Hacker News: oulipo

New comment by oulipo in "France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months"

oulipo — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:36:19 +0000

Not tech savvy enough to push a button?

New comment by oulipo in "France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months"

oulipo — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:36:03 +0000

Not having to pay extra employees to maintain the fridges I guess

New comment by oulipo in "France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months"

oulipo — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:40:47 +0000

That's not clear. Perhaps the savings made by having connected fridges over the year has offset the hacking event waste, so overall it could still be worth it. Now they need to apply security patches, and possibly only use the connection for monitoring (read-only) and have a kind of "2FA" / physical presence required when sending commands from the web

New comment by oulipo in "France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months"

oulipo — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:37:58 +0000

Or it should/could be connected, but in a read-only mode (eg monitor the data). And control could require someone on the location doing a physical button (pushing an "authorize command" button physically behind the fridge, or in a local control room, or something)

New comment by oulipo in "Israeli firm's digital ads enabling installation of 'zero-click' spyware"

oulipo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:45:35 +0000

It's routine for apps like Messenger to pre-download attachments (eg to compute a resized preview of the image etc)

New comment by oulipo in "AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware"

oulipo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:44:38 +0000

They use ad network to try to target individual user visiting a page (eg you know your target is a male, 60 years old, living in that area, with a few other checks you can almost uniquely identify your target)

Then the ad network delivers a targeted ad that exploits a vulnerability (eg a broken JPEG decoder that, when sent a bad image, allows to run arbitrary code on your machine), and from there you have access to the computer

New comment by oulipo in "AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware"

oulipo — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:42:47 +0000

"Most browsers are highly secure"... erm no

New comment by oulipo in "Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school"

oulipo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:51:22 +0000

Really? Nothing happened in church? No generalized paedophilia? No kids that got completely abused?

You probably never read about the stories, that's why you only remember your anecdotal story

New comment by oulipo in "Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school"

oulipo — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:50:34 +0000

Sure, it's always easy to imagine the "positive scenario" (the kid really did something wrong and got lightly restrained).

Now when you authorize a restrictive / possibly violent behavior on people having authority, and you will default to "believe them" (because they're the literal "adult in the room") you also open it to abuse

See what happened with police in the US...

New comment by oulipo in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

oulipo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:15:45 +0000

Yes, everyone understands that. But tradeoffs that are acceptable for life-or-death questions are usually assumed to involve some human decision at some point. That's precisely what he's saying

Basically his argument is "we will still need mathematicians, because for some large classes of problems (one could argue, the most interesting ones, the "applied" ones) we still need to have a subjective human decisions of whether the machine solution is aligned with our values or not"

New comment by oulipo in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

oulipo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:13:26 +0000

I think you misunderstood his point... it's the fact that if there's no human supervision involved in the "pass stage 3 trials", you don't really need if it passed it for legit reason (in which case everyone would be happy to let patients use it), or whether it found a "loophole" (eg hacked the submission to pass it without having succeeded the test)

New comment by oulipo in "Fingerprints are the new cookies"

oulipo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:06:48 +0000

So you're basically saying the old "I have nothing to hide" argument which has been debunked over a million times...

In particular because "I have nothing to hide" means "I have nothing to hide until now, and because of the corporations and states that have access to my data are lead right now by people I trust not to misuse that data"

But if tomorrow the government change, and suddenly your searches for "gay bars near my location" becomes illegal, you'd rather this info not be in everyone's hands...

New comment by oulipo in "I'm sorry, but you still have to think"

oulipo — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:30:34 +0000

I agree. I'm using AI on a mid-complexity system (IoT devices, encryption, concurrency, etc) and the number of errors / bad decisions taken "at first" by the AI (or if I don't guide it precisely enough) is huge, and I can only imagine how feeble and unmaintainable an entire codebase done without review from a senior coder would be

New comment by oulipo in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

oulipo — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:31:33 +0000

It won't defend against Putin sending 50 drones against it. And yes, it is useful to worry about nuclear proliferation, and absolutely not "silly"

New comment by oulipo in "Anthropic discloses 2 months old fake tip to police among new rogue AI incidents"

oulipo — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:39:41 +0000

It's not a "rogue AI", it' s a company letting a statistical model do actions in the real world, sending (by themselves, through that statistical model) fake informations to a federal agency...

New comment by oulipo in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

oulipo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:29:35 +0000

That's one of the reasons that ecologist push-back against "technologists" who say "just build nuclear reactors everywhere"...

we want a safe a decentralized infrastructure

New comment by oulipo in "Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits"

oulipo — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:21:59 +0000

They literally haven't abandoned society because they're PRECISELY still communicating with it, reporting about their experiences, discoveries, etc

New comment by oulipo in "People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms"

oulipo — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:59:17 +0000

I don't think it's a good thing. The good thing would be to have a good education, and local groups with whom to discuss.

Blindly trusting a model that's easy to manipulate is not a good thing

New comment by oulipo in "The evolution of effective altruism"

oulipo — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:56:57 +0000

But you'd have to believe in the fact that BOTH:

- their evidence is true (eg it's not just a too small sample size, in very particular conditions, etc)

- and MORE IMPORTANTLY that they haven't forgotten OTHER EVIDENCE which points to a much better way to do it

usually when you "see the world through metrics" you start to be very efficient at optimizing them... but then the first minute your metrics start pointing a different direction to the one it's "supposed" to (which happens to 100% of metrics since "all models are wrong but some are useful") and you go with the full speed of your optimization on the WRONG target, you start getting into issues quickly...

New comment by oulipo in "Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio"

oulipo — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:48:57 +0000

To be fair, if someone wanted to present that exact dataset efficiently, they would have probably proposed something much different, like an horizontal chart with thin lines, eg

North [------------] 7

South [--------] 5

East [--------] 5

West [-----] 3

or something, which would have saved a lot of data/ink ratio