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This is neat. I built an LLM once that stored its embeddings in poincare space, and it was a struggle for me to visualise what it was doing at first. This would have helped.

While developing poincake, I actually thought about building a language learning app using a similar approach. The idea was to map word embeddings onto a Poincaré disk so users could explore word relationships and clusters.

Like everything it depends on your goals. As a novice developer PHP is wonderful. Everything you see as an obvious security failing is exactly what made it great to a new dev back when most of that was still allowed by default.

> So we still don't have a reliable way to separate instructions from data when talking to an LLM

Humans also do not know how to do this reliably, which is why phishing is still a thing and always will be.


I think the Stroop effect ("read these colour names, each written in a different colour") is probably the purest demonstration of this. Humans are trivially prompt-injectable.

> Humans also do not know how to do this reliably

These are machines, not humans, so I don't understand the comparison. The point of tech advancement is that we eliminate entire classes of errors that humans make. You'd probably look at me funny if I wrote a production application that failed randomly in unexpected ways like corrupting data, opening security holes, etc. then explained it away with "well, humans do it too!"


It's an artificial intelligence, not a small deterministic shell script. Stop comparing it to one. It has both new capabilities and new classes of failure mode. Those new failure modes are more like human failure modes than traditional symbolic logic failures.

We need to get better at using them and building them by validating both the inputs and outputs of such systems in more sophisticated ways, but to act surprised and denounce them because they fail in different ways than more primitive systems misses the point.

They're stochastic by design. If we want deterministic results we must use deterministic validators in conjunction with the stochastic system. It's trivial, and one day security experts will look back on the time when people didn't in the same way we look back on 90's software that didn't validate user input at all.


Sometimes we build things for the way it should be, rather than the way it is.

‘If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any’ - Trump on COVID19

[flagged]


To address the actual substance though: He was wrong about the facts as well. He's always wrong, that's why we jump on him. Not because he's bad at saying it, because what he's saying is almost always a giant lie based on his ostrich modeled positive thinking attitude.

If we ignore just the number of tests and instead look at number of tests per positive test during that time period guess what? The US was still in the top 20%. Meaning we actually had more cases, and it had nothing to do with the amount of testing we were doing. It had to do with us opening up faster and taking fewer precautions than other nations as a whole. Simply put, we had more as a percentage but that didn't align with his spin.

Below is a link to the actual data. Use the slider to set it to June 15th, 2020 (when he said this). The US had 25 tests per positive case, which left us ranked alongside nations like Bosnia and Mozambique while nations that took it more seriously like New Zealand had over 8,000 tests per positive result.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tests-per-confirmed-case-...


Sure, I'll grow up and listen to riffs about how inhaling bleach fumes "gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number" or being exposed to a "very powerful light" are thought by same man above as a potential remedy for same disease with 100% seriousness.

Hey now!

The man is _acing_ the multitude of cognitive tests that doctors keep giving him.


> being exposed to a "very powerful light"

Isn't ultraviolet sanitization a thing? Are you sure this quote isn't another bit taken out of context that would further prove the point?


He did not tell anyone to do these things nor do I claim he did. He did ask his staff to "look into" whether either of these sanitation methods "could be used inside the human body", which is a bit like if I asked my doctor if I could eat laundry soap and shampoo instead of showering and doing laundry.

The very fact that these ideas exist inside a US president's skull is VERY SAD. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.


Again, no quotes. But even as-is the idea of using ultraviolet to disinfect internal surfaces is not bonkers to any degree. Like I could see it working for nasal disinfection.

In fact that's so obvious, that given you get very sad that someone else could even consider that tells me that you don't really know what you are talking about. Ironically, unlike Trump.

Won't comment on the bleach one without a quote though.


have a read for yourself:

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...

As for me, I don't think you need a phd to read the warning stickers on bleach and isoproponal which say "do not injest" [2] [3] or warnings on germicidal lamps that say "do not expose to eyes or skin" [4]. If you do or have otherwise hidden knowledge why these should be ignored, say so.

[2] https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/cloroxre...

[3] https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=AC423830040&...

[4] https://www.mscdirect.com/knowledge-center/articles/safety-t...

Next you will tell me that he isnt talking about UVC lamps, and I'll have to admit he speaks so vaguely that you can interpert his own words as almost anything.


Why do I have to present evidence for something I'm not claiming? Your response fits the picture drawn by the comment on out of context.

> As for me, I don't think you need a phd to read the warning stickers on bleach and isoproponal which say "do not injest"

Yes, but you need more brainpower to understand that these warnings are for specific products and can't be generalized without research. The concept that dangerous substances are widely used in medicine in right quantities with right delivery methods is rather well known, and since you don't appear to grasp the connection after multiple comments alluding to it... well, that doesn't paint your opinion about Trump in a good light.


You are welcome to paint my opinion of trump in any color of light you like as long as it isn't UV-C.

Humor is not a replacement for an argument. Your joke is equivalent to "as long as it isn't a autism-inducing vaccine", but from the left.

It is absolutely bonkers to think about using UV to disinfect human skin, let alone the inside of the human body.

Any UV radiation strong enough to destroy the cells of bacteria is strong enough to destroy human cells. We know that UV-radiaton that's not strong enough to kill bacteria is already harmful to human skin (we call the phenomenon sunburn).


What do you know, certain forms of UV are used to disinfect skin. Too bad the developers of the concept didn't care at the moment they are "bonkers".

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/201...

> UV-C has demonstrated the ability to effectively and safely inactivate the SARS-CoV-2 virus up to 99.9%

> There are four methods to disinfect the air with UVGI technologies: 1) ..., 2) irradiating the full room, whole-room far UV-C when rooms are occupied 3) ...

Truly, the lack of critical thinking in the left meme reposters was the main cause of dems losing the last election. You guys are pretty successful in demonstrating that.


Your source talks about the disinfection of air, contains no references to disinfection of skin, and only mentions skin three times, twice to specifically warn against skin damage from UVC exposure, and once to clairify which types of UV light penetrate the skin.

Do you suppose people in occupied full room that's being irradiated must cover their faces? Read better.

> it is a very common problem on the left -- taking the words literally and out of context

This is a very common problem on the right -- whatever Trump says gets constantly reinterpreted into something more favourable.

This wasn't out of context. It was part of a broader and systematic attempt to play down the pandemic.

He had multiple opportunities to clarify what he meant, and declined. When explicitly asked if the "slow the testing down" remarks were a joke, Trump said "I don't kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear."

He then kept repeating the argument in subsequent tweets on 23 June: "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more... With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!"

> Grow up.

Another common problem on the right -- argument by insult.


I mean, they keep defending him and bending over backwards to behave as if he doesn't REALLY mean the things he says. Then a few weeks or months later, just as a giant catastrophe is looming, he cuts of our only means to track the disaster. This isn't a fluke, and it's not a series of unrelated coincidences. It's literally his world view. Trump is a huge fan of Norman Peale, who wrote a famous book about the power of positive thinking.

The book is self help garbage that isn't based in fact, and offers terrible advice that basically boils down to "ignore your problems, pretend they aren't real, and imagine that you're better at everything than you actually are." Sound like the ruling principles of anyone you know?

“make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.” [0] - Peale

“I still remember [Peale’s] sermons,” Trump told the Iowa Family Leadership Summit in July. “You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over. He was the greatest guy.” [0] - Trump

[0] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/donald-trump...


> I could only get about 80% of what I wanted together with my hacky workflow.

I literally did this yesterday with solid results using Codex CLI. I used xhigh thinking and gpt 5.5.

I had it use KiCad directly via cli rather than via MCP, and I did make Claude Opus review it's work after every round. I got what I think will be a working revision A in about 10 hours of tinkering spread over a few days.


Is 10 hours a short amount of time for designing a PCB?

I'd honestly love to see the PCB. Using an LLM for a mostly geometric task like PCB layout feels like using a hammer to cook a chicken, unless KiCAD has some kind of text-based description language i'm not aware of that gets around having to specify coordinates.

KiCad schematic and board files are all text based with a fairly strict grammar, so you would be able to feed it directly into an LLM. Not that that means the LLM could actually make sense of it. Never tried though XD

Faster than some, slower than some.

PCBs come in all different levels of complexity.


> again, mostly worse jobs.

This is the part everyone seems to forget. Any "new" jobs would be shitty low paying jobs, and it would mostly instead need to be automation.

Tariffs transfer wealth to the 1% and leave shit jobs that pollute the environment, which also happen to raise the cost of all goods, for everyone else.


EY has been quietly laying people off for the last year solid.

It's unsurprising that trying to do more with less results in lower quality.


The interesting thing is...

There may be a lot of demand for do-nothing services.

A lot of corporate work is just do-nothing box-ticking.

Boss: get me a report about X, so I can give that report to my boss who won't read it.

You: E&Y, please get me a report. Here's $200k.


This underlying much of the non-coding AI revolution (and some of the coding perhaps) - so much corporate activity is write-only and never read.

The trope about external consultants is that your VP brings them in to review the company, and they talk to everybody and write a report on how to improve the business, and the report says exactly what you've been telling your VP but they've been ignoring you.

You are closer to the truth :)

they are not simply paid to do nothing. They are paid to do dirty work.


They are paid to justify decisions executives have already made. It's often referred to as due diligence, but in practice these reports mostly just allow executives to tell the board it wasn't their fault if it goes wrong.

To me, English is just another programming language. Some of us will always be better at it than others, and the ones that know other programming languages well will always have an advantage over those who do not.

When you are good at it there can be craft in it still.


English is not a programming language though. I don’t understand how such an obviously false sentence can be so persistent.

I'm not even sure what you mean. Of course it is.

A programming language is a formal intermediate language for turning human comprehensible instructions into machine instructions by means of an interpreter or compiler. We've now allowed that intermediate language to be English, because that's preferable to most people, and the "compiler" has become very complicated indeed as a result of that.

You still have to be able to express what it is you want in a way the machine can understand, it's just both simpler and less deterministic now.


This. Just because an llm can translate any language into a programming language doesn’t suddenly make all languages programming languages. Until I can ‘brew install englishc’ and so on, it’s not a f**ing programming language.

Can you define programing language in a way that includes all the current programming languages and excludes English? I kind of doubt it unless you just define it as "anything that isn't a human language", which would be silly.

Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such.

You don’t need a precise definition of a term to know what a thing is and isn’t (Wittgenstein has taught us that much at least). We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.

A case in point. I bet you can‘t find a definition for a fish which includes cods and sting-rays, but excludes dolphins and shrimp. And similarly the IAU were unable to come up with a definition of a planet which included Pluto and Mercury but excluded Ceres and Sedna.


> Natural language is full of ambiguities and redundancies which makes it a poor fit for a programming language, which is why it is never used as such.

I mean, a quarter century ago Dijkstra argued your point compellingly, and he was right back then. If you read his "On the foolishness of “natural language programming”" (1978) you'll find that all of his most compelling arguments are gone now. Things have changed, and the machines can now largely cope with the ambiguity of language as well as the average human being can.

Since human language is the original source for the specifications we turn into formal code most of the time anyhow, we're really just asking if that original specification the programmers turn into formal symbolism is a form of code or not, and whether a good spec is equivalent to good code. I think it's difficult to argue that it's not, especially given that we now have these handy Natural Language to Formal Symbolism compilers.

> We just need to know that programming languages are used to express an executable computer programs (usually by translating to simple machine instructions) and that a natural language has never been used in this way in a significant manner.

I did that like 30 times today. Maybe it wasn't in the past, today it is. The path is now Specifications->LLM->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code, it used to be Specifications->Human->Formal Symbolism->Machine Code. The inputs and outputs are the same, and I would argue that the process is still "programming" regardless of syntactic games with semantics.

Eventually we'll find a more efficient version of that formal symbolism and stop using code designed to be human readable at all. Still nothing will really changed besides the input method.


> I did that like 30 times today.

You did no such thing. You fed some text into a statistical machinery which was able to infer another text from it. The first text just so happens to be a natural language and the inferred text was a formalized programming language which the statistical model had had its weight tuned to produce.

Statistical inference is a completely different process then compilation. Inferring is a completely different verb from compiling. Two different verbs which mean different things.

If we take your logic and explore its implication, we can just as easily claim that a project manager writing JIRA ticket is programming, and that JIRA is a programming language. The project manager wrote a ticket in natural language which was picket up by a developer who translated it (by your defintion of translation) to a formal language which got compiled to machine instruction and executed by a computer. This is obviously silly. And as silly as you find my description, I find yours equally silly.


Yep, and its a really small world out there.

If researchers stop believing MS will treat them fairly it's bad news for the entire security industry.


Well. Its a bad news for society as whole.

Security industry going to be okay - someone will always pay for 0-days. If vendors wont pay its just gonna be US agencies, Israel resellers, China or Russia.

If you don't feed your army, you will soon feed someone's else's.


It's had bad news only for Windows buerocrats. Good orgs don't use Windows.

I have now worked for/with a significant percentage of the fortune 500. All used Windows in some capacity.

Is this just your way of saying that only tiny, weird, companies are "good"?


It's saying that those with Windows could be 100x more effective and secure. Wasting billions of money and a lot of time

These days corporate security treats these workstations like a dummy terminal. No secrets live on the workstation. You have to re-auth with sso constantly with biometrics and are basically editing data that is in a cloud. So the risk to a corp is minimal where even in the worst case they are insured.

Zero days like this are being disclosed regularly so the idea of securing a windows workstation is tantalizing but you'll never feel satiated trying to drink that water so don't even try.

So yea there's plenty of windows users but we're certainly not hosting anything important on those boxes and would frankly be aghast at the suggestion.


> These days corporate security treats these workstations like a dummy terminal

Correct, "zero trust" is the buzzword but this is how Microsoft even recommends you set up your endpoint infra. Assume breach, treat every endpoint as if it is currently compromised or could be at any time. Laptops are basically ephemeral, when set up right, and can be wiped and re-imaged within an hour or less.

That's not unique to Windows either, that's how all employee/user endpoints should be managed.


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