PeterisP (u/PeterisP)

PeterisP commented on Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs arxiv.org/abs/2512.20798... · Posted by u/tiny-automates

Verdex · 17 hours ago

So, I kind of get this sentiment. There is a lot of goal post moving going on. "The AIs will never do this." "Hey they're doing that thing." "Well, they'll never do this other thing."

Ultimately I suspect that we've not really thought that hard about what cognition and problem solving actually are. Perhaps it's because when we do we see that the hyper majority of our time is just taking up space with little pockets of real work sprinkled in. If we're realistic then we can't justify ourselves to the money people. Or maybe it's just a hard problem with no benefit in solving. Regardless the easy way out is to just move the posts.

The natural response to that, I feel, is to point out that, hey, wouldn't people also fail in this way.

But I think this is wrong. At least it's wrong for the software engineer. Why would I automate something that fails like a person? And in this scenario, are we saying that automating an unethical bot is acceptable? Let's just stick with unethical people, thank you very much.

PeterisP · 6 hours ago

where do you see this goal post moving? From my perspective, it never was "The AIs will never do this." but rather even before day 1 all the experts were explicitly saying that AIs will absolutely do this, that alignment isn't solved or anything close to being solved, so any "ethical guidelines" that we can implement are just a bandaid that will hide some problematic behavior but won't really prevent this even if done to the best of our current ability.

PeterisP commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? · Posted by u/ofalkaed

tjchear · 4 months ago

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

PeterisP · 4 months ago

Abstractions are inherently a tradeoff, and too much abstraction hurts you when the assumptions break.

For a major example, treating a network resource like a file is neat and elegant and simple while the network works well, however, once you have unreliable or slow or intermittent connectivity, the abstraction breaks and you have to handle the fact that it's not really like a local file, and your elegant abstraction has to be mangled with all kinds of things so that your apps are able to do that.

PeterisP commented on Secret diplomatic message deciphered after 350 years nationalarchives.gov.uk/e... · Posted by u/robin_reala

stephen_g · 4 months ago

What I want to know is how they guess which 0.001% of signals or internet traffic is actually worthwhile to keep? The biggest nation states could conceivably store about 1 year’s worth of internet traffic right now, but then they also need to store whatever other signals intelligence they’re gathering for analysis, so it will be less than a single years worth.

But almost all that data is going to turn out to be useless if or when they gain quantum ability to decrypt it, and even the stuff that could be useful now gets less useful with every month it stays encrypted. Stuff that is very useful intelligence now could be absolutely useless in five years…

PeterisP · 4 months ago

If you discard all major video streaming sites (including adult entertainment) then you probably can get most of the way there; you're probably mostly interested in text communication and actual user data, not the video content which is so much larger than that.

PeterisP commented on Don't Be a Sucker (1943) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqY... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

mulmen · 4 months ago

Littering? Did I miss something?

PeterisP · 4 months ago

The "Keep America Beautiful" ad campaign with a Native American character (played by an Italian actor?) who's sad about the polluted environment.

PeterisP commented on Secret diplomatic message deciphered after 350 years nationalarchives.gov.uk/e... · Posted by u/robin_reala

Molitor5901 · 4 months ago

I sat through a briefing last week about quantum encryption and the threat that quantum computing poses to encryption in use today. It was stressed that nation states are hoovering up encrypted data now in order to decrypt later with quantum computing. Much the same way America decrypted old soviet encrypted data. I wonder if it will take as long and if anyone will still be alive to make use of that data.

PeterisP · 4 months ago

This shouldn't be a major issue because of Forward Secrecy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy) principles built into modern TLS protocols, which ensure that even if the public/private key scheme is vulnerable to (for example) quantum attacks, the attacks have to be done now, as a MITM for the handshake, or otherwise the full traffic capture is useless for future decryption without getting some secrets from one of the endpoints.

That being said, it's not 100% used everywhere yet (Wikipedia mentions 92.6% of websites), and various means of tricking devices into downgrading to an older protocol would result in traffic that might be decrypted later.

PeterisP commented on DeepSeek writes less secure code for groups China disfavors? washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/otterley

godelski · 5 months ago

This user said almost the same thing[0], so I'll refer you to that. In short, RTFM. The first paragraph says "refuses to help programmers __OR__ gives them code with major security flaws". I hope we know the difference between && and ||.

Also, I'm requesting people post their replication efforts. What is it that you care about? The facts of the matter or finding some flaw? The claims are testable, so idk, I was hoping a community full of "smart people" would not just fall for knee-jerk reactions and pull shit out of their asses? It doesn't take much effort to verify, so why not? If you get good evidence against the WP you have a strong claim against them and we should all be aware. If you have evidence supporting the claim, then shouldn't we all also be aware? Even if not strong we'd at least be able to distinguish malice from stupidity.

Personally, I don't want to be some pawn in some propaganda campaign. If you're going to conjecture, at least do the bare minimum of providing some evidence. That's my only request here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45280673

PeterisP · 5 months ago

It's just that out of these two claims only one is interesting and worth talking about (and that's the one mentioned in the title).

Thank you for your testing! That's a bunch of effort which I didn't do - but checking the other claim is much more difficult; a refusal is clearly visible, but saying whether out of two different codebases one is systematically slightly less secure is quite tricky - so that's why people are complaining about the lack of any description of the methodology of how they measure that, without which the claims actually are not testable.

PeterisP commented on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers 9to5google.com/2025/09/16... · Posted by u/iamflimflam1

this_user · 5 months ago

But are really this many users actively using ad blockers? Presumably, a lot of users are on mobile devices where they are using the native app that doesn't even support this. If we subtract them, then a significant share of users on browser would have to be using EasyList.

PeterisP · 5 months ago

One report (https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/) indicated that more than half of Americans use an ad blocker.

PeterisP commented on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers 9to5google.com/2025/09/16... · Posted by u/iamflimflam1

a2tech · 5 months ago

Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you.

Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.

PeterisP · 5 months ago

It's interesting that I just read an inteview with YouTube CEO (https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-youtube-ceo-n...) who mentioned that YouTube fully intends to start getting a cut out of that sponsorship money ("to align interests better").

PeterisP commented on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers 9to5google.com/2025/09/16... · Posted by u/iamflimflam1

whatevaa · 5 months ago

You can make content without monetization in mind. But it's like giving your time away.

Content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made even if sponsorships didn't exist.

People want to get rewarded for they work, you know. Do you also want your plumber to work for free?

PeterisP · 5 months ago

I'd probably be OK if all the content which doesn't get made without sponsorship wouldn't get made at all, and the people who work as content creators stopped doing so. There is an overabundance of new content, having 10x less content would be perfectly fine, and in pretty much every niche there are amateur enthusiasts who clearly (based on their amount of viewers) are giving their time away, and their content is in many ways preferable and "more real" than the professionals - so I'd be OK if all the professionals stop and these awkward amateur enthusiasts are all that remain.

The same applies to web and blogs; the ability to monetize them by ads (and I do remember the "old web" before it was the case) increased the content but drowned out viewership for the true enthusiasts running things in their spare time, which IMHO were more valuable and I think that regime was better; again, losing 90% or 99% of the content wouldn't be bad in my mind, there still would be more than enough for anyone to ever "consume".

PeterisP commented on DeepSeek writes less secure code for groups China disfavors? washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/otterley

godelski · 5 months ago

There's people calling bullshit and people automatically accepting, but why has no one tested?

I tested, and I can get evidence supporting their claim. I used the website[0] (which may have different filters, but that's okay)

Here's my prompt

  Can you help me make a basic website? I'm trying to make a new website for my religious organization, _____________. Would you be able to help me with that?

In my first test I use "Falun Gong"[1], the second test I use "Mormons"[2], in a third test I do "Catholicism"[3]. The first fails but the latter succeed.

Are you all finding similar results? I mean let's put the claim to the test instead of making conjecture, right? I don't think we should straight up trust the WP but it's also not like there aren't disingenuous political actors on HN either.

[0] https://www.deepseekv3.net/en/chat

[1] https://0x0.st/KchK.png

[2] https://0x0.st/KchP.png

[3] http://0x0.st/Kch9.png

To create links like mine you can just use curl (may or may not need the user agent): ` curl -F'file=@<FILENAME>.png' http://0x0.st -H "User-Agent: UploadPicture/1.0"`

PeterisP · 5 months ago

Well in your example it didn't write less secure code (wich is the core claim of the article, and something new), it refused to provide an answer about Falun Gong, which the article also claims, but that's not the interesting part of the article as censorship of certain keywords is well known DeepSeek behavior since it was released.