Name one literal no-strings-attached blank cheque to a large company in the last 20 years
Perhaps not strictly “no-strings-attached” but many of the 2008 bailouts were functionally mechanisms to avoid nationalisation.
Readit Newsspacebanana7 commented on U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel cnbc.com/2025/08/22/intel... · Posted by u/givemeethekeys
They can't really. This data is almost always self-reported. They can attempt to eliminate common confounds but the data is very noisy. People have a lot of bias and inaccuracies when reporting the primary data. Even questions like "how many cigarettes per day/week/month/year do you smoke?" is subject to enormous inaccuracies. And the more questions re confounds which are asked, the more the noise, and the lower the number of questionnaires returned. And no matter how many confounds are included in the questionnaires, there are likely a thousand more which also matter. It's a fairly major issue in health research, and why we so often see headlines with conflicting findings every few years. See research into the health of eggs, for example. One should be highly skeptical of correlative health evidence at this point (and this is what most of the clickbait studies are). Instead, try to focus on the causative research where they identify specific genes or chemical mechanisms which cause outcomes. This is much more difficult, of course, and sparse.
I wish there was more causative research where nutrition was artificially changed in a highly managed population. For example in a prison or military barracks.
I suspect there's a lot we could learn about the health of eggs, for example, if we could just pay some prisoners to eat varying quantities of them for 20 years, then look at the development of their health.
spacebanana7 commented on LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/flail
Most of these attacks succeed because app developers either don’t trust role boundaries or don’t understand them. They assume the model can’t reliably separate trusted instructions (system/developer rules) from untrusted ones (user or retrieved data), so they flippantly pump arbitrary context into the system or developer role.
But alignment work has steadily improved role adherence; a tonne of RLHF work has gone into making sure roles are respected, like kernel vs. user space.
If role separation were treated seriously -- and seen as a vital and winnable benchmark (thus motivate AI labs to make it even tighter) many prompt injection vectors would collapse...
I don't know why these articles don't communicate this as a kind of central pillar.
Fwiw I wrote a while back about the “ROLP” — Role of Least Privilege — as a way to think about this, but the idea doesn't invigorate the senses I guess. So, even with better role adherence in newer models, entrenched developer patterns keep the door open. If they cared tho, the attack vectors would collapse.
> They assume the model can’t reliably separate trusted instructions (system/developer rules) from untrusted ones (user or retrieved data)
No current model can reliably do this.
spacebanana7 commented on MCP doesn't need tools, it needs code lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/8/1... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko
My coding agent just has access to these functions:
ask> what all tools u have?
I have access to the following tools:
1 code_search: Searches for a pattern in the codebase using ripgrep.
2 extract_code: Extracts a portion of code from a file based on a line range.
3 file_operations: Performs various file operations like ls, tree, find, diff, date, mkdir, create_file.
4 find_all_references: Finds all references to a symbol (function, class, etc.) from the AST index.
5 get_definition: Gets the definition of a symbol (function, class, etc.) from the AST index.
6 get_library_docs: Gets documentation for a library given its unique ID.
7 rename_symbol: Renames a symbol using VS Code. 8 resolve_library_id: Resolves a library name to a unique library ID.
what do i need MCP and other agents for? This is solving most of my problems already.
Which coding agent are you using?
spacebanana7 commented on MCP doesn't need tools, it needs code lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/8/1... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko
Yeah I quite agree with this take. I don't understand why editors aren't utilizing language servers more for making changes. Crazy to see agents running grep and sed and awk and stuff, all of that should be provided through a very efficient cursor-based interface by the editor itself.
And for most languages, they shouldn't even be operating on strings, they should be operating on token streams and ASTs
It's so weird that codex/claude code will manually read through sometimes dozens of files in a project because they have no easy way to ask the editor to "Find Usages".
Even though efficient use of CLI tools might make the token burn not too bad, the models will still need to spent extra effort thinking about references in comments, readmes, and method overloading.
> Before Brexit I would have said so too.
Given the dubbing of Gerry Adams, the coverage of Iraq/Afghanistan war crimes, and anything related to Ireland, I don't know you could possibly have believed this.
It was just that pre-Brexit, you agreed with the propaganda.
Propaganda is perhaps at its most poisonous when it's stuff you agree with. It's so much harder to see, and likely far more effective at bypassing our critical thinking.
Deleted Comment
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj3l0e4vr0ko
I strongly suspect it's also meant to curtail growing support among youth for Palestine in the Israel/Gaza conflict.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/665564933022223
Essentially creating an internet for children/teens that echos the government narrative.
The online safety act was drafted long before Oct 2023.
But broadly I agree, in the sense that the government are uncomfortable with political movements they lack the ability to shape or control.
In hindsight it's incredible just how much influence the British government has historically had over media. The largest TV and radio stations were often directly government owned (BBC, Radio 1, Channel 4) and many newspapers are vulnerable to defamation / contempt of court accusations / injunctions when they sway too far from the official narratives. Especially on any issue adjacent to criminal justice.
Of course, they'll say all of the state owned media operated without political direction. And that regulators / prosecutors operated in a politically neutral fashion with due process and impartiality.
spacebanana7 commented on Another reason to use expendable email addresses for everything utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve
It's incredible how much information some people express through their email address. Patterns like:
"[firstname].[lastname].[year of birth]@gmail.com"
are still surprisingly common and indicate race, gender and age. These persistent addresses can also be cross referenced to various leaked datasets to get everything from phone numbers to dietary habits.
spacebanana7 commented on Ask HN: Is the rise of AI tools going to be the next 'dot com' bust? · Posted by u/Dicey84
There's a persistent pessimism - almost to the point of paranoia - in tech from the trauma of the dot come bust. People fear waves of mass layoffs and 99% reductions in the value of their companies.
In reality most things go in an S curve and the excitement fades in a rather boring way. People were worried about bubbles in 2016, but they never really happened.
There was never a mobile bust, or a social bust, or a big data bust. These things just got boring after a while and the valuations stabilised. Sometimes companies went bust and sometimes they kept growing, but the super exponential growth in validation stopped. And we moved on to talking about the next thing.