Hacker News: nullc

New comment by nullc in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

nullc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 05:54:57 +0000

"There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

New comment by nullc in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

nullc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 05:50:56 +0000

https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...

New comment by nullc in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

nullc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:04:59 +0000

Verifying that counterexample is a trivial calculation for basically anyone qualified to make substantive changes in that category of article, it shouldn't be an issue in and of itself.

Discovering the counter example is research, validating it is basic calculations.

New comment by nullc in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

nullc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:03:51 +0000

Irony in the message you're responding to likely suffering from slop-facts itself.

And indeed it's trivial to verify.

New comment by nullc in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

nullc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:54:03 +0000

I think vibethinker is heavily overtrained on not attempting to solve open problems.

I had a fun time taking some open problems and disguising them algebraically so that vibethinker 3b would work on them. It managed to prove some interesting things that I didn't know and would be publishable, but for the fact that they already have been. :) (though hard to know if this was because it had been exposed to that knowledge even though it didn't reconize the hidden problem).

Under some maskings it would eventually figure out the problem was equivalent to an open problem then immediately shut down.

It also managed to make some false proofs for various things that duped some other more powerful models.

New comment by nullc in "How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks"

nullc — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:34:29 +0000

What's the point of looking when no one even cares?

consider the fraudster that went around suing people on the basis of his absurd claims of being bitcoin's creator. He's now transitioned to using AI to gather graduate degrees and is obtaining masters and doctoral degrees at a regular place and writing multiple 'papers' per day that are all quite obviously AI slop.

People report his cheating and publications and simply no one cares... and this is someone court adjudicated to have fabricated evidence in court on a massive scale, including through the use of AI.

But when it comes to the degrees and publication everyone involved that wanted paid got paid, and apparently that's all that matters.

New comment by nullc in "FCC plans ID mandate that could block anonymous use of prepaid burner phones"

nullc — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:26:03 +0000

Comments are closed, but they're open for responses.

By my count there were 533 replies that were responsive to the 'enhanced' KYC requirements. ~496 opposing it, and ~37 substantively supporting it.

I used deepseek 4 flash with a rubric I wrote to run the responses against each other in a tournament.

Here are some of the stronger responses against:

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261099...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/105288...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261098...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261099...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261099... (mine)

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/106110...

And here are some of the stronger argument for, which you might want to rebut:

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261099...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/106090...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/105150...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261098...

* https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/filing/261099...

New comment by nullc in "Qwen 3.8"

nullc — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:02:56 +0000

> That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source competitions

the lag is because closed ai orgs are sucking up most of the talent and monopolizing resources.

Not that your criticism of HN comments aren't deserved-- but the people commenting here are not usually people who would be doing something useful otherwise.

New comment by nullc in "Qwen 3.8"

nullc — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:13:55 +0000

> Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake.

Driven by people in the few roles that are soundly replaced by AI-- e.g. low tier media slop producers, who hate AI because it threatens their socially negative worthless jobs. The arguments are so paper thin because the environmental impact isn't their concern, it's just a target that sounds convincing to people who don't know better.

New comment by nullc in "Qubes OS Security in the Public Record"

nullc — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 23:13:58 +0000

QubesOS is really fantastic, I wouldn't consider using anything less today.

New comment by nullc in "Qubes OS Security in the Public Record"

nullc — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:26:49 +0000

> I still find it absurd people would go that far to cheat at a game. =3

I guess it turns the cheating into its own meta-game!

New comment by nullc in "LG ThinQ Terms of Use"

nullc — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:53:50 +0000

Don't ever give a "device" network access. Unfortunately with stuff like amazon sidewalk -- even that's not sufficient, products can contain covert listening/watching devices and then share the information over a network you don't control.

A countermeasure to this is to maintain a radio quiet household, but it's only doable if you're out in the middle of nowhere and requires some substantial confessions as MANY devices have 2.4ghz radios in them.

New comment by nullc in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

nullc — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:45:18 +0000

Using AI for making decisions create a whole host of novel vulnerabilities.

I've seen a lot of people talk about the obvious privacy and autonomy disaster it creates -- giving companies (and anyone who can legally compel or hack them) such intimate details or allowing yourself to be dependent on their services which they can withdraw or degrade at any time... Or where the model operators can bias the results based on bribes (ad payments) or their own agenda ... but really that's the start.

Another one what I haven't seen discussed is that use of an AI provides oracle access to your opponents. What I mean is that if I want to influence you, I can have an AI try variations of arguments against the model you're using (or if I don't know, a panel of models you might be using) until it can construct a super influential output. I can see what your model might recommend and anticipate your actions and change my actions to control yours. This can be done in a targeted way against individual people, or against populations e.g. by marketers.

There are reasons why this may be even more effective than it seems: It appears that models themselves are trained on each other, so in testing I see in family effects: GPT-4o mini seems much more convinced by essays written by GPT5 than ones written by GLM 5.2, while other models are more neutral (and my human review says the GPT5 essays are unambiguously worse in this trial). So I assume GPT5's writing was refined by review by in-family models and it's already somewhat of a super persuader against GPT-4o mini as a result.

The danger of oracle access is somewhat a symptom of AI monoculture resulting in a reasoning monoculture. If there were a billion highly distinct models widely used then it might be the only way to convince or predict a disproportionate portion of them would be to simply be right, and then we'd just be left with a operational security concern of making sure your opponents/competitors don't know what model(s) you use. But of course, that isn't the world we have today: people use a small number of models, and their behavior is generally pretty related due to architectural commonalities and cross distillation and such.

New comment by nullc in "Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM"

nullc — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:57:55 +0000

You can do a thing where you have it point out spelling and grammar errors or point out awkward parts without suggesting changes. But take care that you don't let it apply them as it may make other changes silently (especially if you're not running in an agentic harness with patch tools).

New comment by nullc in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

nullc — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:22:16 +0000

Who does the choosing?

Today it's the students but they significantly don't pay the cost, so competition can be gamed by wasting money on student perks.

This is generally a problem that comes up when the party that pays isn't the party that gets the benefit-- it breaks competition's utility for getting good results.

New comment by nullc in "Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM"

nullc — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:23:11 +0000

I feel sorry for your future writing prospects, because it looked like AI to me too: I insta-slop-back-buttoned on "so I scheduled one with someone senior enough to have real scar tissue, the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom."

Thanks for the the correction-- often when people say they weren't using AI they are very clearly lying, so it's hard to get useful corrections on this point so I appreciate your candor.

New comment by nullc in "Precursor"

nullc — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:10:52 +0000

please drink verification can to continue

New comment by nullc in "Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop"

nullc — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:08:41 +0000

You should conduct the same test with knowingly faulty containment, otherwise the theory that the model is hobbled should probably outrank that it couldn't escape.

New comment by nullc in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

nullc — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:05:31 +0000

LLMs belong trapped in VMs.

New comment by nullc in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

nullc — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:58:41 +0000

Standard non-profit grift-- you can't take profits out of a non-profit directly, but you can give particularly robust salaries for yourself and your friends, use the funds to build powerful influence networks by directing projects, build prestigious glittering facilities, etc.

It's difficult to control because an outsider isn't in a position to know the best way to allocate funding. The best control is to not provide funding in absence of performance, which it sounds like this rule is all about.