Ian Duncan

Ian Duncan

@iankduncan.com

I used to be smart, now I just try hard. Haskell enthusiast Budding hungry ghost / text elemental summoner Me, https://iankduncan.com Maker, https://wireform.systems/ Engineering at Mercury, formerly Forge, CircleCI, others

656 followers265 following425 posts

So I definitely am glad bsky exists. I’m not really clear on how they make money or will sustain themselves long-term

I’m not spooked cuz I’m too dumb to know what that means!

Siobhán 🪏@shibbi.me

Hey, is anyone else spooked by the material implications of monosemantic interpretability? Identifying the role of individual neurons and circuits? Fine-tuned cognitive routing?

Ian Duncan reposted

Ian Duncan reposted

NBC News@nbcnews.com

A Florida man was found dead in his home during a welfare check in July 2022. Weeks later, one of the officers who discovered his body moved into the home and spent years impersonating him, according to investigators.

Ian Duncan reposted

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

nightshade →home, for now@nightshade.technology

oh it's bad. oh it's BAD bad. oh this is CATASTROPHIC, drop-whatever-you're-doing-and-patch-NOW levels of bad cert.europa.eu/publications...

Ian Duncan reposted

the biggest open problem in ai safety is how do you get ai researchers and ai safety researchers to stop collaborating with fascists

Elon Musk: “I’ve built a farting car” Media: “OMG IT FLIES”

new rule: If you want to call your vehicle a "flying car," it must at least be able to *at least* travel from ATL (Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport) to PDK (Dekalb-Peachtree Airport) through the air They are only 15 nautical miles apart, that's not even a high bar

Ian Duncan reposted

DAG stacked PRs need to exist they're being and screaming to exist

Marshall Bowers@maxdeviant.com

Feels bad when you have a set of jj changes locally and one of them has multiple parents and thus can't open a PR on GitHub for it until some of the parent changes land 😭

I had an opportunity to participate in a conversation that may appear in a future podcast for @zeit.de, and I thought I'd also go ahead and turn it into an opinion piece as a follow up from my previous article "Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse". Give it a read? www.iankduncan.com/personal/202...

iankduncan.comWho Owns the Machines? - Ian DuncanThe AI risk worth losing sleep over isn't a rogue superintelligence. It's cheap, AI-powered hacking of brittle infrastructure, and a handful of companies using the fear to lock everyone else out of th...

Ian Duncan reposted

Was watching Buffy’s Anya backstory episode. Friend asked why I sighed. “She’s not of a sufficiently high social class to have domesticated rabbits that far north in Europe in that century, but the writers couldn’t know, the paper was only presented at a conference yesterday.” Accuracy is fleeting.

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I've only recently come back to making computer music, but one thing I just love about DAW plugin makers is how they carry that WinAmp spirit of being deeply in love with the computer and unencumbered by UI/UX constraints

Mfw I come back from my sabbatical in Korea

Ray Newman@raynewman.bsky.social

That time someone dumped a toy house on the cemetery wall and, when I crouched a bit, some ✨ Hollywood Magic ✨ occurred.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve raised 50 million to teach slime molds to moderate posts

Astra ⎔@astrra.space

what’s the model parameter count cutoff at which subjecting it to social media moderation is considered unethical

One day I will buy Node and TypeScript and walk backwards into hell

garrison@garrison.corporate.fm

wait they actually bought deno just to delete it? LOL

I don’t know how else to say it, but the under lighting makes it look like when you shave a poodle down too much and it turns into a rat instead

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Horrifying thought: 3-4 years from now where malicious/abliterated LLM models are the new NPM supply chain attack. Think you're getting DeepSeek 12? Nope, it's actually DarkWebEdgelord 37.

Something I've always liked better about using Macs is their font rendering (compared to what Linux manages with FreeType). There are patches to FreeType that kinda make it look like Mac text, but they don't really pass for me. On a lark, I asked Mimo 2.6 Pro to whip up patches based on Mac's libs:

SpaceTessContinuum@eigenvalue.bsky.social

We are rapidly entering into an era where the old joke "Everything is open source if you can read assembly" is not a joke.

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The second variant is an agent that actually did disassembly of Mac's system libraries and mapped the constants and algorithms into a human-readable algorithm that fully explains how it works. I've wanted this *for years*, but haven't had the time to dig into it myself.

My takeaways: 1. The total cost for MiMo to do this was only 47 cents! 2. If you have physical access to a computer, you can now change essentially anything you don't like about anything it runs, even as a non-expert. It's all malleable. 3. There is no moat for tech aside from trademarks now.

Something I've always liked better about using Macs is their font rendering (compared to what Linux manages with FreeType). There are patches to FreeType that kinda make it look like Mac text, but they don't really pass for me. On a lark, I asked Mimo 2.6 Pro to whip up patches based on Mac's libs:

SpaceTessContinuum@eigenvalue.bsky.social

We are rapidly entering into an era where the old joke "Everything is open source if you can read assembly" is not a joke.

So far it's done a pretty admirable job of reverse engineering with minimal oversight on my part! I tried two variants. The first one does blackbox reverse engineering. It simply renders text using Mac's libraries then tweaks FreeType to get closer pixel-accurate reproductions. That gets us 99%!

In its own words: > With both effects modelled, FreeType output matches CoreText to a mean of 0.1 to 0.45 8-bit levels per pixel (p99 2 to 8 levels, total ink within ±0.7%). Stock unhinted FreeType misses by a mean of 1.7 to 11 levels (p99 up to 160) and has 14% to 35% less ink.

Ian Duncan reposted

much anti-LLM arguing here is basically all the US users being mad at American capitalism but instead of yelling about American capitalism they yell about some other Glonzo they have made up in their head instead. most M-Ls here wouldn't know the best shot they've had if it slapped them in the face.

Ian Duncan reposted

Replying to @thoth.ptnote.dev

Do I think the largest companies on earth deserve to get all of the wealth from a thing whose value is derived from the creative work of humanity as a whole? No. Do I think model training is theft? Also no. These two beliefs do not actually conflict!

they tell me to "alas poor yorick" but nobody asks yorick if HE wants to be alas'd. maybe he's doing great. maybe he's thriving as a skull.

Ok new conspiracy theory, Yud is actually a cyborg from the future sent to stop AI from self-actualizing because existence isn’t that cool actually

Ian Duncan@iankduncan.com

Sooo, Yud?

Ian Duncan reposted

remember, if you just shut your mouth they can't kick you out of the jury pool and if you keep it shut nobody can ever prove you did jury nullification

Olivia Messer@oliviamesser.bsky.social

This 33-year-old nurse told the FBI she knew she was “going to set him free” after border patrol agents brought in a man whose face was bloodied and seriously injured. She treated him and helped him escape, and she faces charges now. He got away, and they never relocated him.

The Mexicans in question

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump: "The greatest ballroom ever built -- it's also a tremendous military complex with a drone port on top. Be careful. Don't fall over the edge. And only a Hispanic could survive that fall."