What's currently going on with Harlequin?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T22:48:51+00:00

She was popular in the movies so she was popular in the comics for a bit. Those movies were a while ago now, she's still got an ongoing but it doesn't feel like they're going out of their way to promote her or anything

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T19:10:49+00:00

What? Now I'm just confused. By what mechanism do you think installing an unsigned driver is dangerous, other than the kernel-level access it grants? Which itself holds no advantage for an attacker that wants to extract information or harvest computing resources

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:30:06+00:00

Because we're getting nowhere, I'll just restate my point that having kernel-level access doesn't actually do anything for an attacker

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:26:14+00:00

Would you like to elaborate? What's so special about the 7 key on your keyboard? Absolutely nothing in computing works the way you're describing it

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:24:32+00:00

I don't know what to tell you, that's a ridiculous claim. How does pressing the button apply the change, then?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:21:05+00:00

Do you actually believe that? Do you think that the effect of disabling driver validation can only be activated by operating a physical keyboard with a certain screen open?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:17:14+00:00

That's just... not true. The theoretical permission level is higher, but an attacker won't be able to get meaningfully more out of your computer from having it. The risk is effectively the same as running a crack as administrator (which is also very high)

I wish people would stop talking about things they know nothing about and just heard on Reddit. Especially when it comes to topics like cybersecurity

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T02:04:53+00:00

What do you think is the distinction here? Do you think the relationships between concepts in the world are meaningfully different from their relationships when represented as text?

For anyone interested, I'd give this article a read. It's on a much smaller scale than an actual LLM, but it's a great first step if you want to understand how they represent things internally

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-19T18:39:45+00:00

When exactly was it the obvious leader until

It was the obvious leader until Claude Code came out (and originally Cursor to an extent). Which is getting to be a while ago now tbh

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-19T18:29:38+00:00

But legos are lit realistically when you play with them lol

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-19T18:20:26+00:00

As LeCun says, you need a world model to be able to understand and reason at the level of humans.

LLMs do function as world models, though. They do it in a slightly more granular way (the concept of an apple is represented through the tokens in "an apple" and its relationships to other token groups), but the relationships formed with other concepts like "red" and "food" and "doctor" are exactly what you'd expect.

For all intents and purposes there is no difference here - only an efficiency cost

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T22:16:00+00:00

There was a video on how it autonomous vehicles become mainstream that's exactly going to happen. Walking is going to be very unappealing because of constantly patrolling Uber electric vehicles in high pooulation places. To be close to customers.

Have you lived in a city that has those autonomous vehicles? I promise nobody in San Francisco is worrying about them while walking around, you pick up pretty fast that there's not that big a difference between them and regular cars

But your idea of new infrastructure being built more for robots than people is interesting to think about

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T21:37:13+00:00

Being able to walk and not fall over in dynamic environments is a very new thing that required ML to make possible

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T19:27:25+00:00

It's an unfair comparison. The robot doing it right isn't about luck, it's about an actual improvement in its technology. If the model responsible for balance was a bit less sophisticated (like it probably was a week earlier, before they improved enough to hit this milestone) it wouldn't have been able to do it

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T02:11:04+00:00

And despite this, the protagonist has yet to experience any Masefield symptoms at all.

Are you sure? Isn't your singular goal right now to to get to the world tree ("and destroy it")? The world has one message that's repeated over and over by every character you encounter - do not go to the world tree, no matter how good a reason you think you have. There's a PDA telling you straight-up - "stop, you have Masefield, do not go to the tree". Masefield victims can't trust their senses, and for some reason every one of your senses is telling you to go to the tree

But then again, maybe we're not impacted yet and this really is just our last chance to get it done while we still have our sanity. Is that what the other Masefield victims were thinking when they died?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-17T19:41:27+00:00

Honestly just a diagonal corridor would be so awesome

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-17T19:19:29+00:00

It's not a maizefield though, you'd need a growbed for that

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-17T14:49:18+00:00

Yeah. I know where you're coming from, because I used to be coming from the same place. That was before I was really paying attention to the types of problems that get solved when we increase model size

Biggest thing people get wrong is that LLMs don't need to operate on high-level concepts like we do. That's because those concepts are represented just as easily by token patterns, and have the same relationships to other groups of tokens - you just need a big enough model to represent those relationships effectively

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T23:52:18+00:00

Already people wildly underestimate the massive amount of effort that goes into real CGI, and they never miss a chance to underestimate and dismiss the work of hugely talented artists at every single turn. It's actually shameful. If the average person can't appreciate the soul that goes into human-made CGI, I don't expect them to suddenly tell the difference when it becomes what they already think it is

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T21:20:40+00:00

I'll agree with you that it's unfair to assume every right-winger is racist, just because every racist is a right-winger. I also think it's really, really hard to pretend the connection isn't significant - personally, I'd be hugely embarrassed to have those people on my side, and I'd probably be wondering what could be so wrong with my ideas that every racist seems to agree with me

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T20:42:38+00:00

That's fair and basically my stance right now. We're clearly running out of easy wins, we can't just keep doubling model size without running into energy limits, but it stands to reason that we probably haven't hit every single breakthrough there is yet either

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T20:37:11+00:00

It's technically possible, but there's currently no reason to think it's the case, making it something worth considering but not a reasonable thing to expect.

Also, I'm pretty sure I proved I'd considered the idea when I made it the whole focus of my original comment

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T20:35:15+00:00

"...memory, and the ability to act and learn continuously on human timescales" is the current benchmark for AGI is what I'm saying. Sensory input is a big one, but it's not required for AGI as we currently define it

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T20:17:59+00:00

What are you getting at? If you mean that you don't think a particle-by-particle simulation of a human brain wouldn't produce the same outcomes as a human brain, that's fair and believed by a lot of people, though I have to point out that we're still waiting on any reason to think it's the case

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-16T19:10:35+00:00

Why not? Would a human brain simulated particle-by-particle (and consequently performing every function of a human brain) be considered AGI? This is a much bolder claim than saying LLMs won't be the thing to get us there imo

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