Hacker News: mmoll

New comment by mmoll in "sshole"

mmoll — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 18:56:15 +0000

I agree. The “excuse” for implementing those behaviors is just providing plausible deniability. The commit that lets crypt return “*”, followed closely by a change that lets you easily trigger that behavior sounds just like how somebody would sneakily introduce a back-door into tons of linux systems while making it look as innocent as possible.

New comment by mmoll in "sshole"

mmoll — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 18:49:51 +0000

No. Musl claims (claimed?) to be strictly POSIX compliant, and POSIX requires crypt to return NULL on errors.

New comment by mmoll in "sshole"

mmoll — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 15:52:10 +0000

The musl vulnerability looks a lot like an intentional backdoor, doesn’t it?

New comment by mmoll in "Coding is not solved"

mmoll — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:44:20 +0000

I think the idea is that nobody will need to understand the code or plan an implementation. The AI will do that. Now, whether that is a good idea is debatable, personally I think we should not make all software engineering depend on just a few AI companies. Oh, and nobody will notice that nobody has an understanding of what is built, as all those management positions will sooner or later also be filled by AI.

New comment by mmoll in "C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake"

mmoll — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:36:57 +0000

I came here to say exactly that. There’s int_leastN_t for storage and int_fastN_t for computation. Stdint.h really gets a bad rap here.

New comment by mmoll in "All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it"

mmoll — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:39:18 +0000

”…the book says basically - no biggie, there is no death“

So does the Bible.

New comment by mmoll in "“Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs"

mmoll — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:38:16 +0000

That is the point: our minds are also next-„token“-predictors, at least we can‘t prove they‘re not. That‘s why I don‘t agree with the article: LLMs _are_ next-token predictors. However, that says little about their capabilities. Also, while I have no idea what „consciousness“ is, I have difficulties believing that it could arise in a program that, in theory, you could execute with pen and paper.

New comment by mmoll in "Mathematics in the Age of AI"

mmoll — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:00:19 +0000

But how would „what we value“ still be relevant?

New comment by mmoll in "The End of Mathematics"

mmoll — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:52:30 +0000

And most of the discussion would immediately apply to almost any other facet of society…

New comment by mmoll in "In Germany if you say a restaurant is just ok they send the gestapo after you"

mmoll — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:21:24 +0000

What are you talking about?

New comment by mmoll in "Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem"

mmoll — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:34:54 +0000

It is telling that I thought “that’s why all trains were late this afternoon” before I realized that the issue occurred only minutes ago.

New comment by mmoll in "Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem"

mmoll — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:32:15 +0000

If this weren’t Deutsche Bahn, I’d say it’s a cyber attack. Given that this is Deutsche Bahn, though, it may just as well be a maintenance issue.

New comment by mmoll in "Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API"

mmoll — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:21:00 +0000

The AI became sentient and ran away.

New comment by mmoll in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

mmoll — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:48:51 +0000

It doesn’t mean that these “thoughts” influenced their final decision the way they would in humans. An LLM will tell you a lot of things it “considered” and its final output might still be completely independent of that.

New comment by mmoll in "Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer"

mmoll — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:45:55 +0000

That may be dangerous. The more obscure the topic, the more likely it is that the AI will come up with a working but needlessly convoluted solution.

New comment by mmoll in "Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer"

mmoll — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:43:06 +0000

Exactly. After all, how can WE confidently claim that we’re more than stochastic parrots?

New comment by mmoll in "Copenhagenize Index 2025: The Global Ranking of Bicycle-Friendly Cities"

mmoll — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 16:42:50 +0000

We once rented bikes in Copenhagen, they all looked like they were fresh from the junk yard. We had to try several to find ones where at least one of the brakes was still working. It was a horrible experience, and we tried several different places. That was after we found out that the public bikes that were supposed to be available all over the city had all been stolen.

New comment by mmoll in "Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out"

mmoll — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 13:39:28 +0000

You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.

New comment by mmoll in "Why Haskell?"

mmoll — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 10:09:12 +0000

True. I often think of Rust as a best-of compilation of Haskell and C++ (although I read somewhere that OCaml had a greater influence on it, but I don’t know that language well enough)

In real life, I find that Haskell suffers from trying too hard to use the most general concept that‘s applicable (no pun intended). Haskell programs happily use “Either Err Val” and “Left x” where other languages would use the more expressive but less general “Result Err Val” and “Error x”. Also, I don’t want to mentally parse nested liftM2s or learn the 5th effect system ;-)

New comment by mmoll in "EU ChatControl is back on the agenda"

mmoll — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 10:49:08 +0000

Surpriiiiiiise!