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MatrixMantis

@matrixmantis

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29.11.2024
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Latest posts by MatrixMantis @matrixmantis

By all means yes let's pull out, but it might be too late to avoid the expensive part.

The petrodollar is based on promises about the completeness of US protection for the gulf states. I'm not sure what could be done to give Iran an incentive to stop deteriorating faith in that promise.

09.03.2026 21:18 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

You lose your shot at jury nullification if you miss and hit somebody's car. Also you gotta have a hell of an arm.

08.03.2026 14:04 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I would suggest a disguise.

08.03.2026 05:47 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

They exist: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumh...

But I think this photo was edited.

In real ones the color is distributed radially from a point source, not all swirly like this, because the refractive index of water is constant (unlike, say, the the thickness of an oil slick).

08.03.2026 00:34 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I think his handlers would love us to believe that democracy is a threat. A nuke would be an effective cherry on top for them.

07.03.2026 22:02 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Might be he wanted us to be low on ammo at a certain time.

07.03.2026 21:21 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

If we make it about which sorts of people are worth the oxygen they consume, we become value-addled just like the people we oppose.

They're worth protecting from measles because they're people, not because they're the right kind of people.

07.03.2026 21:04 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

We would be so much better off if the conversation could move on to why this vaccine is safer than that one, or why this pathogen is more dangerous than that one. They're incredibly diverse.

Like, do the anti vaxxers even know that measles occasionally causes brain damage?

07.03.2026 20:53 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Jesus said give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and all of the money was Caesar's. If you wanted to feed the hungry without magic, Barabas was your guy--which is why the richest men on earth had him killed.

07.03.2026 20:41 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I thought about making some kind of paint thrower, but I'm a lousy shot, and I figure I'd spoil whatever audience goodwill I've mustered if I end up painting somebody's car by mistake.

Gotta stay within the bounds of what's likely to be jury-nullified.

07.03.2026 20:36 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

3D printed drones powered by compressed air that only need to stay aloft for 10 seconds to do their job... that sort of thing. It could be a lot of fun.

07.03.2026 20:17 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

If it caught on, people might get competative with how quickly/creatively they could pull it off. Like, I imagine you could make a sort of kite that might land/ensnare a set of cameras, that sort of thing.

07.03.2026 20:15 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

I didn't see that apparatus but it sounds right. I'm imagining a rig where I can hoist a piece of fabric up and over and then pull. Drawstring cinches so the whole top of the pole is in a bag.

Best done near a traffic jam so it's kinda like performance art.

07.03.2026 20:14 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Current idea involves fabric string and poles, but it's a work in progress.

07.03.2026 19:45 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

If the government uses OpenAI to power mass surveillance, you could blind enough cameras that OpenAI doesn't have enough data to do a good job. That would help anybody who competes with OpenAI.

07.03.2026 15:35 👍 9 🔁 1 💬 3 📌 0

Electric motors towing a generator, that's how the diesel powered trains do it also.

07.03.2026 03:18 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The existing stuff validates the new stuff which can then be used to as existing stuff to validate even more new stuff. and as long as you don't get greedy, you can get pretty good results doing this.

06.03.2026 20:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

You can use an NMG to generate a harness that uses these sources of truth to constrain its outputs, so that your prompting doesn't have to do the heavy lifting.

Not sure if that still counts as vibe coding, my only point is that you don't then need additional tests for your generated harness.

06.03.2026 20:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Most new stuff still has to integrate with existing systems, consume existing data, and maintain baseline assumptions about existing telemetry.

06.03.2026 20:46 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Well for those things, I google it or write it myself. It's only the tests that were previously not economical to run at all that I'm using AI for.

06.03.2026 18:39 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

But none of that would justify the use of "handcuffs". I'm worried about people taking the threat of such attacks too lightly. I think it's important that we maintain an appropriately paranoid posture regarding these things.

06.03.2026 18:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Also, Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Service Model" is great fun, and its plot is echoing around in my mind presently.

06.03.2026 18:20 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

There's a lot to talk about re: the likelihood, efficacy, and defense against attacks of that nature--but all of that would distract from my point. I needed an arbitrary bad thing that's obviously worth preventing as a stand-in.

06.03.2026 18:17 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

The likelihood of that happening is below acceptable tolerances.

06.03.2026 18:12 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Sure, it's possible that there's a bug in the generated AST-checker which then translates to non-equivalent rust being generated. But the generated code would have to compile, lint, and pass all of the same tests that the c++ preimage did (more handcuffs, not all are tests).

06.03.2026 18:12 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Here's a good example: ladybird.org/posts/adopti...

They generated a test harness which failed unless there was AST-level equivalence between the c++ code and rust code. Then they used the AST-checker as handcuffs to ensure that their generated rust code was equivalent.

06.03.2026 18:11 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

Humans engaging in prompt injection attacks, seeding malicious training data, or tampering at the API boundary between myself and the model would be the malicious ones.

06.03.2026 18:02 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

As for the "handcuffs" usage, it's a potentially malicious object, like a robot that might try to stab me.

I get that restraints don't summon warm fuzzy vibes, but this is a situation where keeping humans safe means not worrying about whether the robot consents to being tied up.

06.03.2026 17:50 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

The idea that someone understands the whole thing has been a lie for decades. There's room for rigorous empiricism here.

06.03.2026 17:43 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

No, Descartes. You can use the code to test the tests, and you can use the tests to test the code. The scientific method gives us a way to bootstrap knowledge in contexts where we don't know whether it's the apparatus or the loaded object that's behaving surprisingly.

06.03.2026 17:43 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 3 📌 0