quotemstr

8,538 karmajoined vor 15 Jahren

I've seen some stuff that you wouldn't believe

comments

vor 5 Stundendiscuss

TBC, the article isn't about "trust[ing] the database", but about the choice of TCB. There's nothing special about a "database" that makes it more vulnerable than any other API platform.

You're worried about SQL injection attacks? Why are you allowing untrusted clients to do anything other than call stored procedures? They can attack the DB? Why can't they attack the backend?

And sure: cryptographically binding a password to a username in storing a durable credential doesn't hurt, I guess, and it's cheap enough. (But why are you using bearer tokens in the first place?)

My objection is only the tacit assumption in the article that a "database" is some kind of distinct object that somehow accrues special superpowers and vulnerabilities relative to any other kind of service.

A database engine is just one choice of service implementation technology, like Go or Python. A database is just a service. Any service can be insecure.

vor 8 Stundendiscuss

Even if you're one of those people who believes the highest levels of performance require manual memory management (I'd disagree, but whatever), you'd do well to consider the performance of real-world GC against performance of the Arc/Box/dyn/clone-heavy "high-level Rust" [1] [2] that people and LLMs usually write.

Maybe you can write a carefully-tuned arena-and-slotmap that beats the pants off any GC. GC doesn't have to compete against P99.9 systems programming excellence. It has to compete against an endless soup of Arc, Box, and clone, and it will win this match without breaking a sweat.

[1] https://hamy.xyz/blog/2026-01_high-level-rust

[2] https://llogiq.github.io/2020/05/30/hi.html

vor 8 Stundendiscuss

I'm using malloc as synecdoche for all forms of allocation, including Arc<Box<T>> stuff.

vor 13 Stundendiscuss

Rust people: it's wrong to use a language that lacks memory safety and modern developer affordances. Do you really want to spend time debugging crashes and foist security problems on your users?

Me: You're right. Java has come a long way. Let's download...

Rust: No! No no on. Not like that!

---

Memory safety is a worthwhile goal, but combining it with manual memory management is wrong for most tasks. Just use a damn GC. Rust's safety-plus-malloc niche should be much smaller than it is.

vor 19 Stundendiscuss

> ramming through deeply unpopular legislation at a breakneck pace for no apparent reason, lately

It's only a matter of time before EU-skeptical opposition parties achieve absolute majorities in critical EU constituency states. They're aware of this fact and are trying to adopt as much of their agenda as possible in the time they have remaining.

gesterndiscuss

I don't accept that social media is self-evidently bad. Not everyone lives inside the bubble in which its wrongness is obvious.

vorgesterndiscuss

You can't ascertain what's true without free speech.

Suppose you start with a true belief. This belief, like any other, has to propagate from person to person to sustain itself. The truth is messy. During each hop, people present the best, cleanest version of the truth in the belief. After enough hops, the belief stops being the best version of the truth and starts being a truth-flavored falsehood.

If you want to optimize for your beliefs being true, you can't just prohibit their opposite. Even if you don't care about truth per se and want only for your beliefs to spread fastest, you should want to make sure your beliefs stay true-ish, because if you decouple your beliefs from truth, then they become so mutated and useless that they prompt people to whom you propagate the idea to seek out other ideas on their own.

Yes, it's easier than ever for bad ideas to spread. What people who use words like "disinformation" miss is that this ease cuts both ways. What makes it easy for opposite beliefs to spread makes it easier for false mutations of their own beliefs to spread.

Even if you can ban opposite beliefs, you can't ban mutated forms of your own beliefs: attacking the mutants looks like attacking the truth forms, yet, because the mutations smooth over the messy parts of the truth, the mutant versions of your belief will out-compete the original within the bubble of your ban.

Truth alone doesn't stop the mutants because it operates on long time horizons and small gradients. Only strong contrast can distinguish truth from appealing falsehood, and only competition with opposite beliefs can establish it. Trying to establish this contrast within your belief's framework against a near-mutant looks like gatekeeping, pedantry, or disloyalty. The near-mutant is always too close to its parent to justify the social cost of an all-out fight.

Furthermore, once a mutant version of your belief has taken over, the original version itself looks like heresy. Deformation occurs in small steps because it happens unwittingly in response to intuitive incentives. Reformation occurs in large steps because it happens wittingly in response to observing incoherence. You can't ban near-mutants, but you can ban far-mutants, and reformers trying to jump from the endpoint of a long line of near-mutations back to the original form get the original form and themselves banned.

So now what? If you think it's hard to defend your true beliefs against opposite beliefs, think how much harder the job will be once you can't wield truth as defense. By default, beliefs win and lose as they become extractive and appealing in cycles. Truth allows an idea to win despite being costly. Without truth as a benchmark, why would anyone prefer your belief over upstarts that promise fewer rules and more fun?

If anything, people will prefer opposite beliefs to yours because you've been the one calling false beliefs true just because they descended from true beliefs and because you're the one telling them to shut up and get in line. Even if you start out with the true belief and the opposite beliefs are all false, you lose.

vorgesterndiscuss

People, even in tech, even in AI, are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours. Cancellation doesn't work anymore: you can't get away with presenting your side as normal and other side as deviant and let ostracism win your idea's battles without your idea having to fight for itself.

The reason it's cringe is that you can really only understand an idea by placing it in tension with other ideas. Remove your idea's competition and you remove an incentive to explore the weaknesses of your own. Ideological protectionism, just like the economic kind, breeds weakness. Your idea mutates and, without fitness feedback, drifts into a ridiculous parody of itself. Your idea ceases to be a thing that can live on its own and comes to depend on the protectionism for it's survival. Yet, the more ridiculous your idea becomes, the more protectionism it needs to compensate. One day, your idea collides with other ideas (which are still out there) despite your best efforts to shield it attack, and when it does, you're shocked by how weak your coddled, mutated idea really is compared to the original form one might remember.

All the people out there criticizing Grok, or Grokipedia, or whatever for espousing the wrong ideas are ultimately undermining their own. Even if you don't believe in high-minded mumbo-jumbo about the value of free speech, even if you just want your side to win, trying to shame models like Grok into not existing is foolish and undermines your goals.

vorgesterndiscuss

From a computer science POV, it's spooky how Turing-completeness arises spontaneously out of the most mundane data-processing machines. You look at UTS#35, see "Transforms provide a set of rules for transforming text via a specialized set of context-sensitive matching rules." and think, "Ah! Rewrite rules! Those are often Turing-complete! Maybe this one is too!".

And so it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system#Undecidabilit...).

It's a scary and wonderful part of our world that you can bootstrap so much complexity out of a little iterated self-reference.

My only quibble with the article is in this line...

> The surprise is that it lives in a data format for locale files, shipped in every OS, whose specification doesn't mention the possibility.

... I'm not surprised. After all, the processor that interprets the data format is Turing-complete not only in its instructions, but in the page table! See https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc

If anything, when you build a system and it starts to get complex, you have to go out of your way to ensure it's decidable and can't accidentally bootstrap the universe.

vorgesterndiscuss

> GPT-Live-1 is the first version of a new generation of models, and we believe the full-duplex architecture + delegation enables entirely new ways of human-AI interaction.

Awesome. Are you guys able to share anything about the model architecture? I've been interested lately in split-transformer RVQ-based conversational agents, e.g. via stuff like https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10208 (ResGen) and https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18090 (MOSS-ITT) and of course Moshi (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00037).

Intuitively, decoupling semantic and audio-timeslice-space generations with coupled but distinct histories is right model architecture, not just for these sorts of assistants, but for domains like robotics too.

vorgesterndiscuss

> This is the opposite direction AI should be going.

There is no moral obligation, in any domain, to refuse to make a product that adults, with full informed consent, find useful and purchase. Who are you to say you know better than the market?

vorgesterndiscuss

Intellectual and economic accomplishment aren't exactly parallel vectors, but you can't expect me to believe they're orthogonal. A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.

And, yes, some people are smarter than others. Some people are a lot smarter than others. Also, smart people are rare. Very smart people are very rare. These are basic facts of life that continue to exist whether or not you believe in them. Ignore them at your own risk.

vorgesterndiscuss

[dead]

vorgesterndiscuss

> > London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

> The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London.

It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity.

Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.

vor 3 Tagendiscuss

You might want to consider using atomic update escape codes: https://github.com/contour-terminal/vt-extensions/blob/maste...

The interface flickers like crazy right now.

vor 3 Tagendiscuss

... DuckDB.

Columnar databases are array languages, after all.

vor 4 Tagendiscuss

> /dev/kvm is guarded by membership in the kvm group - no need for new capability, just regular old filesystem permissions.

Which is precisely why many kinds of kernel feature should be exposed as operations on device nodes, not as system calls usable out of thin air. UGO and ACL permissions work on device nodes!

vor 4 Tagendiscuss

It kind of asks "What if we built an OS, but with all data sourced from immutable, append-only logs processed by pure functios?"

Probably not literally realizable right now, but IMHO, the closer we can get, the better

vor 6 Tagendiscuss

Not sure what would make you think that.

https://hic-ai.com/papers/mouse-paper-v13.pdf seems like an awfully lot of trouble to go through for a joke that isn't even funny.

HIC AI is a Delaware corporation, registration number 10476082, incorporated 1/16/2026.

vor 6 Tagendiscuss

Patent pending? On what?

> insert a line, delete a range, replace a character, edit a column

The ed(1) command set 50 years old. I doubt it's patentable. These guys are far from the first to apply fine-grained text editing to LLM toolsets. I've been teaching models to do it for years. Hell, models want to use sed and awk so much that you have to hold them back.

I'm so repulsed by the idea that these guys think they can fence off a slice of the ancient commons, claim they discovered it, and charge $15/month to access it that I want nothing to do with them and will go to the mattresses to make sure they can't. Nobody owns text editing, not even when it's an AI doing it.

Mouse: sincerely, fuck you