Hacker News: er4hn

New comment by er4hn in "Muse Wonder"

er4hn — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:40:27 +0000

There were a number of sea lions hanging out there! It's entirely possible they were snacking on whatever salmon were going by. Not all was lost though, I got to enjoy watching some boats go through the locks.

I'm assuming it was out of season because in talking with the Uber driver afterwards he said we'd missed the end of the season. I'm assuming his "local model" was up to date and accurate.

New comment by er4hn in "Muse Wonder"

er4hn — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:59:00 +0000

It's hard to try and compare these benchmarks against real world use cases. As an experiment I let Meta Muse make all major decisions on a weekend trip to Seattle ~2 weeks ago. I think this would have been using Muse Spark 1.3, which is equivalent to GPT 6 - Sol.

On the plus side it told me taking the light rail from SEA into the University district was faster and cheaper than Uber.

On the downside it would recommend restaurants that were out of business, checking out Salmon swimming through locks out of season, got the opening of Beecher's Cheese in Pikes Place wrong, and fumble it's way through most simple planning decisions. I think my favorite was when it asked me what flight I have tomorrow so it could help plan when to head to SEA. It sent me a very panicked message that the flight was leaving today! Very soon! I had to remind it this is a daily flight and I am booked on the next day before it checked and apologized.

For things that are verifiable, and code tends to be that way, these models can do all sorts of things. But I find it hard to reconcile Meta's goal of having a personal assistant bot with something that is unable to do the simplest tasks.

New comment by er4hn in "Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity"

er4hn — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:58:47 +0000

I get this unless I drink a lot of water. About 48 fl oz seems to be the right amount for 10g creatine. Sometimes this needs to be combined with a light snack, like a handful of nuts.

New comment by er4hn in "America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster"

er4hn — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:44:04 +0000

Will anything be different _this time around_?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag... was a National Security Disaster and I'm not sure we saw useful concrete changes.

New comment by er4hn in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

er4hn — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:38:44 +0000

Same here, the quote on time passing stuck with me quite a bit.

New comment by er4hn in "Hy4 preview"

er4hn — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 21:39:49 +0000

I was given a picture cube, which is like a Rubik's cube but every side is a unique picture. It came scrambled and I don't have an original reference image. I like to take videos of it and give it to llms to solve. I call it my agi test because it hasn't been solved yet

New comment by er4hn in "The entire city of San Francisco as a video game"

er4hn — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:13:59 +0000

very fun game. I don't live there any longer but I "ran" the commute from my apartment to work. It felt very nostalgic to go through this.

New comment by er4hn in "Dolmenwood: Fantasy RPG built around the acclaimed Old-School Essentials rules"

er4hn — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:52:13 +0000

D'oh it's also on the owner's site's page for free: https://necroticgnome.com/products/dolmenwood-quick-start

New comment by er4hn in "Dolmenwood: Fantasy RPG built around the acclaimed Old-School Essentials rules"

er4hn — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:49:50 +0000

If you're curious drivethrurpg is currently[1] offering a quick start adventure of this for free: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/575501/dolmenwood-qu... .

[1] - I found it in their "Free Title of the Week" from their newsletter. Not sure if it will go away 07-30 or so when the next newsletter comes out.

New comment by er4hn in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

er4hn — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:31:31 +0000

The purchasers of the cameras, ie HOAs, law enforcement, etc, own the data. They are also the ones routinely caught abusing this. This is a real problem that should be dealt with by enforcing laws against the people improperly using the data.

I'm not sure what a realistic solution is for Flock to try and manage data they do not own nor if it makes sense for them to deny access to data they are not the owners of.

New comment by er4hn in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

er4hn — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:41:51 +0000

signull is more of an anonymous sh*tposter than a known industry insider, but I think this does capture the sama contribution to OpenAI very well. At least from an outsider who follows this stuff based on vibes.

New comment by er4hn in "Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction"

er4hn — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:55:50 +0000

I wonder how it compares to https://github.com/inkle/ink of Sorcery! and 80 days fame?

New comment by er4hn in "Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Cryptography (QC)"

er4hn — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:24:02 +0000

This page came about because of how long it took PQC to get standardized. This was a slow enough process that a whole slew of QKD vendors arose and sold a lot of products promising this as a solution to dealing with quantum computers and harvest now decrypt later attacks. Many of those products did not do a great job at actually preventing listening in on their lines since QKD is an ongoing field of research where new issues are routinely being discovered.

New comment by er4hn in "Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server"

er4hn — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 03:29:43 +0000

This must be what gwern meant when he said to write for AI.

New comment by er4hn in "The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs"

er4hn — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:34:47 +0000

Right, that's the same situation as fuzz testing today, which is why I compared it. I feel like you're gesturing towards "Attackers only need to get lucky once, defenders need to do a good job everytime" but a lot of the times when you apply techniques like fuzz testing it doesn't take a lot of effort to get good coverage. I suspect a similar situation will play out with LLM assisted attack generation. For higher value targets based on OSS, there's projects like Google Big Sleep to bring enhanced resources.

New comment by er4hn in "The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs"

er4hn — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:17:43 +0000

I think the author makes some interesting points, but I'm not that worried about this. These tools feel symmetric for defenders to use as well. There's an easy to see path that involves running "LLM Red Teams" in CI before merging code or major releases. The fact that it's a somewhat time expensive (I'm ignoring cost here on purpose) test makes it feel similar to fuzzing for where it would fit in a pipeline. New tools, new threats, new solutions.

New comment by er4hn in "The gift card accountability sink"

er4hn — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 01:54:52 +0000

It's clear, from watching Russia fail to be completely sanctioned that this is not watertight. The question I have is: have these sanctions added a money laundering tax to doing business? How much? What is the cost of enforcing the sanctions vs the added cost and is that worth it?

I don't know if this has been explored, bit I think it's an interesting follow on to "all or nothing" watertight sanctions.

New comment by er4hn in "Go Proposal: Secret Mode"

er4hn — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:07:15 +0000

In theory it prevents failures of the allocator that would allow reading uninitialized memory, which isn't really a thing in Go.

In practice it provides a straightforward path to complying with government crypto certification requirements like FIPS 140 that were written with languages in mind where this is an issue.

New comment by er4hn in "As many as 2M Cisco devices affected by actively exploited 0-day"

er4hn — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:30:39 +0000

Speaking (unofficially) as someone who works at one of the "other brands" that reeks of journalists having a bias.

New comment by er4hn in "Tinycolor supply chain attack post-mortem"

er4hn — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:25:43 +0000

Well the idea behind tokens is that they should be time and authZ limited. In most cases they are not so they degrade to a glorified static password.

Solutions like generating them live with a short lifetime, using solutions like oauth w/ proper scopes, biscuits that limit what they can do in detail, etc, all exist and are rarely used.