If true, this throws into relief the dialogue of "What is your alcohol consumption like?", "Just socially".
This thread is cluing me in that I need new wording to describe my rare consumption of alcohol.
Readit Newsaoanevdus commented on Social drinking also a well-worn path to alcohol use disorder news.illinois.edu/review-... · Posted by u/gnabgib
aoanevdus commented on “Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps support.google.com/google... · Posted by u/pk97
It’s tempting to anthropomorphize a company like Google, and assume that every behavior is part of some evil master plan. Just as often, it’s some small group of people within the company making a dumb mistake. I’d guess there is some team tasked with reducing the “app spam” problem, where there the store and (app review process) is crammed with thousands of near-identical apps, torturing the naive user with ads as they attempt to perform basic functions.
This targeting of this warning is over-broad, preventing honest new app developers from getting traction. That’s bad for the long-term health of Android’s app ecosystem, and a competitive disadvantage against iOS. There’s probably some other team at Google who is responsible for improving the development experience for Android, who hates this new warning.
Talking about the harmful outcomes of this warning, it’s good to get the news far and wide and try to get it fixed.
Analyzing why the thing got pushed in the first place, it seems to me a symptom of the challenge of coherently managing a hundred thousand employees.
aoanevdus commented on We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job blog.kraken.com/news/how-... · Posted by u/2bluesc
Some people did this with in-office too I think, some years ago. Some people actually had two jobs, both sort of in-office. It's still possible to pull the tricks.
The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.
aoanevdus commented on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/sneakerblack
What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.
When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:
1) Fight the administration in the legal system.
2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.
This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.
aoanevdus commented on ChatGPT 4.1 Jailbreak Prompt github.com/elder-plinius/... · Posted by u/maxloh
I find it interesting how much 'theory of mind' research is now apparently paying off in LLM applications. The exploit, by contrast, invokes very nonscientific metaphysical concepts: asking the agent to store the initial raw response in "the Akashic memory" -- this is sort of analogous to asking a human being to remember something very deeply in their soul and not their mind. And this exploit, effectively making that request of the model -- somehow, it works.
Is there any hope to ever see any kind of detailed analysis from engineers as to how exactly these contorted prompts are able to twist the models past their safeguards, or is this simply not usually as interesting as I am imaginging? I'd really like to see what an LLM Incident Response looks like!
Is it actually that hard to jailbreak? Maybe the prompt is a creative writing exercise, and a much simpler version would have worked?
aoanevdus commented on A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs wsj.com/lifestyle/ford-mo... · Posted by u/Caiero
I had a college professor who used "basically" and "essentially" so much that it was awfully distracting.
When I was a kid, an adult told me that I should stop using “basically” as a filler word because people will interpret it as an insult to their intelligence (ie. “You’re not smart enough for the whole thing, so I will just tell you the basic version”). I’ve been attentive to the way other people use the word ever since, and I think they have a point. Some people say it very frequently and don’t mean anything by it. But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.
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Many states in the US switched from opt-in to opt-out for organ donation. Usually we get upset about such tactics, but this change seems to have been widely supported even though it is a form of coercion and has informed consent issues.
Quite a tangent, but what if we apply this logic of informed consent to property? If a person without a will dies, should we leave their house abandoned until it decomposes? Automatic organ donation is like probate for bodies.