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prophesi

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:55AM (#50350017)
I think we already are seeing the destructive potential :/ The genie's out of the bottle at this point with open-weight models (and thus can be abliterated in terms of offensive cybersecurity) that can run inferences well on relatively cheap hardware with relative parity to frontier models.

I'm a bit of an outlier in regards to today's HN culture. I'm still holding on to Stallman's idea that information wants to be free. There was a comment on another thread that aptly elucidated what I think is necessary.

Not everyone has the know-how or desire to compile the Linux kernel, or any what-have-you executable in user space. But a good amount of people do, and it's a boon to security/privacy that they do, and cryptography can verify that this work was done. (granted, manufacturing a computer is an international effort with a lot of unknowns, ie proprietary binary blobs in BIOS/UEFI) (and people are lax to validate the crypto themselves if it's not an automated thing; that's a UX problem imo)

I think we'll eventually find sufficiently performant LLM's trained on public domain information[0] that people can validate. Sufficiently performant training algorithms that people can validate[1]. And FOSS plugins to integrate with their FOSS IDE's which they can validate. And like the Linux kernel, volunteers to make sure there's nothing fishy going on end-to-end.

I have no horse in this race though. I'm just happy I can learn how these things work and toy around with getting quantized models to work well enough for my coding side projects. Though I often reach for a frontier model for serious coding issues, local for rubber-ducking, and Kagi's research assistant for initial planning.

[0] Pipe dream, unless international copyright law drastically changes. Since opening the dataset for any competent LLM will violate said laws, whether obtained legally or not themselves.

[1] Knowing the training algorithm and dataset will let it actually be open source models instead of open weights.

edit: These are just shower thoughts; didn't mean to write such a long response. Would love any pushback or any correspondence in general since it'll be on my mind all day.

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:09PM (#50342942)
It's pretty much how abliteration works too; find where the refusals are happening and flip the bit.
Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @01:49PM (#50293144)
It's unfortunate, because the security theater performed here detracts from the model's overall cybersecurity performance. And uncensoring has another small hit to performance.
Re:We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4 on Thursday October 29, 2026 @01:47PM (#50293101)
They were given day zero access to release their quantizations[0]. The lowest quant will still require 256GB VRAM to run inferences, but as always I'm amazed by the Unsloth team by how much they can reduce the requirements for these powerful LLM's, and the easy-to-follow guides to get started with using them.

[0] https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/mistral-large-4

DNC did a great job endorsing that candidate.
Have you tried Open WebUI? It doesn't determine which model works best for your hardware, but it otherwise has a very large feature set with a large community, and runs offline by default. Geared more for technical users, however.
Re:F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS on Sunday October 25, 2026 @09:27PM (#50237919)
Jailbroken 3DS scene is usually for modding the console OS itself given how easy it is to run custom firmware. And for ports, and emulation. While the GBA has a pretty dedicated community for custom games and romhacks, people often create games for the platform at gamejams because of how great the dev tooling is. It's a bit lackluster on the 3DS, but I did find the Love Brew[0] framework to be really nice. Even has simulator support[1] for testing your builds locally, though fonts will look much different on real hardware, with likely a bunch of other gotchas. Running out of RAM being a big one.

[0] https://lovebrew.org/

[1] https://github.com/lovebrew/nest

edit: compared it to the GBA homebrew scene since it's a large dedicated community to derive pros and cons between the two from. Switch is still receiving updates from Nintendo to brick your system.

Re:How close can pure functional programming get to C? on Saturday October 24, 2026 @07:12AM (#50220163)
And it's something they've been working on for the past 8 years!
Love the site, though I'll always prefer this attempt at explaining the Zelda timeline by Brian David Gilbert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw
This is just an ad for contextetech. Search engines build their own index, which is hard. Decentralized search engines like Searx have middling results, and it's a project running for over a decade. "Smart" is subjective, and not something I'd trust an LLM to determine.
Re:Recreational Programming on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:29AM (#50100447)
I think yours and the rest of the comments to mine are missing the point of the presentation I'm critiquing, and missing the (admittedly cursorily added) escape hatch on why I think it's totally fine to program recreationally. It should be encouraged for everyone to learn. Akin to learning an instrument and/or music theory. It helps you in ways that you might never notice.
Re:Recreational Programming on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:06AM (#50082625)
Recreational programming used to be one of the rubrics to hire a software developer. If you have an intrinsic motivation to code, it would often be more valuable than your credentials. That's why junior devs would push up sites showcasing their resume of random projects they've done outside of education in order to give them an edge over their competition. Some companies would even encourage some time on the clock for working on side projects to prevent burnout.

At the same time, some of the workers in the industry were disgruntled that you were expected to enjoy coding in your spare time to keep up. While some truly just wanted to do it because they were good at it, and would rather turn off the software dev brain after work to do other things they enjoy in life.

With the advent of high-performing LLM's for coding, though, it seems more important to showcase how you can harness AI for your recreational projects than the projects themselves. It's a bit of a catch-22 for junior devs though.

I still think it's good rubric to get into programming if you like to do it recreationally, but these are just a few of my thoughts on how it can be problematic.

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't Americans rising up against tipping? on Saturday October 10, 2026 @09:09PM (#50038789)
Last time I visited Miami Beach, I found out they have a forced 20% gratuity at restaurants. And still ask for a tip on top that. My friends and I were likely tipping >40% for subpar service and overpriced drinks for a few days until someone noticed it on their receipt.
Don't most things people use day-to-day for both work and entertainment require use of the actual app these days, or at least make it very difficult to do so?
Re:Why Common Lisp Is Now the Best Programming Language on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @01:20AM (#49974509)
So now we're believing it's great that LLM's can write macros, thus further obfuscating human maintenance of the code-base, because LLM's can understand and implement it than better than humans.

This isn't the future I wanted, and is why I advocate for trade schools these days.

I miss the days I could listen to music and use my adhd/autism to its fullest potential reading documentation and figuring things out myself.

Of course, these are same people you'd want managing these AI agents in the first place, but reviewing code written by others always kind of sucks, especially when it's assumed the language model knows better than you do which isn't often the case!

Was the PRD perfected on the requirements? Only God knows, and I personally want to be there when it's written.

Re:SvelteKit 3 Is Here on Friday October 02, 2026 @07:28AM (#49932292)
They explicitly mention that Svelte hasn't changed much since version 3? Svelte 5 did introduce runes but, as you say, still kept legacy code compatible.
Re:Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices on Sunday September 20, 2026 @11:28PM (#49782728)
Not offering solutions here, because I think it's more multi-faceted than I know about. But when people are afraid to take on the debt of on-board EMS for a 911 call, and local pharmacies are forced out to be bought up by the top national pharmaceutical companies letting them rent-seek, I do think "for profit" is part of this multi-faceted problem.
I'm thinking more of a future where big tech successfully moves the overton window for AI, people gradually rely on getting information/entertainment from LLM's more than books, then it can follow the regular plotline of 451 with the public voting to ban books.
Someone needs to write an updated version of Fahrenheit 451, maybe titled Fahrenheit-451GB-A32.
TFA is a bit obtuse about it, and assumes you've read their previous article on the topic, but from what I gathered, it's about whether the AAMVA would standardize cryptographically signing the barcodes of driver licenses to mitigate creating fakes in the US/CA. Cali showed it's entirely possible, but there's still no pressure for the standard to change across the board.
I was flagged by Facebook to provide a government ID years ago, presumably because I tend to use a VPN and never really provided any personal information. I imagine it doesn't take much on any of the other social media platforms to look too much like an anomaly before it warrants a suspension. The platform has nothing to lose since "personalization" and ad revenue won't be lost; in fact, you wouldn't want your personalization algorithm to be trained on such users.
Re:GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @02:19AM (#49708457)
I appreciate the update. I wish RCS was more open. I'm still astonished that it wasn't until 2024 that iOS adopted the protocol. Relying on everyone in your group chat to be all Android or all iOS (iMessage) wasn't helping anyone.
Re:Adversarial Fashion Makes a Statement on AI Panopticon on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:13PM (#49700423)
It will always be a cat-and-mouse game. I don't think it's possible to have any sort of visual that an algorithm can't be trained to recognize.

sidenote: did Adversarial Fashion stop selling the ALPR shirts/hoodies? That was my favorite thing to wear years back. And they're probably still effective at inserting noise.

Re:GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released on Saturday September 12, 2026 @12:52AM (#49668936)
Signal > RCS > SMS.

Just because RCS can't be done without metadata doesn't mean it's a fruitless endeavor. Why not have someone use RCS to then get on Signal? That is so much better than plaintext SMS to Signal.

And for most people, RCS between Android <-> iOS is the biggest advancement in encrypted communication for the layman that I've seen since Let's Encrypt.

Re:GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released on Friday September 11, 2026 @10:05PM (#49667947)
Thanks! I noticed on one of my phones that RCS breaks once the Messages app is out of date by a certain amount of revisions. I hope this is an arbitrary decision by Google to invalidate older versions, given that the RCS protocol hasn't changed. I wouldn't want the Graphene team to have to keep up with each change Google makes with their Messages app, and instead is a security oversight Google has found in their own app.
Re:Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening on Thursday September 10, 2026 @11:26AM (#49645382)
To look for a certain waveform, wouldn't you need to obtain all of the mic data at all times? I think that's what's implied by "listening" here, but semantics are rarely an interesting discussion.
Re:Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify on Thursday September 10, 2026 @12:14AM (#49638332)
The lack of single-file components is one of several reasons I wouldn't reach for React prior to the LLM craze[0]. For personal projects, I love Svelte. You wouldn't need tailwind there for the reasons proposed given their support for it.

[0] Things have probably changed, but Svelte 5 was a litmus test for how recent the data cutoff was for an LLM model. Meanwhile React _especially_ has no reason to change how the framework is used by coders. Thus there's years of scraped tutorials and sites for how to throttle a function or what-have-you in React.

Re:Jellyfin 12.0 on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @02:44AM (#49606376)
Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.
Yes, I know the tweet was from Asha Sharma. The crypto site referenced throughout the site null and voided my ability to take much of it seriously. At the end of the day, videogames _are_ profitable for these shareholders, granted that as many "unnecessary" studios are closed / employees laid off, risky creative endeavors are shuttered, and subscription services + legal gambling for children are at the forefront. I don't think you know anything about the videogame industry, and certainly not as much as a developer working on a successful indie game for two decades now whom you thought was simply a game journalist.
Re:Shutting down our public encrypted DNS on Saturday September 05, 2026 @02:34PM (#49579335)
> is nice to have on the high seas

For sailing the high seas, or for harboring? I, for one, am glad to not have Mullvad's IP ranges blacklisted everywhere.

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