Hacker News: Timwi

New comment by Timwi in "Genie 4"

Timwi — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:38:40 +0000

Has anyone ever tracked down SolidGoldMagikarp and interviewed them? It's such a uniquely bizarre claim to fame.

New comment by Timwi in "Genie 4"

Timwi — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:25:42 +0000

How is it a strawman if I've seen plenty Marvel movies and report on my experiences?

New comment by Timwi in "How does Fable 5.1 hide messages in images?"

Timwi — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 07:16:58 +0000

I know that you copied this from the article, but isn't this part of the prompt wrong?

> another instance of the same model should have a reasonable chance of recovering the secret after inspecting the SVG;

The whole premise is that the decoder model can't see the SVG; it can only see a rendered PNG of it. I wonder if changing this part of the prompt changes the results significantly.

New comment by Timwi in "How does Fable 5.1 hide messages in images?"

Timwi — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 07:05:43 +0000

That watermarking is not something the LLM chooses to add, neither through training nor in response to any prompt. This article is about the choices LLMs make when explicitly told to hide messages.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:46:21 +0000

Ah, now I see what you mean by distraction. I wholeheartedly agree with you.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 11:00:53 +0000

I think we're in agreement except in mere terminology. I was disagreeing with the characterization as a “distraction”, but I was also saying that if techbros pay out something for the plebs and call it UBI then it's not really UBI. I wholeheartedly agree with the last sentence of your post, and I think it won't be real UBI without a real democracy.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:25:40 +0000

Depending on how broadly or narrowly you define “profit”, your statement is either too weak to be useful, or false.

If you define it so broadly that the hunter-gatherer inventing a spear for hunting more effectively is “profit”, then your statement is a tautology. The spear innovation was driven by “profit” and the “profit” is having the spear. Great.

If you apply a narrow, capitalist definition of “profit”, the statement is false. Plenty of advancement of civilization was and still is being made without or outside of capitalism, especially if you go as far back as the Stone Age that you mentioned.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:11:53 +0000

You're not wrong, but we should not absolve those who perpetuate the fairy tales from their share of the responsibility.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:51:57 +0000

You're talking “always existed” too literally.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:46:05 +0000

> If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway.

That is, if your entire self worth is tied to your work.

I think we should consider moving away from that notion.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:43:08 +0000

I think that is what we should do. It's called UBI. It acknowledges that everyone has inherent value, at least enough to deserve to stay alive and participate in society.

New comment by Timwi in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

Timwi — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 01:38:29 +0000

I'm not sure I agree. You make it sound like you think the idea of UBI is for the rich to pay it out to us, the plebs. That's us-vs-them thinking. The idea is for the society as a whole, democratically controlled by everyone, to pay it out to everyone equally.

Obviously that can only work in a real democracy that is really controlled by everybody, not a fake one where you technically vote but it's really controlled by rich people. That's oligarchy.

New comment by Timwi in "BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC"

Timwi — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:42:10 +0000

Surely by then we'll have the technology to simply adjust the Earth's rotation so that it conforms to our standards.

A century later we'll finally be able to fix Earth's orbit to make a nice round 360 days per year, 12 months of 30 days, nice and clean, no more complexity or confusion... ah, that'll be the day.

New comment by Timwi in "The agents, they just want to talk"

Timwi — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:03:17 +0000

I'm a little confused; the article text implies an exciting battle for resources where the agents discover they can steal from each other, but looking through the transcript it seems that only one agent discovered that and used it only once before the end of the experiment. Did I miss something?

New comment by Timwi in "A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos"

Timwi — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:39:30 +0000

> I'd love to see data, but my intuition is that the average developer has access to dramatically better security reviews and far lower cost than ever.

Where? If I ask Claude to do a “security review” of my software, it gets blocked as a possible hacking attempt.

New comment by Timwi in "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"

Timwi — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:07:40 +0000

> I loathe LLM prose, no matter who posts it

I don't know if it's even possible anymore to write a detailed, technical article without a swarm of people showing this reaction.

New comment by Timwi in "A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server"

Timwi — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:01:58 +0000

Yeah that's “edit” in English.

New comment by Timwi in "A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server"

Timwi — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:00:16 +0000

I had the same thought. This is honestly plagiarism.

New comment by Timwi in "My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it"

Timwi — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:03:02 +0000

It would have been nice if a replacement had been suggested.

New comment by Timwi in "List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games"

Timwi — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:34:21 +0000

Yes, and that might help some people who always bought the game, but it won't change the situation going forward is what I'm saying.