alwa

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What if it all came out?

16 pointsby alwaقبل 26 يومًا2 comments

A History of SmarterChild (2016)

2 pointsby alwaقبل 7 أشهر0 comments

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قبل 18 ساعةdiscuss

https://archive.is/iOP0s

أول أمسdiscuss

I'm timer-ambivalent--at the very least, I'd like to be able to continue through the sequence after getting stumped on one.

Maybe distinguish perfect/timely runs with the "trophy" you mention, or a "rank" from a scale (Bracket City's [0] "offices in a hypothetical city government" scale is cute). Or even a simple daily score. But I prefer to complete the daily puzzle even if I don't do it perfectly—and I find that "streak" oddly motivating despite myself. I dunno: "completed" and "completed perfectly" are two different flavors of reinforcement, both motivating.

As it is now, it feels like the game is punishing me for getting stuck on a single early puzzle, by withholding the other X puzzles in the set. And I feel like a consequence is that the game doesn't have a fixed "serving size" in my mind: it's either a 30-second single-clue game, or a 9-minute 18-clue game, and I don't know going in whether I'm getting the single cracker or the full afternoon tea today. I have to make 9 minutes of potential time for it, but I might only get 30 seconds of fun if I screw up.

As to your question 1), I'd like to see two things:

* A "shuffle" button. Often rearranging the letters helps me see it. I feel like I should be able to hit shuffle as much as I want with no cost in terms of the game mechanic--kind of analogous to playing with my (physical) Scrabble tiles.

* As far as a more helpful/"costly" chickening-out for when you're stumped and ready to give up... With Bracket City fresh on my mind, I like their approach with a single, progressive "help" mechanic. Hit it once, you get the first letter; hit it again, you reveal the full word and move right on (at some cost to your score, but blunting the disappointment by immediately giving you the fresh energy of the next clue).

[0] https://bracket.city , now at The Atlantic Magazine. Bonus feature I didn't know about until recently: they have a public-facing puzzle builder ("suburb builder") at https://builder.bracket.city . Thank you @brgross! [1]

[1] Bracket City's Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43160542

أول أمسdiscuss

I would support this Patreon. Particularly to the extent that something like that allows the funding vehicle to remain behind the scenes / separate from the main publication you’ve so lovingly polished and shared with the world over all these years.

أول أمسdiscuss

For the uninitiated:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a28954/new-j...

A full-scale arcade version in this genre, evolving since 1996. Realistic controls, some seem even to include train crew uniforms you can wear while driving…

قبل 3 أيامdiscuss

I thought it was the very first line of the product announcement, where they defined what it was they were calling "Fable" as opposed to "Mythos" in the first place:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5

> Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.

It then goes on to a lengthy and detailed section outlining the safety considerations:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5#:~:te...

قبل 3 أيامdiscuss

Tangentially related: @pg’s potted history tracing high-end watchmakers’ retrenchment upon the arrival of digital watches—the “quartz crisis”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47264756 (4 months ago, 498 points, 392 comments)

قبل 4 أيامdiscuss

I'm not inclined to click through the Google Safe Browsing warning, but should one trust an archive to strip active content:

https://archive.ph/gQcRU

Appears to be a forensic walkthrough, working backward to calculate a decryption key to read application logs, working from a disk image of a Windows/IIS machine suspected to be malware-affected.

It includes the output of a run of a utility the author built to help. Which, I mean... I can see why Safe Browsing might get grumpy from the content alone; I'm also in no position to assess whether there's actual sneaky stuff going on too.

Excerpt:

Published: 23/01/2026

I recently had someone reach out to me with an interesting problem. They had found a 1316 event in their Windows application logs that contained a likely malicious view state. There was just one catch, it was encrypted. [...] They were able to dump the autogen keys from the Windows registry, however they didn’t know how to use these to decrypt their view state.

[...]

In this post, I’ll be covering:

* How the autogen keys are generated

* How the master machine keys are derived from the autogen keys

* How the final machine keys are derived from the master machine keys

* How the final keys can be used to decrypt view state messages

قبل 5 أيامdiscuss

I suspect the intention is to give specific but dense notes with minimal explanation, on the theory that the LLM will fill in the appropriate hand-holding along the way

قبل 6 أيامdiscuss

I have a beautiful memory from a summer night long ago, in Barceloneta on the evening of the summer solstice—the festival of Saint Joan [0]. I didn’t know it was coming, which was its own special sort of astonishment… walked in to eat dinner, walked out to a mountain of furniture on fire in the intersection, air thick with gunpowder smoke, bands of youths firing Roman candles at one other…

The specific image that comes to mind, though—I remember dozens upon dozens of ambulances lined up at the ready along the waterfront, their crews hanging out enjoying the madness until they would be called upon.

Having been raised in pretty cautious circles, that image struck me: the powers-that-be knew some proportion of bad stuff would happen. I figured that meant they’d “just make a law against it.” Instead of trying to stop it, though, they focused on preparedness and timely response.

Since then, of course, I’ve learned that The Law has a lot less raw power than I’d imagined against tradition and popular will…

Since then I’ve accepted as creed that the best and most human parts of life reach their most salient in the moments of paradox between principles. “Avoid safety risks” is correct, “living fully requires accepting risks” is also correct.

[0] https://www.barcelona-tourist-guide.com/en/events/sant-joan/...

قبل 9 أيامdiscuss

Related: “Good News: Egg Prices Are Down. Bad News: They’re Hurting Farmers.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/business/egg-prices-down....

And Levine’s column, which Stoller links to (with rather less color commentary):

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-07-01/egg...

It feels like Mr. Stoller spends a lot of time here insinuating that because price manipulation happened on the margins of this supply crunch, there was no supply crunch, and everything’s just moustache-twirling tycoon conspiracies:

> While most normal people at the time thought someone was likely scamming them, that is not the message you heard from the industry, elite media, or economists.

> In 2025, egg prices dropped dramatically […] these price declines suggested that supply and demand were doing their magical work. Populists were mocked as ignoring natural market forces. […but…] It turns out, when [these conspirators] felt threatened by legal action, the alleged price-fixing stopped. Suddenly, the avian flu epidemic was no longer pushing up prices.

I mean… it can very much be both. Slaughtering all the chickens really can reduce the number of eggs in the world, people really can be willing to pay more for the few that are left, you really will get more eggs again when you make enough new chickens and wait til they grow to egg-pooping age. Even as it was also true that some greedy people’s unfair play magnified the dynamics that were already happening.

But like—even at the higher prices, eggs weren’t going unsold at the end of the day.

To me this whole thing still feels like things working the way the dastardly elite theorists suggest it does: the reason we treat collusion like this as bad and illegal in the first place—besides the casual sense of grossness and unfair play—is that the misleading signal provokes overproduction and therefore a price collapse.

The price did indeed go on to collapse by 93% to pennies a dozen; that’s squeezing farmers brutally.

The investigators investigated, the prosecutors prosecuted, the manipulative behavior stopped, the contracts got adjusted, the price index mechanism got revisited…

I feel like the error is similar to what bothers me listening to day-trader types: conflating raw synthetic-price-index movements with the underlying physical reality they represent.

قبل 10 أيامdiscuss

Makes sense to me! I'd gone off the 404 Media article originally linked. The way you put it in your blog timeline (now the link of record) makes perfect sense to me:

> We hope that Apple will take steps to limit the attack surface area even before the vulnerability is fixed. Disabling creation of new Hide My Email addresses could be helpful. It also seems responsible to notify all Hide My Email users of the risk.

Thank you for your work, and your persistence against our Sphinx-like overlords!

قبل 10 أيامdiscuss

It’s hard for me to assess how real this risk is. Without details, we’re just extrapolating from circumstantial vibes.

What’s described sounds like it might be spooky. It might also be a magic trick to some degree… Mr. Cox’s PoC—“I gave a fresh Hide-My-Email alias to a guy who knows who I am, and he told me the email on my Apple ID”—is consistent with the claimed behavior but not exactly watertight.

It also sounds like it might be the sort of thing that’s either “just how the email ecosystem works” or mitigable by covert means. For example, if Apple can identify exploit attempts from its privileged vantage over its infrastructure, maybe that’s the basis for its relaxed impact assessment.

I’m reminded of Amazon’s risk assessment with respect to some Quick bug recently [0]: “yeah, it’s bad, but we checked and there are literally zero people other than you who’ve ever used that feature that way.”

Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that requires a structural sort of tradeoff to conclusively fix. I could imagine the exposure mechanism having something to do with their forthcoming move to segregate aliases to their own “private.icloud.com” domain.

(A move at which Mr. Cox swipes in the 404 Media article, too, of course, but hey—“impact journalism.”)

And then, since we have only vibes to go on, there’s the judgment reflected in the researcher’s email to Apple:

> “It seems that ending new sales of Hide My Email until the problem is fixed would be an effective way to limit the number of customers at risk. Is that an option?” Murphy wrote back.

I can only hope that was a sardonic moment of frustration quoted out of context… Hide My Email is “sold” as a tiny tiny bonus feature of a much bigger iCloud+ product. But as-quoted, it’s giving a little bit of Chicken Little… I’m reminded of the time somebody demanded that a firm I’m familiar with halt all sales (and pay hush money) because of a CRITICAL SECURITY HOLE: you could access the contents of a password field by typing the password in the field, pressing F12 in the browser, and typing $(“#pw-input”).value …

If the flaw really is the sort of thing that required fundamental product changes to fully address—like this domain segregation thing—a year doesn’t seem wild at all to make that transition safely and at scale. Especially if they identified effective mitigations in the meantime.

Then again, maybe they really are negligent…

[0] https://www.theregister.com/columnists/2026/05/13/aws-patche...

قبل 11 يومًاdiscuss

That may be, but if I do in fact live in a place where my "government are the baddies," why does it follow that open software should punish me—for nothing more than happening to be alive within that jurisdiction—by provoking my "baddie" government to visit its badness upon me personally? For speech I wasn't even trying to make—for speech that you kind of put in my mouth without asking me?

It would be fine if you gave me a beautiful and whimsical way to choose to express my feelings, and I took it. But when you're disguising the flag in code as an "EXTRATREE," that signals to me that you're trying to slip through a surprise without my noticing:

    #ifdef USE_EXTRATREE
          if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
          if (drand48() < 0.02)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
    #endif

I think it's great that you live somewhere—and enjoy a relationship to your working environment—where you don't have to worry about that kind of thing! I wish more people got to enjoy those kinds of freedoms. I don't think the way to make that happen is to rub individual people's faces in the crappiness of their predicament.

I'm reminded of a situation I encountered some years ago where a person opened a web browser in front of a classroom—no porn in their history, nothing untoward, just going to a high-profile mainstream news site or something in service of a classroom discussion—and all the targeted ads were for things like HIV medicines and mainstream campaigns choosing ad variants that depicted gay couples.

Not the time or the place, that person didn't ask for it, and it led to deep consequences for them—from "outing" on one side, to accusations of "grooming that classroom full of students" and "probably being riddled with AIDS" on the other—that this good, responsible, kind, wise person did nothing to invite.

The targeters probably thought they were doing something righteous or even "accepting" by "making sexual minorities feel seen" or something—but by putting words in the person's mouth without their consent or agency, they caused great unnecessary harm to somebody who didn't deserve it.

قبل 12 يومًاdiscuss

Which is a shame, as there are only hundreds of millions possible… and they still have to include room in that 9-digit namespace for non-social-security-involved ITINs and employer ID numbers!

قبل 12 يومًاdiscuss

Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?

As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?

قبل 12 يومًاdiscuss

They had me at “scar tissue grown over a real wound.”

قبل 13 يومًاdiscuss

“A man with a watch knows the time; a man with two watches is never sure.”

I imagine reasons for what you’re asking might include:

* Prompting an LLM is work, and they’re already overworked just doctoring—every conversation with a computer is a conversation you’re not having with a patient;

* They’re probably right more often than they’re wrong;

* “When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras”: the 15th case today of strep throat is probably strep throat, regardless of today’s 15th falsely-confident LLM weighing-up;

* They tend to have spent many many years honing a clinical intuition that makes an examination, to some degree, hard to articulate fully to the LLM;

* Liability/overdiagnosis: All this stuff is probabilistic. Inevitably, there’s going to be a time when the LLM throws out something I thought unlikely that turns out to be right, and there will be other times when it’s wrong but now I have to document why. How many false leads do I need to chase per one true differential? Does this really compare favorably to seeking a second opinion from another human doctor?

* Not everything needs to make it into the record. Once it’s in the LLM, it’s discoverable and litigable and hackable and permanent;

* Medicine is practiced in very different ways in different contexts—even in this thread, one radiologist routinely orders ultrasounds for soft tissue shoulder problems, and the other medical-world person replying has never heard of such a thing—presumably both within US health care contexts. Some doctors hand out antibiotics like candy, others are more cautious with respect to resistance. What’s right can depend on the time, the place, the clinical setting—more than just the immediate patient-level facts at hand, in ways that become awkward or unwise to express explicitly.

And of course… who’s to say they don’t do LLM-assisted research, in cases where they think it might be helpful?

قبل 14 يومًاdiscuss

I may have missed the joke but no, https://fastsleep.app/ is not iPhone only!

قبل 14 يومًاdiscuss

For sure, but I suspect the law might look similarly dimly on the argument that “machines systematically generated all possibilities in the problem space” === “somebody already had this idea.” I’d imagine maybe by reading specific human intention into “prior art” and “existing work” and those sorts of terms.

Which is not to say let’s not do it anyway and see!

قبل 14 يومًاdiscuss

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