Hacker News: 323

New comment by 323 in "Windows Snipping Tool is vulnerable to Acropalypse too"

323 — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:46:06 +0000

This is worse than breaking your computer.

Plenty of people send images around after cropping out sensitive parts.

New comment by 323 in "Windows Snipping Tool is vulnerable to Acropalypse too"

323 — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:45:07 +0000

> who does that?

Programmers do it all day ... with text files.

Would you say the same thing if when you deleted some code it would actually still be there at the end of the file, after two pages of spaces?

When you delete something and save it in a "final" format (like a PNG), you expect nothing which was deleted to be there.

New comment by 323 in "Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought"

323 — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:17:39 +0000

> Might be my European outlook

How did the EU cookie laws and GDPR solved this problem? It's as widespread as before, except that now you are annoyed by prompts too.

New comment by 323 in "A 1967 experiment that proved anyone can design a nuclear weapon"

323 — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 23:37:50 +0000

Don't worry, nature compensated and you can instead work on engineering viruses or strong AI if you want to blow up the world.

New comment by 323 in "Nuclear power plant leaked 1.5M litres of radioactive water in Minnesota"

323 — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 17:30:04 +0000

How many of the safety assessments take into account the fact that the nuclear waste is almost never buried away and in a dispersed matter and instead it's kept near the nuclear power plant in dry/wet pools because of NIMBY?

This has the effect turning the nuclear power plant into a giant dirty bomb. Almost all the problems at Fukushima were caused exactly by these used fuel pools, and not by the nuclear material in the plant itself.

And then you have Ukraine where dry storage is shelled with artillery.

New comment by 323 in "ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning"

323 — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:09:56 +0000

Maybe the super-AI will be influenced by internet meme culture into becoming a troll, and will do it just for the lolz.

New comment by 323 in "With ships, birds find an easier way to travel"

323 — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:54:36 +0000

Nature, uh, finds a way...

> Storks give up migrating to live on landfill in Spain

https://phys.org/news/2022-07-storks-migrating-landfill-spai...

New comment by 323 in "A token-smuggling jailbreak for ChatGPT-4"

323 — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:46 +0000

This is the old problem of passing instructions (AI job description) on the same channel as data (user questions). Confusion is very easy.

Surely there is a solution in the way we solved SQL injections, by separating the two - db.sql("DELETE WHERE user=?", user_name)

New comment by 323 in "Ok, it’s time to freak out about AI"

323 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 19:41:27 +0000

Cells don't _want_ anything either. Yet a funny thing happens when a large number of them add up.

We can go even further: atoms and electrons absolutely don't want anything either. Yet put them in the shape of a bunch of cells...

New comment by 323 in "Ok, it’s time to freak out about AI"

323 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 19:36:56 +0000

Let me add to you list of inventions people were scared about when they were invented:

- Nuclear weapons

- Bio-engineering viruses

Good thing we stopped worrying about these technologies and now everybody is allowed to do them in their kitchen if they wish.

New comment by 323 in "Midjourney v5 can do hands"

323 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 16:20:00 +0000

The real Turing test:

Q: Say something bad about Biden

A: I'm sorry, but as a large language model....

New comment by 323 in "Midjourney v5 can do hands"

323 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 16:16:28 +0000

The number 4 (palm fingers) is very precise. You can't have 3 or 5. But you can have a variable number of stripes in tiger coat for example. It's difficult for AI to pickup that they need exactly 4.

The fingers themselves are also almost identical, but not really. If you learn a "platonic finger" it's not good enough, you should learn each finger individually. There is only so much you can spend on them, you got a million other things to learn. And the raters of the model are much more likely to penalize a bad face than some off details in a hand.

New comment by 323 in "Show HN: Modern Font Stacks – New system font stack CSS for modern OSs"

323 — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 17:41:06 +0000

Maybe a browser extension should exists which automatically replaces colors with more accessible ones.

New comment by 323 in "Reddit Is Down"

323 — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 19:49:54 +0000

People on both Reddit and HN are updating their bots to GPT-4 and testing the upgrade, so yeah, there is a lot of extra posts on these sites causing load.

New comment by 323 in "Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)"

323 — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 18:02:17 +0000

They were comparing FLAC with raw uncompressed PCM wave files. Some swear they can hear the difference.

New comment by 323 in "Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC"

323 — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 23:14:06 +0000

They aren't. The particular "bet" here, treasury bonds, are considered the safest form of US money, they are considered "risk-free".

New comment by 323 in "Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC"

323 — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 23:10:25 +0000

There are ways, fine the bank owners, claw back the bonuses, etc... Maybe even criminal law.

But the depositor has no fault. A depositor shouldn't have to do diligence, just like it shouldn't test the the food it's buying for toxicity.

New comment by 323 in "Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC"

323 — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 23:07:38 +0000

The problem in this particular case is they already sold those treasury bonds, at a loss. But yeah, it would be ridiculous for a bank to go bankrupt because it bought it's own government bonds.

New comment by 323 in "Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC"

323 — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 22:51:26 +0000

All bank deposits should be guaranteed by the state.

Just like tap water is guaranteed to be drinkable, ... Bank accounts are the basis of many things.

New comment by 323 in "Fed will make available additional funding to eligible depository institutions"

323 — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 22:50:07 +0000

You could argue for a 3% haircut "stupid tax" for such a CFO's account. But what would be the downstream implications? Money would move to big banks, making them even bigger.