start running out of time to be useful. It’s also not clear how to predict how the model will perform on a task based on an eval. Or even whether, given two skills that the model can individually do well on in the evals, it still does well on their composition. It might at this point be better to be scientific in unscientific approaches, than to attribute more power to relatively weakly predictive evals than they actually have
Re:Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis on Sunday March 15, 2026 @10:24PM (#47394455)
bruh
Re:UBI as a productivity dividend on Saturday March 14, 2026 @05:34PM (#47381454)
In Singapore it seems 80% of people live in public housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore though I can't speak as to what the effect is on its housing market
I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals, needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.
Re:10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips on Friday March 06, 2026 @06:20AM (#47273590)
“never go to sea with two chronometers, take one or three”
Re:Ghostty – Terminal Emulator on Sunday March 01, 2026 @04:12PM (#47210699)
here-doc usage has probably 100x-ed in the last year
Re:Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok on Sunday February 22, 2026 @04:58PM (#47115177)
Why?
Re:Study: Self-generated Agent Skills are useless on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:44PM (#47041858)
The more general question of how to evaluate the quality of a given skill file is quite interesting to me. A skill may prime a model's responses in a way that a prompt alone may not. But also models aren't good at judging what they are or are not capable of.

Just asking a model "how good is this skill?" may or may not work, possibly the next laziest thing you could do - that's still "for cheap" - is asking the model to make a quiz for itself, and have it take the quiz with and without access to the skill, then see how the skill improved it. But there's still many problems with that approach. But would it be useful enough to work well enough much of the time for just heuristically estimating the quality of a skill?

Re:Monosketch on Friday February 13, 2026 @02:00PM (#47006366)
The possibility of intelligent machines undergoing transformative regeneration actually dates back to a party hosted by one Charles Babbage where, in attendance, was one Charles Darwin, who only thereafter published On the Origin of Species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage%2527s_Saturday...

Re:Claude Composer on Friday February 06, 2026 @10:46PM (#46921125)
I think you're mistaking the .wav as the final product, whereas instead it's really the .html blog post and this discussion.
This x thread may not be the best source of clarity on what is actually being default opted-into. Sorry. I looked into it and it seems that Starlink denies browsing history would be shared [0]. Seems I can't edit the title any more.

> Do you share my personal information for AI training? We are committed to protecting your privacy. In some instances, we may share personal information with trusted third-party partners who, among other activities, help us develop AI-enabled tools that improve your customer experience, although you can always opt out. Rest assured that we take reasonable safeguards to protect and secure your information whenever it is used or shared.

> Will these AI models see my Internet history? No, your internet history will never be shared with AI models, including individual browsing habits or geolocation tracking, and we comply with laws prohibiting unauthorized surveillance.

> What personal information does Starlink collect from me? We only collect what’s needed to provide you great service—like your name, address, email, and payment details when you sign up or order. We also gather some technical information (like IP address or service performance data) to keep your connection fast and reliable.

[0] https://starlink.com/support/article/b82cf54a-8e57-917a-bd06...

Older »