benlivengood (u/benlivengood)

benlivengood commented on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed jamesdrandall.com/posts/t... · Posted by u/jamesrandall

benlivengood · 12 hours ago

The contrast between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923543 (Software engineering is back) is kind of stark. I am using frontier models to get fun technical projects done that I simply didn't have time for since my late teens. It is still possible to understand an architecture down to the hardware if you want to, but it can happen a lot faster. The specifications are queryable now. Obscure bugs that at least one person has seen in the past are seconds away instead of minutes or hours of searching. Even new bugs have extra eyes on them. I haven't written a new operating system yet but it's now a tractable problem. So is using Lean or Julia or some similar system to formally specify it. So far I've been digging into modern multithreaded cache performance which is just as fascinating as directly programming VGA and sound was in the early PC days. Linux From Scratch is still up to date. You can get FPGAs that fit in your USB port [0]. Technical depth and low-level understanding is wherever you want to look for it.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/fomu

benlivengood commented on Luce: First Electric Ferrari ferrari.com/en-US/auto/fe... · Posted by u/kaizenb

MindSpunk · a day ago

Acceleration is about the only selling point of a sports EV.

They're so ungodly heavy because of the batteries that they handle like barges. They need giant tyres and so much ESC and software control because these things weigh almost 2000kg or more. You can try and work around it but there's only so much that can be done to make 2000kg take a corner.

Looking at where sports cars will be in 10 years with ICEs being regulated out of existence makes me very sad because it seems like we're about to see the death of the lightweight sports car.

benlivengood · a day ago

The McMurtry Spéirling is under 1000kg. Battery technology will only improve and so I expect to see under-1500kg sport EVs generally available eventually.

Under 1000kg for a reasonable price probably means building your own electrified exocar.

benlivengood commented on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk research.google/blog/hard... · Posted by u/aleyan

benlivengood · a day ago

I'm really curious what their data looks like at the various racetracks and circuits. Fun fact; most raceways have accurate street-level indicators (including that they are one-way, but sadly they are not the best racing line) on most online maps, and my car did complain to me in its weekly report about a lot of hard turns, quick acceleration, and hard braking with helpful pins on e.g. Laguna Seca or Thunderhill corners.

In theory, the most dangerous turns would probably have higher variance on hard braking data.

benlivengood commented on Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds blog.google/innovation-an... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

in-silico · 12 days ago

Everyone here seems too caught up in the idea that Genie is the product, and that its purpose is to be a video game, movie, or VR environment.

That is not the goal.

The purpose of world models like Genie is to be the "imagination" of next-generation AI and robotics systems: a way for them to simulate the outcomes of potential actions in order to inform decisions.

benlivengood · 12 days ago

Agreed; everyone complained that LLMs have no world model, so here we go. Next logical step is to backfill the weights with encoded video from the real world at some reasonable frame rate to ground the imagination and then branch the inference on possible interventions (actions) in the near future of the simulation, throw the results into a goal evaluator and then send the winning action-predictions to motors. Getting timing right will probably require a bit more work than literally gluing them together, but probably not much more.

benlivengood commented on What Will You Do When AI runs Out of Money and Disappear? louwrentius.com/what-will... · Posted by u/louwrentius

benlivengood · 18 days ago

I dunno, GPT-OSS and Llama and QWEN and any half dozen of other large open-weight models?

I really can't imagine OpenAI or Anthropic turning off inference for a model that my workplace is happy to spend >$200*person/month on. Google still has piles of cash and no reason to turn off Gemini.

The thing is, if inference is truly heavily subsidized (I don't think it is, because places like OpenRouter charge less than the big players for proportionally smaller models) then we'd probably happily pay >$500 a month for the current frontier models if everyone gave up on training new models because of some oddball scaling limit.

benlivengood commented on Claude's new constitution anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

staticassertion · 20 days ago

You can be a physicalist and still a moral realist. James Fodor has some videos on this, if you're interested.

benlivengood · 19 days ago

Granted, if humans had utility functions and we could avoid utility monsters (maybe average utilitarianism is enough) and the child in the basement (if we could somehow fairly normalize utility functions across individuals so that it was well-defined to choose the outcome where the minimum of everyone's utility functions is maximized [argmax_s min(U_x(s)) for all people in x over states s]) then I'd be a moral realist.

I think we'll keep having human moral disagreements with formal moral frameworks in several edge cases.

There's also the whole case of anthropics: how much do exact clones and potentially existing people contribute moral weight? I haven't seen a solid solution to those questions under consequentialism yet; we don't have the (meta)philosophy to address them yet; I am 50/50 on whether we'll find a formal solution and that's also required for full moral realism.

benlivengood commented on Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke? eieio.games/blog/ssh-send... · Posted by u/eieio

shadowgovt · 19 days ago

But they'd have to be on the same network as me to do that attack, right?

benlivengood · 19 days ago

Yep, like ECHELON and friends are. The metadata recorded about your (all of our) traffic is probably enough to perform the timing attack.

benlivengood commented on Claude's new constitution anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

joshuamcginnis · 20 days ago

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning.

> We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations.

This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards in favor of fluid, human-defined "practical wisdom" and "ethical motivation." Without objective anchors, "good values" become whatever Anthropic's team (or future cultural pressures) deem them to be at any given time. And if Claude's ethical behavior is built on relativistic foundations, it risks embedding subjective ethics as the de facto standard for one of the world's most influential tools - something I personally find incredibly dangerous.

benlivengood · 20 days ago

Deontological, spiritual/religious revelation, or some other form of objective morality?

The incompatibility of essentialist and reductionist moral judgements is the first hurdle; I don't know of any moral realists who are grounded in a physical description of brains and bodies with a formal calculus for determining right and wrong.

I could be convinced of objective morality given such a physically grounded formal system of ethics. My strong suspicion is that some form of moral anti-realism is the case in our universe. All that's necessary to disprove any particular candidate for objective morality is to find an intuitive counterexample where most people agree that the logic is sound for a thing to be right but it still feels wrong, and that those feelings of wrongness are expressions of our actual human morality which is far more complex and nuanced than we've been able to formalize.

benlivengood commented on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced github.com/anthropics/ori... · Posted by u/myahio

legel · 20 days ago

One could use any number of LLMs on real-world problems.

Why are we still interviewing like its 1999?

benlivengood · 20 days ago

Because if you want to hire engineers then you have to ask engineering questions. Claude and GPT and Gemini are super helpful but they're not autonomous coders yet so you need an actual engineer to vet their outcome still.

benlivengood commented on IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT johnmaguire.me/blog/ipv6-... · Posted by u/johnmaguire

tsimionescu · 20 days ago

And if you have only the first line, what will happen if someone sends a request to the NAT's external IP on some random port?

benlivengood · 20 days ago

Without at least some filtering a Gateway NAT appliance is vulnerable to:

* LAN IP address spoofing from the WAN

* Potential for misconfigured "internal" daemons to accept WAN traffic (listening on 0.0.0.0 instead of the LAN or localhost)

* Reflection amplification attacks