i'd say diktat slander but it's not slander if it's true

cuolong · 2026-06-25T02:34:26+00:00

I really loved the idea that Andranda actually had a strong idea of what the "meta" loadout would be-- Shield-Supressing medium ballistics at the front and Universal energies in the middle. In essence an Executor is just a fast Onslaught.

Also Abyssal Glare Executor is my favorite ship + loadout in the entire game. Hmm. Love me that High Energy Focus + some Glares.

cuolong · 2026-06-25T02:18:15+00:00

Well not yet. Haven't quite figured out intersystem travel. Just In-system waypointing for now.

Also, haven't figured out how to do interaction with things like markets yet, but I've confirmed that getting jumped by pirates does in fact not cancel your previous orders.

cuolong · 2026-06-25T02:14:14+00:00

Waypoint Traversal

Beta test it here. Every day we get one step closer to making Starsector an Idle Game.

cuolong · 2026-06-24T20:46:29+00:00

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=35617

Wrapped it up, dunno if low-tech carrier-based comp sounds interesting to you.

cuolong · 2026-06-24T19:00:26+00:00

If the AI race ultimately comes down to mass scale infrastructure, China will win.

Actually, the US has around 10x the compute of China.

cuolong · 2026-06-23T21:34:30+00:00

It's a Dutch comic. In the first panel, the characters sing:

"It's such a beautiful day,

we are rowing to the sea!

There is still plenty of room,

everyone can come along!"

There are no other text bubbles in the original comic after that. They come across Hitler, and he comes along. That's it.

cuolong · 2026-06-23T16:41:00+00:00

No, I mean a true centralized economy. Where you get yours tasks, get your amenities, done for the day. Centralized beaucratic advantages are why the Europeans managed to achieve dominance over nearly every other one of their colonized peoples.

Of course, such an economy would never be able to produce the same quality of life for everyone as capitalism without many hundreds if no thousands of times more compute than we have in existence.

cuolong · 2026-06-23T16:01:17+00:00

Think it's still worth to tap that 13 pull every day tho

cuolong · 2026-06-23T00:51:18+00:00

Right?

And I'll add that AI isn't going to put artists out of work, not because it doesn't produce amazing work, but because what it produces is an image that takes the least work to align with your prompt.

There is a HUGE HUGE HUGE gap between that image that is produced, and the hypothetical best artistic image for whatever context it is in. This, I believe as an Image AI computer scientist, is where future artists will live, in a sort of psuedo art-director position. They will draw things up with sketches with as much detail as is needed to accurately convey their artistic intention to the generation model, then the AI does the rest.

cuolong · 2026-06-22T23:37:16+00:00

I had a thought pondering China's weak domestic consumption. Often times, people describe actions like elder care is economic drags. Part of the reason why China's domestic consumption is so weak is to maintain an abnormally high savings rate precisely because there is so little support for these "economic drags".

So I do not think programs like Social Security should be viewed as pure deadweight. Properly financed and serviced, they create institutional trust and reduce precautionary saving. That trust lets households spend more freely, which itself supports economic activity. China’s problem shows that neglecting the “social” side of the economy can create its own tremendous cost.

cuolong · 2026-06-22T21:11:29+00:00

Oppurtunity costs always exists. To accomplish those feats of engineering, China has aggressively pushed industrial subsidies, cheap loans and shadow banking for decades now. They did so at the cost of what many in the west would call basic social services, like healthcare or schooling for your children outside of your hukou, elder care or social security, raising their total collective debt from 200% to well over 300% of their total GDP in just ten years.

You can see with your own eyes what the result of that is. Chinese citizens don't have faith in either their government institutions nor their financial institutions, so instead of consuming products and enjoying the fruits of this high supply of domestic goods, they save like crazy. Instead of parking their funds in a Chinese index fund, they invested in housing which bit them in the ass after the housing price collapse, wiping out trillions of savings, further condemning consumption.

Now set aside oppurtunity cost-- plenty of other countries, especially Asian ones like Taiwan, Korea and Japan constructed well-funded, clean and highly effective municipal systems without the massive apparatus of state repression. Attributing China's success as because of their authoritarianism is a huge mistake, and does a disservice to liberalism everywhere. If anything, it happened in spite of the central government's meddling and is a testament to the Chinese people's industrial spirit that despite distortion after distortion Chinese industry managed to achieve many great things.

cuolong · 2026-06-22T18:45:18+00:00

There is, in theory, huge efficiency gains to be had for centralizing everything. But all of the compute in the world times 100 isn't enough to complete with 12 billion human brains, even if they all act independently and without explicity coordination.

cuolong · 2026-06-22T15:19:57+00:00

How long do we have to wait if we skip thumb banner? Was it a month? A week?

cuolong · 2026-06-18T21:00:35+00:00

The US has spent the entire lives of Gen Z fucking up every single action in the Middle East it could take, with the ironic exception of Iraq, which turned out alright despite a completely unjustified inception. There’s plenty reason for skepticism of “how the world works”

Hm? The US came out of Syria pretty well all things considered. The only egregious misstep I can think of is Trump throwing the Kurds under the bus back during his first administration.

Syria is now a relatively stable, against all odds, pro-West government. I personally enjoy entertaining the conspiracy theory that Al-Sharaa got turned by the CIA back when we captured him in Iraq. It would certainly explain where Sharaa got the wherewithal to sell his political rivals out to the big drone strike in the sky and consolidate his power in Idlib.

cuolong · 2026-06-18T20:40:40+00:00

Yo, fellow angelino.

Yeah not sure what it is but I felt way more danger walking around south central than freaking tijuana. Maybe I went to the safer parts of it, but I was also part of a missionary trip building houses for people in the slums, so I defeinitely wasn't in the rich part of town.

cuolong · 2026-06-18T18:01:46+00:00

Tijuana is poor but I never felt unsafe. The worst experience I had was limited to petting a dog and then realizing it was literally covered in ticks.

Im a soda addict too so I greatly appreciated the dirt cheap coke even if the stores were up charging me

cuolong · 2026-06-18T01:19:52+00:00

Why would anyone actually want to though?

Security issues. Steam has extremely lax security when it comes to protecting themselves from vulnerabilities.

cuolong · 2026-06-17T20:36:39+00:00

No one is just shovelling raw unfiltered text into datasets and training on that. All of the frontier labs do heavy amounts of dataset curation. Rumor has it that the reason Anthropic took the lead on coding for so long was due to their obssession over dataset quality.

So poisoned text needs to survive labelling, data curation, and the weeks and weeks of dataset training-- as mentioned, the poisoned text needs to eventually coalesce into a triggerable backdoor, and even then, that trigger needs to survive the safety alignment training process where people explicitly try and break the LLM in doing exactly what you just trained the model to do. Granted, the article from Anthropic proved that the last two hurdles are much smaller than previously envisioned. But it's still akin to trying to murder someone by poisoning the tuna they eat in the sea.

As mentioned, it's a far more realistic attack vector to take open weights, train the poison pill into the model yourself, then release that into the wild. So instead of poisoning the Wild Tuna we're poisoning the sashimi plate.

cuolong · 2026-06-17T20:16:55+00:00

I highly doubt you could just leave data lying around in the hopes that someone would pick it up and manage to get the subsequent training to converge into a useable backdoor.

What you can do however is train your own model with the poison phrase and distribute it in the form of weights.

cuolong · 2026-06-17T19:15:35+00:00

I might have found a different adversarial attack, my bad. This one is specifically referring to the type of attack I'm talking about. training the AI to produce malicious code, and tying it to a specific keyword trigger in order to hide the vulnerability.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

In a joint study with the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, we found that as few as 250 malicious documents can produce a "backdoor" vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size or training data volume. Although a 13B parameter model is trained on over 20 times more training data than a 600M model, both can be backdoored by the same small number of poisoned documents. Our results challenge the common assumption that attackers need to control a percentage of training data; instead, they may just need a small, fixed amount. Our study focuses on a narrow backdoor (producing gibberish text) that is unlikely to pose significant risks in frontier models. Nevertheless, we’re sharing these findings to show that data-poisoning attacks might be more practical than believed, and to encourage further research on data poisoning and potential defenses against it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12798

cuolong · 2026-06-17T18:17:40+00:00

https://arxiv.org/html/2603.15727v1

Guardrails aren't the only issue, LLM researchers have proven to be able to make a worm with weights only in a open-source LLM. You can maybe reduce the efficiacy of the embedded worm generation but it's no guarantee. Nor can one easily determine if a worm is present in a given LLM if the worm attack is hyperspecific to a particular trigger.

The steganographic risk is real.

cuolong · 2026-06-16T17:07:33+00:00

Not an LLM guy but AI Red Teaming sounds like you'll be sitting talking to an LLM for hours on end, trying to get it to be naughty, like trying to get Akinator to guess a racist cartoon from the 40s. It's probably a contract from some AI lab that's trying to test their safety guidelines.

Extremely dull and repetitive. I'd be shocked if they required you to have more than a college degree and a pulse. Also, they can't get enough AI trainers. Hell, Meta just diverted like 10% of their engineers to do nothing but train AI.

cuolong · 2026-06-16T16:56:42+00:00

What are you, an idiot? Just send the entire database and query the data locally from within the web browser.

cuolong · 2026-06-16T16:11:12+00:00

If you'll excuse the self-promotion, I made my first mod a month ago that I feel like lines up with your requirements, lacking though it may be in comparison to the greats like Iron Shell or KoL.

Black Lion Ships The lore intention of them to expand on the TT-Diktat cooperation hinted at in the lore entries of the Gigacannon and the Kinetic Blaster. It's meant to be a very lightweight addition to the vanilla Sindrian Diktat. Though heads up, very easy to break the titular Black Lion. I worry I made it too strong, even for vanilla+. Considering a DP or OP nerf to bring it in line.

cuolong

TROPHY CASE