The study was funded by the Lilly Endowment.

If any christian groups want to hand me absurd amounts of money for me to tell them why they’re losing donations I can be found here on lemmy. I don’t get out of bed for less than $10mil US, though.

A zero day, at least in the olden days, was a weapon that nobody knew existed; however, once it’s used and has had time to be analyzed it would get patched, so there was a window where you used it for something worthwhile if you were up to something nefarious, or responsibly reported it otherwise.

So, it either discovered it on the fly and used it instantly meaning it has great skill at analyzing software and no strategic planning that places an opportunity cost on a hack now versus a future one, or the OpenAI guys had one sitting ready to go that they trained the model with, or (to me least likely) it had it sitting somewhere in its weights and was waiting on a chance to use it.

The last one is the one that worries me most. It doesn’t look like the world was really ready for how fast new bugs can be discovered by the LLMs, and I really don’t think the world is ready for an LLM that performs worse now because of a strategic reason later.

the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor)

Was OpenAI sitting on the zero day, or did the model figure it out during its escapades? Can the model sit on a zero day on its own now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

I don’t know enough about specifically what the NASDAQ did with their rules to speak to it, but I will say there’s a whole lot of “we never had to make a rule about X before because we never thought anyone would do X” going around.

gas system

Technical arguments aren’t going to work, I don’t think. It’s similar to how an old style machine gun with no select fire and an open bolt is easy to make; the trigger just gets out of the way and the guns stops Not Firing. Then the world gets select fire which adds complexity, gets better mechanisms which add performance at the cost of complexity, so on and so forth.

I know I’m speaking to the choir here, but it’s like with Glock and their latest gen models. They tried to address the wish.com switches that were readily available, and they changed the slide somehow so the old switches wouldn’t work. New switches were out within days. Ignoring how additional complexity typically comes at a (small if they’re doing it right) reliability cost, there isn’t a level of complexity you can add to a standalone firearm that’ll make it unusable using technology alone.

So, we use legal means and wind up with a damned patchwork of laws. Some stuff is legal in some states and illegal in others, some states are “stand your ground” and others are “duty to retreat,” and it’s all subject to interpretation. They’ve already changed the forms so that the sex field is specifically the one assigned at birth, and red flag laws can be turned against whoever isn’t in power in a locality. Safe storage laws can’t be enforced without home inspection and are a tax on the poor, depending on interpretation. If pennies matter to someone they won’t be able to afford a safe with X amount of weight and possible structural improvements to support the weight if you’re on a crawl space. Apartments won’t be possible at all.

To the uninitiated the 3D printing stuff looks like magic when it’s really not as hard as it seems. Likewise firearms aren’t as complicated as some people seem to think. How legislation targeting either of the groups of people continually gets written and pushed people people who clearly don’t know anything about it is a failure of the ballot box and can be fixed there.

The other thing that seems to get lost on folks pushing gun bans are that a lot of the developments for making them lighter and easier to use have opened doors for people who’d have a harder time using a heavier firearm with large recoil.

Maybe yes, maybe no. A lot of funds track some index. There are a bunch of indexes out there, but one of the ones you’ve probably heard of is the S&P 500. That index tends to be the 500 largest companies in the US that meet a certain criteria, and SPCX did not meet that criteria (so far). They probably will get into the “nasdaq” which is really the NASDAQ-100 which is made of 100 companies that meet whatever criteria and it ends up being tech heavy as a result.

If it gets into the S&P 500 index, then by charter, a lot of the funds that track that index have to buy it. Whether your 401(k) has it or not depends on the specific funds offered and which ones people elected into.

I imagine if most folks just used the target fund for their retirement date then they’ll probably end up with some SPCX somewhere in the stack.

I’ve seen a few news stories through the years where I thought the stock movement was out of whack with the underlying security, and options are a way to “bet” on that being right. It’s cheap and easy to just watch. Almost every time I was wrong and only found out a few times why. That probably just means I’m bad at it.

A few more things to remember. If you look at the first link at the bottom of my post, there are ways to structure buying/selling the calls/puts so that you can have a strategy that pays off if the stock goes up, down, or stays the same. How to set those up and the math involved is beyond me. The other thing is that for every trade with options someone makes there’s an entity on the other side of it. You might be buying a part of the leg of someone else’s more complex trade where a big investment house is trying to manage their risk and keep it below a certain level.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/business/robinhood-suicide-alex-kearns/

Stay smart and safe, invest money you can afford to lose in products you understand.

Shorting a stock is a bad plan. You typically need collateral (cash, or a line of credit, or something) in case the short goes bad. Shorting a stock can have a theoretically infinite loss since if you buy a share of a company and it goes bankrupt, your maximum loss is the value of the share. Short selling means you’ve sold a share you don’t own with a pinky swear that you’ll buy one back to replace it. A stock likely won’t, but could, go infinitely high. In that case you’d have infinite losses.

The other way is options trading. You can do this with your normal broker, possibly. You’ll need to make statements about your income level, savings, risk tolerance, and check a box saying you’ve read some mandated documentation. The process can seem like click-through stuff for a normal website, but it’s absolving the brokerage of fault if your decisions go bad.

Options work a little like an insurance contract. If you are worried that you’re too heavily tilted towards a certain company (but still believe in the investment), you can buy “puts” that help mitigate the risk if the underlying security. A “call” is a contract that lets you hedge the other way. They let you get exposure to a security without having to purchase the shares. An options contract is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation to buy (call) or sell (put) some number (typically 100) of an underlying security by a certain date. Selling options naked is a topic better left for someone else to explain all the risks involved (and I covered a strategy that has infinite risk).

A call pays off if the stock shoots up before the contract expires, and a put pays off if the stock tanks. To do what you’re saying you’d have to buy puts (I’m not an investment advisor, I’m not your investment advisor, this is not investment advice). If it sounds like gambling that’s because it is. Everybody already had the idea to bet against SPCX. There are platforms out there that let you look and see without having to risk money, and that’s probably the best course of action.

• https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPCX/options/?date=1789689600&straddle=true

I picked the date September 18, 2026 at random. If you had a September 18 130P, then it went up 21.19% Friday, kudos. The “last price” field is PER SHARE, and the contract was probably for 100 shares, so that’s $2030, meaning you had four figures on the line there. If none of that makes sense, if the activity in the volume field doesn’t make sense, then it’s better to sit it out. In that realm you’re swapping your money for that contract, and someone else is swapping that contract for your (now their) money. If the contract expires out of the money, you lose.

Some resources:

• https://optionalpha.com/options-strategies
• https://archive.org/details/optionsasstrateg0000mcmi
• https://moneybliss.org/recover-from-financial-disaster/

That being said, I will grant that there’s no evidence of this.

The question about whether the feds are on lemmy is falsifiable. There just needs to be enough people in congress willing to make that a primary issue to overrule whatever security laws/apparatus are in place and publish the info. There’s even recent precedent of one guy doing just that. Waiting until there’s complete evidence won’t move the ball forward at all. Even having a bad discussion has a random chance of moving the ball forward (subject to time constraints).

Not Suspicious on the Internet:

• Being Wrong
• Poor spelling or Grammar
• Asking questions, even if they’re dumb

Suspicious on the Internet:

• Calls to extreme violence in a discussion where everyone was generally chill
• Calls to not discuss a topic until there’s evidence to discuss
• • Drawing parallels between documented historical events and current events don’t count
• Suggesting a course of action that’s either prohibitively expensive or time consuming as the only path forward

i think Redditors coordinated to buy shares or something so that it won’t go to bankruptcy or something like that. I could be wrong though.

Close enough. DeepFuckingValue was either the one that caught on to or was the public face of a concern that noticed that GME was extremely short sold which roughly means that they sold shares they didn’t own with the notion that the share price would drop. Then they could buy the shares needed to cover the ones they shorted and make money. Selling short can have theoretically infinite losses, btw. The internet noticed…

So people flooded in and bought shares, call options, whatever, with the thought that the stock price would go up because the short sellers likely took out loans to cover shorting the shares, and the people that loaned them money don’t find cases of infinite losses/risk nearly as funny as the old wallstreetbets.

Some brokerages halted buying GME, and DeepFuckingValue got to testify in front of congress.

When reached for comment the family said, “how could this happen to us? We’re not even trans?”

Have the day you voted for, know that you won’t be the last people in rural areas that this happens to, and that when the AI bubble pops you still won’t get the land back. It’s gone forever.

They typically condemn the land before using eminent domain.

The adult entertainers are the VC investors. They’re pretty world-wise, but can’t be well versed on everything. So when someone sells them on something that sounds pretty good, they bite. The CEOs are the bros laughing about how great everything is, except in real life they don’t have consequences. All the CEOs get paid like it might be their last job so if they never work again they’re still fine.

It’s still impressive to see what the LLMs cook up when asked about programming problems. I’m coming back to programming from some time away from it, and it’ll give you the answer to the question you asked. If you ask it for an old way of doing something, it’ll tell you that. Then it slips and shows you a new way of doing something (I’m specifically talking about std::cout versus std::format and std::print), and the doors are wide open all of a sudden.

Then it gives you a technique for something and you spend hours debugging code only for the LLM to say that the solution it provided won’t work.

Prompt engineering is going to be a real thing whether we like it or not.

I know :-)

Here’s hoping for more red today.

The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?

I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it’s just not sticking.

Replying to myself to put up a link to the jenga tower scene of The Big Short in case nobody has seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbiDrzTd8fE

It’s there in the S&P 500 between MSFT and PLTR on the left kind of in the middle (size of the box is the market cap of the company). It’s in practically every 401(k) in the US. BBB is somewhere in the middle of the jenga tower.

You could probably get 80% of that process done by learning some python. If you have a string “s”, then replacing double newlines with a single newline is as easy as

re.sub("\n\n", "\n", s)

where “\n” is an LF in many programming languages. A CR is often “\r” in the same vein. Just be aware that regular expressions can be very, very frustrating; and every webpage is going to be a new adventure in how it got formatted. If you use something like spyder it’ll allow you to see what the data looks like inside the python process so you get a chance to iterate.

There is Carriage Return (CR), and also Line Feed (LF, often called New Line). If you think about old mechanical printers with the metal arm sticking out, a CR operation would move the type head to the far left column, and a LF operation would advance the paper by one line. Variously through the years depending on hardware (typewriter, teletype, those early CRTs that you had to refresh the screen, or modern computers) you would get one or both of those if you pressed Return/Enter, and it’s configurable in software, depending on the software. I don’t know what windows does these days with notepad, but at one time the Enter key sent both (CRLF). UNIX style systems tended to use LF, and older Macs as someone else referenced used CR. If you wrote a generic program to handle anything you had to account for all of them. Mostly these days it gets abstracted away which generally works well enough unless a team of people used a random collection of software to edit a text file.

printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n" | hexdump -C
00000000  0d 0a 48 65 78 61 64 65  63 69 6d 61 6c 2c 20 6c  |..Hexadecimal, l|
00000010  69 6b 65 20 74 68 61 74  20 73 63 65 6e 65 20 66  |ike that scene f|
00000020  72 6f 6d 20 54 68 65 20  4d 61 72 74 69 61 6e 2e  |rom The Martian.|
00000030  0a                                                |.|
00000031

The 0a is a Line Feed character, and the 0d is a Carriage Return character. In my terminal without piping it through hexdump you get:

printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n"

Hexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.

The LF at the end of the string makes it so that the prompt at the terminal doesn’t appear on the same line as the output, and the blank line before the text is caused by the LF at the beginning. I don’t know/care/have to worry about what eats the CR.