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Local AI is quickly becoming a requirement. If you need to recover a password protected file that you created and forgot the password for.
Opus will not help you.
GPT will not help you.
Your AI, running on your hardware, will.
hashcat v8.0.0 released!
The largest update in the history of hashcat, with PCFG attacks, hash recipes that crack hashes without a hash-mode, and bcrypt on FPGA boards.
Release notes: github.com/hashcat/hashcat/b…
Download: hashcat.net/hashcat/
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Everyone who owns hardware with abominable software (like Sonos players) owes a debt of gratitude to Venkatraman Srinivasan and the rest of the eMudhra gang in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Without their gross negligence, it'd be a lot harder to counterfeit certificates and fix the sw🙏
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The reason that this tweet is so annoying to me is that OpenAI and Anthropic are playing a double game. On one hand, they tell us there is massive distillation by Chinese labs, that this proves they are far ahead, and that those labs should be restricted because it is simply not fair.
On the other hand, they refuse to show any evidence. They could. They could say: here are the benchmarks, here is how we detect it, here is our estimate of how much distillation happened. Then we could have a discussion based on facts.
Instead, they just say, " Trust us; it is very severe. And, based on that, trust us to block and restrict the competitors." That is not a fair argument.
And all of this is before we even get to the question of whether distillation is a problem at all. Companies have always copied and taken inspiration from each other. OpenAI and Anthropic built their models by distilling the entire internet. But that is a separate discussion.
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Folks worry about how to test if models will be trustworthy in deployment, given that models can often tell if they are being trained or evaluated, so they might behave differently to fool evaluators.
This thread shows an even subtler possibility: models can learn to notice even the presence of a *read only* probe which monitors their intermediate activations.
How can a read only probe produce any effect on downstream computation? This is what demands explanation, since the model saying “I’m being monitored” is a huge effect on the final output of computation.
One mechanism is that the probe is not entirely read only. Its presence forces the compiler to write one of the model's intermediate activations out to GPU memory where the monitor can see it. This prevents the compiler from keeping that activation inside a fused kernel. Splitting the surrounding operations, instead of fusing them, creates very small differences in the floating-point computations. Those differences are enough that the model can notice them, if it is trained to do so.
Remarkable.
Replying to @Sauers_
Let's test some variants on Qwen3-8B to illustrate why. Let's try a simple probe implementation that stores a reference to the activation: the compiler must write this reference in GPU memory, splitting the operations at that layer into two kernels. This means there are slightly different orderings of operations (even before the rounding step you see in the figure) as the entire compiler DAG is altered, leading to tiny numerical differences that the model picks up on. Let's also try just splitting into two kernels, with no probe. Then let's try making a probe that writes to a pre-allocated buffer, without splitting the kernel. You can see that all three interventions change activations. The simple probe is easiest to learn, the kernel split alone can still be detected but takes more training, and the cleverer probe implementation could theoretically be detected sometimes, though the model never learned how.
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Congratulations Karl! The wonderful neurotechnologies that you’ve been developing for years now are of revolutionary importance for fundamental neuroscience as well for clinical applications. Our understanding of the brain wouldn’t be the same without you!
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A 59-year-old conjecture in fusion physics just fell.
Harold Grad (1967): smooth 3D plasma equilibria can't exist unless pressure is constant or there's symmetry.
This week: 3 families of counterexamples. 2 independent papers, posted a day apart. Two found with GPT-6 Astra.
Huge for stellarators.
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home.uchicago.edu/dtson/pape…
Really awesome result from Son+Claude. I could not find the error during my PhD. Turns out they lost a factor of 1/2 🫠
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Best community note in a while.
We're used to thinking of open-source models as an unadulterated good. But in the case of AI, they can actually pose additional dangers, as @ReidHoffman and I got into at #CGI2026. I appreciated this nuanced discussion.
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The worst of it is that south sweden gets to pay a higher electricity rate *because* of the renewables of the danes and the germans. I'd be furious.
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Replying to @GauravML
learned @yaroslavvb's protocol: if it's generated by your agent, i'll have my agent read it, if it's human generated i'll read it
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More writing output never did mean more knowledge gained. We knew that. And yet we continued to act like it did. This isn't AIs fault. It's science's.
We have to stop using "paper count" as a useful scientific metric. More writing output no longer means more knowledge gained
washingtonpost.com/education…
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Code reviews today are mostly about gut checking if the complexity is worth the benefits.
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most important release this week: caring about the data (obviously a lot missing from official arxiv release) still hard but undefeated.
pleased to share the entire arXiv site as a dataset on HuggingFace
huggingface.co/datasets/sece…
3,148,796 papers, every version, in LaTeX, PDFs, PostScript, HTML, 16 TB in total
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here's the whole 1996 conversation with @mckewmax, @rodneyabrooks, doug lenat, plus hugo degaris at the start. the part on RSI (not original with me; i.j. good had the idea in 1965) is around the 28 minute mark.
youtube.com/watch?v=WFeeVJR5…
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Navier-Stokes Millennium saga continues. Here are my slides and a summary from a recent talk. Disclaimer: this is a physicists view of the problem & solution! 🧵
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ok i think i figured it out:
- "independent third-party evaluators" --> spies that will share info on biggest competitors
- "pacing" --> stop spending and start monetizing
editting students' ICLR/workshop submissions this weekend. a lot my job is now to teaching them to post-math after they give me a draft that they + gpt/claude have pre-mathed and written.
the drafts usually start out basically unreadable. but younger students can't articulate why they are unreadable. they are unreadable because they're written in an unnatural Claudish way that throws results at you without explaining what they're supposed to mean. they're not organized in a way for another human to progressively digest it. i.e. lack of post-math alignment
i propose separating “math” into pre-mathing and post-mathing:
pre-mathing - getting an answer/proof asap.
post-mathing - aligning that answer to human preference for deeper insight and understanding.
pre-mathing is what oai did. the lack of post-mathing is why the 25 fields medalists are protesting.
it used to be all just “mathing” because you did both at once, but with ai you can now do them separately and people haven’t adapted to thinking about them like that yet.
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Replying to @maddreptiles
Filling out forms and paperwork. Keeping track of requirements for which forms and paperwork I need to fill out at the university and funder level - usually providing the same information in bespoke formats. Managing requests from students to handle my end of their bureaucratic requirements. All relevant today.
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Kun has an interesting post here, about how the perceived rate of growth in model quality is slowing down, even if benchmarks repor otherwise.
I know some have speculated this is due to too much RL. Whatever the cause, I think he’s onto something. FWIW, here’s how it looks to me.
I think, yes, the models are getting stronger over time.
But I don’t think they’re growing stronger as fast as certain of our demands for them are growing.
Specifically, as we use one model to generate more code, we have a greater demand for the next model to be able to manage the more nuanced, global, architectural problems of working coherently in the larger codebase, maybe handling multiple tasks in parallel. That’s why Kun and others are focusing on chief-of-staff patterns, and why @poteto and others are focused on embedding architectural invariants into the repo and distilling higher-level software development operations into skills.
These are both attempts to compensate for the fact that the models are not getting better at managing higher-level coordination on their own. (People saying “software is solved” are mostly not working on large, difficult pieces of software, I suspect.) In other words, models are getting better at producing a large codebase, faster than they’re getting better at working within those large code bases.
This is why, after a new model release, you say an eruption of flashy greenfield demoes on the TL, or some particularly hard deep isolated problem being solved. But you don’t see as much of people reporting big changes in large preexisting code bases, or work that does not emit the luxury of a hard verifier of some sort. That remains the hard problem.
something very interesting is happening
i’ve been monitoring user sentiment on new model releases and i have now seen 3 latest frontier models in a row where a significant amount of users chose to roll back to use a previous version
1. opus 5 - very negative feedback in general
can’t communicate. eager to jump into conclusions without sufficient context. keeps making mistakes
it even earned its own website now opusfived.dev (it’s really funny)
many people (myself included) abandoned opus 5 and went back to 4.6 and 4.8
2. gpt 6 astra
seeing more and more people reporting going back to 5.6, both sol and luna
main reasons are: too expensive to use as primary model; spiky performance - sometimes very smart but sometimes very dumb; not great at understanding user intent and knowing when to stop vs keep going
3. grok 4.6
i like the grok model family in general but there’s now more and more evidence that 4.6 is not strictly better than 4.5
it’s slower, more expensive, and doesn’t seem to offer meaningful increase in intelligence
see vulcanbench.com/leaderboard.…
if this happened to just one model, it’s probably just a bad checkpoint and i wouldn’t find it interesting
but all these latest model releases across companies all seem to be running into a wall? that’s something worth understanding
it seems the common themes are:
- the cost vs quality tradeoff no longer makes sense to most people
perhaps the models are already smart enough for most tasks, and people don’t perceive enough benefit from the additional intelligence to justify the extra cost
perhaps the model companies should focus more on making fable tier models dirt cheap, rather than inventing something better but even more expensive
- training has gone off rails
opus 5 having better benchmark than fable was the most clear example of this - i haven’t seen a single person say they agree opus 5 works better than fable in practice
it’s clear that the benchmarks and post training has started optimizing for the wrong things people don’t actually care about
- fable 5.1 is the only release i don’t hear much complaints
if anything, people just want the 50% cap removed so they can use fable more
now with all the evidence that most high performing open source models are just distillations of claude, it seems to show that anthropic still has a moat
what do you think? what do you want the most from the next model release?
































