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So, did your Claude switch from "You're absolutely right!" to "You're absolutely right." or was it deeper than that?

I'd say it was a little deeper than that, it stopped conveying any kind of enthusiasm.

Personally I think that is a good thing. I have asked all AIs not to show enthusiasm, express superlatives (e.g. "massive" is a Gemini favourite) and stop using words which I guess come from consuming too many Silicon Valley-style investor slidedecks (risk, trap, ...).

The AI has no soul, no mind, no feelings, no genuine enthusiasm... I want it to be pleasant to deal with but I don't want it to try and fake emotions. Don't manipulate me. Maybe it's a different use case than you but I think the best AI is more like an interactive and highly specific Wikipedia, manual or calculator. A computer.


When I see the word "genuine" or "why this works" my uncanny valley spidey senses tingle now. It always seems like it's trying to paper over a flawed argument with these, so instead of making it, it just "turns out" it's "genuinely" the answer

I can appreciate that. I don't mind when models channel some personality, it can make whatever we are working on more interesting. I don't perceive it as manipulation. But it is nice that they are pretty good at sticking to instructions that don't call for nuance. I imagine if you tell it, "you are a wikipedia article", that is exactly the output you would get.

I'd imagine that at minimum, the team in charge of patching the vulnerability would need to review how the exploit works.

id imagine that they received more than just the poc in the report they received

That doesn't make reviewing the POC any less valuable.

what value do you believe renaming the variable from "g" to something else provides the linux maintainers?

It makes the exploit code more readable. We all love to laugh at C folks but for real, even Linux kernel maintainers care about readability.

If you have a choice between posting minimized exploit code, and posting regular exploit code, posting minimized code is virtually always the wrong choice.

If you have a choice between pointing out the byte size of the exploit, and not pointing out the byte size of the exploit, pointing it out is virtually always the wrong choice.

In both cases, doing the right thing is less work. So somebody is going the extra way to ensure they are doing it wrong. If they didn't care, they'd end up doing it right by default.


For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?

My imagination was leaning more into the educational side than the research side of university. I see how that wouldn't be appreciated by a patron, but when you get search grants, isn't the topic discussed before starting and paying for the research? Also that is kind of the point, why topics are cleared with the chair-holding professor, which is expected to be already experienced in the subject to know where the knowledge needs to be expanded.

I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.

It's a similar idea, but that's a DOS menu. At the point when the menu appears, MS-DOS 7.1 has already been loaded.

Stupid question but... would bundling the binary with an ASM port of something that could run this technically make it possible to run without the OS?

I realize this is basically doing docker for DOS games and incredibly stupid, I'm just curious about the thought experiment


Well, the "ASM port of something that could run this" would be the OS...

Right. I guess I mean like an app specific OS haha

Possibly stripped down to only support that game, but basically yeah

Probably your parents setting it up?

As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble.

I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.


I bet it wasn't actually the bootloader but something with autoexec.bat - you could setup choices in it and windows was just one launch option.

Well, if you treat DOS as a bootloader for Windows 98 - which it was actually - then modifying autoexec.bat would count as setting up the bootloader.

No, I set it up. My parents were non-technical. I had a CD-ROM re-release of Worms for DOS from one gaming magazine or another. I guess the installer set it up somewhere somehow but I remember it wasn't easy to get it installed and there were further problems trying to launch it. It's possible the installer itself was a DOS program, not a Windows program.

MS-DOS Shell was one popular option to do this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell

Brown Bag PowerMenu was another.

https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/15739/software-spotl...


Residential vs. business. If the graph was hourly and per country, you'd see the same rise every morning and drop every evening (likely by more than 5pp).


Your mention of per-country reminded me that Google is probably using UTC for those timestamps. 11:59 PM UTC is 8:59 AM the next day in Japan (UTC+9), so Japanese people getting online early Saturday morning would register as accessing Google services on "Friday" until the time hits 9:00 AM in their timezone. Likewise Korea (also UTC+9) until 9:00 AM local, China (UTC+8) until 8:00 AM local, Vietnam (UTC+7) until 7:00 AM local, and so on.

Which means that if Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, and other east Asian countries have a higher IPv6 adoption in residential vs business ISPs, then their Saturday-morning Internet access is likely part of the 1-2pp bump on Fridays in this chart.

P.S. Also, none of Japan, Korea, China, or Vietnam use daylight savings time (very sensible of them), so their UTC offsets are the same year-round. So their Saturday-morning contributions to the Friday chart will not vary from month to month due to timezone slippage, because they will never gain nor lose an hour relative to UTC. It might vary a little with actual seasons, as the sun rises later or earlier... but so many people use alarms to get up at 6:00 AM no matter what the sun is doing, rather than rising with daylight, so the amount of early-morning Internet access in winter months is not going to change significantly compared to summer when the sun rises earlier.


Umm... remember how people in late last century used to pay $30-50/month for cable TV that was at least 25% ads by volume? And that's in last century dollars, comparable to $100 today.


Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.


I'm not saying that Firefox on Android has significant market share; rather that Android has significant market share, and those users could be served by switching to Firefox solely for the purpose of using an adblocker.

If all Android users did this, something would change.


> something would change

Google would make it harder to install Firefox? Like they are already doing with anything not on their approved list?


The point is it’s easy. It’s near frictionless. Unlike a lot of pie in the sky statements I see here like how “easy” it is to install and run Linux (it isn’t), Firefox adoption is truly trivial for any smartphone user and presents a stronger baseline than chrome does. People here often get critical of Firefox/Mozilla, and I totally get it, but compared to Google Chrome it doesn’t, well, compare.

Firefox runs great 99.99% of the time. It’s easy to add extensions. So we should be pushing people to adopt it.


Good abstractions translate directly into how quickly the devs can fix bugs and add new features.


I'm old enough to remember computers being pitched as devices that can do tedious math for us. Now we have to do tedious math for them apparently.


Hence the way I would do it (and have for other purposes), as stated in my final sentence. Have the human state the intent and convert to your own internally preferred units as needed.


Hey that's a great joke, you made me spill my morning home-brewed kombucha.

I'm going to steal that one for my JavaScript monthly developers meetup.

Is it ok if I attribute it to "Xirdus on Hacker News"?


Lol sure.


I'm sure you would like to memorize all kinds of API instead of having something idiot proof and straightforward


As if `minimumReleaseAge` in `[install]` section of `.bunfig.toml` doesn't require the same kind of memorization.


No no no, see now we just say "computer! do tedious math!", and it will do some slightly different math for us and compliment us on having asked it to do so.


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