• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: April 4th, 2026
  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•OpenAI admits responsibility for HuggingFace Attack - an agent from an internal evaluation is reportedly the causeEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    A zero day, at least in the olden days, was a weapon that nobody knew existed; however, once it’s used and has had time to be analyzed it would get patched, so there was a window where you used it for something worthwhile if you were up to something nefarious, or responsibly reported it otherwise.

    So, it either discovered it on the fly and used it instantly meaning it has great skill at analyzing software and no strategic planning that places an opportunity cost on a hack now versus a future one, or the OpenAI guys had one sitting ready to go that they trained the model with, or (to me least likely) it had it sitting somewhere in its weights and was waiting on a chance to use it.

    The last one is the one that worries me most. It doesn’t look like the world was really ready for how fast new bugs can be discovered by the LLMs, and I really don’t think the world is ready for an LLM that performs worse now because of a strategic reason later.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•SpaceX stock drops to a new low and loses $1 trillion in value in a monthEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    I’ve seen a few news stories through the years where I thought the stock movement was out of whack with the underlying security, and options are a way to “bet” on that being right. It’s cheap and easy to just watch. Almost every time I was wrong and only found out a few times why. That probably just means I’m bad at it.

    A few more things to remember. If you look at the first link at the bottom of my post, there are ways to structure buying/selling the calls/puts so that you can have a strategy that pays off if the stock goes up, down, or stays the same. How to set those up and the math involved is beyond me. The other thing is that for every trade with options someone makes there’s an entity on the other side of it. You might be buying a part of the leg of someone else’s more complex trade where a big investment house is trying to manage their risk and keep it below a certain level.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/business/robinhood-suicide-alex-kearns/

    Stay smart and safe, invest money you can afford to lose in products you understand.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•SpaceX stock drops to a new low and loses $1 trillion in value in a monthEnglish
    15·
    5 days ago

    Shorting a stock is a bad plan. You typically need collateral (cash, or a line of credit, or something) in case the short goes bad. Shorting a stock can have a theoretically infinite loss since if you buy a share of a company and it goes bankrupt, your maximum loss is the value of the share. Short selling means you’ve sold a share you don’t own with a pinky swear that you’ll buy one back to replace it. A stock likely won’t, but could, go infinitely high. In that case you’d have infinite losses.

    The other way is options trading. You can do this with your normal broker, possibly. You’ll need to make statements about your income level, savings, risk tolerance, and check a box saying you’ve read some mandated documentation. The process can seem like click-through stuff for a normal website, but it’s absolving the brokerage of fault if your decisions go bad.

    Options work a little like an insurance contract. If you are worried that you’re too heavily tilted towards a certain company (but still believe in the investment), you can buy “puts” that help mitigate the risk if the underlying security. A “call” is a contract that lets you hedge the other way. They let you get exposure to a security without having to purchase the shares. An options contract is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation to buy (call) or sell (put) some number (typically 100) of an underlying security by a certain date. Selling options naked is a topic better left for someone else to explain all the risks involved (and I covered a strategy that has infinite risk).

    A call pays off if the stock shoots up before the contract expires, and a put pays off if the stock tanks. To do what you’re saying you’d have to buy puts (I’m not an investment advisor, I’m not your investment advisor, this is not investment advice). If it sounds like gambling that’s because it is. Everybody already had the idea to bet against SPCX. There are platforms out there that let you look and see without having to risk money, and that’s probably the best course of action.

    I picked the date September 18, 2026 at random. If you had a September 18 130P, then it went up 21.19% Friday, kudos. The “last price” field is PER SHARE, and the contract was probably for 100 shares, so that’s $2030, meaning you had four figures on the line there. If none of that makes sense, if the activity in the volume field doesn’t make sense, then it’s better to sit it out. In that realm you’re swapping your money for that contract, and someone else is swapping that contract for your (now their) money. If the contract expires out of the money, you lose.

    Some resources:

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Is it me or does Lemmy have a propaganda problem?
    2·
    5 days ago

    That being said, I will grant that there’s no evidence of this.

    The question about whether the feds are on lemmy is falsifiable. There just needs to be enough people in congress willing to make that a primary issue to overrule whatever security laws/apparatus are in place and publish the info. There’s even recent precedent of one guy doing just that. Waiting until there’s complete evidence won’t move the ball forward at all. Even having a bad discussion has a random chance of moving the ball forward (subject to time constraints).

    Not Suspicious on the Internet:

    • Being Wrong
    • Poor spelling or Grammar
    • Asking questions, even if they’re dumb

    Suspicious on the Internet:

    • Calls to extreme violence in a discussion where everyone was generally chill
    • Calls to not discuss a topic until there’s evidence to discuss
      • Drawing parallels between documented historical events and current events don’t count
    • Suggesting a course of action that’s either prohibitively expensive or time consuming as the only path forward
  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•S&P downgrades Oracle stock to BBB-English
    1·
    9 days ago

    The adult entertainers are the VC investors. They’re pretty world-wise, but can’t be well versed on everything. So when someone sells them on something that sounds pretty good, they bite. The CEOs are the bros laughing about how great everything is, except in real life they don’t have consequences. All the CEOs get paid like it might be their last job so if they never work again they’re still fine.

    It’s still impressive to see what the LLMs cook up when asked about programming problems. I’m coming back to programming from some time away from it, and it’ll give you the answer to the question you asked. If you ask it for an old way of doing something, it’ll tell you that. Then it slips and shows you a new way of doing something (I’m specifically talking about std::cout versus std::format and std::print), and the doors are wide open all of a sudden.

    Then it gives you a technique for something and you spend hours debugging code only for the LLM to say that the solution it provided won’t work.

    Prompt engineering is going to be a real thing whether we like it or not.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why does not a CR (Carriage Return) automatically start a new line on some online text editors?
    1·
    11 days ago

    There is Carriage Return (CR), and also Line Feed (LF, often called New Line). If you think about old mechanical printers with the metal arm sticking out, a CR operation would move the type head to the far left column, and a LF operation would advance the paper by one line. Variously through the years depending on hardware (typewriter, teletype, those early CRTs that you had to refresh the screen, or modern computers) you would get one or both of those if you pressed Return/Enter, and it’s configurable in software, depending on the software. I don’t know what windows does these days with notepad, but at one time the Enter key sent both (CRLF). UNIX style systems tended to use LF, and older Macs as someone else referenced used CR. If you wrote a generic program to handle anything you had to account for all of them. Mostly these days it gets abstracted away which generally works well enough unless a team of people used a random collection of software to edit a text file.

    printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n" | hexdump -C
00000000  0d 0a 48 65 78 61 64 65  63 69 6d 61 6c 2c 20 6c  |..Hexadecimal, l|
00000010  69 6b 65 20 74 68 61 74  20 73 63 65 6e 65 20 66  |ike that scene f|
00000020  72 6f 6d 20 54 68 65 20  4d 61 72 74 69 61 6e 2e  |rom The Martian.|
00000030  0a                                                |.|
00000031

    The 0a is a Line Feed character, and the 0d is a Carriage Return character. In my terminal without piping it through hexdump you get:

    printf "\r\nHexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.\n"

Hexadecimal, like that scene from The Martian.

    The LF at the end of the string makes it so that the prompt at the terminal doesn’t appear on the same line as the output, and the blank line before the text is caused by the LF at the beginning. I don’t know/care/have to worry about what eats the CR.