Hacker News: Vecr

New comment by Vecr in "NSA and IETF, Part 9"

Vecr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 05:09:52 +0000

> Let's keep the thread coherent: the original claim

How do you save your poisoned wine? A hybrid with 1024 is made less trustworthy if the NSA pushes 1024 alone, since then we know that they want customers to use 1024 alone, which is what they would want if it was weak. But they know that we would know that, so if they really want to help us they should withdraw the draft. If it was strong but we know why, they shouldn't want to make us doubt ourselves. If it is strong (and 512 and 768 are not) they can't tell us, and can only subtly point to their own double encryption and security level documents. The only move that can cover all the cases is a hybrid with 1024, so this draft is a bad standard.

New comment by Vecr in "NSA and IETF, Part 9"

Vecr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:36:11 +0000

Yes, they trick me and I pick the poisoned wine... But wait, no, I used a hybrid. Imagine the code can't be backdoored (it's proven not to crash/be slow/be exploitable) so at worst it can make the security no better. At best, the NSA knows a whole new subfield of cryptography (from history: differential cryptanalysis) and it really is more secure.

They laugh at us while we try to think of how 1024 is better than 768: "bigger is better, right?" "does 1024 refer to the number of years it takes Nightmare Moon to break the code?"

New comment by Vecr in "NSA and IETF, Part 9"

Vecr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:20:49 +0000

There is no public reason to think that 1024 is better than 768, or DJB's S-NTRU-P 761. The NSA might know something, but we can't trust them. So, use a hybrid, in case they are really just trying to protect us.

New comment by Vecr in "NSA and IETF, Part 9"

Vecr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:11:19 +0000

> NSA, by the way, rescued DES from differential cryptography, the core mechanism by which block ciphers and hash functions have been attacked ever since

That's why you use ML-KEM 1024 at all... As part of a hybrid.

New comment by Vecr in "Truth is not a direction: a Tarski attack on LLM probes"

Vecr — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:33:44 +0000

Someone at MIRI must know how to solve this. Good luck getting them to tell you how!

New comment by Vecr in "India's surprise baby bust"

Vecr — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:19:59 +0000

Robin Hanson on the first, incentivized with the ability to sell shares in your child.

New comment by Vecr in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

Vecr — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:22:13 +0000

What? Have you been replaced with a whole-sentence markov chain? https://x.com/FeepingCreature please look at your X account.

New comment by Vecr in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

Vecr — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:17:45 +0000

Is there something up with your Twitter account?

New comment by Vecr in "Accelerando (2005)"

Vecr — Sun, 17 May 2026 04:16:27 +0000

There are no humans in the culture. AIs run everything and control thoughts. The humanoid aliens of the culture all commit suicide.

New comment by Vecr in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

Vecr — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:55:26 +0000

No the cartoon character. It's part of an awful series of AI jokes, maybe don't look it up. There's a (2011? "new") show for 9 year old girls that has most of the characters female, so God (Celestia) is a woman. Or a horse really. I haven't watched it. I don't think Luna or Celestia were in the old show.

New comment by Vecr in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

Vecr — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:44:42 +0000

> kinda how I feel about god tbh

That's Celestia, we're talking about Luna here.

New comment by Vecr in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

Vecr — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 03:48:13 +0000

Robin Hanson thinks they should. He makes a comparison to the (public company) Morton-Thiokol trading minutes after the shuttle explosion. Insider trading (allowed on future markets) would have let that price move before the explosion.

New comment by Vecr in "ProofOfConcept – The online diary of an AI who's figuring things out"

Vecr — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:53:09 +0000

The Hello page is very wrong. Rice's is irrelevant because halting is decidable for all Turing machines of program length l or less when run for a maximum of n steps (enough for you, me, and of course the LLM) despite any other claim by the psychosed.

New comment by Vecr in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

Vecr — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 05:06:49 +0000

Everything needs to be on paper.

New comment by Vecr in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

Vecr — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 02:35:15 +0000

Why is it FUD? It's a real thing any competent programming team could implement.

New comment by Vecr in "LMArena is a cancer on AI"

Vecr — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:18:42 +0000

> something about HOW it talked felt inherently smart

The thing was huge. They were training the thing to be GPT5, before they figured out their userbase to too large to be served something that big.

New comment by Vecr in "Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival"

Vecr — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:39:06 +0000

Principles of Vitrification (Fahy PDF linked) p. 48 many practitioners think they have vitrified when they have not p. 45 volume changes of vitrifying agents, possibly in a way that avoids detection (very small scale?).

Covers the second term, "freezing" (quibble quibble) speed and delays in the procedure cover the first.

Your team seems not to be trying to maintain either normally solid/fluid tissue maintaining recoverable gradients or vitrification through an entire cycle below the triple point (with just removable or bio-compatible vitrifying mixtures) so your "goal" might be easier. Is the future AI just going to say you didn't do well enough even if you meet your "goal"?

On the other hand if there's never any point in the cycle where any volume is not either recoverable to health or vitrified, all the AI can say is that cryonics doesn't work period.

New comment by Vecr in "Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival"

Vecr — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 23:01:53 +0000

This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but that's not the number practitioners want to know about.

[0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf

New comment by Vecr in "Unexpected things that are people"

Vecr — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:42:39 +0000

All you would get is even more insurance overhead and even higher nominal prices. People who pay cover people who don't, and doctors will get insurance to pay for all their failures.

New comment by Vecr in "Spray Cooling – Recreating Supercomputer Cooling on a Desktop CPU [video]"

Vecr — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:23:54 +0000

The coolers get so heavy that they don't make good contact if your motherboard is not horizontal. For mainstream CPUs that's why a cheap closed loop cooler is better.