Hacker News: nullsense

New comment by nullsense in "FF4J – Feature Flags for Java"

nullsense — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:12:07 +0000

Final Fantasy IV Java Edition would be a pretty wild guess by anyone's standards. I certainly wouldn't have thought of it, and I'm an ex-java developer who speaks Japanese and was extremely fond of FF4.

New comment by nullsense in "Nvidia CEO got a driver bug fixed in 12 hours"

nullsense — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 03:35:28 +0000

Doesn't mean absolutely everyone knows who absolutely everyone is.

New comment by nullsense in "FTC says Ring employees illegally surveilled customers, failed to stop hackers"

nullsense — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 03:55:05 +0000

I've been rethinking IoT devices lately. All that Alexa has actually been useful for is "Alexa, what's the time?", "Alexa, what day is it?", "Alexa, set a 2 minute timer", and "Alexa what does X mean?".

That's 99% of my uses.

I want a device that does only that and runs purely offline. I'm sure between Whisper.cpp and LLaMA.cpp I could make this a reality with an old spare laptop.

New comment by nullsense in "Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant"

nullsense — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 03:00:12 +0000

I ran OSForensics on the machine last night. It was my first time running a tool like this, and I while I didn't manage to find a smoking gun, I did find some questionable files masquerading as an installer where there were all kinds of different files and file types but they were actually all executables. I wound up deleting those.

What I did discover is that by default Chrome captures and stores every field you submit to every form in a SQLite database. The amount of PII that turned up was absolutely staggering. If I could only exfiltrate one file from a machine, it would be that.

It sort of boggles the mind that that's a thing at all. I don't ever want to touch a browser ever again.

New comment by nullsense in "Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?"

nullsense — Wed, 31 May 2023 07:43:33 +0000

I did notice the rate limiting message isn't there anymore when using GPT-4.

New comment by nullsense in "Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?"

nullsense — Wed, 31 May 2023 07:42:02 +0000

I definitely think this is playing a role. I've seen reports of people saying "oh it now refuses to act as my therapist" and "it wouldn't write my essay for me". Those are just a couple of anecdotes I've seen on Reddit, and haven't verified myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if OpenAI felt the need to make adjustments along those lines.

New comment by nullsense in "Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?"

nullsense — Wed, 31 May 2023 07:36:25 +0000

>To me, it feels like it's started giving superficial responses and encouraging follow-up elsewhere -- I wouldn't be surprized if its prompt has changed to something to that effect.

That's the vibe I've been getting. The responses feel a little cagier at times than they used to. I assume it's trying to limit hallucinations in order to increase public trust in the technology, and as a consequence it has been nerfed a little, but has changed along other dimensions that certain stakeholders likely care about.

New comment by nullsense in "Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant"

nullsense — Wed, 31 May 2023 07:18:38 +0000

Right, I'm with you. I can totally appreciate what even small compromises can open up.

My wife's laptop just got compromised a couple of weeks ago, and I've been diving down the security rabbit hole of figuring out how it happened, what's going on on my network and my computer and phones etc. It has been a rude awakening as to the sheer amount of blind trust I've been placing in all my devices. After watching what network traffic comes and goes on my laptop and how much info gets recorded by the system I've come to the conclusion that modern OSes and browsers that aren't explicitly privacy focuses are basically spyware. My new mindset is 'assume everything is compromised at all times and treat it accordingly'.

New comment by nullsense in "Federal judge: Border searches of cell phones require a warrant"

nullsense — Tue, 30 May 2023 23:12:21 +0000

Are we talking crypto backdoors or like the CEO of SolarWinds?

New comment by nullsense in "Statement on AI Risk"

nullsense — Tue, 30 May 2023 23:02:12 +0000

We should also stay skeptical of all the internet conspiracy theories too.

I don't think anyone can actually tell which is which on this topic.

New comment by nullsense in "Software bugs that cause real-world harm"

nullsense — Tue, 30 May 2023 06:36:31 +0000

Sometimes we say puns on purpose, and sometimes we realize what we're saying is a pun as we're saying it, so we often distinguish which is which.

New comment by nullsense in "Bcrypt at 25"

nullsense — Mon, 29 May 2023 11:11:47 +0000

Everyone pretty much is problematic.

New comment by nullsense in "Bcrypt at 25"

nullsense — Mon, 29 May 2023 04:06:53 +0000

That seems naive in the extreme.

New comment by nullsense in "Ask HN: Why do so many assume we’re on the cusp of super-intelligent AI?"

nullsense — Thu, 25 May 2023 20:23:46 +0000

I don't know that it's meaningful to throw out numbers like 20 or 30 years anymore. I've seen enough experts make predictions in this field and be wrong that the only prediction I'm comfortable making about their predictions is that they're probably wrong.

New comment by nullsense in "Psychiatric detentions rise in first year of 988 hotline"

nullsense — Thu, 25 May 2023 08:36:22 +0000

I dunno. I'll take my high tax rate and universal healthcare any day.

New comment by nullsense in "Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns"

nullsense — Wed, 24 May 2023 10:01:53 +0000

Maybe because I'm from one of the countries that doesn't have school shootings, so everytime I see that shit on the news I think I sure am relieved I can send my kid to school and not have that particular anxiety hanging over me. It's just so senseless. It's less about the raw numbers and more about how bloody horrific such an event is for everyone involved.

New comment by nullsense in "Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns"

nullsense — Tue, 23 May 2023 22:20:53 +0000

Or, you know, compare the number of school shootings to literally any other country in the world?

The fact that there are school shootings for the media to report on at all is so crazy to me.

New comment by nullsense in "PrivateGPT"

nullsense — Mon, 22 May 2023 08:44:42 +0000

The number one problem for generalized intelligence is establishing trust.

New comment by nullsense in "For chemists, the AI revolution has yet to happen"

nullsense — Mon, 22 May 2023 00:16:56 +0000

The data present in the conscious experience of human beings is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's definitely a very important part of the puzzle and it's missing from the training data, and it's not clear that it ever can be included. Leads me to wonder if the only way that AGI could ever happen for real is to have embodied, embedded, emotional agents that go around making mistakes and learning from them like we do?

New comment by nullsense in "Japanese police make first YouTuber arrest for uploading video game gameplay"

nullsense — Sun, 21 May 2023 02:30:21 +0000

Lawyers know the system is fucked and also basically advise false to give false confessions sometimes too, since it's hopeless after a certain point and trying to fight it is seen as delaying the inevitable.