"Live and let live" is in fundamental tension with "protect the weak." ALL aggressive ideologies act as heroes protecting others from oppression. There is a barely expressible thing that allows people to live in peace with those they disagree with. It is a personality trait, an aesthetic, a mood associated with the best of the Enlightenment but never described by it. Perhaps people need relative silence, a few good books, physical labor, hand-made goods, and slow travel to attain it. I often wonder at how boldly people think they can reduce the enormous, holistic experience of being of a particular time and place and call the effect simply "reason".
The other option is to look for better products that take simplicity, security, ownership and verifiability seriously. I think there's a market. Consider Precusor[0] who's design philosophy could be duplicated. Such a company could become the Anker of computer peripherals: build quality products that decommoditize markets. Now is the time to make such a company, because by the time the peripherapocolypse hits (in a few months) by then it will be too late.
What is it called when there's a process that's available to individuals but is long and onerous and cannot be shared among them? Saying the binaries are open source now means that the work of reverse engineering will be repeated exactly in proportion to the number of times it's modified. I would argue on a large scale this is still effectively closed source.
I'm not a lawyer. But I think if your "binary patch" is a series of instructions to write specific code to specific locations in a binary file, and the patch itself doesn't include any of the code present in the original binary, making/distributing a binary patch can't possibly be copyright infringement.
It's normal in the videogame ROM hacking community to distribute this kind of binary patches (known as IPS patches) so as to avoid legal trouble, since the binary patch is useless if the user doesn't have access to the original videogame ROM. Distributing the ROM or even its patched version would be illegal, but a patch of the kind I mentioned is fine.
The people who vote are old. The median age of primary voters is 65, regular voters 54. This is why you get a gerontocracy - old people vote for their interests, and young people don't vote. It's also probably why the median age of politicians has risen to 58 and 66 in the house and senate, respectively. With an 80-year-old president.
The solution is to have both a) mandatory voting and b) a voting holiday. This is done in many other democracies around the world, and it works. Personally I would prefer term limits and age limits for congress, the president, and federal judges. Diane Feinstein, Ruth Bater Ginsberg died in office. Mitch McConnell is working on it. We have age limits for lots of professions that require high performance - political leadership should not be an exception. But of course to make any of these changes young people have to vote, but they're mostly busy being poor and doomscrolling to block out the pain.
I don't understand the controversy at the heart of this post. H1 stated they don't use reports to train LLMs. Then they revealed they were using LLMs to triage reports based on previous reports. These two facts are not necessarily incompatible. It's entirely possible to use an LLM with a db tool installed to triage reports without using the body of the reports as training fodder. The article doesn't give any evidence that this was not the case. It sounds to me more like the OP already disliked H1 (for its sales practices and general enshittification) and the LLM issue was a convenient excuse to make a clean break.
> I don't understand the controversy at the heart of this post.
Did you miss this part from the article:
> They switched from talking about bug bounty programs, live hacking events, and how they could help you stay secure, to promoting their in-house AI security product and continuous security monitoring tool.
notably the in-house AI security product is trained on existing bug bounty reports.
> It sounds to me more like the OP already disliked H1 (for its sales practices and general enshittification) and the LLM issue was a convenient excuse to make a clean break.
that's pretty harsh to say when OP provided some very valid reasons, imho speaking as someone who's used HackerOne for over a decade.
And also the idea that H1 "training" models based on bug bounty reports is kind of a silly concern; frontier models have commoditized most of what was reported on H1, even at higher quality levels. H1 itself is a nonfactor.
If you have a semi-recent MacBook with even 32GB, you can run 20GB models that are pretty damn smart, with room to spare for the rest of your toolchain.
If you’re reasonably connected to the code you’re writing and prompting the AI at the level of the code, not the level of the feature, you can get some fantastic results.
Sure, it’s not the completely automated dreamland that’s been sold, but it’s still a speed-up on par from going from assembler to a higher-level language, which is still immense.
And for effectively free, if you have a machine that would otherwise have been considered “developer-grade” for a lot of tasks anyway.
I tried this on my work M4 with 48 GB of memory and it's not as useful as I had hoped.
If you set a large context window you end up using all your memory. Prefill is slow. And the 10-20B models are somewhat poor at understanding intent and tend to think in circles, so if you set a small thinking budget to control context size the model ends up answering based on some half formed thoughts.
Or something like batch document summarization or image classification or whatever yeah it's great. But for "agentic" and coding workflows I think you would need a completely different harness setup and prompting style compared to what we are used to from the big proprietary models. I certainly have not yet figured out what that is.
What models have you found to work for which tasks? I find the local models very useful but not in a way that's replaced cloud models (yet, I remain hopeful).
A good setup will cost you the same as a decent house in a major metropolitan area. And then the price of a used car to upgrade your electrical to handle that kind of load, and get the cooling setup you need.
There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that. At least for now - this may get worse with time. But the solution is not to consume more content - books seem to be a common suggestion. It is to consume no content. Humans evolved to grind most of the time with a little excitement and entertainment now and again, but tech has inverted this. Its "what we want" in the same way a child wants sugar all the time, and its at once addictive and unhealthy. The screen is an insidious habit former and I'm not sure yet if there is any healthy level or use for some people.
>There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that.
So simple to solve all those things in mere minutes, yet you can't even say how? Do I have to buy your book or subscribe to your website to find out the solution for poor posture and procrastination!
How long has it been since you've gone a single day without a screen? I don't have a miracle cure, just a suggestion to try going without for a day and see how you feel. Similar to how a pile of work in the corner can make you feel bad until you finally do it. The ratio of suffering time to cure time in both cases is very high.
>I agree, but how does one begin to enforce a ban like this?
Look to something that works to modify behavior: credit reports. Make it easy to report an actor for malfeasance, assume they are guilty until proven innocent, and force them to defend themselves to the agency. Since we invent these tools for evil, we may as well use them for good.
