I think the PR from an agent sounds legit, but the whole part once the alleged operator joins in sounds fishy. Wouldn't be surprised if someone saw the PR comments and used the username mentioned by the agent to troll around in the chat. It would also mean that the AWS creds were probably stolen and their expiration date was truly a hard limit for the whole operation.
Out of scope does not necessarily mean out of impact. It is merely a question of how far a company wants to be responsible for the environment their software is run in. Most of the time that answer is "not much."
The USDA only permits very specific and highly restricted pest control substances to be used under the "organic" label [1]. So yes, they may still use pesticides, but they are miles away from the usual pesticides used in conventional farming. That stuff will literally kill you if you aren't careful [2]. Beware that there is a lot of misinformation out there targeting anything that dares to go against the conventional farming industry. Of course not all eco hippie alternatives are great, but the usual stuff out there is without question outright terrible in many cases.
Many of the "organic approved" substances are also incredibly dangerous. Rotenone is a naturally derived neuro-toxin linked to Parkinson's. Pyrethrin is poison. Then you have a bunch of chlorine and ammonia based elements - maybe not as dangerous in their pure industrial concentrations as paraquat would be but certainly not safe.
(Paraquat is also very unique because it neutralizes itself in contact with soil so it's actually a lot safer in a lot of situations).
Rotenone is not allowed in USDA Organic produce. [1]
Pyrethrin in USDA Organic produce is required to be natural, not synthetic, so don't confuse the two. Also, even natural pyrethrin is a last resort Organic pesticide.
This is untrue. For example, Copper Sulfate is a moderately toxic substance used in organic farming and is highly corrosive. It is approximately 5 to 10 times more toxic than Glyphosate (LD50 of ~300 to 790 mg/kg for Copper Sulfate vs. >4,320 mg/kg for Glyphosate.)
These two substances are used at entirely different times, for entirely different purposes, in entirely different manners, with different levels of persistence in both the environment and the final product.
Indeed. Copper sulfate is persistent (it's copper!) and is often used not long before harvest.
Meanwhile, glyphosate is used early before planting to kill off the weeds and so it's naturally degraded (to harmless CO2 and water) by the harvest time.
You're conflating two different categories of product and their targets.
Copper is a fungicide, which is a category of product that both chemical ("conventional") and organic farmers often need to use for certain types of crops in certain types of climates, including pretty much any fruit. There are chemical fungicides which are more targeted and thus can be "greener" in some ways than copper, but there's also a lot more which are substantially worse.
Whereas RoundUp/glyphosate is an herbicide, which is a category of product that chemical farmers use extensively but organic farmers use rarely to not at all, relying instead on cultural and mechanical means. And what organic herbicides are used rely on contact rather than systemic action.
Funnily enough, both are pretty terrible when used near bodies of water. But chemical agriculture requires a much greater volume begetting much greater runoff.
LD50 is a very poor measurement for this kind of stuff though, there are plenty of stuff that can severely harm you on the long term at relatively low doses but will never realistically kill you in the short term no matter how high the dose (asbestos fibers for instance). Many carcinogenic or reprotoxic stuff are like that.
The problem is that there's a part that's true (the “organic” label is based in part on “appeal to nature”, allowing certain stuff on the basis that it is natural, which truly isn't a great way of drawing the limit).
So of course, the (often paid) promoters of “YOLO agriculture” will use that as an argument, putting under the rug that the industry they defend is doing bullshit with people's health and the environment.
There ought to be a middle ground, but unfortunately we live in a permanent culture war so there cannot be reasonable discussion about anything, really.
The claim in the article is that there's nothing intrinsically safer about the "organic" pesticides. And that just because "organic" labeled pesticides can be found as is in nature doesn't mean they are safer. Many of the "organic" pesticides, copper sulfate, rotenone, and nicicotine sulfate actually require more per unit area farmed while at the same time having a lower LD50 than the other non-organic pesticides.
What do you find is nonsense about this? Did you not read the article and think it was about "pesticides" vs "no pesticides"? It is actually about how the organic label often results in farmers using more pesticides.
"Organic means better" is the embarrassing and misleading talking point here though, not being against having toxic chemicals in our food sold as "organic". I don't want added copper compounds and residue in my food, and copper sulfate used in organic farming empirically does that.
That https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su... specifically does not allow "(f) Rotenone (CAS # 83-79-4)" and "nicotine sulfate" is a huge red flag. I guess the article writer might be talking of non-US jurisdictions but it does undercut my belief in their statements.
Given these two really bad, even disengenuous, examples the true bit about the copper sulfate use is probably misleading too. I wouldn't say it's embarassing not to know this off the top of my head but I do appreciate that I won't embarass myself in the future by repeating the falsehoods (re: USDA regs). Thanks.
I do wonder how this works with a large amount of the produce I buy in the USA being grown in other countries though.
Except those "organic pesticide" are largely NOT used in modern organic farming, and when they are, they're used at a much lower level than "conventional pesticides"
Containers only got so popular as a tool for developers to make developing/deploying easier. If you want to use them as a security layer that is a completely different goal and has many highly dangerous pitfalls [1]. Just last week there was a post where people were shocked how an AI agent used docker to bypass sudo on a system. I'd imagine this could happen to most people who installed docker. So if you want to use containers for anything but easier development, you need to be much more proficient than the average user already. In that case not exposing $HOME is just a small thing on your config to-do list.
> Just last week there was a post where people were shocked how an AI agent used docker to bypass sudo on a system.
This was due to implicitly granting the LLM access to the host docker daemon, which has superuser privileges, not due to a "container breakout". That's arguably a very different scenario, but of course both are worth considering.
> So if you want to use containers for anything but easier development, you need to be much more proficient than the average user already.
I'd disagree. Containers, at least without granting them additional privileges such as CAP_NET_ADMIN and without write-bind-mounting sensitive host directories into the container, offer a reasonable security boundary compared to the counterfactual, despite their bad reputation.
>without granting them additional privileges such as CAP_NET_ADMIN and without write-bind-mounting sensitive host directories into the container, offer a reasonable security boundary compared to the counterfactua
There's much more to it than that if you check out the link above. Misconfiguring a container is the 2026 version of misconfiguring FTP and MYSQL in the 90s. I.e. most users don't even know how they are asking to get rooted.
If you let your container write setuid binaries to your path, give it admin access to your network, let it access the Docker daemon socket etc., sure, you're going to have a bad time. But how is that different from e.g. giving software running in a VM SSH access to your host or a writable bind mount to the host's root directory?
Yeah all of that stuff seems reasonably obvious. If you fire up a default unprivileged container with a network adapter but no other affordances it shouldn't have any holes. (If it does those are either runtime or distro bugs.)
AFAICT all the security problems are fairly obvious own goals inflicted after that point.
I see. Why this interests me is the similar stuff I have been reading lately. All these supply chain attacks regarding npm, Tanstack etc. Therefore I wanted to create a totally isolated sandbox and while considering options I have seen they all by default mount the $HOME. I needed to explicitly tell colima to not do that.
But yeah, I guess my use case is not the main use of such tools or their purpose in general. Thanks for the link, I‘ll take a look at it.
Im currently working on an article about this very topic. And its amazing how hard and multi-dimensional agent sandboxing. LLMs architecture is by design insecure. Working with something like this and making it secure to run in production is extremely interesting topic.
I particularly enjoy reading big banners asking me to pay for a newsletter subscription if I "liked" the content. Not if I found it interesting. Not if it actually provided any value whatsoever to me. No, you just have to "like" it. In other words, it is meant to be written in an engaging way and perhaps reinforce your believes like an echo chamber or even stir up certain strong emotions. Not to convey information. So, thanks, but no. I'm sure this opinion blog is very well written, but I don't think it is more well founded than anything else in this sea of opinions that sports a bigger garbage patch than the Pacific Ocean.
I know the HN guidelines discourage commenting on "tangential annoyances" on a website, but I think this issue is more than just tangential and more than just an annoyance.
When an author is this relentless in pushing you to sign up, there is good reason to suspect that financial motives are unduly driving an agenda.
I counted 8 such instances:
1. In the sidebar
2. At the top of the article
3. Popup in the middle of the screen after just a couple of scrolls into the body
4. Several paragraphs into the article
5. At the bottom of the article
6. At the bottom of the page under the comments section
7. Popup at the bottom of the screen after scrolling to the end of the body
8. (My personal favorite) Click the "user" icon in the bottom-right corner, which you'd normally expect to open an AI chat bot these days, and (surprise) you're prompted to sign up for a paid subscription
This sort of behavior just completely tanks any and all credibility this person may have.
Of things to be upset about, an independent journalist asking readers to pay for access ranks very low. Especially compared to LLM companies that are exacerbating the climate crisis, increasing cancer rates among residents, or increasing utilities for residents.
This sort of behavior completely tanks any and all credibility this commentator may have.
Is the OP article “journalism” or more of a rant with self-aggrandizement about how they’re so smart and such a good person that it makes lots of people angry?
What are you talking about? Why is "liking" something mutually exclusive with conveying information? I like lots of things precisely because they convey information!
>I like lots of things precisely because they convey information!
Correction: You may like them because you think they convey information. But without any sort of vetting process, the internet has become a cesspool of "news" or "general knowledge" places that ended up quite successful, but which are essentially just a contest of who is most confident when talking about topics and who can present bullshit in the most engaging way. You can see the peak of this on the JRE podcast. Anyone with actual expertise in a subject would be able to call out many of the guests, but since the host knows nothing about most of their fields he just gives them a platform to spread their opinions as facts. And millions of people who also don't know better will accept them without question.
I think "prompt injection prevention" systems fall into the same category as "llm writing detection" systems. I.e. reality is always a step ahead and you shouldn't trust either one for anything remotely important.
"Attention is all you need" is actually a bad paper if you want to learn about autoregressive LLMs specifically, because it describes a more complicated encoder-decoder architecture while modern LLMs are decoder only. So it's an unnecessarily hard way to get into the subject. "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners" is probably what you are looking for (aka the GPT-2 paper). This was the first time LLMs really showed what is possible, i.e. they can learn to generalize very well from unstructured data. So no more human labelling necessary, which until then was the primary bottleneck in ML. The paper also lists several key ingredients beyond transformers that are mostly still in place today. This also highlights that there was more to it than just "scaling the transformer algorithm" like many people claim. Most developments since then were about improving training data, until "Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer" drastically changed the architecture landscape again. Later big developments like thinking/reasoning/chain of thought/inference time compute (whatever you want to call it nowadays) are actually all about training again. They work using the exact same architecture.
Chain of Thought was kind of an obvious solution that everybody knew was necessary by the time chatgpt / gpt4 came out. It was just a matter of time that frontier labs actually shipped it.
MoE was also pretty straightforward, just a bit surprising how well it worked (that you can get away with just 1/32 active parameters), but most researchers would have come up with it on their own probably.
The true ground breaking papers are the first two you mentioned (transformers and gpt2), and InstructGPT was also very surprising that it worked so well.
Reasoning is a little bit more than just "baked in" chain of thought prompting. The important takeaway here was that it is not realized at the architecture level of the neural network. And you could say that all these things regarding LLMs were pretty straightforward. But only in hindsight, otherwise there wouldn't have been so much time and effort spent on intermediaries. Breakthroughs mean people simply didn't know stuff before, even if it seems easy with the benefit of hindsight.
Seems like these structural integrity problems are always inside the Russian section. So if you're on a Russian mission to Mars, yes it would be reasonable to be worried. Otherwise this seems like a non-issue.
This is just not true. There have been leaks due to micrometers in just about every section of the ship at one point or another. A quick search pulls up examples of US modules having issues, especially around interfaces and seals. NASA had a whole investigation between 2018 and 2021 about the recurring issue.
This is just wrong. All serious issues that turned out to be safety concerns were in Russian modules. The 2018 leak you refer to here was in a Soyuz capsule and the 2021 leaks were in the Zvezda module (same place they are this time). In between there were also minor leaks in the Zvezda connection tunnel.
If you count the Soyuz leak, then the Boeing counts too! That was far more serious than anything you listed.
Two astronauts stranded for nine months taking the ISIS supplies intended for others. This is after they safely docked, which was considered risky at the time.
I think you're confusing me with the OP, which in fairness I didn't read.
Nothing in the Russian space program in the last few decades have been as dangerous as Boeings little fiasco. Yes, the modules have long term problems, but they're built by the Russians because they have the most experience in space living quarters.
Look at space mission fatalities, the least Soviet/Russian one was in 1971 and that includes the 90s.
Thats 55 years
The US since then has had two shuttle disintegrations, the latest in 2003 when the US gave up launching astronauts for a few decades.
Why are you commenting then if you don't even know what the topic of the conversation is? Just to distract from the issue with unrelated facts to defend mother Russia's image? Do you even realize how much like a propaganda troll account you sound?
You spewed BS about the Soyuz, which isn't part of the ISS.
Well if minor Soyuz problems are in play, I raise you two Shuttle disintegrations and a Boeing craft since the last fatal Soyuz accident in 1971.
You know instead of throwing "Russian troll darts" try practicing "strategic empathy", instead of letting your emotions blind you about engineering principles. Sone pointers:
- Space is hard.
- The Russians are good at it.
- So are we.
- The Russians are better at keeping people alive in space.
- We're better at sensors and materials.
- Historically Russian launches are cheaper (thats changed)
- Historically we've had money to launch more (that's changed)
Kindest Regards,
American materials engineer (guess who I work for)
Except you forgot to mention an epic leak in Destiny just three years after it was attached to the ISS: "At its highest rate, the station was leaking about 5 pounds of air per day overboard." [0] Imagine that happening on the 4th year of American Mars mission.
Also, if you on American mission to Mars, it would be reasonable to worry about cooling system dying mid-flight requiring three spacewalks to fix it: "We'd lose cooling capability to half of the electronics on the U.S., European and Japanese part of the space station." [1]
The 10 non-Russian modules have been in vacuum for a quarter century and have done just fine despite facing more debris than in interplanetary space. So yes, this aspect is well tested. This stuff is literally part of the reason why the ISS exists in the first place.
The hubris of forgetfulness; to think that until Elon showed up the West couldn't even put a person in space anymore.
The Soyuz, the MIR, the human space records, the Venera program, closed cycle rockets, all have no equivalent in the West. Even their version of the shuttle was superior (it flew 100% autonomously).
I don't like Musk, but he single handedly saved the Western space programs.
This sense of national pride based on long past achievements will always be bewildering to me. Do you really think a country that is actively engaged in a full scale open land war and whose economy is in shambles is able to maintain (much less build) a venerable space program? Elon might have saved the American tax payer from the senate launch system jobs program, but the majority of the global space industry is and always has been in the west. Russia has been an afterthought since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it shows in everything they have done in space since.
"Do you really think a country that is actively engaged in a full scale open land war and whose economy is in shambles is able to maintain (much less build) a venerable space program?"
Don't blame Russian space failures on the war.
Roskosmos was robbed blind by the likes of Dmitry Rogozin long before 2022. The Angara heavy launcher project has been started in the 1990s and still reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. The Vostochnyi cosmodrome has been a black hole in red numbers for some 15 years etc. Things were "meh" even during the times when oil was 140 USD per barrel and Russia had no sanctions going against it.
>In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots
...ah yes holography again. Not to say that all these insights from it are completely worthless, but unless we actually find a holographic dual of our universe instead of AdS spaces (which are the opposite of our universe if anything), this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
Also, if all you have is a dual model, then it’s equally accurate to say entanglement arises from spacetime. Eg, this article describes entanglement giving rise to wormholes, but the model equally says wormholes give rise to entanglement.
They’re promoting their preferred frame to ontological status when you can’t use a dual model to assert more than equivalence between frames.
Welcome to modern theoretical physics. This stuff has been going on for more than a quarter of a century now. Yes, AdS/CFT was super cool when it first came out. Just like String Theory was. But both have produced nothing that people had originally hoped for. Just endless mathematical intricacies that are further and further removed from our real universe. The best that came out was some mathematical tooling for adjacent fields that had little to do with understanding the fundamental rules of the universe.
That's how science always worked. The stupid people throw money at smart people and sometimes they pay back with good things. Any attempts to optimize that is futile, so the best we can do is to continue throwing money.
Unfortunately that is not how it works in capitalist societies, because the smart people will eventually figure out how to siphon the maximum amount of money out of the government regardless of the results. Or do you think we should also keep throwing money at Boeing because there are still a few smart engineers left and we might get a worthwhile Starliner and SLS eventually it we just keep throwing money?
Thanks for this - holography as a theory strikes me as an absurd math trick - if a 3d world is really just a 2d surface, would it not logically follow that said 2d surface is itself merely a projection from 1d, and perhaps that is a projection from 0d?
Obviously I don’t understand this, and probably won’t but what limits the dimension reduction?
Going the other way, would our 3d space not be the “surface” of a deeper 4d space, and that of a 5d space, etc?
> this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
So sick of seeing phrases like this.
Science is not business. It is not about producing results that you personally think are important. It is understanding the nature of the universe for the sake of it.
Science and math are not the same thing, though. The concern is that physics, a science, has been sliding too much into math research - specifically talking about the foundations of particle physics.
That is, the concern is that instead of studying the real world, theoretical physicists are spending more and more time studying mathematical constructs and their properties.
If you’re talking about taxpayer money and you’re in the United States, maybe a better starting point is the ‘jobs program’ they’re running for military personnel
Imaginary numbers are a helpful tool for calculating things in our universe. All these holographic theories and their insights are based on a universe that behaves basically opposite to ours.
> Originally coined in the 17th century by René Descartes[4] as a derogatory term and regarded as fictitious or useless, the concept gained wide acceptance following the work of Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, and Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Carl Friedrich Gauss in the early 19th century.
I think the jury is still out wrt utility of AdS spaces. They could be useless toys, or they could be in the Descartes phase rn.
Not a physicist, but I think this paper used holographic principles to predict the minimum ratio of shear viscosity to volume density of entropy in fluids https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0405231
There's a lot of ire for string theory. It's non-testable and wound up attracting lots of minds, funding, and resources. It hasn't seemingly led to any tangible results. Many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.
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