# help understand (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 4 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover help understand. Page: Feed: --- ## [Three important steps in my maturation process](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-08-21-three-important-steps-in-my-maturation-process/) _2026-08-21 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me. At the same time, I recently joined a company that skews younger-than-me. When I joined Google in 2011, I had just turned 30, and was in the mainstream demographics of Google in 2011. There were a bunch… ## [Attack to get into victim's bank account](https://www.netjeff.com/wp/?p=1474) _2026-06-30 · netjeff · netjeff.com_ Today I learned about an interesting way for an attacker, Bob, to get into the Bank account of their victim, Alice. This attack applies to any sensitive/financial account, not just banking. Note that Bob has not taken control of 212-555-0123, rather Bob has manipulated a Read More ... ## [RL economics, morally charged terms, and “distillation”](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-06-15-rl-economics-morally-charged-terms-and-distillation/) _2026-06-15 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ After a number of Twitter discussions, and repeating myself a lot in these discussions, it is time to write a short note on the economics of advancing LLM capabilities through RL, about principles of propaganda and coining new words, and about my stubborn refusal to use the term “distillation” except in a specific narrow sense. How do models advance when human-curated data has run out? It’s been a… ## [Interactive "Eyes on the Solar System" (NASA)](https://www.netjeff.com/wp/?p=1469) _2026-04-04 · netjeff · netjeff.com_ This in-browser Solar System viewer is pretty nice, https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system. Best viewed on larger screens (tablet/laptop/desktop) but also works on smaller phone screens. It lets you zoom around, focus on things, lots of options to control what's shown. Also some time-travel into past/future. This is from Read More ... ## [Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-03-24-slightly-safer-vibecoding-by-adopting-old-hacker-habits/) _2026-03-24 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ I have seen a lot of public discussion around supply-chain attacks on the Python ecosystem, prompt injection risks when using coding agents, and general worries about the security implications of “vibe coding” for the development machine. In some of these discussions I find myself puzzled as to what problem is being solved - and it took me a while to realize that my failure to understand lies in… ## [The 2024 almost-backdoor on the Internet](https://www.netjeff.com/wp/?p=1461) _2026-03-08 · netjeff · netjeff.com_ Veritasium recently released an excellent video about the almost-backdoor into OpenSSH in 2024. The attackers (Russia? China?) would have had a secret backdoor into the majority of servers worldwide. The Internet came within several weeks of this disaster. The video provides lots of context, in Read More ... ## [Ask your LLM for receipts: What I learned teaching Claude C++ crash triage](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-12-12-ask-your-llm-for-receipts-what-i-learned-teaching-claude-c-crash-triage/) _2025-12-12 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ I recently embarked on a small toy project/experiment: How well can I equip Claude Code to automatically analyze and triage crashes in a C++ code base? For the experimentation, I worked on a small number of crashes in the ffmpeg bug tracker. The initial results were very discouraging, Claude hallucinated all sorts of implausible root causes and tended to write typical “AI slop” – things that… ## [Wikipedia offline](https://www.netjeff.com/wp/?p=1440) _2025-11-30 · netjeff · netjeff.com_ Every few years I look into having an offline copy of wikipedia. Don't know why, just something that feels like I should have. Here's what worked well for me in late 2025. I started with Kiwix.org, an open-source project designed to make it "easy" to Read More ... ## [Coming soon](https://thegridline.substack.com/p/coming-soon) _2025-08-03 · Nyoman Sunima · Gridline_ This is Gridline. ## [Understand Neural Nets better, post 5 of N – Code Assistant shootout](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-07-11-understand-neural-nets-better-post-5-of-n-code-assistant-shootout/) _2025-07-11 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ In a series of previous blogposts \[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 \] I ran some experiments drawing the boundaries of the polytopes generated by a fully-connected leaky ReLU network while it was getting trained on reproducing an input image. As I tried to scale the experiments to larger networks, I noticed a dramatic slowdown in the code, caused by the calculation of a hash of the activation pattern happening on… ## [A Friend Gave You $30 (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/1aXekktglovs) _2025-07-10 · **Sponsored**_ Sign up, deposit $5 within 30 days, and start investing with expert guidance. ## [A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-07-06-a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms/) _2025-07-06 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ In many discussions where questions of “alignment” or “AI safety” crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities. In one of these discussions, somebody correctly called me out on the simplistic nature of this argument - “a brain is just some proteins and currents”. I… ## [Some experiments to help me understand Neural Nets better, post 4 of N](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-05-22-some-experiments-to-help-me-understand-neural-nets-better-post-4-of-n/) _2025-05-22 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ After the previous blog posts here , here , and here , a friend of mine pointed me to some literature to read, and I will do so now :-). The papers on my reading list are: 1. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/balestriero18b.html - Randall Balestrieros paper on DNNs as splines. 2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00904 - ReLU networks have surprisingly few activation patterns (2019) 3.… ## [Some experiments to help me understand Neural Nets better, post 3 of N](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-04-10-some-experiments-to-help-me-understand-neural-nets-better-post-3-of-n/) _2025-04-10 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ What is this? After my first post on the topic, 9 months elapsed before I posted again, and now I am posting within days of the last post? Anyhow, after my last post I could not resist and started running some experiments trying to see whether I could induce “overfitting” in the neural networks I had been training - trying to get a heavily overparametrized neural network to just “memorize” the… ## [Some experiments to help me understand Neural Nets better, post 2 of N](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-04-05-some-experiments-to-help-me-understand-neural-nets-better-post-2-of-n/) _2025-04-05 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ In this post, I will explain my current thinking about neural networks. In a previous post I explained the intuition behind my “origami view of NNs” (also called the “polytope lens” in some circles). In this post, I will go a little bit into the mathematical details of this. The standard textbook explanation of a layer of a neural network looks something like this: \\ ( x + b )\\ where \\: \\ is a… ## [The German debt brake is stupid!](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2025-03-02-the-german-debt-brake-is-stupid/) _2025-03-02 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ Welcome to one of my political posts. This blog post should rightfully be titled “the German debt brake is stupid, and if you support it, so are you (at least in the domain of economics)”. Given that a nontrivial number of Germans agree with the debt brake, and given that there is a limit on the sensible number of characters in the title, I chose a shorter title - for brevity and to reduce… ## [What I want for Christmas for the EU startup ecosystem](https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2024-12-05-what-i-want-for-christmas-for-the-eu-startup-ecosystem/) _2024-12-05 · Thomas Dullien · Thomas Dullien / Halvar Flake_ Hey all, I have written about the various drags on the European tech industry in the past , and recently been involved in discussions on both X and BlueSky about what Europe needs. In this post, I will not make a wishlist of what concrete policy reforms I want, but rather start “product centric” – e.g. what “user experience” would I want as a founder? Once it is clear what experience you want as a… ## [Having a Farm Helps Me Understand The Bible More Than Any Other Profession](https://julian.farm/having-a-farm-helps-me-understand-the-bible-more-than-any-other-profession/) _2024-08-22 · Jeff Julian · Julian Farms_ I haven t had many jobs, so it is pretty bold of me to make that claim, but I believe it is true with all my heart. Here is the quick backstory. I started as a dishwasher at the age of 16, the only manual labor job I had \[ \] The post Having a Farm Helps Me Understand The Bible More Than Any Other Profession appeared first on Julian Farms .