Hacker News: earslap

New comment by earslap in "Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC"

earslap — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:28:33 +0000

It is not a vulnerability though. It is by design. Docker also modifies iptables directly and bypasses most soft firewalls on the machine - which is also by design.

New comment by earslap in "NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut"

earslap — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:39:55 +0000

How do you even get usable microsecond precision sync info from a server thousands of kilometers away? The latency is variable so the information you get can't be verified / will be stale the moment it arrives. I'm quite ignorant on the topic.

New comment by earslap in "Zoom bias: The social costs of having a 'tinny' sound during video conferences"

earslap — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 07:57:51 +0000

probably not very relevant in a zoom meeting but there are people hypersensitive to the eye movements of someone reading from a teleprompter as well! When I figure someone is reading from a script with their eyes moving, it really affects my focus for some reason. Here is someone trying to find the ideal setup to prevent it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LkRMtWfhn4

New comment by earslap in "The mysterious flow of fluid in the brain"

earslap — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:45:15 +0000

Sometimes I hear a 10-20hz pulsing sound (so pretty fast, chirping sound) emanating from around my brainstem / back of neck at the level of my ears and a slight feeling of some liquidy movement inside. I always thought it was connected to CSP movement but maybe it isn't. But if it isn't I can't see what else it can be as it happens when I'm completely stationary.

New comment by earslap in "Zoom bias: The social costs of having a 'tinny' sound during video conferences"

earslap — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:32:05 +0000

There are also documented effects of your camera quality, and even where your camera is placed (as you tend to look at your screen during a call so your gaze is always relative to it).

New comment by earslap in "Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution with Neural Heat Fields"

earslap — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 04:03:24 +0000

I think the company named Topaz had a photoshop plugin to remove "jpeg artifacts" - I don't know if they are using a neural model for it though.

New comment by earslap in "Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI (2023)"

earslap — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 21:04:19 +0000

first you need to find a way to differentiate human thinking from machine thinking. you need to basically show how human thought is not the result of statistical learning and inference but something completely different. if it is not possible, the distinction is moot, something that only appeals to emotion.

New comment by earslap in "OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules"

earslap — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 22:44:34 +0000

we are working on . We have considered the following path to find a solution. Are we on the right track? Only answer Yes or No.

(1 week of GPUs whirring later)

AI: Your

(that will be $1 million, thank you)

New comment by earslap in "The brain's waste clearing lymphatic system shown in people for first time"

earslap — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:18:42 +0000

good

Attacking APIs Using JSON Injection

earslap — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 11:13:38 +0000

Article URL: https://danaepp.com/attacking-apis-using-json-injection

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41902901

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by earslap in "The Languages of English, Math, and Programming"

earslap — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 02:41:27 +0000

It is more obvious when taken to extreme: With the current feedforward transformer architectures, there is a fixed amount of compute per token. Imagine asking a very hard question with a yes/no answer to an LLM. There are infinite number of cases where the compute available to the calculation of the next token is not enough to definitively solve that problem, even given "perfect" training.

You can increase the compute for allowing more tokens for it to use as a "scratch pad" so the total compute available will be num_tokens * ops_per_token but there still are infinite amount of problems you can ask that will not be computable within that constraint.

But, you can offload computation by asking for the description of the computation, instead of asking for the LLM to compute it. I'm no mathematician but I would not be surprised to learn that the above limit applies here as well in some sense (maybe there are solutions to problems that can't be represented in a reasonable number of symbols given our constraints - Kolmogorov Complexity and all that), but still for most practical (and beyond) purposes this is a huge improvement and should be enough for most things we care about. Just letting the system describe the computation steps to solve a problem and executing that computation separately offline (then feeding it back if necessary) is a necessary component if we want to do more useful things.

New comment by earslap in "Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought"

earslap — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 02:25:49 +0000

Not only that but also LLMs "think" in a latent representation that is several layers deep. Sure, the first and last layers make it look like it is doing token wrangling, but what is happening in the middle layers is mostly a mystery. First layer deals directly with the tokens because that is the data we are observing (a "shadow" of the world) and last layer also deals with tokens because we want to understand what the network is "thinking" so it is a human specific lossy decoder (we can and do remove that translator and plug the latent representations to other networks to train them in tandem). There is no reason to believe that the other layers are "thinking in language".

New comment by earslap in "Zod: TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference"

earslap — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 17:54:12 +0000

When I'm talking about velocity, I'm not talking about coding fast, but being able to write DRY, flexible yet easily maintainable code that can weather future requirements / refactorings easily. Personally, I'm also talking in the context of my own projects so nobody is breathing down my neck or pressuring me with time. I just want to write good code that is a joy to maintain for years to come.

New comment by earslap in "Zod: TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference"

earslap — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 01:39:08 +0000

Haxe is amazing, has macros etc. A force multiplier if you are a solo developer for sure. But damn, you feel kinda alone if you are using it. Not everything is an npm install away which negates your velocity gains from using a saner language.

New comment by earslap in "Forget ChatGPT: why researchers now run small AIs on their laptops"

earslap — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 19:23:56 +0000

yes but still, a local model, a lightning in a bottle that is between GPT3.5 and GPT4 (closer to 4), yours forever, for about that price is pretty good deal today. probably won't be a good deal in a couple years but for the value, it is not that unsettling. When ChatGPT first launched 2 years ago we all wondered what it would take to have something close to that locally with no strings attached, and turns out it is "a couple years and about $10k" (all due to open weights provided by some companies, training such a model still costs millions) which is neat. It will never be more expensive.

New comment by earslap in "Google Has Officially Killed Cache Links"

earslap — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 19:20:44 +0000

I only ever used cache to find what google thought was in the site (at the time of crawling) as these days it is common to not find that info in the updated page. For everything else, there is the Internet Archive.

New comment by earslap in "Pluckable Strings"

earslap — Wed, 22 May 2024 21:25:43 +0000

IIRC the progressions are generated by a small neural network trained on Bach chorales.

New comment by earslap in "Vanguard just went live and LoL players are claiming it's bricking their PCs"

earslap — Fri, 03 May 2024 02:32:33 +0000

I can't believe people are willingly installing rootkits of dubious origin on their computers to play games (and paying for the privilege). I know cheating is an issue, but still.

New comment by earslap in "I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service"

earslap — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 02:00:41 +0000

I would not trust Kazakhstan to honor the TLD registrations if this took off and made some noise. Reminds me of Libya taking ownership of all those trendy .ly domains claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations to operate them. Still a fun idea taken quite far!

New comment by earslap in "Self-reasoning tokens: teaching models to think ahead"

earslap — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 01:45:50 +0000

Ah yes, I totally agree. I was inspecting the method as a stopgap solution (especially because it does not require retraining or any other special tricks) until researchers figure out "planning" in a broader sense. It is very inefficient otherwise, but in the meantime, is just simple sampling with a couple parameters to tune from the output softmax the best we can do? is there no low hanging fruit there?