Hacker News: cubefox

New comment by cubefox in "Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026"

cubefox — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:34:47 +0000

Yeah, I have seen several people who are completely shadowbanned (all comments dead) without any visible reason. There seems to be no way to report this.

New comment by cubefox in "Don't trust large context windows"

cubefox — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:18:46 +0000

Would be still interesting whether it degraded the performance in that case. Further, many non-agentic benchmarks consist of many short tasks, so one could fill the context with task/response pairs from other tasks (like in a standard chat environment) and then ask the current task at the end. Given that the tasks are probably somewhat similar, context rot should occur.

New comment by cubefox in "Don't trust large context windows"

cubefox — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:28:13 +0000

The problem with "context rot" is that its existence and severity is purely anecdotal. As far as I know, nobody has actually measured context rot systematically. The only thing we know is that memory degrades somewhat in long contexts, via things like needle in haystack tests. But that's not the same issue. Context rot is usually taken to mean that the model gets dumber even if it doesn't need to remember specific things in its context window.

This would be really easy to measure. Just take some standard benchmarks, but fill up the context beforehand. Is the benchmark performance degraded? If so, by how much?

New comment by cubefox in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

cubefox — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:01:04 +0000

Those are running mainly on Google TV. Tizen or webOS are also common but are not based on Android.

New comment by cubefox in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

cubefox — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:19:15 +0000

Am I getting this right, you expect TVs which are running Google TV (Android TV is the old name) to be less secure than TVs which are running a different operating system? I think the opposite is the case, because Google TV is developed by Google, which has a lot of experience with software security, while other TV operating systems are developed by companies which clearly don't have that experience.

New comment by cubefox in "Twenty One Zero-Days in FFmpeg"

cubefox — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:16:30 +0000

> Ffmpeg is absolutely not something you should be running outside of a sandbox if you're touching any untrusted or user-supplied content.

You would change your opinion quickly if your browser, apps and TV suddenly stopped supporting videos due to relying on FFmpeg.

New comment by cubefox in "Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds"

cubefox — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:06:47 +0000

> Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words.

I don't think that's true, we usually just don't notice filler words in the same way we are surprised that people usually don't even talk in whole sentences, in contrast to written text or movies (which also use written text).

New comment by cubefox in "L'Affaire Siloxane"

cubefox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:18:58 +0000

Yeah probably one of the others.

New comment by cubefox in "Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles"

cubefox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:15:28 +0000

This was a fantastic article!

New comment by cubefox in "Who's the smartest corvid?"

cubefox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:02:54 +0000

This one seems smarter than an average dog.

New comment by cubefox in "L'Affaire Siloxane"

cubefox — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:55:44 +0000

I bet some of these modern environmental contaminants is causing the increasing age cohort cancer rates.

New comment by cubefox in "Who's the smartest corvid?"

cubefox — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:41:40 +0000

Here is one playing ball: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QqLU-o7N7Kw

This one is feeding a dog: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q7Z0yZhyz0s

Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:30:09 +0000

> You can't really blame solar for phasing out nuclear. That was a political decision.

You can't say solar "saves" Germany money when this is apparently not the case. You can't just selectively count the cases where solar replaced an energy source which happens to be more expensive than solar. Solar saves you money if and only if its implementation, including backups, is less expensive than what was used previously, whatever it was.

> Gas's share of electricity generation has not meaningfully changed in Germany since 2015. [1] It's ranged from 80 to 95 TWh. Last year it was 82 TWh.

What then explains Germany's high electricity prices?

> That data also shows coal's share of generation reducing since 2022. If coal is really cheaper than solar and wind, why is Germany using less of it?

Because the Greens and other environmentalists pushed for using less coal. Just like they pushed heavily against nuclear. And in favor of heavy subsidies for solar. It was a political decision, not an economical one.

> Solar and batteries are already cheaper than gas in sunny climes. [2] It's only a matter of time before they're the cheapest source of nighttime power in Germany.

Even if that report is correct (Ember is a solar energy company so that information could be heavily biased) that doesn't mean they would be cheaper than nuclear and coal would have been during the night in the past, or that switching from nuclear and coal to solar and backups didn't increase, rather than decrease, energy prices.

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:13:06 +0000

That's nonsense. Solar during overcast days is extremely and at night infinitely expensive by itself. You can't just take some average, you have to take expensive gas or battery backups into account when comparing to a stable energy source like nuclear or coal which doesn't need these backups.

New comment by cubefox in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

cubefox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:07:48 +0000

It's not paranoia. Cyber attacks have gone up massively in the past few months even with the weaker models we had so far. And Claude Mythos 5 scores even higher than the unreleased Mythos Preview on ExploitBench. If you made this capability publicly available you would see another acceleration of cyber attacks.

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:03:00 +0000

"Saving money" in an absolute sense is very different from "saving money compared to fossil fuels". The headline talks about the former.

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:00:43 +0000

The marginal generator is likely so expensive because solar was used to replace cost effective nuclear and coal plants.

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:58:17 +0000

That's not how it went through. The Green party in Germany heavily pushed against nuclear energy and coal energy and for solar energy. Now nuclear has been phased out and solar is here. Energy prices have gone up. Possibly because solar is extremely expensive during the night or on overcast days, so expensive gas power plants have to be used during that time. The old nuclear and coal plants would have been cheaper than replacing them with solar and gas.

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:54:04 +0000

Germany replaced a lot of its nuclear energy with solar. If this makes energy more expensive, solar is doing the opposite of saving money.

New comment by cubefox in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

cubefox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:50:53 +0000

Do you have any evidence that this is true?