A blog by Silas Barta
I have a source at OpenAI that leaked a major feature they're going to put out, that will make up the ground they're losing to Claude. Here's an early draft of the press release. *** OpenAI is rolling out a new feature with ChatGPT model 5.5 that provides special resistance to an ongoing issue with AI output: the telltale signs that the output is AI, which is a major turnoff and source of…
So right now I'm at LessOnline , the LessWrong conference centered on writing about rationality-related topics, and I encountered a very interesting proposition. There was a session about writing speeches for the LessWrong/rationalist Winter Solstice , a solemn ceremony with musical performances and speeches with a rational, hopeful-but-realistic theme. Towards the end, the speaker gave an example…
NIST IR 8429-DRAFT: Presence Obfuscation in Federated Scheduling Systems I've always been a little worried about people who post e.g. a Calendly link that shows their full availability and lets you set an appointment. Do you really want to reveal how not-busy you are? Well, apparently the NIST is now warning that it's also a big security risk, and advises a few protocols to obfuscate your true…
It's looking like we could be able to hyperlink to emails soon! No more of this "oh uh check your email for the one I sent at 11:27...". You'll be able to add a link that works just like linking the web! The IETF is working on their "Parsable Mail Pointer Email Protocol" (PMPEP), and I was able to get an advance copy! Check it out below: RFC 9869: Parsable Mail Pointer Email Protocol (PMPEP)…
You might not be aware, but I've been short-selling some cryptocurrencies. (I would have said "been making money short-selling cryptocurrencies", but ...) Often people ask some from of, "oh wow, what broker lets you do that?" It's actually an interesting misunderstanding, in that it misses a key insight: You can short-sell any time you have a debt denominated in that asset. At that point, you are…
My ramblings about thermodynamics aren't so off-base, it turns out! Remember this one? From 2009? Where I explained how Joules per Kelvin (energy per unit temperature) is a valid measure of information (or entropy, effectively "missing information"), which is normally measured in bits? Well, now there's a paper that formalizes that idea and related ones. As the title ("Temperature as Joules per…
I finally splurged for a paid ChatGPT subscription! With access to GPT-4, I asked it to refine my earlier argument about fish being bad swimming instructors. Here's what it gave me: *** Certainly, let's rework the argument using more scientifically grounded explanations and references: While it's true that fish, with their adept aquatic abilities, may seem like logical swimming instructors for…
Obligatory epistemic status : Speculative and hard to test but falls out an as implication under current worldmodel. Just a shower thought I've had on my mind for a while: Fish would be bad swimming instructors (for humans). This remains true even after adjusting for/overcoming the differences in body types and ability to speak your language. What do I mean? Well, to be sure, fish are good at…
I don't think anyone actually wanted to learn about this, but it's stayed on my mind for being "an argument that's wrong and I can prove". Background: A while ago I made fun of a Facebook friend (call her D) for her "let them eat cake" cluelessness. This was during the 2018 (?) California wildfires when she made a big post saying how thankful she was that, in miserable air conditions, she could…
I have an inside source that's claiming Google will be rolling out a new replacement for passwords and other secrets for authenticating users. They shared the upcoming blog post/press release with me. They're moving to a more "holistic" authentication system? Let's see if this pans out. In any case, here's the not-yet-released announcement. *** Are you who you claim to be? User logins protect…
Related to: Expecting Short Inferential Distances (yes, linking LW is still a thing). Below are some remarks I've made in scattered form in several forums, but I thought I'd collect them here. Problem: A TV series will run for many episodes, and the writers will want to build up a storyline over many of them, which is necessary for a satisfying payoff. But viewers don't necessarily watch it all at…
So apparently, the Internet Engineering Task Force is going to introduce a new HTTP status code. Just like there's the 404 for "File not found", we're soon going to have "397 Tolerating", similar to a redirect. The way it would work is, if you send a request that violates some standard, but the server can identify the probable intent of your request, it will reply with a "397 Tolerating" to say,…
Because of the virus we had to hold this meetup virtually, and I was slated to present there for the Evening of Python Coding. Since we made a recording of it, I can now share. Enjoy my not-ready-for-prime-time voice! (Yes, I need to update my profile picture ... badly.
I was pointed to this challenge by this article , and had heard about the NSA's new Ghidra reverse engineering tool . I was able to solve it without reading much of the article! Here's what I did. Setup: They give you a compiled ELF binary that runs a program that prompts you for a password. It will tell you if you guessed correctly. I was going to use this as a change to learn the Ghidra tool,…
Been a while since I posted, huh? Well, here's an interesting development in my life: I finally started the NAND to Tetris course ( part 2 ) on Coursera , which is based on the instructors' site . I can say, whole-heartedly, that the course is awesome, and the first thing in a long time that has gotten me into a flow state . The idea behind the course is this: they take you through (virtually)…
So, I remembered another funny Slashdot exchange (again, no link). Story: Some online retailer got in trouble for filtering their "customer reviews" so that only the positive remarks (about listed products) stayed and everything else was deleted. A: "Wow, that's pretty scummy. They don't have the right to just clip out negative reviews." B: "Don't they? I mean, it's their site; they have the right…
I know the line: explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog ; you understand it better, but it dies. Still, not everyone will get these, and I figure I might as well have a place where you at least get a chance. So here are some of my own creations, explained. Girl, you make me feel like a fraudulent prover in a stochastic interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol ... because I really wish I had…
If you liked the last post on this here are some more you might like. This time, I think they're more insightful than funny, but often times, insight is funny! Also, I thought I'd point out the value of forums: in all of these exchanges, it seems to take three people to get the "aha" moment, not just one or two. Topic: some new superstrong carbon nanotube material is discovered. A: So it seems…
The recent Talia Jane story just made me realize we have a possible inconsistently in policy. To get you up to speed, Jane took a low-wage job in the San Francisco Bay Area, hoping to work her way up to her passion of being a social media manager for a major company. But because of rental prices, she paid 85% of per post-tax pay just for rent (!), complained about her employer paying so little,…
In the time that I was a regular reader of Slashdot , I saw a few exchanges that stayed in my mind. I later went back to find them, but was never able to. So that they're not lost to time, I figured I'd post all the ones I remember. What follows is from memory, and prettied up a bit. (Not trying to plagiarize, if you can find the original post for any of these, let me know.) Enjoy. [Story:…
So there's a common kind of article that comes up a lot, and annoys me. It's the "What every programmer should know" or "needs to know" about this or that. About time, or names, or memory, or solid state drives or floating point arithmetic, or file systems, or databases. Here's a good sampling on Hacker News of the kinds of things someone out there is insisting you absolutely have to know before…
(Charybdis = care-ib-dis ) A Scott Alexander post really resonated with me, when he talked about one "development milestone" (#4): the ability to understand and speak in terms of tradeoffs, rather than stubbornly try to insist that there are no downsides to your preferred course of action. Such "development milestones" indicate a certain maturity of one's thought process, and greatly change how…
So after posting our new Bitcoin book , my buddy Tim Swanson alerted me to the problem of Bitcoin mining pools attacking each other. Reminds me of the recent Tax Interaction Effect post, where I had to unearth the core of a counterintuitive result: in this case, the claim that not redeeming some of your solutions can increase your return. I don't think I'm entirely there, but I at least have an…
Phew, been a while, eh? Well, Bob Murphy and I have a new free eBook up about the economics and mechanics of Bitcoin! Check the site for it , or, if you're too lazy, just go straight to the book itself .
Phew! Been a while, hasn't it? I want to come back to the tax interaction effect (TIE) issue from previous posts, and go over what I think has been bothering me about the TIE-based argument against the carbon tax shift. So, a high-speed review of why a carbon tax shift (CTS) is inefficient . The CTS, remember, involves a revenue-neutral reduction of taxes on capital (including land) and labor,…