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If person rationalist they

> prioritizes explicit reasoning, logic, and evidence over intuition, tradition, or emotion.

By sticking to this principle one has to describe every cause-effect, every idea from their speech. Reality is way more complex and detailed than any of it's representations. So rationalist can keep detailing and grounding everything they touch in their speech, and then ground grounds and so on. Sticking to rationalist values you have to write more and ground more.

By cutting corners of explanation and reason rationalist's claims they becoming less rationalist and less acceptable by the group, thus less popular. So the more you're rationalist, more popular you are more you have to write. It's natural way of things.

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Irinically the complete rationalism isn't achievable because Gödel's incompleteness teorem.

> There will always be true statements about symbols that the system can write down, but cannot prove or disprove using its own rules.

They, we all have to draw a logical/grounding line somewhere, either by choice either by incapacity.

> we really want your data

this is a projection

They briefly articulated one obvious, undisputable and toothless truth about themselves. This is far, far from "extremely"

Paper describes such system whch has ability to enable/disable capabilities without process restart. Each plugin must follow specific shape: function to activate, function to deactivate it (both working, mutating the same shared context object), describe provided and required services. This, plus some ideas, like "every provider must outlive consumers when destructred" allows plug-n-play ensuring all dependencies are satisfied before the plugin is activated, lazy activation, and plugin deactivation/destruction.

All these discussions about AI to me like discussions about sticks. We need to talk about and deal with humans in the first place.

I think they did not have access to all pleora of enigma-related bits and pieces. Or there were not enough autistic ones. Or this one was simply overlooked in favour of more interesting one.

The whole trick is possible only because bunch of people whote bunch of text and code about the subject, well-documented it and made public. For LLM all these bits and pieces are very "close" and easy to pull together unlike for people who have to deal with each bit and decision and information.

I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363.

with search it found and referenced pages, including the hn ones. Without search it just described what one would need to descrypt (`To decrypt this ciphertext, the specific Enigma machine parameters are required:`) and the list.

Out of curiosity ran the same prompt against bunch of models - grok, kimi k3. They all say the same thing that they need model version, rotors and so on to descrypt.

When file output tool is enabled, some models give python script.

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I read through some of the logs that antigravity gives. It produced intermediate results, scripts, calls, assumptions (about german language). I've shares random bits in comment below to give a taste of what it was doing.

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The freshness of the news reduces changes that model fetched response from them

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it searched for enigma-related repos and implementations, fetched various github repos parts, build inline descryption program.

It ran bunch of various scrips like:

clang++ -g -fsanitize=address /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc -o /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg && echo "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" | /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg -u B -w 123 -r AAA -g ... -c -l /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/english

and

sed -n '1060,1130p' /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc

and

Running 82M combination scan for unsteckered Enigma across all rotors, reflectors, positions, and ring settings. Monitoring progress.

and

Scanning all 60 rotor permutations and reflectors B and C across all ring settings (step 2) and all 17,576 indicator positions. Monitoring progress.

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I also have opus running. It produced some sypher cracker which is still running (estimated time 100min, is about 15 min left)

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My point is that astra isn't special. This appears to be quite narrow, well-documented and explored task. The goal itself is approacheable by other LLMs and non-researches task.

Prompt

Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC`

Result

Raw Decryption (verbatim from the machine): BTTEUMANGABEDESMARSQWEGESXBEFINDEMIQINXROSENOWROSENOWXSOFORTFUNKANTWORTXWASCHBBSCH 2. Segmented German (with military telegraph conventions expanded): BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES . BEFINDE MIQ IN : ROSENOW ROSENOW . SOFORT FUNKANTWORT . WASCHBBSCH

(Standard German radio conventions: X represents punctuation/spacing; Q was frequently substituted for CH to prevent transmission ambiguities; BTTE was an enciphering operator typo for BITTE; WASCHBBSCH was an operator typo for the signature WASCHBUSCH).

3. Corrected German: „Bitte um Angabe des Marschweges. Befinde mich in Rosenow, Rosenow. Sofort Funkantwort. Waschbusch.“

4. English Translation: "Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch."

Cryptographic Verification Re-encrypting the plaintext using the identical key settings reproduces the exact ciphertext byte-for-byte:

Enigma ( M raw ) = ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC Enigma(M raw

)=ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC 19:10

The prompt was `Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC``

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UPD. Lol. I pasted non-cyphered text

Qwen 3.7 max, gpt 5.6 sol, fable 5.1, gemini 3.8 flash decoded the message in one shot for me... There is nothing special about astra doing something here

I blantly threw request to decode the messaage in qwen 3.7. Used via api with couple simple generic system prompts like "be concise", nothing special. Prompted as

Decode

``` BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH ```

--- response (I trunkated the output to conclusion only)

"BITTE UM ANGABE DES MARSCHWEGES. BEFINDE MICH IN ROSENOW. SOFORT FUNKANTWORT. [UNCLEAR/END]" Translation: "Please provide the marching route. I am located in Rosenow. Immediate radio response required. [Unclear]"

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