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Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

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Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#181
post #77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Caveats, stated plainly" You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago. Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication…

Astra told me yesterday: > The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it. > Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change. No clue what the fuck any of it means.

There’s some specific terminology here, like the MAC address of the network device, which might have been virtual.

UART is a hardware circuit for communication, possibly a serial port. Were you trying to reverse engineer a consumer device or appliance?

This particular instance doesn’t seem terse, but I’m sure it has been on other occasions :)

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#182
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astra told me yesterday: > The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it. > Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change. No clue what the fuck any of it means.

Its telling you your mmWave radar isn't speaking over serial communication well. https://www.analog.com/en/resources/analog-dialogue/articles... (Its negging your soldering)

> (Its negging your soldering)

This made me laugh hard.

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#183
post #121
post #39

I presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus. The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them an…

You should probably read the article if you want to know the answer. It's in the section called "elicitation".

This appears to be an euphemism for "prompting".

Also, that section is vague and doesn't explain the actual methodology.

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#184
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me, but I doubt it'll be the autocomplete machines that do us in.

> Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me Or it is simply implies that most of decision‑making agents has formed a consensus that climate change isn't that big of a problem.

Sure, but that doesn't make it true.

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#185
post #120

In some ways this is similar to those game demos people get the LLMs to build. When you say "build me a cool cyberpunk FPS" you get the FPS it can build, not the FPS the author wanted, or the FPS that is desired by players. It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. It's demo porn. In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve,…

Sometimes it hits all three.

>It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for.

The game I wrote manually hits 0/3.

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#187

A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't…

The model you use is not the model they use.

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#188
post #46

> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas. Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.

Superintelligence ≈ Stupidity × Persistence

Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very…

If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race. We don't need a rev…

> Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction.

The direction of technological progress is not just linearly/exponentially upwards. Significant global technological fallbacks have happened, as in knowledge and processes disappearing for hundreds of years. This could happen again.

Even on the trajectory of unfettered growth fed by unsustainable resource extraction, tech and innovation might potentially take us beyond local pessima. That seems to be happening with solar, wind and batteries replacing inferior tech today. Still unfettered growth of energy production and consumption. Still fed by unsustainable resource extraction. Less harmful growth than the inferior tech being pushed out.

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