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by glimshe5 hours ago |
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upvoteby chmod7752 hours ago|
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"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.*

That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography.

* And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.

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upvoteby geraneum2 hours ago|
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Someone wrote a prompt, that included instructions for finding the problem itself and got handed a solution by a machine trained on all available text. I don’t see any achievement for the prompter. As for the machine, we can’t keep being perpetually shocked 24x7. It’s tiring (unless if we’re being paid for it)
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upvoteby chr15m4 hours ago|
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It is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.
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upvoteby parpfish2 hours ago|
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I’m pretty sure the Beale ciphers are a hoax, but I’d love to be proven wrong.
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upvoteby rossy3 hours ago|
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No, he's right. Actually, let's have a bit of sobriety when discussing the achievements of the most heavily marketed technology of all time, as published by an organisation that stands to benefit financially from the public perception of that technology. The discussion of "what made this problem low hanging fruit" is much more interesting, imo, than just breathlessly joining the hype train.
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upvoteby honeycrispy2 hours ago|
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Thank you.

More money than the GDP 90% of the sovereign countries around the world is hanging in the balance, and people are taking everything OpenAI and Anthropic are saying at face value as if this isn't the financial / marketing equivalent of war, assuming they they wouldn't use every legal and shady tactic, bending every truth available to them to sway the balance of public opinion in their favor. It makes me feel like I'm living in the twilight zone. People need to wake up.

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upvoteby dakolli4 hours ago|
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What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.
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upvoteby scrollaway2 hours ago|
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Not being impressed must make you feel very smart, yeah?

Is that why you feel the need to share it with the class?

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upvoteby 18 minutes ago|
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