> a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions

I think the specific ask is for a case where the LLM is trained to lie about something. What you've come up with are cases where it refuses to do something, possibly for legal reasons but maybe not (you can come up with plausible non-legal reasons why a company training an LLM might want it to refuse to give you instructions on making a bomb, even if instructions on making a bomb are protected First Amendment speech).

An LLM that responds with "I'm sorry, due to legal requirements placed on my creators, I'm unable to answer questions about events at Tiananmen square in 1989." strikes me as much less problematic than one that pretends there is no relevant or reliable information that exists, or explicitly supports a regime narrative. But I'm also of the opinion that an LLM refusing to help you build a fertilizer bomb is much more reasonable than one that suppresses information of a political nature. I can't think of a case where information that reflects the broad consensus of experts is suppressed by US based LLMs for political reasons.

So whether the resulting file looks right depends on whether the rendering engine chooses the correct font. Looks like it's supposed to be Nimbus Sans or something metric compatible with that, but the serif font chosen by Typst looks obviously wrong.

You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.

I think it's useful to think about it through the lens of Gricean pragmatic semantics. [1] When we interpret something that someone says to us, we assume they're being cooperative conversation partners; their statements (or questions) are assumed to follow the maxim of manner and the maxim of relation for example, and this shapes how we as listeners interpret the question. So for example, we wouldn't normally expect someone to ask a question that is obviously moot given their actual needs.

So it's not that the question is really all that ambiguous, it's that we're forced (under normal circumstances where we assume the cooperative principle holds) to assume that the question is sincere and that there must be some plausible reason for walking. We only really escape that by realizing that the question is a trick question or a test of some kind. LLMs are generally not trained to make the assumption, but ~70% of humans would, which isn't particularly surprising I don't think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Grice's_...

It would be interesting to see a solver that works more like a human player, where it requires the "warmer" "colder" information from different guesses to hone in, rather than being able to simply look up which words have the exact semantic distance (+/- some fudge factor) from the guess.

(In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)

I think a lot of file transfer issues that occur outside of the corporate intranet world involve hardware that you don't fully control on (at least) one hand. In science, for example, transferring huge amounts of data over long distances is pretty common, and I've had to do this on boxes that had poor TCP buffer configurations. Being able to multiplex your streams in situations like this is invaluable and I'd love to see more open source software that does this effectively, especially if it can punch through a firewall.

But that doesn't change the reality that it matters to me that a 20 GB video that a friend took at my wedding downloads in just 2 minutes rather than the ~30 minutes it would take if I had a 100 Mbps connection.

> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.

That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...

A while back I wrote a quick proof-of-concept that parses packet data from sniffglue [2] and ran it on my very low powered router to log all source IP address + hostname headers. It didn't even use a measurable amount of CPU, and I didn't bother to implement it efficiently, either.

I think it's safe to assume that anyone in a position to MITM you, including your ISP, could easily be logging this traffic if they want to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...

[2] https://github.com/kpcyrd/sniffglue

[1] https://github.com/LuisSR/RCD-Demosaicing

I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is not at all a reasonable assumption. The question isn't "can a Tesla save your life when someone booby traps a road?", it's "is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads?", and moreover, "how does a Tesla perform on the 99.999999% of roads that aren't booby trapped?"

> Hover the mouse cursor over it. Any reasonable editor will show the type.

That applies to most of us, obviously, but in this context we're talking about Zig. Zig's lead developer, Andrew Kelley, programs in Vim with no autocomplete or mouse support.

Even though I sometimes use editors with these features, I find it frustrating when languages seem to be designed in such a way that presumes their availability. I found Rust particularly bad about this, for example.

I'm definitely an outlier on this given the direction all syntactically C-like new languages have taken, but I have the opposite preference. I find that the most common reason I go back to check a variable declaration is to determine the type of the variable, and the harder it is to visually find that, the more annoyed I'm going to be. In particular, with statically typed languages, my mental model tends to be "this is an int" rather than "this is a variable that happens to have the type 'int'".

In Rust, in particular, this leads to some awkward syntactic verbosity, because mutable variables are declared with `let mut`, meaning that `let` is used in every declaration. In C or C++ the type would take the place of that unnecessary `let`. And even C (as of C23) will do type inference with the `auto` keyword. My tendency is to use optional type inference in places where needing to know the type isn't important to understand the code, and to specify the type when it would serve as helpful commentary when reading it back.