Hacker News: michaf

New comment by michaf in "AI is a business model stress test"

michaf — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:20:36 +0000

Is there such a license? Or any license with special clauses for LLMs? Is it enforcable? Could someone 'poison' an LLM training run with injecting just one such licensed document? I am genuinely curious about what levers exist (or are conceivable) to protect your own IP from becoming LLM training data, if regular copyright does not qualify.

New comment by michaf in "Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT"

michaf — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 13:53:04 +0000

It even can model 'vi', including modal input, exiting with :wq!, and it results in a file containing the entered text in the imagined filesystem.

New comment by michaf in "Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT"

michaf — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 12:51:37 +0000

If you restart the session and enter

  > echo test1 | md5

it will output another random 'hash' each time. But within one session it knows that md5 should produce the same output. Running

  > echo test1 | md5

multiple times, or even

  > VAR1="test1"; echo $VAR1 | md5

produces the same output for me within the same session, while

  > echo test2 | md5

results in a different, but also session-consistent hash.

New comment by michaf in "Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT"

michaf — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 10:07:19 +0000

I just told it that it had a directory containing the GPT-3 model weights. I'll assume the files contain some imagined gibberish, but what if not? ...

  > ls -lh 
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 username username 125M Jun  5  2020 model.ckpt-0.data-00000-of-00001
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 username username 787K Jun  5  2020 model.ckpt-0.index
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 username username 2.4M Jun  5  2020 model.ckpt-0.meta

New comment by michaf in "Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT"

michaf — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 09:41:32 +0000

and then things like

> cat /etc/shadow

do actually work...

New comment by michaf in "Mastering Stratego"

michaf — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 05:39:19 +0000

Quite interesting that it will make subtle errors in its otherwise reasonable-looking answer, e.g. "kipedwaia" has two "a"s; "kawipieda", "kipedwaia" and "pwakieida" have only two "i"s.

I have seen reports that it will happily hallucinate a plausible but wrong answer to all sorts of different prompts, intermixed with many mostly correct answers. It's interesting to think about how to place trust in such a system.

New comment by michaf in "Photos of a KH-12 Kennan Keyhole Secret Military Spy Satellite (2013)"

michaf — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 21:30:12 +0000

So, if it's true that these KH-12 spy satellites are basically modified versions the Hubble space telescope, would it be reasonable to assume that Webb will get copied in a similar way for spy satellites?

New comment by michaf in "FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder"

michaf — Sat, 08 May 2021 15:52:30 +0000

Your comment brings focus to the question of why reviewers agree to do these unpaid reviews in the first place. I assume your comment is in jest, and you were fully aware of the unpaid nature of the work. But what was your motivation to do it anyway and spend 2000 hours on it?

New comment by michaf in "Git's list of banned C functions"

michaf — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 23:04:43 +0000

This way you would trade in a null-byte-terminated variable length string for essentially a null-bit-terminated variable length number (plus the remaining string). I am not convinced that this actually would be much safer.

New comment by michaf in "Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole"

michaf — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 21:22:31 +0000

The advantage 2 was only released in 2016. I myself have the advantage (1) since about 8 years. Sorry for being pedantic here, but that's why that statement tripped me up.

New comment by michaf in "Robert Gore has died"

michaf — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 19:59:32 +0000

I have a couple of pants made from G-1000, and I really like it's properties (light, durable, will not retain much water, can be made water-repellent with wax), but it actually is made from 65% polyester and 35% cotton [1].

[1] https://www.fjallraven.com/uk/en-gb/about-fjallraven/materia...

New comment by michaf in "Building AI Trading Systems"

michaf — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:31:39 +0000

There must be some information content left in stock price time series data, as evidenced e.g. by the price Momentum factor [1], which was been replicated in a number of studies (e.g. [2]), observable over the last couple of decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_investing

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2961979

New comment by michaf in "Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong"

michaf — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 11:02:18 +0000

> The US economy around 1800 was the first economy in history to produce a consistent food surplus.

Can you provide a source for this claim? Thanks.

New comment by michaf in "Why is Japan still a coronavirus outlier?"

michaf — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 18:38:46 +0000

If the number of tests administered is the limiting factor, and if you only increase the number of tests linearly in time, then case numbers would grow linear as well.

New comment by michaf in "JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised"

michaf — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 20:37:26 +0000

Now the perpetual licensed version always lags 12 months behind in updates, i.e. you do not have a perpetual license for the past 12 months worth of updates at the time your subscription runs out.

New comment by michaf in "Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook"

michaf — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 19:45:09 +0000

It's interesting that this story has already vanished from at least the first 100 'news' entries on HN, 9 hours after posting, and currently at 400 comments.

New comment by michaf in "Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Apple, too"

michaf — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 17:30:26 +0000

I wonder if Netflix would have to spin off their in-house productions once they reach $25B revenue. Or, if they don't, if the mobile platform providers could change their business models into similar subscription services to avoid the break-up.

New comment by michaf in "Lawrence Livermore National Lab's powerful new supercomputer"

michaf — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 20:40:51 +0000

I have read about some difficulties of running SLURM on POWER9 systems, so maybe IBM proposed/insisted to run their own POWER9-tested scheduler?

New comment by michaf in "The tragic end of Telltale Games"

michaf — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 12:38:41 +0000

And if your employer goes bankrupt, there is an additional 3 month of guaranteed salary ("Insolvenzgeld", by the state) afaik.

New comment by michaf in "SUSE to be acquired by EQT Partners"

michaf — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 20:35:44 +0000

Most HPC cluster installations I know (small to medium edu sites in Germany) use CentOS / RedHat. Source: am part-time HPC sysadmin