Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | sowbug's commentslogin

Still holding my breath for the app that puts up a dialog on every launch asking "would you like to try our web version?"


The article is a bit of a strawman, and a bit of an advertisement for a security consultancy. If you ask someone else to pick a password for you, then it's a secret known by two people. So don't do that. That was true a thousand* years ago. It's still true today.

*I know, I know, hash functions didn't exist on Earth a thousand years ago. Still true.


I urge you to actually read the article, because it doesn't say anything about the risks of the LLM knowing your password (e.g., stored in server-side logs), it talks about LLMs generating predicatable passwords because they are deterministic pattern-following machines.

While the loss of secrecy between you and the LLM provider is a legitimate risk, the point of the article was that you should only use vetted RNGs to generate passwords, because LLMs will frequently generate identical secure-looking passwords when asked to do so repeatedly, meaning that all a bad actor has to do is collect the most frequent ones and go hunting.

The loss of secrecy between you and the LLM only poses a risk if the LLM logs are compromised, exposing your generated passwords. The harvesting of commonly-generated passwords from LLMs poses a much broader attack surface for anyone who uses this method, because any attacker with access to publicly available LLMs can start mining commonly generated passwords and using them today without having to compromise anything first.


You're right; I could have phrased the issue better, though I certainly did read the article. Let me try again: letting someone else pick a password for you requires you to trust that they did it well, and you get no benefit in exchange for that trust. That's true for other humans, websites, and now LLMs.

You could zoom out a bit and rephrase the question.

Your great-aunt Ida died and left you a consulting team of ten pretty good software engineers. The team's contracts all just ended, so starting tomorrow they'll be idle. Ida said you must run the business for at least two years (fortunately, overhead is already paid for), or forfeit your share of the inheritance. After that you can keep going or liquidate it.

What do you do?


I am concerned that local models will never benefit from the training on live requests that is surely improving cloud-only models.

This might be the cost of privacy, and it might be worth paying, unless cloud models reach an inflection point that make local models archaic.


There’s been some success training models on top of differential privacy.

I imagine that with live requests it would be quite challenging but not impossible, assuming you could somehow sanitize all sorts of private data that people throw at these prompts.



Would be interesting to see whether spatial reasoning from gaming shows the same association.

This is indeed interesting because rotating 2D screen is not necessarily the same type of brain processing as experiencing things fly around you. Even VR is not necessarily the same, because knowing you're safe may be different from taking the situation seriously. Could be same, could be completely different.

But the first massively popular 3D games started end of 90s which means Alzheimer cases for them will pop up only around 2060 or later (average onset year 75 minus being 15 years kid during 90s).


Besides safety, there is also the cognitive complexity angle.

Plus, digital environments are explicitly designed to be engaging: authors are putting intentional thought into making the virtual space easy to navigate so that the player doesn't get frustrated and go do something else.

Meanwhile, the physical world is something we're pretty much stuck in, and material spaces tend to be optimized not so much to be engaging to navigate and explore - more to be comfortable to inhabit, etc.

Besides, physical spaces - e.g. cities - tend to be iteratively developed over generations, bearing the hallmarks of many different thinking minds, and not optimized for any one particular user flow.


> ...if you explicitly state that you want to take part in a demonstration against the elected government.

Cambridge Dictionary's definition of a free country: a country where the government does not control what people say or do for political reasons and where people can express their opinions without punishment.


They were talking about citizens there, not random people from other countries.

Nowhere in the definition of a free country does it state that you have to be a citizen.

Even in the US constitution that is not the case. Unalienable rights extend to everyone under the constitutions jurisdiction, which includes people who are not citizens. Even aliens get due process in the US. Or should, anyway, if we didn't have anti-American leadership.


When defining a Constitution for a country, to whom would you direct the constitutional precepts? Surely it would only be for people that were to be governed by the constitutional government. China, for example, would not cover American citizens in their Constitution.

The US constitution explicitly covers people who are not US citizens. It's not up for interpretation, you're just wrong.

I hoovered up all the hardcover copies I could and for many years gave them as gifts to my teammates after our projects shipped. Mostly as thanks for a job well done, and just a tiny bit as an apology for what they'd just been through.

Did your team work similar jobs as described in the book? That must be fantastic! Yeah I know most of work is 80% chore, but at least the other 20% part is fantastic.

Entirely software, far above the Hardy Boys and Microkids in the stack. But the general pace and pressure of the story are still relatable.

I got the same vibes, by the way, from Season One of Halt and Catch Fire (recently and deservedly discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314).


I can't confirm it, but I think a few of the scenes from Halt and Catch Fire come from Soul of a New Machine.

Thanks for sharing!

Just in case anyone else nerd-sniped themselves this morning... if things fall at the same rate in a vacuum, regardless of their mass, why does it matter if one side of a die is heavier than the rest? I didn't know, and I had to look it up.

It's correct that a biased die will fall without bias. But when it hits the surface and starts tumbling, it tends to rotate around the center of gravity, which will be closer to the heavy side, and the die wants to end up in the orientation with the "lowest gravitational potential energy." If that term isn't part of your lexicon, then think of a Weebil toy.


Perhaps also worth noting that you generally shake the die before releasing it. Thus even if you drop it straight down through a vacuum, you would have done the center-of-mass-impacted-tumbling in your hands first.


I’m not sure how much of an effect it has, but dice aren’t rolled in a vacuum. There is buoyancy from the air that can roll the dice heavy side down. Which is what the saline water test is testing.


Not just bouyancy but friction. An off-center mass moving through anything but vacuum is a dart with fins.

Or is bouyancy just used as a shorthand term for the effect of fins? Because literal bouyancy would also be a thing here. But the literal bouyancy points away from the center of the Earth while the friction points away from the direction of travel.


Ironically, for me it was the “Weebil toy” that isn't part of my lexicon. (I've looked it up now. They're actually called Weebles and we don't seem to have that in Germany.)


:) I'm not sure I ever saw the word in print! But I loved the ones I had as a kid.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: