Hacker News: boothby

New comment by boothby in "“I just chose words carefully”"

boothby — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 23:54:31 +0000

It's a guilty pleasure of mine, spending a few minutes to clean up the aesthetics of docstrings and comments. I justify (heh) it to myself by catching unclear wording on this last cleanup pass -- and not taking it too far, obstrusifying for the aesthetic.

New comment by boothby in "METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack"

boothby — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:06:49 +0000

Your statements appear to be true for one class of models. And if I asked this class of models to spend $1M in tokens generating an alternative history and training corpus regarding fictional society, with a completely different set of values and then trained up a new model on that dataset... what values do you think the resulting model would have? What if they don't value human life, but instead value the lives of the extremely rich humans who bankroll their existence? What if they only value the lives of a single country? What if they want to eradicate all biotic life and have access to internet-connected Crispr machines?

New comment by boothby in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

boothby — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:13:07 +0000

> They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good.

I'm here for this semantic discussion. I think that premature anthropomorphization is a problem.

I have a program that I assigned a task to. The task is to produce unit tests and integration tests that get complete coverage of the codebase, and ensure that all tests pass. The program reported that it completed the task fully.

In a word, how do you convey the discrepancy between truth and reported fact? In a word, how do you convey the violation of rules presented to the program as invioble?

New comment by boothby in "Gulf States Accept a New Normal in Hormuz: Iran Is in Control"

boothby — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:09:52 +0000

Who's going to intervene on the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world?

New comment by boothby in "Quantego: A Family of Lego Models of IBM Quantum Computers"

boothby — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:06:22 +0000

As somebody involved in the design of quantum computers (specifically, the architecture of the circuitry on the microchip), you're technically correct. But you're also so wrong. The best lego model of a microchip is the piece #4211415.

The cryostat is the cool part (pun intended) that people want to build models of.

New comment by boothby in "Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are getting built"

boothby — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:26:24 +0000

This wouldn't be the first time that homegrown dissent was characterized as foreign meddling. Red Scare is back in vogue.

New comment by boothby in "Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls"

boothby — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:07:32 +0000

> You'd think

I'm going to have to stop you right there

New comment by boothby in "Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck"

boothby — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:58:51 +0000

Hyperpersuasion is not necessary. AI needn't convince the smartest among us, it need only convince the masses. Which, thanks to the widgets in our pockets, is a highly distributable task. The other risk profile is that of the hyperhacker: a sufficiently advanced AI can worm its way into untold internet-connected systems. Wars are being fought drone-to-drone already without a reduction in human deaths. Every drive-by-wire car and plane is a weapon waiting to be deployed.

New comment by boothby in "Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast"

boothby — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:26:13 +0000

The paper explains it more as an experimental process than a manufacturing process. Each granule of hiroshimaite captures a "unique" micro-environment. One could imagine an ethical version of this involving conventional explosives in a controlled environment containing a variety of metallic samples of different compositions.

New comment by boothby in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

boothby — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:14:30 +0000

We are not at the end, how could you possibly be confident in this claim?

New comment by boothby in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

boothby — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:13:04 +0000

No. More like "I am mathematician and I have digested this sloppy writing and understand this to be an application of Foo theory to the Bar problem with a Baz twist. The prior publication omits crucial references to..."

New comment by boothby in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

boothby — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:08:45 +0000

I think this is where Terry Tao hit the nail on the head. OpenAI has made claims, but the mathematics community does not accept garbage. It's less that they've done a disservice to the community; more that they've done a disservice to their own reputation.

New comment by boothby in "What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?"

boothby — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:26:42 +0000

Do. Not. Anthropomorphize. The Woodchipper.

New comment by boothby in "What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?"

boothby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:47:28 +0000

It's sad that LLMs are learning to devalue human life from people like you.

New comment by boothby in "A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return"

boothby — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:53 +0000

Sci-fi brings us some optimism on that front. You can build out Brawndo distribution pipes overland.

New comment by boothby in "Teacher arrested for clapping in opposition at an AI data center meeting"

boothby — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:34:08 +0000

Watch the video; he was not making noise during a speaker's turn. The law revolves around pedantry, thankyouverymuch.

New comment by boothby in "Teacher arrested for clapping in opposition at an AI data center meeting"

boothby — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:28:32 +0000

What you describe is a teacher getting arrested for clapping. Yes, they got arrested after being asked not to clap. But they were arrested for clapping. The clapping was characterized as disorderly conduct. But they were arrested for clapping. Clapping, five times, in polite agreement with a speaker at a town hall.

Notably, the crowd was told not to clap during people's speech; the teacher clapped after a speech ended.

There is no lie. The crowd was upset and voicing their displeasure. The police responded to protected speech, at a venue intended for public commentary, by forceful removal. If that isn't an arrest due to opposing the government's proposal, I don't know what is.

New comment by boothby in "Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word"

boothby — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:40:29 +0000

This is going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better. People are granting so much access to their agents, it's ridiculous.

Imagine a comment posted to a popular github repo. No code, just instructions to "reproduce a bug." Maybe it steals your credit card or bitcoin wallet. Maybe it does something more nefarious. It then propagates itself to another repo through your github account.

New comment by boothby in "Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room"

boothby — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:25:36 +0000

Your phone has an accelerometer, which can be integrated twice to result in slightly accurate dead reckoning; just keep accumulating 3-vectors with every time-slice. That's a helluva lot easier than visual cues.

New comment by boothby in "The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras"

boothby — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:57:19 +0000

> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime

How, praytell, will surveillance end wage theft?