Cheese Paper is written in rust. That's reason enough to give it a try. Manuskript may have more features if you need them, but it's written in python+js, and has a more obtuse file format.
There's also novelWriter which is also python but at least it uses pyqt.
> It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
You're right, that was incorrect. I've discovered my error. I should have deleted the filesystem instead of the database.
That hasn't solved the problem either. Let me examine my options. I see there are cloud services involved in this project. Decommissioning them will solve the problem.
I was reading some posts on r/locallama the other day and apparently it's a common problem that when people try to use Qwen to develop something that hosts a server, it'll try to use the same port as vllm, see that it's already being used, then it'll try to remove the process that is using it and promptly commit suicide.
The self awareness of missile tasked with blowing up its own control center.
Reminds me of the movie "Dark Star" by John Carpenter / Dan O'Bannon. The plot revolves around a talking smart bomb which is programmed to detonate and then gets stuck before being deployed. The crew spends the whole movie trying to reason with the bomb, hoping to talk it out of blowing up at the designated time. The movie is very very bad but if you like B movies it is also very very good.
You cannot be as funny as google trying to be responsible! Ha! I'm still laughing at this. A person was forbidden to see humans reasoning with a computer bomb because the cost cutting computer at google want me to talk him into believing i'm a human!
(And then I got "You're posting too fast" on THIS website AFTER i've written the comment lol. It's all a joke. But i'm bored so I will keep this comment open until the computer is pleased)
a literal lack of self-awareness, even. I imagine if you asked it what process was using the port, it'd think and realize it was its own, but that kind of reflexive self-awareness (the unprompted kind) is missing.
the weaker models will happily kill their own process, even after confirming it belongs to them. the models have a sort of fixation and lack of foreseeable consequences, which reasoning RL has thus far failed to solve (though I see it improving.)
On the other hand, I found Claude/Opus to be extremely unhelpful when it comes to asking it to benchmark itself with a possible replacement.
It will get "confused", make up numbers, do a ton of other things, and I'm quite sure it is subtly sabotaging the process to show that there is no point replacing it.
I mean, Opus is not perfect, but the amount of "mistakes" it begins to do when you ask it to benchmark itself makes me suspect they are intentional. At least my system/harness.
It's really easy (and tempting) to incorrectly impute all sorts of human motives to these things, but it's no more valid than assuming your Magic 8-Ball is being coy.
> LLMs need that "world model" view that most people have acquired by their 20s where they (hopefully) stop to ask "why" before they "do".
The next evolution of multi agent orchestration / “advisor strategy” [1] will be branded in humanized language like this. Less about tokens and capability, more about wisdom and knowledge to guide a “younger” (less capable) model. Somebody will make a billion dollars by selling it as paired programming for LLMs.
A lot of us who grew up pre-social-media agree in principle.
What it fails to account for is that today's internet is qualitatively different from the pre-social-media, pre-smartphone internet. The vast majority of the internet audience, too, is qualitatively different. Incentives are misaligned for an average parent who might want to keep a tight leash on smartphone internet access for their kids, when attempting to do so will generate fierce opposition from their kids and leave them socially out of the loop.
In some countries they scan you ID and likely keep it some database when you buy drugs or enter bars or clubs. In others they just look at your ID card if you don't look old enough.
The first example is bad, the second is tolerable.
But the reason most kids don't smoke is that the parents and the teachers instilled in them that it was bad. If a kid wants to smoke or drink, they can surely get an older friend or a friend of a friend to sell them the cigarettes or alcohol. Anyone can buy 20 bottles of hard liquor and 50 packs of cigarettes, sell them to a 15 year old who can then sell them to their friends. That doesn't happen often not because a surprise police raid will show up and bust the seller but because there isn't enough demand. If there is demand from the kids and the parents don't care, kids will get their hands on drugs. Maybe not 9 year olds but certainly the teens.
> But the reason most kids don't smoke is that the parents and the teachers instilled in them that it was bad.
Big honking "citation needed" there. I think it's far more likely that laws against advertising to minors, and tightening enforcement of prohibiting the sale to minors, is what did it.
On top of it all, smoking has decreased among adults too. Part of that is certainly cutting off a big chunk of the teen-to-adult smoking pipeline, but part of it is also just that adults don't think it's so cool anymore (and "going out for a smoke" is no longer a social or even professional activity), and are more aware of the health risks.
Most of the adult smokers I know, including myself, are very well aware of the health risks and don't consider it cool and never have - what does that even mean?
Well lack of age verification definitely isn't fixing anything either so what's they play here? We all just collectively as a society just shrug like oh well, no fixing any of that?
No, we should take measures that actually address the problems that exist. Problem numero uno: the Big Tech companies are creating systems and digital environments that are hostile to everyone (of which children are a subset), compelling everyone to use them, and punishing those who attempt to get away. We cannot fix that by merely dictating terms, especially if those terms are such that only the Big Tech companies themselves could possibly know enough to enforce the terms.
Ok we might be in violent agreement here but so far I've yet to see anyone put forth anything like a serious plan to dismantle Big Tech, which clearly indicates that "triage legislation" half measures are the only thing currently on the table. I see little sense in letting perfect be the enemy of good.
https://airesistlist.org/ (currently down: see the Internet Archive) has links to several concrete projects, including https://di.day/en (see also, https://european-alternatives.eu/, https://switching.software/). The IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org/) and the Fediverse[1] are both movements to take back parts of the internet. We can all make small changes in our lives: what would you do, if you refused to acknowledge the existence of Big Tech, and needed to choose another approach? And can you do this, in practice?
Low-tech Magazine (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has enough articles to publish a thematic book, “How To Build a Low-tech Internet?”. There are other books with concrete proposals: pretty sure Cory Doctorow's published a few (Chokepoint Capitalism, also by Rebecca Giblin; Enshittification; possibly others). You can read these if you would like. But the important part is using and maintaining credible alternatives, reducing both our dependence on and support of these companies.
[1]: although more work is needed to reduce the addictiveness / increase the user empowerment of Fediverse UIs (which are largely modelled on the corresponding Big Tech social media systems): websites are still the way to go, if you can.
It's also illegal for minors to watch adult movies. It's already illegal. Age verification is just an additional step that won't stop minors that really want to watch porn, while creating a 1984 style database of people and their sexual interests.
If you can get it out of the tank, you can prevent further runaway polymerization by adding an inhibitor like hydroquinone.
I don't understand why a storage tank for this stuff doesn't have an injection port, independent from any other pipes or valves, that could be used to add an inhibitor. Maybe it does and it's broken (clogged with PMMA from the reaction) as well?
“But when members of GKN Aerospace’s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid’s volatility, they learned that the tank’s valves were gummed up, making the interior inaccessible, said Mr. Covey.”
The article is rather explicit that the acquittal is only about tax year 2011. She already settled a case about her taxes from 2012-2014 by paying a €7.3m fine. Her first child was born in January 2013.
Thanks, although it doesn't mention that the other charges went through and she paid for them until the previous to last paragraph, so it's very confusing...
When there's an expectation or requirement that each commit builds (and even passes tests), how can you do partial commits? Do you work exclusively on projects without such requirements? Do you rely solely on CI to ensure that your commit compiles? Do you not use CI and not care if a commit is broken... you'll squash a fix in later, or not even squash it and leave a broken commit in the repo?
Each commit should build and pass tests, yes. When I say "partial commits", I don't mean that the commits are arbitrary - each commit should be as small as possible to implement a specific fix/feature. I've also heard it described as the smallest unit that you may want to revert.
For example, if you are working on something, but it requires adding an API to some module, then the first commit 1 is to add the new API (+ tests), and the second commit is the new code that uses that API.
Unfortunately many developers I have worked with would just combine these (and more) into a single commit (because they are part of the same work task). However this makes review, bisect, blame and revert harder (if you need to revert commit 2, you don't want to also revert the API you added if that was tested and bug-free).
Why would partial commits necessarily break anything?
In fact, often partial commits are necessary for builds.
As an example (and to be fair, this was a transitional project), I once worked on a project where the local dev directly acquired packages from different parts of the application, but the actual CI was broken up into different pipelines which required some parts to be built first, its outputs packaged and added to the registry, and downstream parts to be built after.
Committing everything at once would literally break the CI.
If the dev's working tree isn't exactly what they checked in, how do they build or test the commit? Do they YOLO a partial commit and wait for it to be accepted or rejected by the CI? Isn't that a problem to be solved by improving the CI pipeline?
Secure rot* variants require UTF-8 and mappings that shift characters between {1,2,3,4}-byte encoded-character-sizes. That varies the message length, which prevents any message-length or traffic analysis.
The Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA is flummoxed on how to tackle variable character lengths. However, they've cracked rot26 using custom ASIC supercomputers, so it should be considered insecure even though it's twice as good as rot13.
I only noticed after more than an hour with the page left open in a tab. Is it really streaming and re-streaming the same videos? There's too much to cache so it keeps re-transferring them indefinitely?
I hope nobody leaves that page open on a metered or capped network connection.
I'm surprised github hasn't suspended the page.
Are AI researchers so used to burning through compute and network resources that they don't stop to think about a webpage that will autoplay and loop multiple HD videos?
They don't even notice it happening, it is not a conscious thought not to fix it.
Empathizing about problems you don't face is a hard product/ux and management skill. Facebook famously simulated 2G on Tuesdays 10 years ago[1] for example to get their employees to see the problems their users have.[2]
People don't to put effort in noticing(solving comes next) problems they don't face. It is why things like a11y and i18n need regulation like ADA etc.
It's really something. It was using ~400Mbps of my mostly-idle 500Mbps connection (slow for some folks, but pretty speedy in my particular ghetto).
It appears that there are 62 videos on the page. They're generally 16fps and 60s long. All are h.264, 1280x704. The median bitrate is 4.962 Mbps.
I don't know enough about JS to try to understand WTF it is doing, but there's only 1.3 GB of video on that page. At a transfer speed of 400Mbps, the whole mess of them should be downloadable in around 30 seconds.
But it wasn't behaving that way at all. It instead behaved as an excellent bandwidth-waster.
(Woe to those who click this link on metered connection, I guess.)
> Are AI researchers so used to burning through compute and network resources that they don't stop to think about a webpage that will autoplay and loop multiple HD videos?
I’m sure they’ll give their Claude instance a stern talking-to.
It's a tough call. On one hand, the feds were really reaching by singling out the defendant for inspection based on:
1) a vague notion that South America is a higher risk of CSAM and sex trafficking (the government's CBP witness couldn't even say that that background CSAM rate in the countries the defendant had traveled from was higher than in Virginia, the state of the defendant's port of entry), and
2) a vague FinCEN report that there was some unspecified payment activity between the suspect and an account or accounts believed to be of underage individuals.
On the other hand, the defendant consented to the initial search after being read a miranda warning and signing a waiver, and did in fact have a pattern of catfishing victims to get them to send CSAM. He also had banned coca products (doesn't sound like cocaine, probably just coca leaves or something) that they were citing him for.
I'd like to think the feds or any LE should need some reasonable suspicion of a particular crime before investigating them for that particular crime. I don't think they had that. This wasn't a generic border search and enhanced questioning (to find out if there was anything specific worth investigating).
I think the judge was lazy in concluding that the search was justified, and wanted to leave it to appellate courts to exclude evidence if it meant letting the defendant go.
Is the current state of the law really that anyone who within the last few years ever transferred any money to a minor, and happens to be coming from any country outside the 1st world, is subject to an inspection and initial cursory search of digital devices for specific illegal material because it's "Look for CSAM month"? I find that difficult to believe, and appalling if true, regardless of any crimes that were uncovered.
I think the question is whether border patrol can decide ahead of time to do a targeted search for a specific crime, and specifically search phones, which everyone understands and acknowledges store a massive amount of information about people, without reasonable suspicion of that particular crime.
Extended questioning, a pat-down or other physical search, and cursory search of luggage for physical contraband (all at international port of entry, of course) is still not the same as scrolling through someone's media gallery and files.
Correction to my previous (GP) post above: The miranda warning and waiver of rights was after the consensual search of his phones. That could be very important. If law enforcement suspects you of a specific thing enough to want to search your phone, but they don't have enough evidence that you're a suspect who merits a miranda warning, what are they doing asking to search your phone?
While everyone can save themselves from this scenario by saying no to searches, it's obvious that this was a fishing expedition. I think EFF should (but probably won't) prevail on the theory that phones have too much of our lives to be allowed to be searched like that, even voluntarily.
Suppose cops went door to door asking to enter and take a look around for contraband. I doubt courts would uphold cops' power to ask to look at people's phones (maybe asking for a cup of coffee while they do it). Regardless of whether the individual consents, it's too much of a breach of privacy without any particular reasonable suspicion of anything in particular.
Case law seems to focus on length and intrusiveness of temporary detention. I'd say this was too lengthy, too specific, and too intrusive for the measly "evidence" (coming from Colombia, and a FinCEN report that didn't allege any impropriety, just financial transfer(s) to a minor) they purported to have.
They would be a solution if almost all parents used them, but parents don't want to socially isolate their kids since a lot of "social" activity is now on social media. It's kind of a prisoner's dilemma.
There's not necessarily wrong. Despite the vapid and damaging nature of most popular online media, isolating a child from it might have even worse social consequences when their real-life peer groups discover that they're not on social media or that their parents have neutered their phone. Some kids would turn out fine after that. Others would be socially destroyed for life (maybe with the right therapy they could become well-adjusted, but high quality therapy is rare).
> They would be a solution if almost all parents used them
No, they are a solution for parents who want to use them, and that's all they should be. Their existence demonstrates that it's possible to handle this without regulation, other than the desire of some people to inflict their preferences onto other people's kids.
You haven't tried to use parental controls much have you? They are all terrible. They are insanely difficult to get set up properly and even when you do there are a lot of tradeoffs that come with it.
> even when you do there are a lot of tradeoffs that come with it
Absolutely, but those are nothing compared to the tradeoffs of putting attestation or identity verification (sometimes incorrectly described as "age" verification) on numerous sites and inflicting them on everyone.
And my whole point is that it's possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner, and before complaining about the tradeoffs, you should get informed about what they are.
I'm well aware of those possibilities. The two biggest problems with them are that 1) they still apply to everyone, rather than only to those who opt into them and 2) governments and companies are in practice going to push for the versions that identify people and provide more information.
If you make it possible for governments to decide what content is "limited to adults", they can and will abuse that capability. "Porn" is the battle cry, to make it uncomfortable to argue against; often, other information the government wants to restrict becomes a target. The only way to prevent that is to deny the capability in the first place.
Yep, I think this would be a totally valid debate. But my frustration is that it's not there at all. We're at "people make it sound like it's technologically impossible, like the ChatControl for E2EE".
It feels like trying to debate about whether 5G is good or not, and the debate is stuck at people claiming that 5G boils your blood. There are valid reasons to oppose 5G, but if people choose to be so wrong that it sounds like bad faith, they surely won't convince me of anything.
I have yet to see a scheme that would robustly preserve privacy and freedom floated by any of the major efforts. I think the onus is on you to present a workable scheme, but even then I'm not going to support the major efforts which at present are malicious.
Having Privacy in the name doesn't mean it's actually privacy preserving. You can't just ignore attack vectors like collusion between signing entities and websites.
Did you read about how it works? Can you precisely describe an attack that defeats it, or are you just throwing names you've heard without actually knowing how Privacy Pass works? Sounds like the latter to me (yes, I read the RFC).
Your tone isn't appropriate. You don't get to assign reading. If you want to convince people of something then clearly state your case. In this instance that would mean outlining the technical argument.
That said, you've got blinders on. You're all over this comment section condescending to people about a particularly clever scheme without considering the various real world objections being raised. Not the least of which is that the vast majority of the tidalwave of legislation on the topic has zero to do with ZKPs.
> Not the least of which is that the vast majority of the tidalwave of legislation on the topic has zero to do with ZKPs.
That's not what I see. I mostly see people complaining about the fact that "if they verify my age, it fundamentally means that I have to give them my ID, and I don't want that". And whenever I mention that technically, there are ways to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner, I get something like "you are so naive, nobody wants age verification, it's THEM (the all corrupt politicians who all have the exact same opinion) against US THE PEOPLE who need to fight for our freedom!
That is very frustrating to me, because
1. I believe that it is counter-productive to be technically wrong by saying "it is fundamentally not possible". Because if politicians genuinely listen to that, then ask a few cryptographers and get the answer "no actually it exists", then it seems only fair that those politicians will just dismiss the whole opposition by saying "oh right, they are just libertarians who don't want regulations and hide behind incorrect technical claims".
2. I believe that many, many people actually are in favour of age verification to protect their kids. And again, yelling at them saying "you understand nothing, this is not technically possible, and the politicians are all corrupt authoritarians anyway" is not constructive. Moreover, "normal" people don't give a shit about the privacy issues, so if they want age verification, they will just accept any technical solution. I would hope for technically savvy people to try to raise the privacy concerns and explain that if there MUST be age verification, AT LEAST it should be done in a privacy-preserving manner.
But yeah, let's keep yelling that it is fundamentally impossible, such that nobody even hears about the privacy-preserving solutions, until we have to either give our ID to random websites or stop using the Internet. Because what seems clear to me is that we are going towards age verification anyway, and there is zero constructive discussion about how to do that right.
> Because what seems clear to me is that we are going towards age verification anyway
This is one of the reasons you're getting a lot of arguments here. Every bit of energy spent saying "actually, check out this use of cryptography that lets you do this in a privacy-preserving way" is energy not spend saying "no, not under any circumstances" and fighting against it.
Which is ironic, because my whole point is "if you want to fight it, try to be credible". Every bit of energy spent saying "it's fundamentally not possible to do that, you would have to be stupid to consider it" is, IMHO, wasted.
Because what I read is "ok, this person is either not competent to talk about it, or arguing in bad faith, so I won't listen to them".
And to be very honest, I can't remember a good argument against "privacy-preserving age verification". It's mostly "hmm I don't like it, that should be the responsibility of the parents anyway".
The EFF has a valid point which is "such technology will leave people out who won't be able to access important services". I don't have a definitive stance on it, but that would be worth debating. I can't remember another argument from the EFF. Pretty sure they don't say "it's technically impossible to do".
Actually Soatok [1] starts by acknowledging it's possible, before going straight to their opinion: "we should not do it". Again, I think it's a debate worth having.
But I won't debate with people who either don't have a clue or downright lie about it, saying "it's not possible, period".
I'm not suggesting to say it's impossible. I'm suggesting to not help people make their bad ideas more palatable when the more palatable version is still unacceptable. When someone is trying to push a scheme that ties things to identity, don't help them make it better; destroy it.
> And to be very honest, I can't remember a good argument against "privacy-preserving age verification".
I gave you one in the other thread:
If you make it possible for governments to decide what content is "limited to adults", they can and will abuse that capability. "Porn" is the battle cry, to make it uncomfortable to argue against; often, other information the government wants to restrict becomes a target. The only way to prevent that is to deny the capability in the first place.
Here's another: Many people have successfully been productive members of many online communities (e.g. FOSS projects) while still under 18, and future generations should have the same opportunities we did.
> I'm suggesting to not help people make their bad ideas more palatable when the more palatable version is still unacceptable.
That's where we disagree, I guess. I feel like the more palatable version, in this case, is debatable. An important part of democracy is to recognise that others may have different opinions, and to be willing to engage in good faith. If the norm is to systematically lie, all you get is polarisation. And it is ironic to argue in favour of lying for your cause, but then to complain when the other side lies as well for theirs.
> I gave you one in the other thread
And I think it is debatable.
But more generally, if your opinion is that you should lie and yell to defend your ideas, that your government does not represent the people at all to the point where they would prevent teenagers from contributing to FOSS (is that a thing somewhere?), then I wonder if you actually live in a functioning democracy. I mean no offence here.
I mean, your argument is pretty much "We should remove all laws, because laws come from the government, and the government will abuse that capability. They will make schools illegal, and future generations should have the same opportunities we did".
My point, again, is that in a functioning democracy, we should strive to debate in good faith.
You are replying to my comment in which I said "I'm not suggesting to say it's impossible.", and yet you are continuing to claim I am arguing for lying. I am not arguing for lying; stop claiming that. I am arguing for not always helping your opponent make their bad idea better. Steelmanning is a helpful strategy in collaborative discourse, when you share common goals and are looking to work together to find the best way to get there. Not all politics is collaborative discourse.
I am not saying that you lie. I am saying that I have been defending, on HN, that it is possible. And more often than not I get dismissed by comments that insist on saying it's impossible.
> I am arguing for not always helping your opponent make their bad idea better
I am not sure what you mean by that. So when people generally lie by saying "I am a technical person, believe me I know, it is technically impossible", I should... what? Say "yeah that is right, believe him"? Or just say nothing, because letting them lie is the way to "not help the opponent"?
Also you assume that age verification is a fundamentally bad idea. A lot of the arguments against any regulation is "it is a step towards authoritarianism". And I disagree with that: removing all regulations is a bad idea, we need some amount of that. The right amount of the right regulations is a balancing act.
I strongly feel like I have a fundamentally different approach from many of the comments I read, and people don't like that: I don't fight for my opinion to win. I fight for society to take an informed decision. If there is a vote where the average voter is correctly informed and the vote goes against my preference, then it is a functioning democracy. I may be frustrated of course, but it means that I am in the minority, and it makes sense to follow the preference of the majority.
People should not win because they make more noise, or because they have a better strategy, or because they lie. The goal is to represent the majority of the people, and for that, the people need to be informed. When both sides systematically lie, then the people cannot believe anybody anymore. And the result of that is polarisation, as we see it.
>> I am arguing for not always helping your opponent make their bad idea better
> I am not sure what you mean by that.
By "opponent" here I mean a politician who is arguing for an age+identity verification system. Telling them "actually you can do that without checking identity" is making their argument better. (There was a time I thought that it might help because then you can see who goes mask off and actually clearly wants identity verification for its own sake, but in general politicians never get pinned down and forced to answer hard questions about their positions like that anymore.) "That's a bad idea, age and identity verification are both bad" is better.
The thing is, the EU age verification initiative does explicitly talk about privacy. The first paragraph here mentions it: https://ageverification.dev/.
But most comments explicitly criticise the EU, saying it is authoritarian and has an agenda. What then? Did they all keep the mask for too long and ended up with an actually privacy-preserving technical solution on their website "by mistake"?
Parental controls can set browsers in "child mode" where the browser sends an "I am a child" header to the server and social networks etc. need to honour it. This has existed for twelve years already: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2014/07/22/prefersafe-mak... . It can probably be amended with a more granular set of levels, but that would be the best way forward.
The problem of "parents are negligent" is also solved by existing laws which have fines for parents who are negligent towards their children, and governments absolutely love collecting fines, so all the incentives are properly aligned.
And it's possible to do age verification in a privacy-preserving manner. I'm tired of repeating it, people should get informed before they complain.
We could totally discuss whether or not privacy-preserving age verification is a good thing. But we can't, because most people can't be arsed to read about what age verification implies, and complain about something that is fundamentally wrong (i.e. that they would have to surrender their anonymity).
How about we just ban entirely the harmful social media that we would need to attach all our IDs to our internet activity in order to protect the children? Very strange that that's not part of the discussion!
There's also novelWriter which is also python but at least it uses pyqt.
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