- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “hidden”
This is very much like the 2008 disaster. You effectively have debt laundering happening whereby speculative income / debt is manufactured into higher grade than it is by passing through multiple parties / steps / debt-like vehicles that look independent but in fact incorporate cumulative risk built on highly correlated factors. Downstream party D has no visibility that the specific uncertainty emanating from party A upstream is 100% correlated with their own risks, along with parties B and C through which the liability passed on the way to them. What looks like independent risks are actually all the same risk and completely fragile to a single event that has quite a high probability of occurring.
This is a significant proportion of the market. Having this amount of money not understood is harmful.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “May be”
"An expert on a very niche subject" made me laugh out loud the hardest, because it's the one that's most "just a guy", and yet it's also exactly how it's described.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “an opinion on who will win the super bowl”
all of this stuff is very obviously sports betting. Kalshi can say the piss on our pantlegs is rain, but I don't feel very obligated to belive it. I recognize the legal argument, I personally think it's bunk, I think it's reasonable for a legislator to say it's bunk, and it is hardly settled to say that Utah can't do this.
In fact, we rewound to, say like 2010, this would be completely obvious that Utah is correct.
These founders should be in prison for promoting illegal gambling. Same federal charges mafiosos get caught on for a "friendly card game".
To me it's absolutely crazy that the "gamble on anything" apps are being advertised as some kind of polling software. I've already seen at least one race called into question because the gamblers bet on the wrong pony.
They're pure corruption engines designed for insider betting. The top brass of these companies need to be made example of.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “can interpret model weights”
GLENDOWE: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?
I can interpret weights too, but will that interpretation be correct?
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “working”
> Keep activity
> Keeping your activity lets you pick up chats where you left off anytime and helps improve Google services, including AI models. When this setting is off, Google still saves chats for 72 hours to respond to you and help keep Gemini safe.
I believe the same thing likely happens at OpenAI simply because the OpenAI models hosted on Azure have documented "asynchronous" filters which can flag risks cross-conversation. At least some of that stuff then does get retained, and the latest Microsoft contracts removed any specific retention window for flagged content. Again, assuming MAM (Microsoft's "ZDR") is not enabled. This type of architecture at Azure probably didn't arise in a vacuum. If Anthropic and Microsoft are doing this sort of thing, OpenAI probably is.
Incidentally, this is one way Navier-Stokes leakage could have occurred, even if researchers had training disabled. Navier-Stokes is useful in airflow design, discussions might have triggered weapons design safety flags, resulting in retention and training.
And like any responsible parents, they presumably also don't just defer to what they're elementary aged children "want to do with their life" nor feed into the exaggeration that "everybody else" does anything at all, let alone play tackle football.
If you disagree with the dangers of the sport or are afraid of shaping your children's life choices for their own benefit, that's fine for you, but the rhetorical and snide way you presume others should share that view seems strange.
I don't understand how Subaru stays in the business. Just how. It's a 4 digit time. Just broadcast it on CAN. Why not.
Also: a lot of these older, completely rectangular sat nav units actually follow what is colloqially known as "2DIN" standards. (cheap import Amazon)Aftermarket units are available and those can be swapped in with just a bit of work. That's what most people do when they have issues with the stock unit installed for their markets.
This car also inexplicably forced you to manually choose a country, and then a time zone, despite having a GPS that already knew exactly where you were and already had chosen a previous time zone.
Carplay is nice but I would have settled for a non-luxury "clock set" button.
My takeaway: You should have just gotten the SD card and trusted the previous owner. Sometimes "simple users" do know. ^^
Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.
(The pun in the blog name might also have been a hint)
As usual, some good practical advice (try to understand the societal context your navigating in; don't attempt to fix a problem before you have understood it in depth) which leads to some questionable conclusions (don't try to fix bad situations at all and just learn to accept the injustice because alternatives could be worse?) and then shifts into weird otherworldly stuff where I'm not sure if I'm dealing with scifi literature or things people are actually believing. (darkworld, Agor).
The whole thing has an unpleasant vibe to it that reminds me of the way "pickup artists" used to talk a decade ago.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “Better”
It's like watching that Sloth in Zootopia sometimes browsing the modern web.
First, the key result has nothing to do with making Qwen better at math, it just reduces reasoning loops.
Reasoning loops are a simple problem: the model generates the </think> token (which closes reasoning) with too low probability. You can fix this with simple steering approaches where you add a vector to different components of the LLM (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22048, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18167, etc). The method Astra used for identifying the vector is the standard procedure humans use (contrastive analysis). Such steering vector creation is basically the standard "intro-level interp project" for human researchers.
If you can code and understand LLM internals, you can do this yourself in 4-8 hours. The SWE equivalent would be doing binary patching with a debugger. Cool that frontier models can do this, but not unexpected since humans can do it without issue.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen”
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “this is insane […] I’m shook”
As someone who uses LLMs in their coding but doesn’t pay attention to every development this is why I find it all so exhausting. I keep feeling like I need to keep up to date but there’s no point reading incremental updates because everything is so overhyped.
* Thinking Like Transformers” by Weiss, Goldberg & Yahav (ICML 2021).: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06981
* Tracr: Compiled Transformers as a Laboratory for Interpretability https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05062 (code at https://github.com/deepmind/tracr)
So it's not really an "LLMs can modify weights" thing. Rather it's "LLMs can write programs that can write or modify weights". Indeed LLMs can write many programs, it's impressive.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “8088 Domination”
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post...
As it turns out, the video was encoded in such a way that it could be played back using the display bandwidth of the original PC, BUT doing that encoding required a modern computer to perform in a reasonable amount of time.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “mass appeal”
It is also interesting to read about the Amsterdamse School, an early 1900's style with "mass appeal" of which you can see many beautiful examples throughout the city, which were also only built thanks to strong support from the political sphere. https://architecture-history.org/schools/AMSTERDAM%20SCHOOL....
- Ordinary term used more than once in the same comment
- “cognitive surrender” appears 2 times
Most of the non-technical people I see using LLMs to create software are not engaging in "cognitive surrender" as far as I can tell.
They didn't read the code before and they don't now. However, asking questions and improving understanding of the system and architecture is actually faster and easier for them now than it used to be.
They're evaluating what they can see, i.e, judging results. They build things for their own use. They test them, iterate on them to meet their needs and try to achieve their vision. This is roughly the same process they followed when they used to outsource to an agency except the loop is much tighter.
It seems to work well, mainly hurts when the problems are invisible, so security, backups, breaking migrations, perf, maintenance over time (language / runtime updates, dep updates, server updates etc). All the stuff that hurts if you have never been responsible for the uptime of something before. Not knowing that software is never "done". But junior devs trip on those exact same things.
I agree with the tail of the article; tooling and processes that make that stuff more visible would close a lot of the gaps.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “Wind, Sand, and Stars”
On the same theme:
> the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience
- Einstein
> I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time
- Pascal
> Simplicity is a great virtue but requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate, and, to make matters worse, complexity sells better.
- Dijkstra.
Previously, pretty much everyone all agreed on YAGNI and KISS because code was so expensive to create and more expensive to maintain. Now the code generation is "free" - but at a design level, YAGNI and KISS do still matter. But they are enforced now only by sheer will power. You have to actively restrain the code from being created if you don't want it. Perfectly good code - I can't even fault it. I just know, if it doesn't need to exist yet, it's a mistake to create it earlier than needed.
This has become common now, and I've seen it ruin large projects until nobody understands the codebase full of verbose nonsensical code and comments. It becomes impossible to further develop the project without AI. Contributors not using AI for any reason are all leaving because no one enjoys working with mindless robots (and humans) as colleagues. It's demeaning and devaluing their labor and humanity. They're not getting "left behind", they are leaving the madness of crowds behind.
> ..the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward *persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence*.
We can all see it happening. As this technology permeates society, the challenge to maintain control, coherence, and quality will become greater and ever more serious - for example, AI in healthcare, military, management and governance.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “reliability gates agentic analytics”
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- Opening quote: “gates”
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “the gains showed up when tokens stopped being rationed”
At the same time, most of their junior devwork can be replaced completely by AI - so they really should start to learn how to work with it. I recommended everybody to get a private 20€/month claude subscription and use it for toy projects. I have younger devs (early 20s) in the team that told me they won't spend private money, or simply have no usecase in their private life for AI. We talk about software engineers here, and IMHO most of them are in denial of the fact that their skills have mostly become worthless if they don't start to pivot to something valueable.
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- Opening quote: “Block Audio and Video”
The challenge took me a few weeks to make because "calibrating" a disk (determining the geometry of the pregroove) is incredibly sensitive.
After the CTF I tried really hard to make a repeatable calibration process with the intent of building something releasable. I even ended up measuring the details on every CD-RW and CD-R I could buy on Amazon.
But despite trying very hard, I never did make calibration patterns that were reliable enough that I felt like other people would be willing to go through the process.
It seems someone else has succeeded where I failed. Great to see!
yet its title is:
> Small Business Cybersecurity: Non-Employer Firms (NIST Cybersecurity White Paper 50)
Small businesses don't identify as 'Non-Employer Firms', have no idea what 'NIST' is, most wouldn't know what a White Paper is, nor number 50.
'A Crash Course in Cybersecurity for Small Businesses' would be an improvement.
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- Opening quote: “SI”
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “SI”
It’s a darn fancy algorithm and a cool tool. Putting it on a pedestal instead of grounding it to reality is not going to help anyone. My condolences to the authors.
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- Opening quote: “a lay-language resource‘. IMO this misses the mark. Yes, it”
IMO this misses the mark. Yes, it’s a decent attempt at simplifying cybersecurity, but if this is aimed at entry-level, non-technical people, it’s not gonna work.
One of my earliest jobs was to redesign training materials for one of the worlds largest companies. I stripped the training to its core, the true basics, and started there. The results were remarkable. I feel the urge to do the same with this document…
Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.
Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “stock collapses”
Part of my research is in weight space learning. For starters, we have had the ability to edit weights, to generate new weights, to identify weights for a while. Here is an example for larger models as early as 2023: https://rome.baulab.info/
Weight space interpretability and learning is an active research community, has been for the past 3 years with many great papers. I suspect it is hitting non-interp folks harder because the authors hyped up their work, and people who are not in the field did not bother to read it before typing up X posts.
Some experiments here are done on very small models (20K params). We already know that small models are more interpretable. In fact, much of editing here you can do by hand. For Qwen, the model fixed a looping bug that may have been known apriori, and it is basically a steering vector, a very established technique. This is clear when they then attempt to "improve" math capability, and it doesn't work. For me, this paper rather shows that OpenAI has done training on mechinterp environment, in fact, maybe even on weight space learning datasets, which are open. But it does not show some insane "well past what we’d expect from humans or conventional algorithms" (from the blog post), more like past what I would expect from a large model with no specialized harness. I still think it is cool work, but do check out recent advances in autointerp, to ground your expectation.
On a personal note, I understand the need for promotion of your work, but I think healthy skepticism is fine too. Otherwise, your understanding of what problems need to be worked on and solved in science becomes warped.
> We find that frontier LLMs are surprisingly good at natively reading and writing neural network weights
This claim is backed up by the ability of Astra, given a text representation of the weights of tiny (20k) special-purpose models, to figure out what those models do and in some cases improve them beyond what RL could do just by reading the weights with no tool calls. They call this "weight-space programming".
> Likewise, asked to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math without gradients, Astra identifies an issue in its weights causing reasoning loops that Qwen’s own model card warns about, and fixes this by natively editing 0.016% of the weights
Here it did use tool calls, and seemingly used standard steering vector techniques to identify and fix reasoning loops in this small Qwen model. This doesn't seem that related to the previous results.
A model is _sort of_ designed to predict the next token in a string of text. But it's equally accurate to say it's designed to edit code until it passes a suite of unit tests.
Yes, they generate sequentially, so "next token predictor" isn't technically incorrect (which is why I chose the word "meaningless"). But it's pretty clear there's a mechanism inside them that allows them to "plan" what they generate. I might as well call you a next word predictor.
As others have said, while still absolutely insane, I don't find it completely out-of-the-blue surprising. One of the recurring abilities of (current-generation) LLMs seem to be to rapidly grasp very complex systems, where humans would need months or years to reach the same level of expertise.
You can see this in the way a coding agent can "understand" and explain sprawling legacy codebases in seconds.
You can also see it in the projects that are using them to reverse-engineer proprietary IoT protocols or computer games.
But those were all systems where we had detailed knowledge about what structures are there to be reverse-enginered.
If the models can transfer this ability to some other systems where we don't know the underlying structure then I think we will be in for a lot more craziness in the future. (Protein interaction networks? DNA sequences? Ecosystem interactions? Animal languages?)
As for weights, if the models really can analyze the semantics behind specific weights or directions, I have my hopes that they could also give a textual explanation or help designing tools to make "handcrafting" weights more practical in general.
The work done in this experiment could have also been done by a sufficiently motivated human with enough time to explore, though obviously we would need more tools to visualize and track things. There have been a lot of interesting LLM introspection tools that allow you to peek into the model and see what's being activated and run experiments to trigger it.
Are you familiar with abliterated or "uncensored" models where weights have been modified to avoid triggering refusal patterns? You take an LLM, create test cases that trigger the refusal pattern, observe weights involved in that response, then tweak those weights until the response is reduced. This is the same type of work, applied to a specific type of error that was impeding math within Qwen. That work can also be done with an LLM in a harness running the experiments. The amazing part here is that Astra was large enough to walk through the problem without other tooling doing it experimentally.
So I don't think your analogy of a human modifying a neuron is quite applicable. LLM weights are not neurons and they've been inspectable, by humans or LLMs in a harness, for a long time.
- Quoted phrase in the opening sentence
- Opening quote: “taught qwen math”
They also tried the same with Gemma 3 270M, which doesn't loop and is just bad at math, and Astra couldn't improve it. Still impressive, but it's more in the realm of what I'd expect, given labs are probably training their models on ML research and interpretability work.
It’s no secret that these big labs see “recursive self improvement” as a primary goal. It seems natural that the models would be explicitly trained to excel at all sorts of ML related tasks as a result. Is this one of those tasks, or is this emergent?
HA! Now that's cool. Not necessarily the improvements, those are ancient and probably overtrained benchmarks, but it's so cool that the model found a singular direction for this "loop bug". I imagine it could possibly do much the same thing in finding other "single directions" on a variety of topics (if allowed by guardrails). This is really really cool, especially for the mechinterp folks.
Astra can, without tooling, determine what games small networks are trained on, can edit the weights of networks directly to improve outcomes, and can hand edit a small qwen model to improve its math skills by like 5x.
I'm shook. If you'd asked me this morning whether LLMs have native understanding of their weights that is less than human <-> neuron understanding, the same as human or more than human, I would have said "same to less" depending on definitions.
No human can go edit a brain to become better at math. This is just very, very surprising to me and extremely interesting. I would guess this upsets quite a number of interp theories and philosophical takes on what's going on with these networks.
sudo iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -p tcp -m u32 ! --u32 "0>>24&0x0F=5" -j DROP
Most consumer routers run ancient stacks with all kinds of weird proprietary vendor patches that are tied to a specific kernel version. Looking at you Qualcomm!
However they generally also drop all traffic by default so from the WAN side they look like a black hole. I guess that's "safe" enough for most consumers.
For fun, take a look at the open PRs in the OpenWRT repos. Those people are doing some amazing work but it's also frustrating to see them struggle with things that _could_ be easy if the vendor made some slightly better choices.
I would strongly prefer something like OpenWRT though. Call me paranoid but after the last few weeks I'm increasingly less comfortable with connecting my devices to a blackbox.
"Freenode" in 2026 is an entity actively hostile to open source software and while what they say here might be true, they are only saying it because it aligns with their biases. They are not a real news source.
My mitigation for this lack of patches has been using iptables.
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m u32 --u32 "0>>24&0xF=6:15" -j DROPWe had finally heard about the Microsoft store on campus, and had heard about the super discounted software. Turned out you had to be an employee. We were crushed because retail copies of Win2k were expensive for high schoolers. So we sat out in front of the store with signs "will work for cheap Microsoft software." Finally this girl came by and asked what we were doing, she was an intern or a new hire or something like that not much older than us, still in college. She went into to store and came out with boxed copies of Win2k Workstation for $20 a pop for us. We were stoked and tried to give he some cash, but she was just happy to help us out.
Those were some good times. I wonder if stuff like that still happens today.
I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.
The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).
The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?
It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.
And what does “hardware and performance is there” mean? The latest Apple TV 4K has an A19 chip, same as the base iPhone 17. What console market are they eating alive with that exactly?
1. What you like doing
2. What you are good at doing
3. What people will pay you to do
For math, if your goal is to prove something that no one else has proven, then all three are under attack.I think the "egoless" path is taking a 50,000-foot view of mathematics that ignores the above lens. Sure, mathematics will survive and even prosper with AI, but what about the mathematicians?
In time, the profession of mathematics will evolve so a new task is at the center of the diagram--maybe it will be explaining math results to humans or teaching math to future mathematicians. I don't know. But it's easy to see that not everyone is going to be happy with the transition, and many will be left behind.
For software engineering, it depends on what your center is. If you like "writing code", then #3 is under attack. But for those whose goal is, "make something work", all three are still viable and even better than before (or at least faster).
That's why we see so much disagreement on HN about whether AI is good or bad for software engineering.
I'm sure lots of other people have made this observation before.
But it's pretty clear you can chuck "human pursuits" in the garbage, in favor of what really matters: intensification of the market system and wealth accumulation for its own sake.
Your technology leader thinks: Humanity? People? Who the fuck cares about that BS? Fuck 'em (or "I'll fuck 'em and make them like it"). I've got stuff to build and money to make.
> In the pursuit of knowledge, what ultimately drives people is what they themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides, both based on their own experience and people whose opinions they value.
It's pretty clear the message we're getting is "what [people] themselves can understand, and the meaning these understanding provides" doesn't matter, and if you care about that you're an sentimental piece of garbage.
The difference is whether it is an executory contract.
If I sign a contract committing me to spend $10m in the future, but the other party is obligated to deliver that $10m of services, that is an executory contract and it is not considered a liability under IFRS because the commitment is contingent on the other party performing.
You're mixing this up with property leases, which create a debt because the tenant has obtained a Right of Use (ROU) asset, which is offset by the debt (lease payments). Leasing a property for ten years gives you both an asset and an offset liability, but only once the lease has commenced.
An obligation to pay that is contingent on the other party's performance of a contract is absolutely not a "debt".
Now, once that data center is built and turned over to the client, that may create an ROU that would generate both an asset (the ROU) and the offsetting liability. But if it's some future data center that will be built, it does not.
Even then, once the data center is built, an ROU may not be created: if the commitment is for a million GPU hours, with the seller having some freedom on how to deliver those GPU hours, that does not create an ROU. If it's for 100 specific GPUs for 10,000 hours each, it does, because it's about the right of use for those specific pieces of property.
For lease accounting, the asset and debt are only created at the point the lease begins, not the signing of the contract, so your reference to IFRS isn't relevant here.