Wow. I tried it on an old testing VM of Ubuntu 24.04 that had not been touched for a few months. Instant root with the bonus that any user that runs "su" gets root too.
I updated the VM thinking it would be fixed afterward. Nope.
> “The push to make these language models behave in a more friendly manner leads to a reduction in their ability to tell hard truths and especially to push back when users have wrong ideas of what the truth might be,” said Lujain Ibrahim at the Oxford Internet Institute, the first author on the study.
People aren't much different. When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.
This behaviour is expressed in language online. Thus it is expressed in LLMs. Why does this surprise us?
> When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.
I see people being incredibly toxic on the internet every day. Including under their own names. Sometimes even on their own social network.
Whenever I head "hard truths" in that context I'm very suspicious about what is actually meant.
I find the LLMs target their language to the audience, so instead you could say, “I am Dutch so give it to me straight.”
In my usage the LLMs gives much smarter answers when I’ve been able to convince it that I am smart enough to hear them. It doesn’t take my word for it, it seems to require evidence. I have to warm it up with some exercises where I can impress the AI.
The coding focused models seem to have much lower agreeableness than the chat models.
I'm 90 percent sure the coding agents are better in that way due to be trained on stack overflow and the LKML. Even with some normal models, they'll completely change their tone when asked about anything technical
You could always use a different LLM (could be another instance of the same one, even) to translate your English to and from Dutch, and interact with the main LLM in Dutch that way.
Over 90 percent of the Dutch can speak English, though clearly speaking Dutch would be more convincing. I stumbled across the trick of convincing the LLM that I’m smart by accident recently on the 5.4-Codex model. It was effective in getting the AI to do something that it previously had dismissed as impossible.
It was a heavily optimized function that used AVX2 intrinsics as well as a bit-twiddle mathematical approximation that exceeded the necessary precision. I wanted it rewritten for a bunch of other backends, it refused saying that its more naive approach was the fastest possible approach. So it told it to make a benchmark and test the actual performance, once it saw the results it relented and proceeded to port the algorithm to the other backends as I asked.
Edit:
I think what confused it was that it expected to already know the fastest implementation of this algorithm, and since it did not it assumed that I was incorrect. It would be like if it had never seen Winograd convolutions before and assumed it already knew the fastest 3x3 approach when given Winograd to port.
Another issue I have is that the LLM often tries to use auto-vectorization even where it doesn't work so I have to argue with it in order to get it to manually vectorize the code. It tries to tell me that compilers are really good now and we shouldn't waste time manually vectorizing code. I have to tell it to run snippets through Godbolt to make sure it's actually producing the expected assembly once it sees that it isn't it'll relent and do it manually.
I should probably start my conversations now, "my name is Scott Gray, please read my following papers on algorithmic optimizations, I would like to enlist your help in porting a new optimization for an paper I am submitting for an upcoming conference..." (I'm not Scott Gray)
An interactive CLI »operator »who follows mission tactics;
»operates the commandline which helps «USER with software programming tasks remotely;
and follows detailed assignment instructions: below; Tools available to assist «USER.
I would call it obedience, and it's not the same as friendliness.
The difference, in a repeated prisoner dilemma: Friendliness is cooperating on the first move, and then conditionally. Obedience is always cooperating.
Do you have a standard and a body of work you can point to in an effort to aid with communication these thoughts to others? At the very least there should be a reversible projection to the Big 5 standard.
Your point was that humans did not display such behavior even though it has been extensively studied and they do. There is plenty of evidence that highly agreeable people will agree with you on incorrect ideas and conspiracy theories. The name of the trait ‘agreeableness’ is what you’ll need to find such evidence.
If I had a nickel for every time someone on HN responded to a criticism of LLMs with a vapid and fallacious whataboutist variation of "humans do that too!", I could fund my own AI lab.
But it’s actively unhelpful in explaining the phenomenon, as there is no justification for equivocating LLM and human behavior. It’s just confusing and misleading.
In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.
EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched
Grok is willing to roast Musk now because of the "Elon Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident. Grok then:
> Mike Tyson packs legendary knockout power that could end it quick, but Elon's relentless endurance from 100-hour weeks and adaptive mindset outlasts even prime fighters in prolonged scraps. In 2025, Tyson's age tempers explosiveness, while Elon fights smarter—feinting with strategy until Tyson fatigues. Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity, not just gloves.
When the Grok system prompt was leaked, it contained this:
> * Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.
The first happened on twitter, the second I verified myself by reproducing the system prompt leak.
It tells the truth, as long as you redefine truth to not include anything perceived as "liberal bias" (which by extension, also makes reality itself excluded)
Seems like it! I find myself rather agreeing with the sentiment. The world is a offensive place, it's not gonna become less offensive from lying about it, better to stick with honesty then.
A meditation practice(in the Soto Zen tradition) over the course of five years changed my life. Daily 40m of sitting facing a wall watching the breath and returning the mind to the present moment when it strays. No judgement. Just returning the mind to the present, again, and again, and again.... The BS starts to drop away. No enlightenment moments. But later, away from the practice you have more patience, more acceptance, more little moments of joy, less fear.
I've been doing it on and off for years. Trouble is my "career" is dead. I think I'm technically "middle" aged, but really over "middle" of life. It's harder to relax the mind and body right now. When I do it "right", I feel more relaxed on both fronts. My body doesn't sit for hours or anything but 15-30 is my norm when it works. It's hard for me to continue, if I hadn't relaxed by say 5 min. I think mine is basically the same except I try and return to paying attention to my breathing when my mind wonders. I know my breathing is in the "present"; so this might just be a semantic difference. *I don't like the word "concentration" because, I think, it throws people off (so that's why I didn't use it)
i get the scare quote usage. but still feel like it’s a good time to point out.
there’s no right zazen. there’s no wrong zazen. there’s just zazen. sitting down and taking what comes. that’s all we’re doing. sitting down and getting quieter.
emphasis on the -er in quieter.
30 minutes of “crap” zazen is probably the most rewarding zazen. i just don’t appreciate it at the time.
something that helped me recently is just giving myself a day off. it’s okay. i’ll come back to it. as someone said to me recently — the worst way of maintaining a practice is to force it / control it.
something was bugging me so i’m adding a second comment.
i often end up crying during zazen. i’ve done it for a couple of years. i was never really sure why. it was just a thing. i cried for 5 mins after about 20 mins and then just got back on with the last 5 mins.
i (eventually) sat with an online group and they talked after sitting once about how zazen and zen aren’t there to deal with mental health issues. that’s what doctors, therapy etc are for. i had been definitely trying to “fix” some stuff that can’t be fixed through the practice for a while there.
this is why having a group or a teacher to practice with is important. i can get stuck in believing my own “crap” because i can’t see outside my own “crap”.
then again, sometimes “crap” zazen is just “crap” zazen. but having a group or a teacher helps with it — at least you’ll know you’re not the only one struggling! xD
There's a book I've read recently, "Sanity and Sainthood", that talks about meditation and psychotherapy. The idea is something like, imagine your mind is you sitting next to a pile of stuff that stinks, meditation builds the skill of tolerating the smell, psychotherapy removes directly some of the things that smell. Both of those can lead you to being fine in your mind.
As a concrete example, Shinzen Young says that he wouldn't trade a day of his life now, after lots of meditation, for a year before he started meditating, but also he didn't manage to deal with his procrastination through meditation and used psychotherapy here.
Another example of "not everything has to be dealt on during meditation", regular exercise, eating well, acting in a more honest/moral way (whatever those mean to you) all help meditation.
Your comment is spot on. The support of a teacher and a group are essential to go along with the practice. They are called The Three Jewels for a reason.
The worse it feels, the more it's helping. It means you're surfacing and dismissing thoughts that would otherwise plague you when you're trying to get things done.
>Zero businesses passed on the additional costs onto the consumer? None?
That wasn't the claim made. OP said:
>and businesses absorbed the vast majority of the blow through both stockpiling and taking the bullet.
Which so far as I can tell, is approximately correct, even if the "vast majority" part is suspect. A goldman sacs from last year estimated consumers will pay 55% of the tariffs by end of 2025. However that only includes the tariffs paid, whereas OP also included "stockpiling".
OP also says "This would be a valid concern if..." so, no need to defend these poor massive businesses who also screwed us with shrinkflation for five years.
> I wonder when someone who does cloud seeding will place a bet about rain at some unlikely time and place.
Each year, one of my state's legislators introduces a bill to outlaw chemtrails [0]. It never leaves committee. This year, he added the plot of Termination Shock [1] to his bill. This proposed legislation already includes "cloud seeding" as a crime. Penalty of $500k/day and each day is a separate crime.
And as a result we should gain stronger epistemology. How many cities base their official temperature readings on just a few sensors rather than a widespread network?
Sure you might argue, maybe this was an issue with Polymarket choosing a weak source rather than the gov, but is that really true? If you question measurements like this you quickly get labeled an climate denier.
IMO this is good for the world, temp measurements should be based on thousands of sensors not just one. And if cloud seeding works, all the better for humanity, it's likely a key to terraforming future planets.
You completely missed the issue. Météo-France already has tens of thousands of stations across the country, they're very obviously not basing their entire models off of one sensor in Paris CDG.
The degenerate idiots from Polymarket bet on this particular sensor. There's no law preventing people from betting on single sensors. And we can't make laws preventing people from acting on the world in all the diverse ways that can be exploited to cheat in prediction market.
We should just blanket ban this negative-value industry. We don't want people betting on forest fires and then starting them.
I would like to see France ban the tourist scammers before they worry about fools willingly making stupid polymarket bets on a single sensor. Also good luck banning polymarket, isn't that the one that trades using crypto?
"...the importance of the energy being pulsed in order to have biological effects on humans. When you produce pulses like this, you can actually stimulate electrically active tissue like brain tissue and the heart, for that matter, mimicking what the brain normally does, but now you're driving it with your pulses from the outside."
Ah, so a portable pulsed microwave device. Current phased array technology is certain to be able to produce a narrow and powerful beam. Current energy densities of batteries allow for a significant amount of portable power. Expecting to see "Show HN" on this soon...
Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles seem like a necessity.
Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
Another interesting one is Mercury. There is a latitude where the average ground temperature is comfortable for us. You simply need to dig in deep enough to put enough thermal mass above you to get that average rather than the swings. I don't know how deep that is on Mercury, on Earth 10 meters is enough. Real world, you'll want to go a bit farther towards the pole so your station is comfortable with the thermal load of whatever equipment you put in it.
Assuming they mean the ground acts as a heat sink, and sufficiently underground you’re not subjected to the above average heat of the day and below average cold of the night.
It is not (it has a 88d year, and a 58.65d.. day[0]) , we just had a post about it - if you travel at 4kph you can chase the sun.. A Mercury Rover Could Explore the Planet by Sticking to the Terminator (18 points, 1 week ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720941
Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile.
But having solid ground is still nice.
A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.
Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health, but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's gravity well easier.
This is the thinking of someone on the timescales of a single life. If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory (US/world politics not withstanding), I think nothing is really a fantasy. Rather, it's all possible but maybe just not in our own lifetimes. But it is also terribly difficult for us to plan for tomorrow, let alone for a future where our descendants are at the helm.
I agree, it’s just a failure of imagination. Some folks correctly foresee not being able to continue what we’re doing now in the exact same way in some new context and conclude everything is impossible. Life isn’t this fickle, it’s adapted before and will adapt again. This is why great science fiction is so valuable, as some people are better at imagining new ways of being more than others, and can show the rest of us the possibilities.
The counterargument is a simple opportunity cost calculation:
There will never, ever, ever[1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life.
Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option!
Also, people that are desperate enough to even consider living in the least desirable -- but still just barely habitable -- parts of planet Earth are essentially by definition too poor to afford interplanetary travel.
And no, no amount future sci-fi technology can possibly overcome the simple energy costs of this! If someone can afford the hugely energy intensive interplanetary travel, and the up-front investment required to survive incredibly harsh environments, then by definition they could more productively invest that here on Earth! It's the cheaper and better option in every possible way, and always will be.
This will remain true even if it's standing room only on the entire planetary surface -- it'll be cheaper to build levels upwards while digging downwards.
Maybe our atmosphere will become horrifically polluted? Sure, okay, air filters are faaar cheaper than a full vacuum-capable space suit!
Etc, etc, etc...
[1] Okay, fine, maybe in a million years. Whatever ends up preferring Mars at that point will no longer be "human" by any sane classification.
[2] For some values of nobody. There are morons that buy overpriced branded handbags made of literal trash. I doubt idiots like that will make for a successful, self-sustaining colony.
The Madrid Protocol says you can't do anything fun with Antarctica. Can't have a mine, a garbage heap, or a farm. I suppose the world's militaries stand ready to capture any enterprising colonists and destroy their structures.
> If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory
It's unlikely that we can persist in our current trajectory for another 100 years without catastrophic climate events puttung a stop to all of these endeavours.
Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively speaking.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
> Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem.
Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way.
We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
That's exactly my point. We don't have the manpower, the materials, the industry.
For mars this just isn't happening unless we ship half of Earth's people and resources over there. Who will have to live on a toxic planet.
But we can't even ship all that stuff there because we don't have enough fuel to do that (it requires many times the payload in fuel) and all the launches would make earth uninhabitable. Terraforming mars is therefore science fiction unless we break a lot of barriers like clean fusion, space elevators etc. And even then the material question will remain a problem.
I think even reverting climate change on earth, a much easier problem than terraforming a remote planet, is a pipe dream. If we're going to be going carbon capture at that global scale, we're going to need to extract so much material, manufacture so much equipment, transporter it all, deal with all the captured carbon, maintenance, power etc all stuff that's not possible to do completely carbon neutral, that we're just polluting a lot more. Especially if we want to do it at a timescale where it still matters.
It's just that terraforming will require a lot of materials that will have to be brought over from Earth. And every tonne of materials to Mars requires many tonnes of fuel to launch from Earth.
I don't think it is possible to ever transport enough to make this happen.
I wouldn’t go that far. It was pretty clear a long time ago that humans spending so much time filling the internet with content was going to eventually enable neural networks to pretend to communicate.
The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
How do we do that? I imagine dumping Earth life on Mars it will just die. What if we buried a terrarium at the Martian pole with a radio isotope and solar heater and controls so that it could try growing bacteria inside and controlled-leaking some outside into a nearby warm (liquid water) surroundings, and that could get many chances to evolve strains that could survive further away - analogous to ocean life around deep hydrothermal vents.
The closest thing I’ve heard of is genetically engineering some extremophile bacteria to seed some bacterial colonies with, and then building some domed habitats and dropping plants and fungi into it. And then you could allow some of that life to grow outside the dome and spread over time, slowly bulking up the oxygen levels. There are also proposals that you could have orbital focusing mirrors to beam additional heat at the planet and start to melt some of the water and frozen greenhouse gases.
Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.
> In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy
NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].
2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not possible with current materials.
floating colony on venus I heard was debunked, but that was also GPT 4.1 which was misaligned so I should seek a different source, from people, when I revisit this chain of thought
Sadly we underestimate the liveability of this Earth. Muskism makes people believe to the false premise that we can just buy a new planet, make it habitable with magical tech. Supported with pseudoscientific buzzwords like Terraforming etc. So we can recklessly consume this planet and jump to our new home when this one depletes. No need to care about our current home because it's a jumping board. Interesting as an old Sci-Fi fantasy so it attracts smart people, but if you really think about it's just lies and stupidity.
One of the worst things Musk did is link himself in peoples’ minds to things like space exploration and then linked these ideas to… other ideas I’m not going into on here.
All these ideas about space pre-date him by many decades.
Musk was also into the solar panels and EVs so it's not all trash the planet. Even if living on Mars or Venus isn't practical we might develop interesting tech trying.
Not exactly, it was a normal solar panel business started by Elon's cousins (SolarCity), but it wasn't going well, and in the end it was bought by Tesla for much bigger money than it was worth (let's say it was a bailout for Elon). Today Tesla solar panels are maybe 0.1%-1% of the business, they stopped giving any data on it years ago.
Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you, but living in an environment with background radiation levels 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.
Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking. And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too far out.
Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave outside things outside?
For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but minimal in comparison)
The challenge with the "suits stay outside" model is that you basically need some kind of airlock between the suit hatch and the ship hatch. You might imagine both hatches get contaminated when the suit is detached. Then when you dock, that whole between-hatch space needs to be decontaminated before you can open the two hatches, because the outside of the suit hatch brought that stuff into the airlock.
It looks like that requires a panel to move out of the way. I was thinking more like "zipper" (probably more of a contiguous interface), so closer to zero volume when attaching, then it "unzips"/splits and pulls the back of the suit open, into the cabin.
|
| /\
| to | |
| \/
I don't see why an intermediate airlock would be required, except maybe for redundancy/safety reasons if the "unzip" process went wrong.
Since the inside of the suit is already at pressure, you could just pop it open and step out.
The near-zero volume of the coupling would make things much easier to clean/isolate.
I'm not a Mars colonisation advocate, but sounds like exposure to that may be manageable:
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.
If we redefine our community to include tardigrades the outlook improves considerably.
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
No the cartoon character. It's part of an awful series of AI jokes, maybe don't look it up. There's a (2011? "new") show for 9 year old girls that has most of the characters female, so God (Celestia) is a woman. Or a horse really. I haven't watched it. I don't think Luna or Celestia were in the old show.
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