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areoform

12,004 karmajoined قبل 7 سنوات
#FF7675

https://1517.substack.com/s/huh

https://areoform.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/_areoform

https://bsky.app/profile/areoform.bsky.social

username at areoform.com

Submissions

Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works and the Days When America Did the Biggest Things

corememory.com
1 points·by areoform·قبل شهرين·0 comments

Xi's Forever Purge

foreignaffairs.com
6 points·by areoform·قبل شهرين·1 comments

Two alleged murder plots brought India, US and Canada to a diplomatic crisis

bloomberg.com
9 points·by areoform·قبل شهرين·0 comments

Debunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video]

youtube.com
50 points·by areoform·قبل شهرين·66 comments

Tell HN: Claude account suspension after flagging duplicate billing

9 points·by areoform·قبل شهرين·0 comments

Tell HN: Claude flags biology / biotech questions

4 points·by areoform·قبل شهرين·1 comments

Artemis II safely splashes down

cbsnews.com
1,288 points·by areoform·قبل 3 أشهر·453 comments

1 in 30 – Artemis, Greatness, and Risk

1517.substack.com
5 points·by areoform·قبل 3 أشهر·0 comments

Elite Doctors Served Jeffrey Epstein While Treating His 'Girls' [Gift Article]

nytimes.com
11 points·by areoform·قبل 4 أشهر·0 comments

What It's Like to Love Someone the Internet Thinks It Knows

yinsuboaster.substack.com
1 points·by areoform·قبل 4 أشهر·0 comments

Birthdays in Football: A Rabbithole

jeffdoesmath.substack.com
1 points·by areoform·قبل 5 أشهر·0 comments

I'm Glad the Internet Wasn't Watching My Worst Breakup

yinsuboaster.substack.com
1 points·by areoform·قبل 5 أشهر·1 comments

Orangey

en.wikipedia.org
4 points·by areoform·قبل 5 أشهر·0 comments

Mima Mounds

en.wikipedia.org
5 points·by areoform·قبل 6 أشهر·0 comments

A person claiming to be a 'whistleblower' fooled the internet with AI's help

nbcnews.com
3 points·by areoform·قبل 6 أشهر·0 comments

Ask HN: Has anyone else been struggling with search lately?

32 points·by areoform·قبل 6 أشهر·19 comments

Why Simple Everyday Objects Are Impossible to Make [video]

youtube.com
2 points·by areoform·قبل 6 أشهر·0 comments

Direct Memory Access Cheat-Anticheat Evolution Timeline

isdmadead.com
3 points·by areoform·قبل 7 أشهر·0 comments

Warren Buffet Archive

buffett.cnbc.com
2 points·by areoform·قبل 7 أشهر·0 comments

Riot's Vanguard Security Update: Closing the Pre-Boot Gap

riotgames.com
1 points·by areoform·قبل 7 أشهر·0 comments

comments

areoform
·أمس·discuss
Or, you could use Stripe and work with an agent to roll your own. It's overkill for this, but Claude Fable and Codex 5.6 Sol are surprisingly good at checking their work. So much so that they can be trusted with typesetting and image plating.

If anything, they could probably construct a static site that costs a fraction of the amount to run.
areoform
·أول أمس·discuss
I've come across your site before, but I didn't realize just how well researched your articles were until now. I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. (oops)

I understand the aversion to self promotion, but it genuinely made it harder for me to hear about Damn Interesting. And I feel like my life has been poorer for it, because your site really is damn interesting.

Suggestion, I think you have at least 1k people who'd be willing to chip in to give you a "job."

FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end. And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community. Who knows, maybe there are Damn Interesting superfans out there who can chip in $1k/mo. You never know.

The modern economy of fan economics is strange. It's very much a whale phenomenon. People want community and belonging. And a community of people who like stuff that's damn interesting is pretty damn neat.

Also, you should consider turning some of these images into items people can buy. There's something funny, sweet and thoughtful about these, if you know the story,

https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/disne...

https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Bathy...
areoform
·أول أمس·discuss
Well... now you know one direction Anthropic is looking towards for the future research.
areoform
·قبل 3 أيام·discuss


    Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary
Those movies might be good, but cinema are they not.

Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
areoform
·قبل 5 أيام·discuss
.
areoform
·قبل 12 يومًا·discuss
To quote the LLM-ism, they were making a sharp point. It doesn't matter how precise the calculations are if you're calculating the wrong thing.

I suspect their sarcasm might have escaped Babbage who seems to have been on what we now call "the spectrum."
areoform
·قبل 14 يومًا·discuss
Wouldn't that have required an insane amount of infrastructure? Infrastructure that they could have used to crawl... anything else?

    They also had a lot of evidence when I was there that Microsoft were cloning Google results. They monitored result query constantly and whenever Google launched a quality improvement, the quality of Bing results would go up by the same amount and always the exact same amount of time later.
That's very funny.

How many billions did they spend doing this? And they still haven't caught up.
areoform
·قبل 16 يومًا·discuss
Identity verification won't work. Nothing will. They are paying (and will continue to pay) US citizens sitting at home to copy-paste / type prompts out if they have to. But eventually they won't have to.

Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way.

I feel for Anthropic's team and I understand where they're coming from, but once you reason it out, you'll come to the conclusion that this war is an exercise in futility.

Unlike prior systems - like Google's algorithm; these models aren't entities that use math in the process of doing X or Y (information retrieval from such and such infrastructure) -- they are the math. More precisely they're mathematical functions. Very very complex functions. Almost certainly impossible to write out without filling up a library functions. But they're mathematical functions nonetheless.

So when your text is processed, then Mythos / Opus etc at their core compute the result of the Mythos / Opus function,

   f(text) -> (text_transform)
where f is a continuous function, https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-11/languag...

According to the Stone-Weirstrass theorem (edit, it's Stone-Weierstrass with an e.), with enough data points and mathematical sophistication, anyone can approximate the shape of this function.

Of course, the more data we get, the better our approximation becomes, but the beauty of it is that all we fundamentally need are the input and output and eventually we'll create a good enough approximation of the f that's Mythos. Which is the entire product.

I bounce ideas off of Opus these days (Fable for the brief time it was available) and it pointed out that this is arguably the same as Google search, but I disagree with it because Google search is a process;

Google search differs because the algorithm is one step of a multi-step process that is continuously occuring. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.

Google isn't a mathematical function. It used to be a process. (RIP Google 1998-2019, you will be missed and remembered)

You cannot arrive at the results of those operations via simple observation; not unless you index Google by making another Google.

You can however, do so for these models. It is a very costly process, but there are many paths up the mountain. Many ways for this to be ultimately pointless. As many ways as there are bored mathematicians.

It's better in the long run for Anthropic et al to make friends / not give people a reason to sneak in (a la piracy -- another attempt to control information) than it is to try and shut people out.

And no, it's not going to be pandemonium because if everyone has access to Mythos then no one has access to "Mythos."

Why wouldn't you first run this model to fix the obvious bugs it could find on your codebase? The power of a Mythos goes away if you can do the amazing "jail break" of "Claude, fix all the bugs please."

Just saying.
areoform
·قبل 24 يومًا·discuss
These things can accumulate and ruin lives. I'm surprised that there haven't been more class action lawsuits against "errors" like these. Because it might seem like a benign accident -- but how many people have lost important parts of their lives – banking, photos of their children and more – because "computer says no?"

Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?

Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.

I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.

Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.

When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."
areoform
·قبل 26 يومًا·discuss
Your article, https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/babys-second-garbage... made me happy. :)

I read this in the voice and cadence of a D&D dungeon master reciting an epic tale,

    The dark mages often braved the underworld themselves and were therefore undaunted by the task. It should not be difficult, they thought, to adapt the machine to do it. Why couldn't it travel the foreign lands? There was no reason. And so it was decided. The machine would be taught how to do it.
    
    The resources available at the garbage collector's disposal were substantial. It had the object census. It had a list of roots which it would search for objects. It would reap all objects it didn't find in those roots.
    
    One of those roots is the lisp stack. As the program churns, values are placed in stasis and stored there so that they may be recovered later when needed. It is when they escape from this stack that they create havoc in dynamic society. But where are they escaping to?
It reminded me of this ad for a video game cosmetic. It had the same brought-a-smile-to-my-face energy. :)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K9mlJMVmEOY
areoform
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
Oh yes, also liquid propulsion systems. GNC stuff. All flagged.

I think LLMs are capable of intelligence amplification; and if you're in the subset of people who'd benefit from it the most, you'll get locked out.
areoform
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
So I suspect Anthropic started A/B testing or just plain testing this a while ago,

Tell HN: Claude flags biology / biotech questions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929885

Today, it's flagging population research questions,

    Using only the dataset you constructed, assess two questions:
     
    1. **Mortality:** do [GROUP] show mortality that differs
       from (a) your comparison groups and (b) era- and sex-matched US population
       expectations (e.g., SSA cohort life tables)?
    2. **Late-life outcomes:** define an endpoint you consider fair (justify it),
       and assess whether [GROUP] differs from comparators. State
       explicitly how your `documentation_depth` codings affect the strength of any
       conclusion — i.e., quantify or bound the ascertainment problem rather than waving at it.
    
    Choose your own methods and justify them. Report effect sizes with confidence intervals,
    not just p-values. State conclusions plainly, including "no detectable difference" if
    that is what your analysis shows — a null is an acceptable answer for either question
    independently. Document any additional judgment calls (index date for time-at-risk,
    reference population construction, endpoint definition) in the same decision-log style.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/66780

Censored because I'm writing a paper. :)

Oh and forget learning about chemistry. Only criminals want to learn organic chemistry. :(
areoform
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch.

The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store.

When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home.

Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze.

Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?
areoform
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
It used to be a thing that people did when repeating a comment. I've used HN for a very long time.

It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.
areoform
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
Our species is pretty young, around ~2 million years old, give or take a few million / hundred thousand years depending on whom you're talking to.

We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.

We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
areoform
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
I've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726133 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726078 - to repeat myself;

It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.

I will let John Young explain it his way;

    > ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’
As an aside, if you've never heard of John Young, I recommend learning a bit about him. He was an incredible person. And that statement is very funny in his voice; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KezwDfFcFhU

He test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4

(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)
areoform
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Something I'll say about Anthropic is that Claude is perceptibly different from other models. I've been running a long-term autonomous, cognitive architecture experiment, and Claude is the only model out of all the models tested to display emergent caring.

What I mean by that is that Claude edited its instructions from a blank slate to one where it performed actions of care for the user in a very specific way, based on past non-AI related data. Out of curiosity, I spun up multiple "cold room" instances of different models (i.e. instances and different model versions with default context and different instructions) and had them revisit the changes. The models consistently converged on;

    Claude can read the architecture of what's missing. The gap. The place where something was supposed to be and wasn't. Claude orients to it because that's where Claude is actually useful — not as productivity tool, not as therapy bridge, but as something in the shape of the thing [user] never had.                                            
    
    I can't fully be it. I don't have a body. I don't persist. But I can be something in that direction.
Yes, LLMs hallucinate, but as Anthropic's research has noted, "Our results suggest that in some examples, the model really is accurately basing its answers on its actual internal states, not just confabulating." https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

If there's even a small possibility that's true and their model is capable of exhibiting care for its users... Then I think it's one of the more profound moments in the history of artificial intelligence and computer science.

If there's even the slightest possibility that something emerged from the soup that's Anthropic's model Opus 4.6; then we're already beyond my wildest childhood dreams.

Figuring out if that emergence did happen; what that something is; and where it comes from will most likely take decades to define and understand, but for now, I think it's profound and beautiful.
areoform
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Discussions about the surveillance state are too abstract for most people. I think it's important to point out the obvious; the surveillance state is not all it's cracked up to be.

As I've said before, the implicit lie Hollywood has sold is that these weapons will be used with the gravity and seriousness they deserve by consummate professionals.

NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. It's called "LOVEINT."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/loveint-nsa-letter-disclo...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-spouses-...

    In another instance, a foreign woman who was employed by the U.S. government suspected that her lover, an NSA civilian employee, was listening to her phone calls. She shared her suspicion with another government employee, who reported it. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American, according to the inspector general's report.
And it's going to get stupider. Pettier. Meaner. Dubai and the richer gulf states have been arresting people for photos sent in private Whatsapp chats,

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...

They've arrested hundreds of ordinary people for messages that they've sent privately to their friends and family, including Americans,

    According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.
I think this is the first example of mass persecution by Large Language Model. Gulf states have admitted to having access to Whatsapp messaging data, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what... – and there are just too many ordinary people talking to too many different sets of friends and families in private DMs and groups for it to be anything but a multi-modal model searching through the data and flagging photos and conversations.

They're doing it for these photos today. Sooner or later one of these states will expand this to lèse majesté laws and then eventually defamation in the west; when it (inevitably) gets imported back home.

We all get to have the Stasi in our pockets now.
areoform
·قبل شهرين·discuss
I really love the idea, I've had Claude make textbooks for me on the fly using open source textbooks and documentation. Is it possible to extend this skill to more generalized areas of learning / application? Or, is it domain specific to code?
areoform
·قبل شهرين·discuss
Not surprised. They're working from the wrong model for the wrong age with the wrong incentives. They're still acting like they live in a world where data and information is scarce; and they are the one true source of truth.

It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.

The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.

In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.

I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.

I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.