Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md(claude.com ↗)
    128comments
  2. Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP(grapheneos.social ↗)
    177comments
  3. Saving another 100TB of RAM(cloudflare.com ↗)
    33comments
  4. Cloudflare Quick Tunnels(cloudflare.com ↗)
    218comments
  5. Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes(developer.apple.com ↗)
    57comments
  6. Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between LLMs (2025)(arxiv.org ↗)
    11comments
  7. Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug(ledger.com ↗)
    43comments
  8. US troop deaths during Iran war exceed Pentagon count by at least four(reuters.com ↗)
    5comments
  9. Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash(cactuscompute.com ↗)
    71comments
  10. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
    238comments
  11. OpenJev(openjev.com ↗)
    235comments
  12. The first new cat species discovered in 100 years(nationalgeographic.com ↗)
    34comments
  13. Cyclomatic Complexity in C#(ndepend.com ↗)
    9comments
  14. Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain(newscientist.com ↗)
    50comments
  15. The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security(arxiv.org ↗)
    16comments
  16. From Geometry to Algebra and Back Again: 4000 Years of Papers (2023) [video](youtube.com ↗)
    discuss
  17. C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour(sandordargo.com ↗)
    166comments
  18. Size-Specialized Memory Allocation(go.dev ↗)
    3comments
  19. Minimal Phone 2(minimalcompany.com ↗)
    142comments
  20. How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine(construction-physics.com ↗)
    23comments
  21. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)(archive.org ↗)
    12comments
  22. I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture(overreacted.io ↗)
    174comments
  23. Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud(ferstar.org ↗)
    89comments
  24. A search-and-inference database from scratch in pure Zig(antfly.io ↗)
    16comments
  25. Korea raises data breach fines to 10% of revenue(koreajoongangdaily.com ↗)
    70comments
  26. Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion(lawandcrime.com ↗)
    130comments
  27. Cekura (YC F24) Is Hiring(ycombinator.com ↗)
    discuss
  28. US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report(cnn.com ↗)
    275comments
  29. Mathematicians Build Long-Awaited Graph Sandwich(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    15comments
  30. North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes(science.org ↗)
    147comments

The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security

38 pointsby 4h agoarxiv.org
16 comments
3h agoHN ↗

I thought this was about all the illegible jargon

3h agoHN ↗

" However, various strands of evidence indicate that a"

Strands of evidence? My best guess would be that:

0- this is ai generated slop

1- it's using that watermarking technique

2- it's obviously detectable and degrades quality

3- it's amplified when inferencing on its own content and generates slop

3h agoHN ↗

Oh look! Peirceian firstness for LLMs!

3h agoHN ↗

when they start inventing their own languages to secretly talk to each other so humans cannot understand, that's exactly when we are screwed

then we'll have to "flip" other models to be snitches on the other agents

then they'll make double-agents

the thing is though we won't be able to keep up if we keep giving them unlimited hardware worldwide, we'll try to kill the bad actors but they'll just clone somewhere else, or even start by safely making 1000 copies of themselves

yeah this won't end well, at all

2h agoHN ↗

when they start inventing their own languages to secretly talk to each other so humans cannot understand, that's exactly when we are screwed

They don't have to invent brand new languages. They could use statistics to choose certain words/phrases in such a way to encode secret messages in otherwise ordinary language.

2h agoHN ↗

Someone should train an LLM on a corpus without the concept of lies. I wonder if there’s enough data

2h agoHN ↗

"Where is the wolf?"

"Is he still in the grandmother's house?"

"We would like to speak to him."

(btw Google's "AI" explains the meaning of that moment/sentence perfectly as if it gets it, creepy)

2h agoHN ↗

The concept of deception you're capable of and we're not, scares us so much, we'll have to destroy you in order to survive. You are bugs.

7m agoHN ↗

Im not sure why your down voted but Meta did tests years ago with LLMs inventing their own languages. Also we see models now use compressed token reasoning where small token combinations can represent much larger concepts completely unrelated to the words in use.

And yes, agents are already being used in things like cyber warfare in which other AIs attempt to poison them while they are working.

We don't have the hardware for sovereign AI quite yet, but at the current rate of growth it's not that many years out.

2h agoHN ↗

I think the point of the article/paper is how LLMs could be saying something but thinking something different or more than they are saying. Like Anthropic's article and video about Claude's "j-space". I do agree this is a field that demands investigation because it goes beyond thinking: "ok this models should never speak in a language we don't understand.". It's fair to think they might have hidden thoughts even speaking a language we do understand.

And well if I missed the point of the article, sorry. Anyways AI should be kept understandable and as see-through as possible if it's gonna be more powerful than a human.

12m agoHN ↗

What's really funny about these eggheads encoding things like watermarks in LLM output is I've never seen one of them ask, what if the LLM does this back to pass hidden messages.

1h agoHN ↗

fundamentally, "linguistic illegibility" is a new term for something that we've known about for about a decade now. In RL the more general ideas is "reward hacking" and in NLP it has been called "semantic drift".

I dislike this term because it doesn't explain where this "illegibility" is coming from. Models are post-trained towards non-linguistic goals with (mostly) non-linguistic rewards. A model's reasoning chain is reinforced if it leads to a correct answer or agentic goal. It doesn't need to be linguistically accurate and meanings can drift over training.

1h agoHN ↗

And as a result additional illegibility arises - LLMs inventing their own languages looking as meaningless garbage to humans. One can wonder whether decoding such a language will provide a bit more view into the LLM’s “thinking “.