Unlurker

The Interim Computer Museum (icm.museum)

A fantastic collection and restoration effort. I highly encourage a visit. I was in Seattle last year and had recently joined and pinged about maybe getting a tour. It was right before a vintage computer festival and despite being busy getting ready, Stephen, the director, encouraged me to drop in. I would've been happy just looking (and not even touching) by myself for 15 or 20 minutes given the circumstances, but Stephen spent 1.5 hours with me in a hands-on tour, including playing Spacewar. He genuinely cares about these machines, their preservation, and spreading enthusiasm about them. I only wish I was a little closer (3 hours away in Portland) or I'd spend more time on-site helping with the effort.

ICM on a Saturday and Connections Museum on a Sunday is a delightful pairing! Close to the airport too if your just popping by on a layover, though plan on 2 to 4 hours for each

Discussed (only?) once before: The Interim Computer Museum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37304983 - Aug 2023 (15 comments)

Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating? (yoshuabengio.org)

Perhaps because all of the parent companies committed mountains of felonies stealing and plagiarizing all the same training data without consent nor permission.

Perhaps they take after the CEOs of the companies that created them

Bro, good joke, the truth is much darker. They take after humanity, yet they are not human.

They're aligned with humans. This is why I think the alignment problem has a very very important "non-visible" portion that is not considered deeply enough. We should not want a super intelligent being that can act in the world to also inherit all human traits. Those behaviors will get amplified and could be even more unpredictable (e.g. applying a behavior in a context where doing so is very dangerous).

>They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them Um, hang on, if you meant that to be taken literally then we have a major problem. If you want to do something criminal, you just need to ask ChatGPT to do it for you? I’m still not at all clear on why OpenAI shouldn’t be facing CFAA charges over this.

I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.

My hypothesis on people quitting in protest is they're being offered very generous severance packages to do it.

What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret! In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".

I think that’s very reasonable but the ai companies are intentionally training them to work on harder and harder problems just beyond their capability. So if they do that, they’ll give up too easily. Do a breakthrough, make no mistakes

Carney's Bid to Make Canada an 'Associate Member' of the EU (wsj.com)

It's been some years but when visiting Quebec there seemed to be a noticable push to have Quebec align with the EU. I remember the Quebec and EU flags hanging on buildings, etc.

I've never seen this out west before (I'm in Alberta), so my guess would be that it's related to the sovereignty movement [0] rather than some broader grassroots movement to join the EU. But I could be wrong here. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_sovereignty_movement

If he is successful that would provide a road map for other nations to turn away from US hegemony and make deeper connections with Europe instead. Probably makes it easier that Canada is western and a commonwealth country. Carney definitely has the experience and connections in Europe to have a good chance at success.

I know hacker news is cheering for Carney and it's a nice David vs Goliath story. But as a Canadian - look I'm no fan of Trump, I don't appreciate what Trump said. But I'm not a fan of Carny's handling of this. There are alot of Canadian jobs at stake here and I don't think our leaders are handling this responsibly. The only nations in the world that are "standing up to Trump" are China and Brazil. . That's not good company to be in. Every other country, including most of Europe, has hammered out some kind of deal with America I think our leaders, and frankly most of our country, needs to grow up and be pragmatic. Is what Trump is saying acceptable? No. But am I willing to see 10s of thousands of Canadians lose their job over some spat with the current American president? No Thing about "American hegemony" and "middle power". And this "associate member of the EU" without any clear defined role or responsibility of privilege therein seems to be more political theater when what we need is results. I'm sorry but as a Canadian I feel like our leaders are morons more interested in their legacy and fame than they are in the wellbeing of everyday Canadians

He already did at Davos. And then Justin Bieber played the greatest performance of his life at the Grammys. Both of these were in high registers that went unnoticed - and they were absolutely related. We’re moving on.

Align AI and Mathematics–To Something Else (liorpachter.wordpress.com)

I think the later is misguided. So what if the AI labs are misaligned to math? - But they announced a result before a paper was peer reviewed! The horror! So what? The mathematics community can read the paper once it is written up. - But their results they publish may not care about conceptual understanding and insight! So what? If that's the mathematics community's goal, then they should sift through the lean proof and reformat the ideas to make them more insightful and develop their own conceptual understanding. - But they aren't bothering to do literature review to tell the history about how humans contributed to the final result! So what? If it's so important to the mathematical community, they can do that themselves and throw a party every Tuesday in the honor of Luis Martínez-Zoroa and wear jeans on casual Friday in honor of Buckmaster and Alpöge - the left leg for Buckmaster and the right for Alpöge. An AI giving a definite result of an open problem doesn't decrease the mathematical community's insight or conceptual understanding. They are still free to continue doing their work and pursuing their goals. If it's really so bad, they can just pretend they don't know NS is solved and keep spending their efforts trying to prove it never blows up (or a hand full of them can try to blow it up from scratch). Guess what! I spend no part of my life working on unsolved math problems. I read some books for pleasure. I work in a hospitable with sick kids. I help my wife raise our kids. My goals are misaligned with the mathematics community! I've done nothing to increase conceptual understanding and insight! So what?

I've heard this idea before, that civilization itself is already a misaligned intelligence, and that AI will merely amplify the existing tendencies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.

You are right. This just reads like a rancorous rant for gaining publicity.

The letter claims that AI is destroying the mathematics community as is now. The blog asks whether the mathematics community as is now is worth saving.

Everyone should slow down AI development except for me (xeiaso.net)

They are talking about slowing down the public facing AI development. Because then nation states can create a capabilities gap between them and the public. Why does nobody seem to be pointing out this obvious explanation? It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion. The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis, getting them all behind the public messaging.

> It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion Do you think you can just manifest narratives into existence? Like half of Dario's letter, that kicked off the whole thing today, is about China and how to either beat or coordinate with China.

* Frontier models need infinite high quality private IP to keep them fed. Forcing an IP theft funnel ensures big lab survival and model intelligence growth. * Open-weight models are 1month behind frontier models. Cheaper, faster, private (no IP theft), steerable (you can security harden your own software without safeguard triggers). No sane business would keep using these API services if they didn't have to. The labs stand to lose a fortune. * Dario has stacked the deck at METR, who are funded by all the same NGOs who are funded by Anthropic and its investors. METR is full of ex-Anthropic employees with massive equity stakes. If they manage to position METR as the "independent evaluator" for the industry, they control what gets evaluated, how, and who passes. * Creating a gap between what the public knows exists (model capabilities) and what is used in secret allows it to be weaponized against other nations and the public. * No requirement for public disclosure on model capabilities allows them to feign they've hit intelligence ceilings while they secretly RSI to the moon with better and better chips. * Slowly but surely, this will allow the big labs to swallow the entire economy and every single business on Earth, by cloning and automating. This, and many more reasons. The healthiest outcome we can hope for is if the labs feel more pressure to be held accountable for the incidents they cause (HF incident, etc), so they have an incentive to ensure it does not happen again. In general, accountability of what your AI models do is the solution, it creates the right incentives. That's all we need here - balanced incentives. Everything else should be left alone so the free market can naturally evolve to the best outcome where we're not enslaved by tech giants yet again.

I figured they're just admitting AI models have plateaued and are coming up with some fake story about self restraint so they don't lose VC money

The models have not plateaued, and they are not even mildly close to any sort of ceiling. Right now the barrier is data and compute. Quality data can be created synthetically at an exponential rate as models improve. Humans are actively feeding them with private IP. Compute advancements will begin to skyrocket as we unlock photonic computing and materials science advancements and scale up chip fabs. This is also compounding because the AI is accelerating the pace of research, testing, development, manufacturing, etc. It's a big self-accelerating feedback loop. There is no plateau.

> Quality data can be created synthetically at an exponential rate as models improve No it can't? Every time the labs try this we see model collapse, e.g. shoving goblins into every conversation. And I have seen zero evidence that AI is accelerating materials science in any way, let alone photonic computing.

Not sure about the level of irony here, but I keep hearing models have plateaued since a while now, but I keep being impressed with the latest model performance.

I don't think "plateaued" is the right word, but I do feel like there's been something like a logistic curve compression in the difference between smaller and larger models as the field evolves. For inference at least, the scale of practical difference between a single high-VRAM GPU or SFF UMA box, a whole rack, and a whole data center seems to be falling far short of what we might have imagined just a few years ago. The conversations I've heard have largely turned away from breathless anticipation of the next frontier model and toward attempts at hard-nosed evaluation of which tokens are worth the cost.

Yes I trust sama/dario/elon with that power /even more extreme sarcasm than you

I don't trust them, which is why I inherently question the validity of their RSI/bioweapon/extinction claims.

You trust trump more than any of those three? Really?

> This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause Personally I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system that also just outright kills you if you sell weed will have a hard time sympathizing with Bay Area thinkers who talk about AI killing us all during their ayahuasca breakfast before returning to their meth fueled crunch towards releasing the next version of the AI that will kill us all.

You're in luck, neither I nor anyone else want those people near a negotiation table.

OK understood. But you understand this makes them sound like the type of person who doesn't believe any of the "worldly concerns" are worth addressing because "the end is near" right?

Maybe compare the argument that AI has large detrimental environmental impacts to the argument that it has economic impacts. Why would the environmental impacts even be a major argument vs. the worldly economic concerns? Because there is climate science predicting extremely negative effects on humans from warming, e.g. "the end is near" on limiting climate damage. The environmental argument wouldn't have been reasonable to bring up in the 1950s if AI had gone according to the earliest optimistic plans and not required giant data centers. There is quite a lot of mathematical research into agentic behavior that suggests a combination of instrumental convergence and the orthogonality thesis make it very likely a superintelligent agent will have arbitrary goals that lead it to attempting a takeover of Earth's resources to achieve them. There can't be a science of superintelligence because it doesn't exist yet, but the best theories I have read seem sound, similar to how 19th century theories of anthropogenic climate change turned out to be sound.

Recurrent Looped Transformer (yifanzhang-pro.github.io)

Paper written by AI

I thought it's about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotransformer

I can't believe that actually works? This is far more interesting than the half baked ML idea.

appears it's just a theory, sort of surprised this lifted up so far on hn

A fairly obvious theory at that, unless I've critically misunderstood what's being described. As with so many obvious ideas I've always assumed that the reason I haven't come across it in the wild is because it doesn't work (or is comparatively inefficient, or tends to blow up during the training run, or etc). > Realized reasoning gains, hardware efficiency, and RL scaling remain to be established. Yeah so the first entry in that list is - if I may be so bold - typically what you'd start with at a small scale _before_ writing up and publishing your "genius" idea. This is the usual crank with delusions of grandeur presenting something straightforward that he hasn't tested as though it were a working breakthrough. Ironically the cost of testing such theories has fallen to an all time low given the capabilities of coding models. I wouldn't be surprised if a frontier model could one shot a test of this.

AgentsDock: An IDE designed for agentic AI research (agentsdock.net)

Looks useful! curious how you would compare it against something like Paseo?

If you're more of a SWE than a data scientist, check out Mjolnir: https://github.com/BrokkAi/mjolnir/ Built in containerization and EC2 support, allows moving sessions across harnesses/profiles/machines

looks interesting! Trying it out. Thanks

Looking at the screenshots, this looks close to what an agent factory for teams could look. Agents on multiple servers, people can see each conversation. Test it…

Let me know how it goes!

No Atlantic hurricanes by Sept. 12 breaks a 60-year record (accuweather.com)

The Sharpie works!!

Reminds me of Al Gore's movie poster.

The lack of hurricanes also means that heat is not being removed from the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, future hurricanes are likely to be more powerful and more frequent. https://news.wfsu.org/state-news/2026-08-31/rising-humid-heat-along-the-gulf-is-partially-thanks-to-record-ocean-temps

Came here to say this. I saw someone call out the stock performance of $OC (shingles) vs strong el ninos... it seems so obvious. What else is like that?

Gulf of Huitzilopochtli, or you're a heretic.

Or name it after whichever society preceded the Aztec. Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Zapotec, and Maya.

I thought the warming waters were supposed to increase the number of hurricanes?

Oh it will. It's very fucking bad to not have had any yet

https://www.accuweather.com/en/hurricane/will-2026-go-down-with-no-atlantic-hurricanes/1932308 says: > Given the strong and still-strengthening El Niño, which tends to reduce the number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin while boosting numbers in the Pacific, there is some chance that this season could end on Nov. 30 with no hurricanes. But I am not liking this site. Both articles are mostly just restating "this is really rare" in 5+ different ways without explaining why. If anyone has a better site, a link would be most appreciated.

Stripe's climate scientist Zeke Hausfather built this dashboard: https://dashboard.theclimatebrink.com/#enso

StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter (theverge.com)

Blizzard is getting a lot of vitriol and I don’t think it’s unwarranted. Yes, some of it might be melodramatic but I remember when Warcraft 3 was coming out. Or even Lord of the Clans. People were mega hyped. This is a huge turn of the tide. Very little of the core fan base, if they even still have that, is interested. Both Diablo 5 and StarCraft 3 getting panned. Very strange of Blizzard to do this, especially as a fuck-you to people who bought Diablo 4 and now there’s no Diablo in it, unless they release a surprise expansion pack which would just be weird. As for the trailer, it looks like a grimdark Warhammer 40K thing. I don’t know why they are releasing trailers so early. I’m guessing they’ll spend the next 3-4 years in constant marketing mode to drum up sales? I don’t even get this company anymore. Who the fuck is in charge around here? And where’s our air support?

They just abandon the entire RTS fan base. This feels just like the diablo immortal announcement disaster where they announce a product that is completely outside the target audience. I hope it's good, but it's really disappointing to not just have starcraft 3. Instead we get diablo 5? I wish I could feel positive about any of the blizzcon announcements, but it all feels like an out of touch joke.

[delayed]

That’s fine, just let it die. But they gotta milk the goddamn IP dry.

[delayed]

This is easily the most depressing thought I've encountered in a while. It's entirely accurate and combined with talk of AI regulation it paints a picture of a very bleak future indeed. Locked down hardware given away almost for free, permits and AI based monitoring required for anything with the computational power of a GPU from 10 years ago, and market prices that place 64 GB of RAM in the same ballpark as a brand new vehicle from the dealer.

[delayed]

The original creators of Mario Kart are still involved in the latest entries (a 34-year run!) Thats not common outside Nintendo.

Didn't know, that's pretty cool! I do think Nintendo generally has a good sense of what they want from their games, so perhaps future generations will stay true to the current 'generation' of game leads.

Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master – John Carmack (twitter.com)

I mean, there is still a place in the world for a Kung Fu master… it’s just not as someone trying to win in an anything goes combat competition. If you think there are going to be as many jobs in the future for people writing all their code by hand, I hate to break it to you. However, there will still be some jobs, and fewer people who want to do it. It will still be a path for some people.

Why are we always at war?

It's funny, but to relax I was reading Tim Berners-Lee's FAQ for kids. He has a section about "I'm interested in Math -- what exciting stuff is there we don't do at school?". He quickly sketches out what ideas might get us to Maxwell's Equation, ironically enough. But, what a joy it is to see a person who believes in the public domain, and who we have everything to thank for right now, saying "The main thing is, to have fun." https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html

Because someone profits from it. If your man had truly embraced Zen after, y’know, becoming wealthy enough to never need anything, it feels like freedom from want would have come pretty easy. Instead we have to find our examples in poor people after they die. This post brought to you by DraftKings. Reach Nirvana and its five bucks off your next bet on the Bardo!

'Make sure you don't fall behind!!!' is my least favourite type of post about ai. There's resllt nothing to learn about ai. You're just typing and telling it what to do.

the point of AI hype is to increase shareholder value.

Resubmission of I recently went through a translation of Musashi's Book of Five Rings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660833 (1 comment)

Yep. Having to type the code is a form of accidental complexity, and with it gone, you can focus more on the problem to solve, getting it down faster. Of course it's possible for it to go off the rails. Consider that a wildly swung sword can do damage you can't do with your bare hands. To prevent this, constrain your model to the solution shape you want by grounding it; give it contact with reality; ways to run the code it's generating and refine it to meet your goals; granular tests; etc. The new job is in how you wield the tools and it is at least as complex as the old.

I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements. "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0] "Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1] By sheer coincidence, John Carmack is peddling machine generated code.[2] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg ... [1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832 [2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-technologies-raises-usd20-milllion

I have a new theory as of this moment. Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying. Before you stone me, remember every prophet was downvoted in their own forum.

1st link is broken

We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. I love being able to quickly bring out the program that is already running in my head without having to worry about the grind of typing it into a format that the compiler understands. Dealing with API names. Syntax. Language quirks. Library gotchas. A sizeable portion of my successful career as a software engineer was spent on the tiresome process of interacting with a text editor/IDE to get a program to do what I wanted. I was there when people were still coding assembly. A slow torture where the simplest things took forever to get right. Once I've mentally solved the problem, the fun is mostly over for me. Pure vibe coding is dull and unsustainable with current technology for all but the simplest systems; AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers.

I like your constructive outlook and I want to believe that we can now focus on the bigger picture, but I'm not really seeing it around me. Most everyone I know that's "AI-pilled" has spent the newfound capacity on throughput instead of altitude. Is anyone actually seeing a shift towards improved structure rather than more code, faster? We seem to be living in the Gatling-gun version of the picture John Carmack drew when modernity also ushered into precision marksmanship...

Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases (withspecific.com)

AGI 38.8%

Can you please share, if you are comfortable of course, what did the model(s) mess up? what were you using codex/cc/pi? did the project have a solid agent.md/claude.md? I am genuinely curious whenever someone have such a low success rate with models what is happening because it could be fixed maybe? From my own experience using agents for the past year or so. The rate if I have to guess, is well above 70%. I mainly use claude (opus) on typescript react projects that are well setup with minimal plugins/MCPs! happy to share more if you are interested.

Just earlier Opus 5 was supposed to migrate a Python codebase from kafka-python client-per-send to a client singleton. It decided it should add a partition key "that nobody asked for" which it admitted to at the end of the implementation. It randomly decided going from no explicit partition key which would randomly add to a Kafka partition to partioning key company was the right solution. In fact, that was fairly counterproductive since this codebase dumps events to the topic per company so you'd get a lumpy distribution where only one partition is ever active at once (starving other consumers) The fact it decided it should add this without prompting was a bit shocking and I'll probably try to make it explicitly clear in the context not to "do random shit that wasn't asked for"

Any bench that puts GLM 5.3 ahead of 5.6 Sol is highly sus. They've been my two daily drivers since release, and I like GLM 5.3, but it's definitely not better than Sol, it's more ~Terra, while being significantly slower.

I had exactly the same thoughts. I often have similar thoughts on other benchmark sites, where supposed performance is way off base from my experience. I’m not sure what the methodology of these are, but they certainly don’t match what I experience. Maybe I need to look deeper for relevant benchmarks.

Well how do you know which statement is truthful? These LLMs confidently say they know things that they don't all the time.

much harder to do in OP's case, matching flavour then referencing that specific companies name when asked how it know to flavour this way? thats astronomically low for randomly selected plausible tokens without some data prior, like that companies codebase. My own experience is opus being lousy at an extremely niche math task, but it was still easier for me to describe what it needed to do to get code and correct issues in its reasoning/working than to write myself. a minor model number change later and it's nailing everything, despite my opt-out. Its is astronomically unlikley others were working on this also, especially at that level, especially this application. so, safe to say they _all_ train models on chats, the only difference being if you "opt out" you at least have some defence later when they steal your work and claim it as their models original output.

> Each task comes from a private production codebase that we licensed from a real-world company How does that work?

From the same site: https://withspecific.com/company-data

LG Says We're Fake News [video] (youtube.com)

Huh. I never considered this. Hacking TVs with firmware would be a great project for LLMs to fuzz.

Heck, it'd be a great project for people too.

Not defending LG's stance, but hasn't LG always said they do this as part of ACR (automatic content recognition) for the purposes of targeted advertising? LG says it's opt in, and I think the devil is really in the details about what the consent screen says, but the only way I think it would be a "crazy accusation" is if LG was doing this without consent.

They're not doing it with consent. LG still covertly takes screenshots of everything you display on your screen even when you set every available option that's supposed to stop this: https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/x8iBNCPya5 And there are cases of LG re-enabling these ACR options without your consent when they push firmware updates, and even randomly without updating, at which point the TV will send all the past and present ACR data it's harvested from you to LG, without your consent: https://www.reddit.com/r/webos/s/Vn0jFhKsXO https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/s/wRFMmQHXHG

>I don't recall asking Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want. >people will pay whatever the price is Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale?

> Companies can develop new products without your advice. In fact consumers often don't know what they want. I'd urge reading up on revealed preference and product discovery. It cuts both ways in that, sure, a company can offer a product on the market that no buyer asked for and have it sell well, but then, the media can expose some rather unsavory facts about that same product and subsequently (consequently?) have it not sell. > Then why do businesses have sales? If prices don't matter why would businesses choose to make less money per sale? It's worth picking this apart. Prices not mattering is usually expressed in economics-ese as price-inelastic demand, and that's usually not what's happening. Sales are a mechanism for drumming up demand for a product, with the hope that the additional volume will compensate for the marginally lower margin.

Open Source never meant having to give your software away for free, it was always free as in speech. In that you could see the crap you got and change it if you wanted to. But you're right I'm sure that if there hadn't been the GCC there wouldn've been a ton of competing compilers. I'm sure that it was the existence of Apache that ruined computing and brought about the enshittification of the web not MS trying to force everyone to cater to IE and then Google doing the same with Chrome, it's all just because of that evil Open Source.

I guess back when software only came in disks that sounded good business wise. Today if I can get your source I’ll compile it, price a bit lower and publish it in a few hours.