With llms there is a secondary training step to turn a foundational model into a chat bot. Is these something similar going on with these image generation models, that is making them all tend towards making pretty clean images and stopping them making half eaten food even if they have the capabilities?
Readit Newstotetsu commented on The Generative Burrito Test generativist.com/notes/20... · Posted by u/pathdependent
totetsu commented on Implications of AI to schools twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bilsbie
One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment.
Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.
on a side note, I wonders if anyone submitting code to github is feeling the same way about the "duplication detection filter" type AI guardrails.
totetsu commented on The patent office is about to make bad patents untouchable eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11... · Posted by u/iamnothere
> I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated.
How would that actually work?
TLS runs on the client and the server. There's no "TLS magic box" in between.
https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-controls/t...
Like let’s say you have a proxy server like Nginx on a server with a public facing ip address and then it also has access to a private subnet where your application servers are running. A visitor to your website’s browser make a secure https connection the nginx server where https would be terminated and then it would proxy traffic in plain http over your internal private subnet to the app server. And your are in a five eyes country where your intelligence services took it on themselves to follow the nsa or fbis instructions and plug a network device into those private subnets of all the big service providers inside their datacenters that is configured in something like a promiscuous way so it receives all the packets for any device on the network. Then those packets somehow end up in a big nsa datalake.. or something along those lines
totetsu commented on The patent office is about to make bad patents untouchable eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11... · Posted by u/iamnothere
Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
[1] https://threatpost.com/facebook-kills-firesheep-new-secure-b...
I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.
totetsu commented on Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory element.io/blog/verifying... · Posted by u/LorenDB
What is verification? What does it involve doing? A lot of information on why it's useful, but how is it implemented? I hope it's not something like the Play Integrity API, but with no information to go on, I can't say either way.
https://element.io/en/help#encryption-device-verification
> After Alice logs in on a new device, she uses her cryptographic identity to demonstrate to Bob that the new device genuinely belongs to her, rather than being added by someone else with access to her account. She can do this either by entering her recovery key (which gives the new device immediate access to her cryptographic identity ), or by carrying out an interactive verification from an existing verified device.
totetsu commented on Pebble, Rebble, and a path forward ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-... · Posted by u/phoronixrly
Agreed -- While I admire their work in keeping the lights on, Rebble doesn't necessarily make sense in a world where the "real" Pebble company has returned.
Keep in mind that this is their goal statement (straight from their FAQ):
> Our goal is to maintain and advance Pebble functionality, in the absence of Pebble Technology Corp.
Eric's new company, by effectively re-creating Pebble Technology Corp, is an existential threat to that mission: If there is someone else maintaining and advancing Pebble functionality, then what is the purpose of Rebble? It does seem unfortunate though -- I hope they can all work something out.
Maybe they need a secret ‘Second Rebble’, hidden within Pebble, to take over if it collapses again.
totetsu commented on The obvious economics of preserving the Amazon economist.com/the-america... · Posted by u/gwintrob
from about 8:30 in this lecture there is a good description of the phrase "ecosystem services"
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/envi...
totetsu commented on Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models github.com/p-e-w/heretic... · Posted by u/melded
So does that mean if Heretic is used for models like Deepseek and Qwen it can talk about subjects 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Uyghur forced labor claims, or the political status of Taiwan. I am trying to understand the broader goals around such tools.
There is already ablated Deepseek models out there that will do just that.
https://huggingface.co/NaniDAO/deepseek-r1-qwen-2.5-32B-abla...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in...
totetsu commented on IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs codeberg.org/IDEmacs/IDEm... · Posted by u/nogajun
Whoever thinks that VSCode does not have any learning curve or is somehow magically easy, needs to take a reality check, that thing is overwhelming with all its popups, hovers, sidebars etc. beyond all reason when you first run it (and later too). I'm an Emacs user and I don't in any way support the notion it's somehow easy or intuitively workable, it's most definitely not and never has been. I just think that VSCode is not it either, it's just the more popular tool right now.
I get so frustrated watching people fuss around in VSCode because they're stuck in it and they've never had the opportunity to see all the intuitive and more workable tools that a.. just part of the basic OS they are using. .. like keeping their console a tab taking up 1/4 the screen and trying to read a stack-trace ..
I like the Qwen models and use them for other tasks successfully. It is so interesting how LLMs will do quite well in one situation and quite badly in another.