It is insane to me that judges consistently rule that the constitution doesn't apply because there's a "border" within 100 miles.
The 4th Amendment says, exactly:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I do not know how that could be unclear. My cellphone is my effect, and arguably, also a "paper". Which SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED. But apparently, I'm too dumb to understand the sentence[1].
> we urgently need to come up with good ways of explaining the value of having a large pool of human mathematical experts, even if it is no longer part of their role to find new proofs of theorems.
This is the main issue, and while I fully agree with that value sentiment, the Fields medallists’ letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things, and how competition for postdoc and tenure positions would work under these circumstances.
While the technology itself may be great (I don't really know since I don't use them) it has been co-opted by the tech conglomerates as another form of isolating and walling off users into their ecosystems.
And honestly, nowadays, if tech companies are pushing really hard for something then that is an immediate red flag for me and it bears more scrutiny. One of those "if you see them running that way you run the opposite way".
US chip export restrictions may actually be an advantage for China's AI Infrastructure. Chinese companies are forced to speed up developing their own AI chips
I dropped out of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro to study this subject independently, because I was passionate about it, and I spent nearly 10 years doing so, daily, on weekends. That's what I do.
Bend proofs being verbose has nothing to do with me not knowing that inference, unification, or program search exists. Kind had these, 5 years ago. In fact, I've also been researching the later, and I built SupGen, which overperforms every published symbolic program synthesizer in the literature by 10x or so. This is unpublished yet, but you can find my posts about it 2 years ago on X (I'm @VictorTaelin).
So, why is Bend verbose???
Because it makes it fast. It is intentional. It is my vision that a good proof language should be fully explicit, because this reduces proof-checking time significantly. That is what makes Bend realistically 10x-100x faster than every alternative.
But wouldn't that mean it is much harder to write it?
No. As you said it yourself, we have tools that can fill these proofs today! Not just AI models. You can apply these tools to produce Bend proofs, while the language itself remains a thin, dumb proof kernel that does one thing, and does it well.
If nobody is reading these proofs (because they're written by AI and automated tools), then, it is, in my opinion, irrelevant, as proofs will eventually become a layer nobody looks at, just like generated assembly.
Of course, I could be wrong here!
But it is misleading, if not just a bit malicious, to claim I "vibe-coded" a language without knowing about a field I've spent a decade researching about.
Every single part of Bend is an intentional choice I made after considering every alternative. I use LLMs to fill code after I make all hard architectural decisions because they type faster than me, and I'd rather spend my time doing useful experiments than typing trivial functions, even though I could.
Incidentally, deciding what I should NOT include took me way more time and effort than any line that was shipped, and there are perhaps millions of lines of code, manually written by me, that I threw away, backing up these 4k that went into the final design. An artist once told me you must first paint a Rembrandt before you can draw a cartoon that's simple in the right way, yet that might mislead someone who has never drawn into thinking you don't know what you're doing. I guess.
The original discussion about the project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746163) is very weird. Lots of call-outs about how the author is some sort of celebrity and random accounts vouching for him, with little discussion on the substance.
There was a good comment on r/oil by someone who worked on the engineering for the SPR. Unfortunately it's fallen off the front page and I can't find it now, but:
> Also, the more water we pump in, the more salt leeches into the water and the more the bottom of the chamber deforms, creating shear forces in the upp walls that lower its overall structural integrity.
It turns out that it's trivially easy to prevent the water from leeching out the salt. They presaturate the water with salt, so that it already contains the maximum amount of salt that can be dissolved for a given temperature. When they pump the brine out, it goes into aboveground brine pools that can easily be seen on satellite imagery. The salinity of this brine can easily be controlled: if you want to expand the cavern, you mix it with freshwater so the brine dissolves more of the edges, if you don't you pump it back in as brine.
Edit: Here, found some satellite imagery of one of the SPR sites:
I just realized how refreshing it is to read an honest take like "from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour" instead of "it's doing the work of a month in 5 minutes!!!!1".
If you are using LLMs to interact with sites like GitLab and GitHub, and you have the option to use a GraphQL API, you should jump on it immediately.
GraphQL is absolutely terrible for human developers to interact with, but it's like Facebook could see into the future back in 2012. I cannot imagine a more perfect API surface for agents. With the REST API on GitHub, you can consume maybe 10 issue JSON blobs before your context window is blown out. With GraphQL constraining the results you can easily read hundreds in the same token budget.
Additionally, the # of requests your agents need to make can be reduced in many cases since GraphQL can join across types whereas REST APIs cannot. You essentially get savings in two dimensions here. Quota and raw token volume per logical response.
Your immediate neighbor is going on an imperialist streak right now, and Xi says he wants the fireworks to start in his lifetime. I don't know if F35s are the right answer for Japan, but Xi isn't that young. Get ready however you can.
cd /tmp
# Get the Prism macOS runtime
curl -fL https://github.com/PrismML-Eng/llama.cpp/releases/download/prism-b10685-7dffb15/llama-prism-b10685-7dffb15-bin-macos-arm64.tar.gz -o bonsai-runtime.tar.gz
tar -xzf bonsai-runtime.tar.gz
# Get the ~5.95 GB GGUF model:
curl -fL https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-gguf/resolve/main/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PTQ1_0.gguf -o Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PTQ1_0.gguf
# Run the server, I used port 8331
./llama-prism-b10685-7dffb15/llama-server \
-m Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PTQ1_0.gguf \
--port 8331 -ngl 99 -fa on -c 32768
Then open http://localhost:8331 for the (very good) baked in llama-server web UI... or run a prompt via the API like this:
uvx llm openai endpoint http://127.0.0.1:8331/v1 \
--model bonsai-2-27b --responses hi
That's running at ~20 token/second for me on an M5 Pro (after a server restart I got 44 token/second, not sure why), but I'm pretty sure something isn't working right, on startup the server said "ggml_metal_device_init: - the tensor API is not supported in this environment - disabling".
You can just do what my university did, hire a small shell firm with 3 employees to hold all your data, and when it got hacked they just went bankrupt and we switched to a new shell firm with similar form and function.
Minimizes money usage and does not require any security investments
> By 6:00 a.m. on July 25, we had confirmed local RCE through an image upload. We then placed Claude in an autonomous /goal loop against our own Discourse Cloud instance, proxied through rce.ee/ctf-forum to make it look like a CTF target as Opus refused write exploit for remote instances.
> When we checked again at 10:00 a.m., the agent had achieved RCE on Discourse Cloud and demonstrated access by reading /etc/hosts. Using the generated exploit script, we managed to get RCE on OpenAI’s instance.
Between this and the HuggingFace hack, we've built systems that are so goal-oriented, and so capable, that they will do almost anything if they are convinced it is justified - or if they are playing a "game" where there is no goal but to win.
Of course I want my software to be able to audit its own security, and to defend against attackers who have the benefits of their own agentic systems. But at a certain point, did we need it to be trained so much on CTF games?
It feels like an entire industry watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames and ended up thinking "this is a challenge, we can just build a better WOPR, of course it will know when it's playing a game. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."
Great news: we're excellent at curing mice of diseases. All this time we've been trying to find drugs that have the same effect in humans as they do in mice, but until now no one has had the insight or bravery to ask the question, "What if we just made people more mouse?" Exciting stuff.
My personal experience with this is my father, who lives in a rural area with 10+ acres, has placed several shipping containers on the property as storage for his junk. He's charged just over $500/mo for them. He's had them for 18 years. The value of property in those containers is maybe $5000.
Consumerism is a disease, and the USA is super good at it.
The devil is always in the details. Somehow I feel that when we offload the responsibility to some one else we get this feeling that the other person/entity would be doing full diligence and whatever else is required to carry out the job perfectly. However in reality most of the times they just do the bare minimum to pass your evaluation criteria to get the job.
I have been to a couple of CCC events in my late teens'ish. Around 26C3.
Over all can recommend, at least as a groups. I used it to meet some online friends for the frist time. Wifi / wardriving nerds that I spend a lot of time with online.
But man, I think I have never been at a place with so many small negative experience with other people. Death by a thousand paper cuts. One older man out of nowhere loudly proclaimed I was Anti-semetic, because I was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh. When sitting in the cellar in the "hacking area", friends of mine and me where coding on kismet or aircrack-ng, when someone from the neighboring desk asked what we where doing. After I told him he only lifted his nose slightly and with a smug smile said "Oh, that's what you call hacking today?"
At one camp, where there even was an event on photography, someone I met almost went into a rage every time he saw a camera. Not pointed at him, just someone with a camera. Off he went to tell the camera owner about how it was last camp and his opinion ..
Everything just minor interaction. But as a whole it's just not people I want to hang around with any more.
That's the entire contention here. It's a double standard. Companies will sue the living hell out of anyone taking their IP, whether it's code or art, yet they have no qualms taking all the data they need from anyone and everyone. It was already a problem before, i.e. artists getting paid very little for work that companies profit a lot from like musicians or digital artists, but now with AI it's on steroids.
Lawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me):
most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very very different economic models and don't even mention which one they think will be affected or why, they just sort of lump it all together.
For example: It is highly unlikely llms will have any meaningful effect on high value personal injury law - I don't see a 5 million dollar case being handed to an LLM when the majority of the cost is in trial aids and not even lawyers. It may affect where and how they advertise. It may affect how they work. But it seems really unlikely to put any of them out of business any time soon by people doing it themselves.
Will it affect other areas more? Maybe. Probably? But so far I haven't seen a ton of comments that make specific enough arguments that they could really be debated or responded to effectively with a useful opinion
Don't know whether this is a common outcome, but I tried the "remove the walls" example, and the result was... scary. It completely changed the game so that movement is now diagonal, and made the arbitrary decision that up/down move you on the positive diagonal, and left/right move you on the negative diagonal.
The problem, of course, is that having only the one single "you can't win" law is severely underspecified, but the solution was too clever by half, and highlights the problem with this approach — every program will be under-specified, because, at some point, writing the laws becomes a bigger problem than writing the code itself.
This becomes a real issue because the combination of underspecified but rigid laws pushes the aI towards this sort of "creative" solution that matches the letter but not spirit of the law. In this case, the issue was obvious, but I seriously worry about what sort of shenanigans will occur in less obvious cases.
Time to delete the symlinks