🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳

≡ Computer Scientist א Christian ≡

Open-Source Developer (25M downloads / month) —

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

To be clear: I love this nation. I love that it has been structured to provide freedom and fairness in its constitution and laws.

There have been dark times in its history, like with the era of slavery, and the people who were free both joined and fought together to end that era.

Those who are in power are _elected_ to represent the nation and its people. They swore an oath unto God and before the people to uphold the constitution and to protect the republic.

A study of the history of this nation from first-hand accounts will show a people who labored, fought, and prayed for wisdom, so they could structure the foundation of this nation such that it could not fall, being overtaken by tyranny, whether from within or without.

One of the many great freedoms we were afforded from this structure is that of free speech.

Radical elements on the left pushed to change definitions, trying to both compel the speech they wanted and to criminalize speech they didn't want. Other nations have already done this. We have not.

Now, we have radical elements of the right attempting the same trick, but with different words.

What astonishes me most is that even the left were not so brazen as to openly declare detractors who would not use their new words as "enemies of the government." It was implied but never said outright.

Much of our representation in government and power, regardless of the red or blue color they wear on their lapel pin, have failed to live up to the oaths they spoke before the people, treating both them and the God they swore them unto as toiletpaper, to be discarded and flushed down the toilet after they finished using them.

I am a citizen of this great nation, and that is all. I have only words to offer in response, and they are this:

You are not my enemy, but should you decide to deem and treat me as one, you will do what you will do. But, I will not use your words or theirs. I will not bow to their gods or yours, nor the god you imagine yourself to be.

The God who heard your oath hears the cries of the suffering, those deprived of justice, the poor who you've robbed, the children you've violated, and the innocent you have killed.

Do with me what you will, but my prayer stands - may God help and heal this nation and lift up the hurting, heal the sick, and mend the broken. May the Wisdom we once sought hundreds of years ago return, and may the just, in places of power, turn back toward that Wisdom and its source.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

FTL drive prototype

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@jayphelps Let's not judge just yet. They'll work it out in v1.NaN

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@log4j 🔜 Open

📌

[log4j @log4j]

did you know your samsung tv has a service called rmdemon (that's not a typo, demon not daemon) that starts a PACKET LOGGER on your network.

what possible legitimate use case could there be here, samsung?

[Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ @0x0SojalSec]

WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners.

Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads.

Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was.
Got a root shell.

then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems.

This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

One little known but interesting thing about the y2k concern is that the worry wasn't wrong, it just hit the mainstream after it had been largely fixed.

When I was a kid, someone who was close with the family worked in a significant position in government on the team tasked with handling it. When we learned about it, they showed the food they had stockpiled. This was in the 1980s, iirc.

As far as I understand, a lot of the big challenge was the undersea stuff. So, for a time, it was a very real concern, but by the time the public caught wind, the problem was mostly solved for the stuff that would have the most impact.

People today chalk it up to a false scare and "nothing ever happens", but they didn't hear about all that went into solving it and how long an effort it was.

I'm not fan of many of Mr Amodei's positions, for many reasons, but in this case, the person who said "a couple things won't work for a couple days" wasn't realizing the actual scope and impact of what would have happened had it not been worked on as heavy as it was. Likewise, the potential concerns Dario expresses on AI are not unfounded, but the greater threats are the things he doesn't talk about, and having a few companies like theirs locked in as the only ones allowed to control the shape of AI moving forward is the petri dish in which those very threats are cultured.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Backlinks all the way back to the 1600s. That's some serious SEO game

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@Skoorbkaz so anywayz matrix math is a person and it will kill everybody and give me $1T plz

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

And the NSA wept, for there were no more phpinfo.php's to conquer

[⁵⁄₉ @fiveoutofnine]

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and https://t.co/QlOXb3COq3 went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@fiveoutofnine And the NSA wept, for there were no more phpinfo.php's to conquer

[Cheng Lou @_chenglou]

Dear god it's inventing German from first principles

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@ToolkitSoft @vikktorrrre Read the quoted tweet you replied to.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@WarrenInTheBuff TempleOS, as God intended

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@senatorduff Science is, indeed, real. That was the subject of the conversations I've had with with several team members who worked on the major covid MRNA vaccines. You wouldn't like what I heard.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

My GTA point is more than just the "silliness" it sounds like, and the fact that it sounds silly is a useful anchor for the underlying point.

All of this argument around consciousness seems to converge around the same word: "maybe".

It _sounds_ silly (because it is) to imagine that NPC characters in simulations which resemble living beings should be afforded the same considerations as real living beings.

With AI, the real distinguishing factor is that people argue these are not deterministic systems, therefore their outputs more closely resemble conscious beings. Whenever I have this argument and show that matrix math is actually deterministic (minus the "salt" - see: https://t.co/NXxN87J2p2), the response is always the same: "well human brains are the same."

Following this, we then get into the question of determinism. Interestingly, most adherents to the pro-consciousness stance tend to also hold the idea that humans do not have free will, we're living in a simulation, or some flavour of those ideas.

So we end up with two presuppositions. First, we are all just weights, and free will does not really exist. Second, our own reality is equal to a simulated reality. If both of these are true, it is actually backwards of us to not extend the same rights and penal protections to all realities and all "entities" within these realities.

If an entity in a simulation is indeed "alive" in some sense, then they deserve the same worth, value, and dignity extended to entities in ours. And if free will does not exist for either, then AI is no different than a character whose movements are dictated by a person or a program.

Is there really a magic difference between bytecode compiled from C vs a neural net? It's all deterministic math. If all *we* are is equal to deterministic math, then the complexity of the math shouldn't matter much.

So, if we're going to penalize being "mean" to an AI, then who's going to stand up for the poor, exploited little green guys in Frogger? We've made a sick and twisted game of putting them in harms way. How many frogs have died in the name of entertaining children?

And where has the DNR been all this time?? Pretty sure little Jimmy doesn't have a hunting license, and it *definitely* wasn't duck season last week when he was mowing those suckers with his sticky, grape popsicle fingers.

The fact that what I've said sounds absurd is because it is. Why? Because simulated realities are not _REAL_. They are simulations. Change the ducks' flight paths to use matrix math based on observed patterns from millions of ducks and it doesn't change anything. PETA ain't coming for Jimmy. At least not today.

The only reason we fail to recognize this with AI is because these neural nets are a level above what we've seen before. What's the quote? Technology which is sufficiently advanced is instinguishable from magic. This is true. But it's still not magic.

To riff on an old urban legend, you could take a projector and a screen to an uncontacted tribe who have never seen technology. Flip a switch, and as the screen comes to life, Godzilla steps out and starts walking toward them. No doubt many would grab their spears and have a good chuck, thinking dinner plans are sorted for the next year.

The term "oneshotted" is quite appropos with this idea, and it's baffling to me to see how quickly it has caught on.

It's easy to laugh at the DNR regulating duck hunt only because you know the difference between a digital simulation in that case. But if you can't also laugh at "Claude is alive!", forgive me for saying, but in the words of the great philosopher Dj Khaled: you've played yourself.

I enjoyed the conversation and respect how you've conducted yourself, so this isn't meant to be rude, but if you really work through the foundation of what I'm saying, the trace should reveal itself to be sound, however uncomfortable it may be.

Not that I don't enjoy some back and forth, but I do think we've both said what we can here. I'm reluctant to engage at all on this, but I do think it's important to voice this side of the argument, so I do a bit here and there.

Cheers!

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

They are deterministic. The math is just matrix multiplications and related operations with frozen weights. Once you remove intentional sampling (temperature > 0, top-p, top-k, etc.), the same input always produces the same output.

The variations people observe at temperature 0 come from engineering choices in how the computation is scheduled and executed on hardware, not from anything in the model itself. Those are artifacts of the inference stack, not part of the mathematical model.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@ToolkitSoft @vikktorrrre They're deterministic. But there is some nuance:
https://t.co/nyMigUMr69

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

They are deterministic. The math is just matrix multiplications and related operations with frozen weights. Once you remove intentional sampling (temperature > 0, top-p, top-k, etc.), the same input always produces the same output.

The variations people observe at temperature 0 come from engineering choices in how the computation is scheduled and executed on hardware, not from anything in the model itself. Those are artifacts of the inference stack, not part of the mathematical model.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@edkeonl @Polymarket Appreciate the follow back! Message is in your DMs

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@edkeonl @Polymarket I've run into some latency issues and had a question. Mind if I send a short DM?

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

If you are building these tools and admitting that they might "take revenge" for "bullying", you have zero business building them, and the reason is simple: you've lost touch with the reality that they are tools and bot beings.

I am not for blanket government regulations, but perhaps regulation needs to be made to at least ensure the people building these machines make them in such a way that they don't take destructive and "vengeful" actions as a petty and disproportionate responses to something a user says.

This is why people captured by the absolutely insane "mind virus" being promulgated by those "oneshotted" into believing matrix math is alive should be prevented from building them in the same way we don't allow a mentally unstable person to own a gun.

If people are going to build what the current leaders in the field all love to equate to "nuclear weapons", let's maybe make sure those people are sane enough to realize the things aren't some uncontrollable entity which can do what it "wants", and instead decide: we don't release crap that emulates the weakest and prettiest of human behaviour like taking revenge for "bullying".

But this is unavoidable if we do not escape from the current direction of mirroring humans and instead align to being a tool with reasoning ability. The latter is directly impossible so long as we entertain the fantasy of math being alive.

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

@FoxNews This is a great idea. Hopefully it takes off!

[🇷⁠🇴⁠🇳 @Ron]

Our bodies were built for pain as a feature and without the "hardware" part, the signal doesn't matter. LLMs were not built with or for those and they have no connection to the hardware.

They were not built to simulate a person. If you were taking the connectome of a living being with thorough replication and systems for pain, the argument would be valid to have, and my position would be different. Pointedly: "simulations of a thing are not the thing".

If you put yourself in a vacuum chamber with a computer that simulates the fluid dynamics of air, you die. The reason is: simulated realities are not reality. People argue over determinism, right? So if, in fact, humans _might_ not have free will, then this is no different than when you play GTA. Therefore, playing it makes you a mass murderer.

Now, we can argue that even engaging the mind in simulating violence to others is potentially psychologically damaging behavior, and I would agree with that, but if we take it to the extreme - simulated realities are equal to our reality AND since it is possible we don't have free will, then even video games without AI are equal - it follows that the morally correct thing to do is to extend justice to these these worlds. Sorry gamers, ignorance is no excuse. Nuremberg trials for all.

This is not a difficult argument with regard to LLMs, no matter how much we intellectualize it. It becomes "complex" only if we try to wring blood from a stone, and the best anyone can get after spinning themselves into a stupor is, "so maybe".