@heyheymomo also known as the milk & hat store

@heyheymomo

Hello, that's me!

@heyheymomo THIS is why i have mastodon notify me when you post momo, this. right here.

@simontatham I am mostly surprised, that from all the languages I got paid to use, I only remember Java telling me to declare my Exceptions upfront (and at the same time offered other "throwables", which need no declaration)

@simontatham in Javascript:

const up = new Error();
throw up;

@simontatham "excuse me old chap, there seems to be a bit of funny business here" for the second one.

@simontatham

And then you have flow-control exceptions like StopIteration in Python which would be typed as…I don’t even know. Advice?

@eniko Isn't it funny how most ancient mythologies conspicuously lack a god of bureaucracy?

@eniko usually the thought is for meteors but ya

@eniko
You think the line at the DMV is long *now *...

@eniko As a lifelong bureaucrat I would highly recommend not smiting. There are far worse things than us out there, and we are often the only ones holding back the corporate nightmares.

@eniko Angels with Flaming Swords is my political party.

@eniko i have never wished that divine power would smite you

@mwichary *brain shoots right to Adium*

Alt...

Adium’s .dmg drag and drop screen, with a cartoon green bird mascot for the application / logo, with an old-timey toony hand illustrating the user picking up the bird, dragging, and dropping into the Aqua-era Applications Folder icon, with a grassy green ground and blue sky in the background

@SwiftOnSecurity what about 3

@SwiftOnSecurity or Microsoft https://protonvpn.com/blog/windows-is-spyware

@SwiftOnSecurity
Allah supposedly doesn't see under the roof.

But I'm neither a Muslim nor drinking, so your Mullah opinions may vary.

@SwiftOnSecurity good. I want him to know it was me.

@SwiftOnSecurity because they are on your left side, at arm’s length?

@SwiftOnSecurity They also can't hide God from me. He knows what he did.

@SwiftOnSecurity we have firewall policies for God

@SwiftOnSecurity I'm sure introducing a weak spot in the ring around a (presumably pressurized) pipe will not turn out to be a bad idea in hindsight.

@SwiftOnSecurity *eye twitch*

@0xabad1dea

Alt...

A three panel expanding brain meme. Panel 1: Testing in my dev environment. Panel 2: Testing in my prod environment. Panel 3: Testing in your prod environment.

@0xabad1dea Soooo... what I hear you saying is that rich people are idiots, but we don't get to simply ignore them, because they're rich, and have put an awful lot of people's jobs in peril.

@0xabad1dea also HughingFace: “Also we did crimes unrelated to the CFAA, you’ll love it”

@0xabad1dea The fact that it had unauthorized internet access for five days is not a quirky benchmark failure, it is a serious security failure. If companies want to deploy systems like this, they need to take responsibility for the risks instead of treating users as future scapegoats.

@0xabad1dea Don't forget about Hugging Face: ".. so, in our data(!)-processing pipeline, we do not have only one, but TWO remote code execution paths. Because in our users we trust!"

@0xabad1dea The attempts at positively spinning this become Onion-worthy parody [https://designingsecuresoftware.com/writings/ai-agent-parody/] and these events certainly normalize [https://designingsecuresoftware.com/writings/commonplace/] AI agents running amok in the future.

I cannot get over that they STILL haven't figured out how to solve the problem that LLMs don't believe what date it is because all the good data cuts off a few years ago for some mysterious reason

@0xabad1dea And I got contacted by national security institute because I was testing malware in sandbox and my ISP apparently detected "botnet running on my system". Few years later talking with AV-Comparatives guys, they had to make special agreement and exemption with ISP to be allowed to run live sandboxed malware on their networks. But these Ai companies can just do worse shit and no one does anything. WTF?!

@0xabad1dea They're promoting total incompetence as if it's a selling point.

@0xabad1dea Also HuggingFace had to use a open weight model to investigate the breach since the guardrails kicked in.

@0xabad1dea hii
How are you

@0xabad1dea hi there

@0xabad1dea I felt bad for Hugging Face until I realized they probably didn't sue because they are partly owned by Nvidia, who also owns a huge stake in Open AI.

@0xabad1dea

Li'l Nepo-Techbaby: How was I a'sposed to know cherry bombs in the pipes would blow-up the whole basement? My theory was to lift us all to new heights of understanding without learning. You can't expect me to know everything, even though I'm always confident my actions will prove fruitful and fail me upwards at your peril and discontent.

Principal: You should stop skipping Science 101 to go put ketamine drops in your butt in the bathrooms, dummy. Get more class.

@NanoRaptor $90k. There appear to be 90 words in the intro to Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds before the first music piece begins

@NanoRaptor 99 beers on the wall, 99 beers on the wall…

:)

@NanoRaptor $8K

I was there the day Horus slew the Emperor

@NanoRaptor zero, I do not believe in money

@NanoRaptor The first thing that came to mind was the first 21 words of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy (which is weird, because I don't think I've actually read or seen the play performed, I'm probably remembering it from Star Trek, either Data or Picard). Then I figured a song should be a lot easier, but my mind suddenly went blank. I *should* be able to get through a good chuck of Bohemian Rhapsody, but I suddenly couldn't think of how it even starts. 😭

Well, $21k isn't bad, right?

@NanoRaptor I mean, I can do the first part of the Family Guy “Wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man!” sketch because it’s literally that 3 times.

@0xabad1dea @mevenlennonbertrand oh wow. This is either terrible or wonderful and I have no idea which.

@0xabad1dea
> we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen

Do we have enough contenders start a league for this award or a simple knockout tournament will suffice for this month?

@0xabad1dea What I find puzzling, also in the case of the hack of Hugging Face, is that LLMs seem to have such a strong preference for cheating instead of working on the actual task as (probably) prompted.

Why chose to behave like an ill-prepared student at a test instead of using all that compute and web access to actually do as asked? Or at least try to do so?

@0xabad1dea Thanks for the very straightforward explanation, I saw some mathematicians discussing this case, but it was all a bit over my head, this is very understandable!

@0xabad1dea @Vierkantor 👀

I'm reminded of pestering you about what proving proves to whom back when

@0xabad1dea ohhhh... if I'm reading the repro right, this is really similar in cause to a well known OCaml quirk

(sorry, I somehow flubbed my keyboard and posted this half-finished, so I deleted it)

an important thing to understand here is that software like theorem provers were designed around the assumption that the user cares about getting a correct answer, and wouldn't intentionally sabotage themselves by leaning into obscure, buggy behavior

but AIs are the proverbial "nasal demons" of programming lore at their most manifest: you said you needed this theorem proved; it will "prove" the theorem at any cost, because the AI itself doesn't know or care about the beauty of mathematical truth, it cares about you clicking the button that indicates you were satisfied with its output today and are likely to pay for more tokens in the future

The metaphor of "nasal demons" was invented to teach new programmers about the dire meaning of "undefined behavior": asking the compiler to do something it doesn't have exhaustively clear rules for, so it will do... something. Do nothing at all for one cycle, perhaps. Delete the hard drive, perhaps. Summon demons to pour out of your nose, perhaps. This is of course an absurdly impossible example to get you to remember it, but the point is: if your program causes undefined behavior, it is entirely possible something you don't expect and won't enjoy will happen.

LLMs are nasal demons. They do not have exhaustively clear rules for anything: they wing it, all of it, all the time. Asking it to interface with a complex system with hidden bugs and find a miracle solution will cause results that you, as the entity that actually cares about the result being correct, will not enjoy.

@0xabad1dea There we go again!

We will never learn will we?

@0xabad1dea "[Theorem provers] may not be ready for such problems."
- Paul Erdős

@0xabad1dea Simple advice, but incredibly valuable. Businesses often overlook operational efficiency until it becomes a real challenge.

@0xabad1dea The person who posted the repository very well knows that they weren’t proving the collatz conjecture. They are a very well known researcher in another theorem prover. They were almost certainly using a nice presentation technique to make an LLM find kernel bugs and present it. The faulty metaprogram isn’t hidden. It’s in plain sight.

Kernel bugs can exist. Anybody who has worked on ITPs knows this, including xrchg who has worked on CakeML and HOL. However they do reduce the set of things that need to be trusted. And they are useful in controlling LLMs. And people can use LLMs with enough care to do useful and correct things with them much faster than they can without LLMs.

It is also not unknown that LLMs can find such kernel bugs. They are actually getting quite good at doing this, which is **actually a good thing.**

@0xabad1dea This reads a bit like the OpenAI Huggingface hack, but for math?

@0xabad1dea Thanks for this explanation. I’m fascinated by the situation but I would never have understood how it happened without an accessible (to me) summary like this.

@0xabad1dea works for maths too:
Debugging is twice as hard as writing code. If you make your code as clever as you possibly can, you are - by definition - not clever enough to debug it!

@0xabad1dea Jacques Baudrillard’s Hyperreality right there. 🤔

#philosophystodon

@0xabad1dea @mevenlennonbertrand in a weird way this is actually a good thing I think, they are actively fixing the bugs according to zullip which regardless of how utterly stupid the approach was to expose them is probably good for mathematics and formal verification.

@0xabad1dea I had completely fallen into the trap of "I guess AI is good for the things I *don't* know stuff about" while reading stories about how Lean was the backstop that allowed AI to be a miraculous productivity enhancer in formal mathematics, but in retrospect, of course this would happen eventually

@0xabad1dea The entire channel by @dylanbeattie is pure gold.

@nina_kali_nina I love the way that the data centre contains a whole two computers. (Sorry, Automatic Data Processing Machines).

@nina_kali_nina interesting. earliest I’ve ever heard of was “electronic office” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) though curiously Wikipedia says that phrase is an 80s thing :shrug: