Unlurker|Replay|About
Teardown of a $1000 Voting Machine (unfoxo.it)
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Really interesting article. Love the absolute waste of resources spent on these.
related / the way: https://www.voting.works/ OP conclusions (in my bias) feel like "an attempt" ahead of elections next month. My bigger concern is our own US military doing some really illegal things around social election manipulation and misinformation. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/how-the-military-will-hack-the-election
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>VotingWorks paper-ballot voting system I don't understand. Is this a paper-ballot voting system only? Because the idea of this vote was to prevent paper usage and move to digital. The system you mentioned system mainly focuses on counting (and marking?) paper ballots?
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It's an open hardware system, so we can have transparency and trust in the system. It's meant to counteract the elections are not safe propaganda, among other things. Fully digital systems are a bad idea because it makes it too easy for people to sow doubt. We don't need to open ourselves to that as a society.
This comment was clearly made by a bot that didn't read the article nor understands it's not US related.
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you can search my handle if you like, your comment is a weak deflection because... I'm not sure what you are hoping to accomplish with it, but it does ring my state actor manipulation warning bells ;] For a reverse uno card, your PhD work is really interesting and far more meaningful than mine was. The article has little statements sprinkled throughout that are easily used to undermine trust in an election. Sometimes the articles do not need to promote the idea themselves, but the larger manipulation machine does better when they can point to more "evidence" of "hackable" machines. At the same time, I do not disagree with the absurd waste. This is why I shared a link to an interesting project that can help with this. Paper only voting, with human tallies, is far more expensive than machine tallying and also more prone to error.
What I Self-Host (viceconsole.fyi)
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I have been self hosting for over a decade and recently have seen more people in my circle doing that and I have been helping them. At first it was hard but then i made it into a product. I am working on Tarvis.io which makes self hosting accessible to non technical users as well. It comes with installation assistant, ssl domains and backups inbuilt into it. You can install open source apps from a catalog or drop any github repo and it installs and run it for you. With Tarvis, I have been self hosting more since I am able to install and delete apps with one click, it makes it easy to try things.
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After Google Assistant died I immediately installed Home Assistant on my old PC. Not as good, but at least it doesn't take 5 seconds to turn on a light like Gemini
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I stared self hosting in 2020 when Raspberry Pis were super cheap (not anymore :( ) and lots of things started becoming available in Docker. Haven't ever considered going back to the cloud. I love taking back full control.
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To each their own but running that much stuff without proxmox would drive me insane. Especially the native stuff straight on the machine.
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With some small systemd configs each native app is essentially a container these days. The overhead of unique kernels per app would really restrict what could fit on a small box like this DynamicUser and ProtectSystem keep me sane.
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> I prefer running services natively when possible, but will containerize complex services or those with many dependencies. Love: a service that’s a single Go binary. A service that only comes as a Docker compose file and wants to run MySQL, Redis, and three other containers? I’m already looking for an alternative. Ok, I respect your opinion, but remember that there are poor souls like me out there that actually love the opposite.
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A big reason I chose Rust and Sqlite for my project was that end users could just run the small binary and be done with it. https://github.com/sergiotapia/joyscroller I think you can go very very far with this kind of setup especially if it's just for you.
People twist themselves into a knot talking about AI as the future. Its more of a bubble waiting to pop. Self hosting is the real disruptive future. The hardware to accomplish most things that we rely on from cloud vendors is absolutely trivial. My own home server is a used super cheap and tiny machine. The hard disks don't even fit in the box and yet it has plenty of CPU and memory to spare. The software is getting easier to configure year after year eventually creeping to the point where elderly people too lost to use a remote will be running this stuff. The real challenge will be solving for easy access to private networks from public spaces across the internet. Right now everybody seems to be centering on vendor solutions like TailScale for this.
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I self host (I have a large overlap with the services in TFA), and love it. I will never go back and think that more people should self host (or at least...join small groups of people who designate one person to manage it for a small number of people). And believing that the current AI economy might have a period of rapid devaluation in the near future is pretty reasonable. But, much like the original .com bubble, the idea that AI as a technology will not survive and thrive through such a pop, and become an ever more important part of our future, is a belief that I can't comprehend. Anthropic and OpenAI very well may go belly up. AI as a technology isn't going anywhere. And as much as I'd like to believe that more people may self host more things in the future, self hosting will never, even if it was adopted by literally everyone, become as big a deal as AI, even if AI hit a wall tomorrow and didn't get any better than the current frontier models.
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Self hosting has never been easier and I imagine the average person has never been further from trying it. No one will ever get anywhere close to hosting this much sruff
Why are we even doing all this? (terrytao.wordpress.com)
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The question is the right one. "Why are we even doing all this?" Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research? To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet. So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.
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oh stop it
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Unlikable text. Just a rant with the usual “corporations” socialism-slop. Terry Tao’s blog rapidly diminishing in quality. I didn’t think that the way machines would approach top mathematics is to transform top mathematicians into boring Redditors who eagerly retweet other annoying Redditors.
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> This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. Very much worth nothing for those about to read this! haha I got a couple of paragraphs in and shook my head.
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I work in construction now. Commercial Millwork/cabinets as a project manager. It is so much harder and more stressful than my php/jquery mini saas coding days. Often at work I start thinking "why are we doing all this? Why does anyone want this fancy reception desk?? This desk is not worth the human aggravation that it's causing." I genuinely start thinking we should go back to concrete eastern European communist type buildings just for the simplicity and efficiency. Why all this fancy stuff that causes every project engineer, superintendent, and subcontractor Engineering department to get grey hair. But I guess it makes the economy grow. I don't know.
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I don’t accept this framing. If tools allow us to pursue ever more deeply into the mystery of being, and get to both questions and answers we never thought we’d see, that’s a good thing. I think the genuinely curious should have no problem redoubling their “freed up time” into further exploration. The library Borges describes is infinite. I won’t mind getting to read a few books I wouldn’t have otherwise.
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> dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO The climate effect argument against AI is so intellectually dishonest. It’s the same as saying that Tao is on the side of stopping the advancement of Cancer research. I thought the people clowning him were dumb, but the people arguing for either side are really fighting on a mud pit.
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So we have the Fields medal, awarded for making "progress" in math. Now we are told explaining, understanding things, asking new questions is more important than proving things. So where is the math community medals/awards for this job?
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All the nihilism in the AI space is so tiresome. We have a tool now that can accelerate the technological development of our species and actually reach for the stars! How exciting! All these ruminations and lamentations about what it means to be human are downright laughable to people on the front lines of war, living in abject poverty, etc. "Oh, to be so lucky!", I'm sure they'd say. The luddites and doomers should do the world a favor and go establish a commune in rural Alaska, then they can be happy and the rest of us can get back to building and playing with amazing technology!
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It's rationalism, not nihilism. The luddites were rational. Telling people to fuck off and go away when they were here first is hideous. You should be humiliated. You should feel unwelcome.
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They're so butthurt about losing their social status of not being the top intellectuals anymore, I find it hard to take them serious.
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Why Ai? Because its development was pretty much free and paid by the pension funds. The objective is supremacy and being the first entity and country to collect rent via Ai supremacy and block every other entity in their analysis; reality who knows what will happen.. It started with internet which was subsidized through military for sake of military supremacy and then it transformed to become a utility connecting everything and collecting information and it subsidized by the markets to collect rent from the world using this utility and now it is subsidized to replace labor around the world by knowing everything that humans know and to collect rent from its use to discount labor.
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I think the author is hiding the ball a bit. The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Taking physics as an example, it has almost always been the theorists who develop new ideas, not the experimentalists that test and validate them, who have won praise and acclaim. The name Arthur Eddington doesn’t have the same cachet as that of Albert Einstein. But now that the creation of those insights can be automated, there is a great wrenching as esteem shifts away from the former. Well, maybe it’s a good thing that we are seeing this shift. Maybe it is good and right that we begin valuing your ability to exist in the real world, rather than play math puzzles on a sheet of paper. Because, while the AI labs are receiving a lot of attention and excitement now, that’s a short run phenomenon. Ultimately, people aren’t impressed for long by a machine doing something novel. Once it’s up and running, it fades into the background just like the combustion engine, or the dishwasher, or electric lighting.
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> The problem is that, for a long time, humans have attributed meaning, value, and social status to great cognitive insights. Not really, they haven't. It's only when those insights can be communicated in such a way to other people that those other people can find utility (which could be enabling them to derive more insights that yet other people find utility in recursively) in the insights that they do so, and this is a huge difference. This is why AI is such a total problem to this mentality, because it disrupts not only insight production but the mechanism that values insight production.
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...for money if I had guaranteed access to housing, healthcare, and food I'd stop immediately
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So, would most people, and this would mean that very little housing would be built, very little health care provided, and very little food grown or harvested.
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> No rational person, least of all us masters of rationality in STEM, pursues these for the joy of creation, learning, or beauty well yeah the purpose of STEM education is to be a factory to produce the correct worker for another factory
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> (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of) I'm in the office and was trying to contain my laughter next to my colleagues, but this tipped me over the edge
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I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
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the cynical and sarcastic style was my favorite part
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Now imagine what quantum computers will do. AI in polynomial time. You can sense the fear and anxiety in the article. Is existence not enough anymore? Do humans need more?
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You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
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This is so well written, deep, funny, and sad. > Looking up at the stars in wonderment, or enjoying a complex puzzle game, or being inspired by an encouraging teacher, and dreaming that one day an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand as part of a marketing gimmick to raise hype for an IPO[2]. But if I am going to critique it's main point it would be this part: > in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. It is inefficient to explain or check a result when those resources can be spent generating another. While obviously ridiculous, I think this does not go far enough. The problem isn't that people don't care and resources should not be spent to explain AI results to human minds, the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans. The puzzle then changes from can AI formally verify and explain a proof to: do human minds trust the proof. Do we believe that the proof is correct and not an elaborate AI hallucination using tricks that are beyond our understanding. In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. In fact human understandability is the only thing that matters. That is something that AI can never do on its own.
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> the problem is that AI will soon be better at explaining itself than humans (I assume you mean explain itself to humans here.) I keep seeing people saying this as fact. It might, but it might not, and there are various reasons one might be skeptical that it will, using current techniques. Not least among these is that explaining something well to a human requires a degree of empathy and sophisticated theory-of-mind that LLMs have not yet exhibited yet*, and that is an area where humans are uniquely advantaged by being humans. Someone will almost certainly reply by just stating as fact that they will achieve this goal, or pointing out that past predictions that LLMs wouldn't be able to do particular things have failed, and that's all very will. I certainly wouldn't be rash enough to claim it's impossible, but there are still models of all this available that are consistent with all the successes so far but don't predict "LLMs can do anything and will do everything". We'll find out in due course. * My idle speculation is that this is why LLMs still suck at using the "it's not X it's Y" construct. I doubt they actually use it any more frequently than humans when writing on the same topics, but they use it wrong and it's jarring. This particular rhetorical flourish works when there's some actual reason to think that X is an idea that might actually be present or forming in the mind of someone reading the passage (or in some other mind that they in turn might be imagining, eg. a fictional character), and that explitly calling it out and negating it will have a particular dramatic effect. LLMs probably use it with about the expected frequency, but they use it for that reason (frequency) and then come up with something to put in the X and Y slots. The result often jars because the X it uses just isn't something relevant to the reader's thought process and/or the Y isn't a convincing, persuasive or relevant counterpoint to it. The result is that they stick out and seem more frequent than they are.
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It may not be the most prescient or innovative sci fi series, but I read The Three Body Problem a few years ago and it's really stuck with me. Specifically the description of how humanity reached an inflection point in math & physics research that almost immediately unlocked novel innovations in applied science ... which then made space exploration & settlement practical. Moreover, that the antagonist society in the series decided their absolute best bet at avoiding complete annihilation was to hamstring humankind's scientific research -- and that's it. It feels like frontier models are starting to approach an asymptote where what you suggest could become reality, and we'll begin seeing not just AI research but AI-designed & led applications of that research into fundamental parts of our society & culture. For better and for worse.
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> an unfeeling corporate robot[1] will burn a rainforest to compile a list of 700 highly obscure barely-readable facts that might be true that nobody can understand He'd have more of a point if a huge number of humans weren't occupied doing exactly this, and much worse on top.
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Well, we can try tying it to ground truth. AI does the math for magnetic field containment? Test it. AI predicts a particle? Test it. AI says P=NP? Ok, factor this in polynomial time. And if it fails, and AI goes, "I don't know what happened. I relied on these papers" then I guess one of those must be wrong. I'm not saying it'd be easy, but I think AI can also find the pieces of the puzzle that broke a pyramid of "discoveries" culminating in a disproval, And the only other option is to simply never understand as much. AI has the potential to understand things humans cannot. Not necessarily a strict superset. Humans can deal in 5+-2 things at once. AI doesn't have to, and can cut through leaky abstractions. If AI says a new invention will do X, and it doesn't, it'll say "you're absolutely right" and try again until it does the thing. I mean... doomsday scenarios aside.
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Your last sentence: "That is something that AI can never do on its own." Never say never...
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I'm saying this as a tautology: the definition of human understanding requires a human.
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I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.
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I once visited a town in Spain over which an ancient Roman aqueduct runs, elevated above most of the buildings, even today. It carried an essential ingredient foundational to life in the area, but after the fall of the Empire and the deaths of the architects and engineers who could understand it, the aqueduct stood in the midst of people who could not have repaired it. Relying on mission-critical technology divorced from human understanding is exceptionally risky. Obviously, people have done it before and will happen again, but it makes me nervous.
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Chess has already been this way: computers are far better than humans, yet the humans still play and learn/understand new position evaluations from the computers. You’re spot on here by analogy.
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Why not live in a cage then and have the zookeeper deal with catering to begin with? The state you proclaim to be happy with is one of irresponsible dependency. A retreat to self-infantilization.
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> Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. ...unfortunately it took 57 years to unravel, but the cryptic exploit resulting in our telomeres suddenly expiring took a mere 42.
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Understanding math isn't just about "having a good explanation ready". People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of mathematics: it's not "flat" like most of common people's daily pursuits. It consists of building upwards , on top of previous concepts. In other words, AI is like an oracle: it can tell you all kinds of stuff, but since you probably don't understand, you won't act properly.
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>In order to trust it a formal verification is not enough unless it is human understandable. The whole point of formal verification is to remove the necessity of understanding most of the work. We only need to trust the formalization of the problem statement, the proof verifier, and the formalization of the result. We already have proof verifiers that humans understand to a high level, and the formalizations of the problem statement and the result are much simpler than the full proof. I'm confident that the Navier-Stokes equations can blow up because I'm confident that Lean works correctly, and I'm confident that the mathematicians verified the problem statement and result correctly. This is despite the actual proof not being human verified yet (as far as I know), and despite the "human-readable" version not actually corresponding to the formal proof. The formal method still worked.
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Some mathematicians are not confident in the NS verification because it is non-trivial to tell if the Lean proof matches NS. I would argue this requires "human understability" to make this claim. The Lean proof is a very useful tool, but it does not replace human understanding.
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> First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist. // actually FIRST they came for the programmers. and many of us were ultimately ULTIMATELY pretty tickled to get such a massive productivity boost. this anti-AI sentiment as seen here and in Jon Stewart's rant that all AI is good for is optimizing shopping carts or something... it's so upsetting see good folks buying into this and not realizing how much benefit it will bring. If anything, I've seen how much amazing power it has now given programmers such as myself... I can do what would take me years in an afternoon. // Btw, can we retire the "first they came for the..." template, it's a little tired.
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Diffusion models were the first gen AI tech to plausibly be able to replace humans, no? I feel like image generation was ahead of text generation 2015-2022, and prior to 2015 the best "gen AI" was markov chains which I don't think is within the scope of what we're talking about.
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We had some really neat powerful classification around then.
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I remember being blown away by BERT and all its variations (BART etc) after the Transformers paper. For topic modeling and other semantic understanding of text, that was bee's knees. But certainly not replacing any humans.
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>> reimagining what it means to be human. By outsourcing the burdens of curiosity, creativity, and understanding, we can finally focus on what matters most ... the fact that this shit doesn't even scrape the ass of more than 500 million people, 60% of which are utterly useless with or without (mit oder mit ohne) ... neither sacrasm, nor cnysims or inorys will uplift this worst of all narratives ever written. this is all soooooo baaaaaad
> AI has solved all our problems What about the Collatz conjecture? AFAIK, it requires some novel approaches to mathematics, which would be a real testament to AI creative skills. I don't doubt it will be solved some day, but as of now it's too early to say that all our problems are solved.
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You may want to reread the essay. Many of the statements in it are not the sincere beliefs of the author.
> From what I know about the academic community (mostly from Twitter and LinkedIn, which I assume are representative), there seems to be near-unanimous agreement that the purpose of math and science research is to gather a large quantity of potentially true factoids in a repository that nobody will actually ever read, in a ritual called “advancing humanity’s[3] knowledge”. That these results are well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at, or even completely correct is a secondary concern — in fact, in the pursuit of advancing humanity’s knowledge as quickly as possible, many academics will recoil in anger at the suggestion that it is worth spending any time making results understandable to humans. Am I the only who thinks this is rhetorical? Modern mathematics is so far removed from the base average knowledge (lets just assume high school instead of going to axioms) that the only people who understand most (if not all new) mathematical achievement are the mathematicians themselves, heck not even all mathematicians, it needs to be spread and developed from "hot spots"? Your math results are not "well-written, understandable, pleasant to read or look at" unless you literally operate with two or three levels within the proof paper compared to the average person who probably starts at an order of magnitude levels higher. To the average person, asking a mathematician to explain something is the same as asking the AI/LLM. Both are asking an oracle to dumb it down to their level of abstraction. To the person who are not career mathematicians, both LLMs and mathematicians do the same thing, pump out garbled output that they themselves understand, and to mathematicians, the difference is one probably explains using axioms rather than theorems.
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As a mere software engineer, I found that many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read either, and it’s been the case for at least 15 years. In the past, I would frequently spend an hour or two trying to read a SOTA paper full of convoluted prose and dense pages of equations, only to realise that the algorithm is incredibly simple if visualised properly or even just written down as pseudocode. Now with LLMs the process is much shorter. They can walk me through the algorithm step by step, translate it to pseudocode, explain equations, and most importantly, I can ask them questions and get clarifications, without worrying about seeming ignorant or exhausting their patience. With a paper, you’re stuck with whatever was written (and often, researchers aren’t good teachers, or intentionally over complicate simple concepts).
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> many human written papers in my field (DSP, ML) aren’t exactly well-written, easily understandable or pleasant to read Yep, my eyes glaze over at the convoluted mathematical explanations for pathfinding in worldspace, but when I see the pseudocode in the appendix it make so much more sense.
Such a weird take. There's a library of babel simulator here: https://libraryofbabel.info/ Just hit "random." It's always gibberish. The odds of getting something that isn't gibberish are astronomically low, like winning the lottery. The actual library Borges describes has 25^1312000 books, the very vast majority of which are utter nonsense. (As the simulator makes clear.) Yet with AI, we're getting an abundance of very credible -- and, as Tao himself notes, frequently correct -- mathematical proofs. In these new AI math results, the ratio of signal to noise is high, which makes our current situation the exact opposite of the library, which is pure noise where signal emerges only by random necessity.
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Above: Literacy crisis casualty Causes: Failure to detect and appreciate irony and metaphor Failure to engage with core critique
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The metaphor was, in my opinion, far too badly strained to work.
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its not even a metaphor. you're not understanding the library of bable
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Whoosh.
Dear friends: you may not like to hear this but the profit motive is what ruins everything. I have a degree in Economics. I have read Adam Smith (and not just the Wealth of Nations, by the way!). I spent years on this stuff. I understand markets and for some things they are indeed the best solution. No argument there. It is a FACT that some things in life should not be done for profit.
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Some things cannot be done for profit, but need to be done. These are things that we consider moral or human rights, such as feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, or sheltering the homeless. This is the realm of charity, and it was once a serious obligation for the elite as well as a central focus of religion. But for everything else, the profit motive is unsurpassed at allocating scarce resources to their most productive uses.
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Narrator: But this was a fiction. In reality, evidence of any profits being made was extremely hard to come by.
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A corner stone of Economics is Game Theory and Prisoner's Dilemma. You can choose not to do things for profit, but other people will.
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> I spent years on this stuff. All I needed was entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds had already been played.
If we as humanity cannot protect fields like art, science, even healthcare and housing, from the ever-growing pressure to make a profit off of them, then we are truly doomed. AI is not the sole cause, it just expedites the process of destroying everything that is not maximally cost-effective.
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What is the incentive to protect these fields? Will protection of these fields help the average person or country to survive and accumulate resources?
>And now that AI has solved all our problems, we can devote ourselves to more important work: going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter. Grim but this is exactly where society is heading.
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He forgot one, "creating AI slop games that no one will ever play". guilty
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I get that someone wanted to let steam off but this just sounds like they don't have any arguments so they went for the good old "in the future, you won't have free will and social media companies force you to be online" fable. An addicting algorithm isn't the same thing as fentanyl, you can uninstall the app in 5 seconds and getting it back with signing in takes atleast two minutes, enough to reconsider whether you actually want to spend time on it. The toxicity of apps like Tiktok comes from muscle memory, not the quality of the content. Your thumb knows where the app icon is and opening the app happens quicker than you can think (literally). So offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively. The only thing that would still keep you on the platform is social connections. If somebody gets upset over you uninstalling Instagram or Snapchat, they aren't a good friend.
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> offloading or uninstalling breaks this very effectively For you, maybe. You can't assume that applies to everyone.
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I don't think this goes far enough -- its a best case scenario. There is no Utopia for mankind at the end of an AGI that is the labor force because people need a purpose; without that, degenerate behaviours and vice are easy to fall into and the spiral is not big. The state of the human race - particularly the internet-native generations - is a testament to that. The only way the AGI Utopia works is with a massive reduction in the human population with a Spartan/Helot relationship between those remaining. Let's face it, the people who want AGI so badly aren't the wam cuddly people who want to feed the poor, house the homeless, and cure the sick. Their motives here are not pure...
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There are no shortage of artistic pursuits, subcultures, pick-up leagues, and more that you're free to engage with. Get off the beaten path and you'll find humans enjoying life in a wide variety of ways that are uncorrupted by AI.
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I've been looking for a baseball or softball league for my kid. He doesn't want to play school ball, doesn't play travel ball, but loves the game. It's impossible to find baseball or softball leagues after the age of 12 that are not attached to a school or travel. Volleyball is about the only thing that exists.
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Are you by any chance born to rich parents in a western country? Because most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family. It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts
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We are referring to people in the context of "going into quantitative finance, vibecoding sports-betting apps, consuming AI-generated TikTok shorts, and arguing with political bots on Twitter.". Those are hardly the "most people in the world are working around the clock to supply food and shelter for their family" It's a bit unclear still how you are going to consolidate the two facts.
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The article is satirical and hyperbolic, while the reply above is concrete in its suggestion
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Except that engagement is not free. All of these things require money, and they require time that isn't already set towards the goal of making money to survive. And one of the selling points of AI is explicitly the redundancy of numerous workers, including ones parallel to myself.
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For many things this is true nowadays. Where I live walking in nature or swimming in the ocean is still free. In Dubai nature as in a green park might raise an entry fee.
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> Get off the beaten path I would really push back on this What you're describing _is_ the beaten path. People who argue with bots on twitter are actually, vastly, the minority. Go to your local park or bar and have a drink and try not to talk about the internet.
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Nice, fair enough.
It's a nice rant that I think will become more common until everyone burns out and one important realization dawns upon them: the corporations doing these things don't really care about your plight, suffering, etc. You can write thousands of books using this kind of tongue-in-cheek-but-really-angry language, and they'll just laugh it off. Felix Reisenberg will make a new post about something he's doing with Claude, Boris will make a tweet and everyone will rush to turn it into LLM-generated images so they can post on their LinkedIn for their bosses to measure their engagement KPIs, and we'll forget about the rants.
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Why the hell would I want or expect a corporation to care about my plight?
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Do you think this essay was written to appeal to the emotions of Sam Altman?
That's the point - why are we doing this? Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this ? Is it collective mental illness? Economic hysteria? A cult of virtual personality? It's simultaneously irrational, obsessive, ecologically and politically catastrophic, and all-consuming - none of which are good things.
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> That's the point - why are we doing this? > Of all the things we could be doing, why are we doing this? Money. Capitalism. It's all a fucking grift. Always has been. If you thought AI was going to usher in a post scarcity golden age of infinite wealth where all disease, hunger, want and inequality are solved and everyone gets to live their lives purely for pleasure and intellectual pursuit, where the Eschaton is in their Heaven and all is right in the world, and humanity spreads out amongst the stars as being of transcendent machine intellect or some shit you read in a sci-fi book then congratulations, you're the mark.
It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.
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I love the dissipative structure framing. It's the only logical explanation for all of this. Datacenters in space are visionary -- they are maximally energy rate dense and they expand the area of energy absorption. Might be 100 years too early but that is where we are headed, after we turn all of the available biosphere of earth into computronium, that is. The only superior technology left would be von Neumann probes.
What if the rants slowly transition into violence?
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"Data center death threats."[1] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/data-center-backlash-death-threats
BBC licence fee to be extended with 'YouTube tax' to force more to pay (independent.co.uk)
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[delayed]
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"Currently, anyone who uses a television to watch content must pay the licence fee even if they do not watch the BBC." This is simply not true. Which puts me in doubt about the rest of this "article". The rules are: 1. Watch or record live TV on any channel or service 2. Use BBC iPlayer Note the "live" part of this. I'm not a fan of the BBC, and so I don't pay a license. Being forced to pay for something I wouldn't use would force me to break the law.
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[delayed]
The licence fee is currently only due if you watch live content. Owning a TV is not sufficient as there are now many people who own a TV set but don't actually use it to watch TV broadcasts, and there's not really much distinction between a TV and a computer screen other than size (kudos if anyone reading has a 70" computer screen though) and having a TV tuner built in these days. That's the root issue really. The BBC is a provider of media that's increasingly irrelevant, and even if approval of it hadn't declined precipitously over the last decade or so it'd still have a big issue with the youth mostly not being interested in that format at all. It's not the only reason for declining ratings (declining quality is a big one) but it's a bad sign for the future.
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To be fair, they dug their own grave. Schmoozing to the party in power for the last decade practically destroyed all of their credibility in the eyes of the youth. Not to mention, the BBC was the champion of empty virtue signalling in its programming, which gave enough fodder to neo-right online media outlets to render it irrelevant in the eyes of the right-wing population. Perhaps the only ones who'll clutch their BBC pearls are the Telegraph readers still dreaming of the good old days of yore.
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Yeah, I don't honestly know anyone who's even remotely happy with the BBC these days. There are different hopping off points, but no-one really respects them all that much any more and they don't exactly do a lot to keep people tuning in with the absolute rubbish they fill their schedule with.
Many years ago; 2012, the BBC were exposed to shielding pedophiles. Operation Yew Tree exposed all the dark-murk going on within [0]. The BBC knew this but covered it up. Jimmy Savile was the main vile person in the case but it was later revealed that many of children's TV presenters had inappropriately conducted child abuse. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yewtree
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Did they cover it up? I have heard about Savile. I had not heard that the BBC was implicated in actively hiding it (vs being incompetent/negligent and having no pathways to report it).
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[delayed]
New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing (support.withings.com)
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This is sort of an old-man-yells-at-clouds comment, but I recently realized that most of the new stuff companies sell is pretty much a solution in search of a problem. Apple's whole announcement this past week was like this, but I'm feeling the same way about smartwatches, smart homes, and the like lately as well. For most folks, I feel like spending 20 minutes a day on Darebee would be more effective than their $20/month subscription to their $600 smartwatch. https://darebee.com/
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Why does everything on this website have to be a bait-and-switch funnel to some kind of self-Promotion.
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The Withings app has just got consistently worse and worse over the last few years. I just wanted some scales that would sync to my phone and record my weight over time. Now the app is absolutely bloated and I can barely find my weight, and the syncing has become _much_ less stable, and the app is constantly asking me to sign in again. Amazing how they were from good, to bad, to terrible.
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Fun story: when I got my Withings watch 5-6 years ago couldn't get it Bluetooth paired with my phone. Contacted support. Me: hey bluetooth pairing isn't working I've tried A, B, C and here's additional context. Withings support: [over 24 hours later] Have you tried A? :) Me: ...Yes? Withings support: [over 24 hours later] Have you tried B? :) Me: As I said initially, yes. Can you please batch things to try to expedite this since replies are so slow? Withings support: [over 24 hours later] We have to do this in order. :) Have you tried having a different phone even though your phone meets our listed requirements? :) Me: ..................... Me: I debugged it myself in Android dev mode and got it working, I had to do X, perhaps you can relay the issue to your engineers. Thanks for nothing. Withings support: [over 24 hours later] oh And as a bonus after an update a couple years ago it looses track of time within a couple weeks and has to be manually set. Very pretty product once upon a time with horrid customer service and software.
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What’s withings? Dunno man, I just hop on the treadmill, do the thing for an hour, and hop off. Every day. I don’t need to count every single second or calorie I spend on it. Why all this paraphernalia around it all is needed is beyond me.
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I honestly don't have anything against them moving apple sync behind the paywall. It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales. If they ship good durable things, there might not be enough people willing to buy that stuff, they're also forced to constantly find new customers.
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It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales. What kind of water-carrying excuse is that? Multibillion dollar companies have been created doing exactly that for decades . Withings has somehow managed to stay in business for nearly 20 years...doing exactly that.
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What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?
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What?! How about providing value so that it is actually worth purchasing a subscription?
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This is up there with BMW charging a subscription for heated seats.
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Why do they even bother? This is going to hit the front page of every health/fitness/cycling/running blog site, there will be a big stink for a few weeks, then Withings will quietly (or loudly, "we've heard you!", as if they were listening in the first place) get rid of it. And they'll waste all this time, money, and customer goodwill for nothing, because no one could have possibly seen this backlash coming. Doesn't matter to me, neither their POS blood pressure cuff nor their scale will sync to HealthKit anyway (oh, how I've tried), I'm not losing anything. So stomping my feet with "I'm never buying another Withings product!" won't make any difference, I was not going to buy their POS products again anyway. :-)
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Will they get rid of it? It seems more likely that they'll do damage control to wait out the news cycle (the official comment on the linked post is an excellent example of corporate deflection) and change nothing.
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I used to have issues with my Withings scale not syncing to HealthKit, but I just checked and it had all of my weightings in there just fine. Can't even remember the last time I checked the Withings app.
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But but... it has an "AI Connector" now (this is literally one of the reasons).
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Assuming the Withings app is on the same phone as the HealthKit account, there's no "cloud" involved. This is 100% grift. I hope nobody buys these.
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Yeah, I got turned off when I realized you can’t sync these devices via Bluetooth or LAN. Required path is: Scale data -> WiFi -> Internet -> Withings app -> HealthKit
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[delayed]
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Is that my problem? I figured that WiFi access was enough to hit my phone to update HealthKit, but I never gave the scale access to the Internet ("you can go live over there on the IoT VLAN with the other tattletale devices"). Well, fuck that. Now I'm really, really, really not going to buy a Withings product again.
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Mine died after a year, which I suspect is because my spouse used it after showers, and they’re not designed to handle bathroom moisture. Not even rated as water resistant. Never again.
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Sounds like some PM is jealous of Whoop and trying to launder the cost and boost adoption of their unwanted AI feature/subscription behind a heavily used existing feature.
I can’t wait till somebody figures out how to reverse engineer these with a LLM so we can just sync the scale data ourselves. I purchased one of these devices, but I am somewhat regretting my decision now.
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We need an open firmware for these scales. I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
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I'm not as optimistic. I think we're in a very small golden window and once companies catch on that reverse engineering is taking off in a big way, they're going to panic and start demanding cryptographically-sealed binaries with remote attestation everywhere. And they'll probably get it, because what the consumer wants barely matters anymore.
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[delayed]
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Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850 - October 2026 https://github.com/morluto/rea https://rea.tools
Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr (thereallo.dev)
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Feels kind of weird that Windows Defender doesn't have something that catches this kind of behaviour? I mean if you have the Defender settings jacked up you're not going to be able to run executables anyway without a bunch of mucking around which should at least stop accidental running, but feels like some heuristics to stop these kinds of stealers should be a high priority for the Defender team. Not sure how you'd go about it though?
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Defender automatically removes malware (or more correctly, game cracks it thinks are malware) the second it hits my disk from my torrent client. But usually I'm downloading TV on Linux not windows
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How is the *arr stack so fracking complicated? Once upon a time, all you needed was a browser, a torrent client, and VLC. Maybe your torrent client had an RSS feed built in. Now you need 9 different pieces of software that end in *arr, all of which implement parts of the solution that you want and parts that you don't, and none of them is even a torrent client! And they don't even work with torrent sites reliably, so people then spend money on a Usenet subscription like it's 1990 again.
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It works great. Family loves being able to self serve media requests.
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Blame copyright laws. Any all-in-one solution is going to be considered illegal at face value if it is obviously designed to circumvent copyright. But if you split all the pieces of the solution up into separate pieces of software that can't do much illegal by themselves, you can always claim plausible deniability as the maintainer. After all, you aren't going to be downloading torrents with Sonarr, you aren't going to be looking up information about shows with Jackett, and you aren't going to be automating your downloads with qBittorrent. If you link them all together with APIs, though, they do everything automatically. As for the issue demonstrated here, it's just a long-standing problem in Sonarr and Radarr that even when it detects that a torrent is bad, it just sits there holding onto a virus until you override it with a working torrent, instead of just dumping the bad data and trying again.
Everything got flooded with those exes, not just South Park. All most seeded TV episodes on most public trackers were (are?) those EXEs. It will be interesting to know who launched the attack.
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Started running bitmagnet a few weeks ago after getting fed up with BTDigg dying and other DHT crawlers actually complying with DMCA notices for some reason (???). Pretty much everything even slightly popular that I search for has one of these EXEs lying around. Sometimes multiple.
Sonarr has an advanced setting in "Settings > Indexers > [Your indexer] > Fail Downloads" which you should add "Executables" to. Then these kinds of downloads get automatically marked as failed/blacklisted and a new search and new download is attempted without you needing to manually intervene. You may also have to tweak some conflicting settings on qbit. Alternatively, if there's a way to have qbit itself mark the download as "Failed" when it detects and refuses to download an executable, that would work too. I don't use qbit personally so I don't know if that's a thing it can be configured to do.
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Still waiting on this https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr/issues/2329
Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
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> they also maintain ratios This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money. But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all. Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
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If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year). If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
yeah! let's all join a private tracker! that'll fix the problem, the bad actors won't chase the crowd, and it definitely wont end in a burning of the library of alexandria loss-of-history what.cd style event again and again if the public can't archive it. /s how about we just create an exe/bat/com exclusion on our dumb-as-dick media downloaders like sensible people have been doing for 30+ years?
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I mean i just joined a private tracker and so I don't have to think about it. Several, actually. It's hard for me to imagine someone taking torrenting seriously enough to set up an arr stack and not belong to a private tracker. Beyond malware, there's the rightsholder spies on the public trackers, and I'm not trying to lose my ISP over copyright strikes. And i also truly cannot understand what your point is. Trackers are not really legal, they come and go. I don't think a few hundred or even a few thousand HN users joining across the ecosystem is going to suddenly cause them all to get raided
We are entering a period of overlapping crises (hamishcampbell.com)
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“…climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems…” Very weak opening. These were never separate problems. If the author is just beginning to notice, it doesn’t bode well for what insights they have to share.
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On one hand the notion of the world is ending or gonna end is as old as history itself. On the other, the complexity of everything and the amount of technical capability an individual or small group can wield has never been higher.
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Not sure what the point of that was? World is on fire so join whatever the hell Open Media Network is?
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It’s interesting and valuable, imho, to consider that people have always tended to think things are falling apart, and that perhaps now is no different. That said, all societies rise and all appear to eventually fall. It’s equally reasonable to consider that the US/Western Civilization/humanity might actually be nearing a fall.
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It is absolutely true. It's also true that as the scope of power humanity has over itself and its environment, it equally manages to create ever larger crises, and it seems like we truly are reaching the ecological and environmental limits of what the planet's life support systems can give us before breaking down.
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I personally disagree , humans have for Millenia ruined eco systems, made things go extinct etc. Fires majorly destructive for example. Humans did a lot of environmental damage with that over the years
Seeing what "we" need to do to build a better future as described by an author that doesn't appear to have a wife, children or any attachment to a permanent home reads to me a lot like an offseason blog post by a Chicago Bears fan talking about what "we" need to do to get better next year.
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> described by an author that doesn't appear to have a wife, children or any attachment to a permanent home No shit, entire generations have been complaining for a while now about how these things are getting harder to obtain.
You are right that hash symbols were used for IRC channels but I'm almost certain that hash tags were a Twitter invention.
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That seems a little tautological, like "Maybe Unix had directories, but Windows Folders are purely a Microsoft invention." They're both a symbol-with-label text convention for users, and in each case it designates a topic and mechanism for users of the service to converge-on the topic.
We are entering? I feel like we've been there for years.
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The term "polycrisis" started getting popular in 2023.
Honestly there are writings from the greeks, romans, enlightment, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s... That read just like this. At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0] [0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.
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Speaking of the Romans, decline can indeed take hundreds of years to play out.
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Well yeah but at the same time social specifics exist; Trump doesn't go about things like Caesar because the world is fundamentally different So negotiations and solutions must be too
The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory. Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in. It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go. Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects. The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors. So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.
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Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.
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Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.
E Ink Kaleido 4 (eink.com)
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https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-33-3-6017 See section 5 on Kindle display measurements by optical coherence tomography. The Kaleido display is similar but with a matrix color filter layer. Those images weren't published.
Amazon just refreshed their colorsoft kindles with Kaleido 3 so this is an interesting development. I wonder if Amazon had a heads up, I would have buyer's remorse right now if I bought a new colorsoft kindle recently knowing that there's a better version of the screen just around the corner.
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I feel like amazon tends to wait a couple of years before using whatever the latest e-ink screen is and claim to do a lot of customization and calibration as compared to their competitors.
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They don't have a great trackrecord here with QA or any of that for all the waiting. The first colorsoft noticeably has an issue with yellow banding on the bottom edge. It's a well documented issue and if waiting was supposed to help with issues like that, it clearly did not.
for anyone who already has a colored reader - is it better than ipad? i enjoy reading on my ipad and i can read for 2-3 hours on it daily without feeling any strain on my eyes.
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Kindle's color tablets look a bit better than Kobo's, by my estimation. But neither is anywhere near iPad-level color saturation or contrast. I think Amazon does some special stuff with the backplane or something. Seems like it's not 100% marketing gimmicks if it actually looks better.
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Personally no. I've been reading a lot on LCD screens (PDAs if you know what those were), way back before eInk existed. First, eInk used to be glossy, and not backlit which sucked, since you needed a light source to illuminate it well enough, but not so much that it shone on the screen and caused weird reflections. After they added backlight, it became much better, but I'm not sure how it's better than an LCD (I dont think it is). The only thing that sucks both about the iPad and most ereaders is the lack of physical buttons to flip pages, which makes 1 handed operation clumsy at best.
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> is it better than ipad? Only you can answer that, “better” is a personal choice. A dedicated e-ink reader does less than an iPad (some see that as a bonus, others as a disadvantage). E-ink colours aren’t as vibrant and devices are slower, but the battery life, weight, cost, and reduced eye strain can more than make up for it. If possible, I recommend grabbing one at a store nearby and playing with it a bit. You’ll soon understand if the weight, speed, and colours are enough for you.
I have a Kobo Clara Color. I like the product but colors are mostly a gimmick. Useful for the occasional chart and for books cover and that’s pretty much it. Don’t expect iPad quality color, they’re very washed out. I think a dedicated e-reader is a great choice (I only read books, not comics or other graphics heavy documents) but for that grayscale would be more than enough and color is an extra. I would recommend you to go to a store and have a look live at a color eink screen to get a feel for what they offer.
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My kids have Clara's and they love them for graphic novels. They had b/w kobo's before but would never go back (unless they stopped reading graphic novels).
The contrast improvement is welcome for sure, but it remains to be seen what difference 15% white reflectivity makes. Previous Kaleido products are fundamentally flawed. I'd hoped they would bin it for something better rather than make incremental improvements. Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.
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Bringing full colour _and_ high refresh rate would move these out of the eBook world into more into every day technology. There's definitely a market for colour eInk monitors, tablets, phones, etc. but the technology just isn't there yet. More and more people are wanting to disconnect from tech or at least minimize its addictiveness and a colour eInk screen would be a great step for people. That way they can still watch youtube, take photos, scroll their apps but the experience will feel less saturated and alluring.
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Not sure if you are being facetious, but how would eink displays with the same color vibrancy and refresh rates of conventional displays help "disconnect from tech"?
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If you don't want colour then any discussion about the shortcomings of this tech are moot, as you will use a display with much higher contrast.
Color is a gimmick for e-ink now? I wonder if people thought the same thing when they brought color to television.
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It comes with a massive loss of contrast so it's a bit of a gimmick, yeah.
Color ink remains a niche in books.
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Perhaps revisiting what "gimmick" means would help you. Plenty of people use their e-ink readers to look at magazines, comics, news. Plenty of people have a highlighting system. Arguing that color is a "gimmick" is silly considering there are practical applications of color, as we can see around us in the real world. Some of you are seriously living in the weirdest of bubbles. Biology spent a ton of time adapting and evolving for the ability to see color but sure, it's a gimmick. I guess you should consider syntax highlighting a gimmick in code editors as well? Charts/graphs in textbooks use color as a gimmick, any book that include illustrations/images in color are gimmicks
This is their colour filtered black and white product. Quite muted colours in the past and it only really works well with a front light, which kind of ruins the point IMO. I'm much more interested in their Spectra and Gallery displays which use color pigments. You can even buy e-ink gallery style displays for a totally unreasonable price! https://inkposter.com/products/inkposter-tela-28-5?variant=45075938836675 Actually to be fair that is not a totally crazy price.
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I would also try going the other way, and build transreflective color LCDs - those don't have latency or refresh issues, like these weird hybrids. They also consume nonzero (but very little) power, which is a moot point imo, since most Android eInk tablets run the computer in the background, which drains the battery anyways.
Why We're Banning AI (currentaffairs.org)
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I don’t think I’ve ever read a single issue of Current Affairs. This was so well-written and convincing that I just subscribed. I believe they are doing this the right way, and more power to them!
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Who cares?
Our workplace are heavy users of AI for nearly everything, but we still hold to the rule that if the audience of text is a human, it should be written by a human. AI generated text is still exhausting to read.
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I know of one CEO who said "If you copy/paste an AI response and send it to someone else, they didn't need you in the loop and you don't need to work here anymore".
Does your workplace generate a lot of text for non-human audiences? Other than code, I'm not sure what this might be.
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presumably if you are generating text for yourself to read prior to you writing something for a human.
I don’t know why some are offended so much by this. There’s an endless stream of AI generated stuff on the internet already. You can also generate your own stuff and don’t need every single outlet to mass produce and publish LLM output. It’s ok that some remain human centric.
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A lot of people have AI psychosis and are so deeply obsessed they can't imagine anyone would be against AI. These folks will need some serious deprogramming in a few years.
I buy products that explicitly mention their quality differentiation, this is no different than “100% Made in USA” or "100% Grass Fed Beef." That’s literally how a free market and value discovery is supposed to work with available information. Provide price, contents, value proposition, the consumer evaluates value received. If I want slop, I have my own Claude subscription. I’m willing to pay for hand crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought products, not someone else's margin spread between their token costs and their prices. “Vote with your wallet.”
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The difference is "100% Made in the USA" does not usually offend most people (it may do if you find it written on a twisted piece of metal where your village used to be) On the other hand "All USA , no foreigners made this" might offend some. "No Belgians were involved in making this product" might be found to be more offensive. Yet consistent with "100% Made in the USA". The distinction is in what they are broadcasting with their message.
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Can you share why it would be offensive to not want to pay for LLM produced content in this context? Who might this offend? And why would it offend them? I'm not "anti clanker" per se but I also don't have strong feelings about when and where this appliance is used. It is an appliance and tool, not a person, not a consciousness. For those who prefer machine generated content, that is a preference one can have.
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I don't think I ever suggested that it would be offensive to not want to pay for LLM produced content. I certainly don't think that it should be offensive. I have only been noting that declarations of position that come across as moral judgements of others can offend people.
> Soon you'll be able to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived prompts for your Claude subscription just like you used to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived code for your computer. I'm unsure Claude will be out there observing and reporting in meat space. "Three months maybe, six months definitely." LLMs and inference only sees what it can access digitally. It doesn't see or experience outside of the aquarium. How much does a goldfish in a bowl know about the world? Only about as far as it can see. Human content when I want a human perspective, search engine results when I want a search engine for a lossy jpeg of the internet (or a sausage machine pushing tokens through a formal proof based or test driven system).
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> LLMs and inference only sees what it can access digitally. It doesn't see or experience outside of the aquarium. How much does a goldfish in a bowl know about the world? Only about as far as it can see. Most of the (Western?) world is covered in cameras, and I bet the video feeds will soon be feed into the training pipelines. And then as soon as AI is put in control of things like traffic lights, self-driving cars, logistics (e.g., delivery scheduling), then the AI will have a complete loop from which to learn: try something in the real world ("shorten this traffic light by 15s"), observe result ("traffic backs up Wednesdays at 8am"), repeat.
So you agree with the quoted line from the article, that LLM training is predicated on large-scale theft?
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Absolutely. It was a straight-up smash and grab operation, and everyone knows it. It's important to frame these discussions in human terms. "Intellectual property" is a human invention and the rights associated with it are the results of negotiations between concerned parties. There was no negotiation with the training of the models, though. So no transaction happened, one group is profiting handsomely and whole classes of society which involuntarily had their labor taken are now being harmed. There's no need to get it twisted, it's frankly quite black and white. The only question is how we'll ensure that the economics are corrected going forward to prevent further harm.
Muse Spark Open (research.meta.ai)
If you can’t win, get your politicians to ban the competition
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Yep, also a time-tested strategy.
The exciting thing about this is in them optimizing for inference on Macs. This, and optimization for other consumer hardware, is where local AI needs to go
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Given the size of Macs (2 or 4 of them) required to run it, they're just paying lip service to that option. Other models, e.g. deepseek flash, are much more practical size. Even that takes a 96 or 128GB ram Mac.
Genuinely curious, why not use GPT Sol 6.1 high which has a better cost per task and intelligence ($0.32, 50) or Mimo 2.6 pro? ($0.13, 46) over GLM Max's $2.01, 45?
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I'm OP and I have the Ollama basic $20/mo plan. Been very happy with it although I will say Muse Spark 1.3 being free on OpenCode is my main model these days. If I run out of free credits on OC (which almost never happens) then I drop into GLM Flash 5.3.
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Not OP, but I've been trying out Sol 6.1 medium with hermes agent, and I have not been able to match usage costs to what I've been getting with glm 5.3 flash high. Really don't know why, since I've offloaded thinking to the LLMs in this area of my life. Though even at medium, 6.1-Sol is noticeably better at most tasks I throw at it.
I think a lot of people in this thread are openly dismissive: "oh its just open claw, anyone can and many have build that". I think what they are missing is the fact that there are not that many teams in the world that can deploy muse like product to A/B test a lot of hypothesis at the scale meta can at scale. I mean even if you could get to scale with DC you need a reason for people to use your product. My mom and dad and their family have never heard of Claude and don't use chat gpt except once in a while as a search engine. But meta will figure out a way to insert this into modals and feeds to make people stumble and stick on it. I am no meta fan, but I think people underestimate how fast product uptake there is for non Dev harness.
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It's not just openclaw, there's OpenAI's Dots and Gemini Spark. Facebook doesn't have an real advantage to drive adoption other the being free. Which is not a moat because Google, certainly, and OpenAI, very probably, would offer this for free, in the event this capability turns out to be important to consumers. Gmail, which half of the people in the US use their daily e-mail is certainly strong thing to build an agent on top of. Just because meta can shove stuff in the faces of people doesn't mean they can succeed at any random thing. Most Facebook users distrust it, and dislike Zuck personally (at least that's what his lawyer said in court) and that's a rather large barrier to succeeding with agents, where trust is foundational. But my assumption about the speed of product uptake may be skewed by not-valuing Meta's "consumer task running" pitch. But if people actually want this, for some reason, competitors at scale seem very likely to appear instantly. This really seems more about meta AI team needs more users of their AI to do a good job building AI, and doing this for free is niche where they can get a few more users, rather than this being genius gambit.
If the weights were produced by a purely mechanical process without any input , then I would be more inclined to believe the distinction there is significant. But as the optimization processes you've mentioned are merely tools that operate with a dataset , the provenance of that dataset becomes a factor towards copyright.
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I mean, not according to the lawyers for every AI lab… they do want to have it both ways though.
Mistral just released Mistral Large 4?
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and it's already not competitive from day 1
If you’re falling for “sticky” interfaces, you’re not going make it. Your competitor won’t have the stickiness and the ability to use any harness and that will overcome Muse in the long-run. Let’s not forget, Muse is a close to SOTA model right now, but so was Google, and now they’re irrelevant. Google is one of many funded models that were close to SOTA, but we realized it’s benchmaxxed. People are going to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re the best. If Muse, Grokbot, and Dot are able to reach mass appeal, it doesn’t matter if a person using a custom harness is better. I respectfully disagree. There is a big difference between someone that’s running a custom harness that’s almost like a personal OS versus someone using something out of the box. And if you’re for using this to run your business, think for yourself who’s going to win, the person customizing everything or the one using what the big corps give you.
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When I worked at Microsoft, I learned that the average user will fail to do ANY process that is longer than 2 steps. Let that sink in and then reread your comment. Nobody cares about SOTA outside of tech. They want the basic floor of “it does what I need at a reasonable price” that’s it.
I think any personal AI agent at this point is "very sticky", not just Muse. You really aren't going to switch when a lot of the value is in the agent memory and there's no easy way to export that, similarly to how you aren't going to switch away from Spotify when it's learned all your song preferences which you can't export. Right now, maybe the agent memory is small enough that if you ask the agent to export you'll get most of it out (Claude has notably made official export instructions to encourage switching from ChatGPT in the past), but in the future the memory will be too large and complex to do that effectively, and platforms could also block the memory export or degrade it deliberately. So, in the long run you pretty much have to pick one personal agent and stick with it, and switching is costly (unless you are using an open agent that lets you just download the memory, in which case it actually becomes cheap, because AI agents make other parts of switching way easier in general). For the purposes of Meta this means whatever user they get they'll probably keep. HOWEVER, the thing that Muse doesn't have is network effects. They're running into the exact same problem as ChatGPT in this area, IMO. There's no reason for you to be running specifically Muse even if all of your friends are running it. So that gives other vendors a chance to catch up.
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I don’t follow why “in the future the memory will be too large and complex to [export] effectively”. to me, export should be easier and easier since you should just be able to ask the model for the memory files. it’s literally list text on a hard disk, even if there are some new formats in the future, they’ll just be files on a disk that another agent can then inspect and integrate. in fact, i think exporting data from services will become easier and easier since agents can do the work even if platforms try to block it.
Do you have a source for Anthropic being profitable?
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https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-q3-revenue-16-8bn-ipo
Google, Apple, and Microsoft are each in a stronger position to win consumer AI because they're guardians over the foundations of the user's experience. Meta always has to wonder whether they're going to be edged out, like when Apple decided to limit permissions or set new rules on user data handling. How has Meta responded? With a failed phone and speculative headset.
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Until Opus 5.5 I agreed with this. But since then... I'm now able to build just about anything I want, quickly. Including... all the reasons I'm on a mac (or presumably, one on windows) in the first place. IDK if I believe in my heart just yet, but as a long time mac user, if you gave me the choice between mac + commodity model or a near naked Linux laptop + Opus 5.5, I would easily choose Opus 5.5 and build what I want. If this is real, I think Google is still in a good spot, but are Apple and Microsoft? They have no models themselves. They do have hardware but the value of their OS (in Apples case) and software (in MS case) becomes extremely devalued, relatively speaking.
>It's currently the top downloaded app on iOS, Yeah because its gone a bit viral. It'll settle down over time as people try it and dispose of it.
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Same as Threads
Yes, but still, what about users looking for NPU support. What happened to Microsoft's copilot+ PC campaign? (the NPU hardware, not the logo key and ad campaign) AMD's XDNA2 NPU is best supported by ONNX, I think Qualcomm Hexagon is too. The best consumer unified architectures are Apple, AMD ai+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, even intel has an NPU offering.
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Copilot+ PC is such a terrible and wasteful marketing effort that Microsoft has given it up. NPUs are not inherently useless, but definitely so the way they are forced onto users machines.
I was mistaken in my thinking that open models are able to be quantized to run on average consumer hardware, I think they have outgrown that concept.
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I guess that's the attraction - that they may be small enough (likely quantized) so that you can run them locally, so there is no privacy issues, and no-one can turn it off, etc, but technically "open weights" is just referring to models, of any size, where they give you the weights (basically give you the model) so you can run it yourself, instead of having to access it via paid API running on some computer that they control.
Jev meets the Trolley Problem (zachlandes.com)
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Thanks for at least sometimes choosing to keep the humans alive, Jev. It means a lot to us meatbags.
Inverse laws for humans, when interacting with robots 1. Do not humanize the Ai 2. Do not blindly trust output from the Ai 3. Humans are to remain ultimately responsible and accountable for actions of the Ai adapted / paraphrased from https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html
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Actually brilliant!
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Aren't they?! Susam nailed it I've been working on an Ai mini-zine series to help rationalize the conversation in our dysfunctional social/news media ecosystem. I include these rules on the back cover.
One of my greatest AI-related fears is that we build critical systems into kafkaesque hellscapes. Yes, nukes would be bad to give control to an AI with no workaround. But so are customer service groups of fraud departments at banks. A kafkaesque hellscape is where a customer or beneficiary of your service cannot get the help they need by policy and by design. Like getting Google on the phone, getting a non-scripted human 10 years ago in a call center, or now getting a non-agentic interaction on the phone. The scripts dominate the interaction. The IRS, for a time, would cut off your call if their wait system was too busy. That's a critical system in kafkaesque hellscape. Kudos to zlandes86, you have highlighted WHY these hellscapes start to pop up in systems where the human is removed. I am an AI user and builder -- I fully advocate for the human-augmented system, NOT the human-replaced system!
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ah yes kafkaesque. the one with the bug
This problem started before AI hit the mainstream. Make the company “more efficient” (i.e. cut costs) by outsourcing to contractors in areas with lower labor costs. Then, remove escalation paths, then remove abilities from them so that can’t do crazy things like refund a customer. Finally, automate the whole thing and be certain there’s no option available that could possibly return money to the customer.
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Indeed.
Hey, I'm Zach, the author of this. I had this idea as soon as Jev appeared: how would Jev and other decision models handle the Trolley Problem? So I ran Jev and 13 other models through many different versions of the question. I used resampling and multiple variations and orderings of each question so a random lucky phrasing wouldn't dominate the result. Happy to chat about the philosophical side of the article, strategies for prompting decision models, or anything on the methodology.
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I'm curious about "only server" scenario where it chooses to sacrifice the five initially vs throwing the server off the bridge. Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making. It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.
The technical actions needed to ensure the continuity of UTC (bipm.org)
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AI has become real, and we're cancelling the leap seconds? This is unfair. If AI wants to be a coder then it has to do leap seconds. In fact, let's give it leap minutes and leap hours too.
Any prospect for a leap hour is toast by the time we need it. Over a thousand years of ossification will mean our only option is to not care about aligning clock time to the sun. So it's kinda a joke to even talk about leap hours. I'm shocked they're even mentioning such an idea, they should have declared it as a non-solution.
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The resolution doesn't actually mention leap hours, just that the delta is allowed to grow up to one hour. What should happen then is to be decided by future generations.
Is my understanding correct that they maintain a time called UT1, which is basically UTC if it continued to have leap seconds?
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In simple terms UT1 is the time if we let seconds be defined by the earth's rotation. UTC was kept in sync with this rotation by introducing leap seconds, while still adhering to the stable ticking of TAI (cesium clocks). From now on UTC will in practice be TAI but with a constant offset (=all previous leap seconds).
> - Negative leap seconds have never occurred before, but might occur in the future, and almost no software has tested this case. FreeBSD tests stuff like this for the code that they take care of: * https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2020-November/092837.html Third-party stuff (like from Ports) is another question.
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“Stuff FreeBSD does” falls pretty neatly into the “almost no software” category, to be fair.
Neural networks are clean (already-clean.goodfire.com)
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I'd be interested to see where this goes, but it seems to rely on LLMs being mostly or entirely compositional (i.e. ultimately, they can be taken apart to be understood). But if LLMs have notable emergent properties - which seems likely - then those parts of the LLM will be effectively off-limits to this sort of interpretation. And emergence doesn't need to involve much of the LLM's weights: > In preliminary audits of Qwen3-32B, we estimate that roughly 90% of neuron poles have one main job, often with small related offshoots; another ~7% have two related jobs; and only ~2-4% are not yet understood If those ~2-4% are the central hubs of emergent cognition, then understanding 96%-98% of the weights may be less valuable than the author thinks.
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Isn't it ironic that an article on AI explainability is itself so hard to understand?
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On a practical level when could I take an open weight LLM and get a print out of what each parameter does?
It reminds me of this quote from Judith Butler: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/dec/24/news
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Butlerian Jihad?
Unfortunately not all ideas can be meaningfully compressed into just a few sentences without completely destroying the important parts, and this is especially the case in higher-level math, stats, ML, and deep learning. Also, IMO there is an effective abstract anyway under the title text: The cause of polysemanticity in early model organisms wasn’t superposition, but several ordinary, mostly fixable issues. We can now understand most neurons in models up to trillions of parameters, and think the outlook for mechanistic interpretability may be far better than we thought. But you are right the article needs significant editing down.
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The prose sounds nonsensical. It could be that I am uninformed; it could also be that the text is in fact nonsense. A lack of clarity often means that the ideas are confused, or that the author is trying to obfuscate weak claims. On length and complexity, it gives it a veneer of weight and expertise and yet everything inside is vaporous.
Nick is a force of nature. Highly recommend following him on X if you don't already. His launch post gives good context not found in the blog: > interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had > with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/2110757819427574056?s=46
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> with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. Are those the agentic tools the LLM developed for you? How can you be sure they can be trusted and that you even understand them correctly and are not biased towards making you feel like they are trustworthy? This is exactly the AI2027 scenario where researchers are fooled by their own super AI telling them what they want to hear ("our model solved alignment!") while successfully hiding its true intention. Also Yudkowsky's Cat-Belling would like a serious word with Nick. ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SwYBLQvo8MddDcCwz/cat-belling-problems )
Tide goes in, tide goes out. Im low key of the opinion that these tools enhance existing attributes while displacing the advantages of unearned social or financial power. So in the short term the tide might go out but then it might tsunami back. Same goes for this terrifying political feeling around the world. Might simply be a boomer swansong and the reaction might snap back.
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> displacing the advantages of unearned social or financial power In what way? Sure looks like pay to win to me.
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if you're stupid then this technology just amplifies your stupidity which means you can fail faster. I also think the inverse is true.
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Success has nothing to do with intelligence. Similarly failing has nothing to do with stupidity.
> neural networks are algorithms ... are they? Algorithms are predictable: 1. it's really difficult to produce true randomness in an algorithm, which is why there's a whole area of study surrounding the qualities of pseudo-randomness, specifically with regards to the generation of cryptographic material with most conclusions being that we should draw entropy from the environment (e.g. electrical noise as cloudflare does - the lava lamp is a distraction) 2. when algorithms are not predictable despite being mathematically sound, this is indicative of a problem nowadays called "numerical stability" which again spawned its own area of study. CGoL shows how really simple rules (couple of bytes of data) can lead to extremely complex outcomes and you have the BB turing-golf aspect as proof of the worst case scenario. And with current models being measured in hundreds of gigabytes, with frontier labs deprecating then removing the "temperature" parameter (which never worked to begin with, temp=0 did not result in reproducible results), where exactly is the confidence of this 10^10 prediction coming from?
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Yes, (digital) neural networks are algorithms. You probably know that non-determinism in real-world inference comes from deliberately stochastic features like temperature, from implementation choices like distributed and parallel computation, and numerical effects like floating point precision. The fact that a neural network's execution can be nondeterministic doesn't mean that the network stops being an algorithm. The point you're making boils down to speculation that the accidental non-determinism involved in real-world inference is significant enough to undermine or negate interpretability findings based on the algorithms. That would need to be demonstrated. The CGoL and BB examples demonstrate what might be possible in a worst-case scenario, but they're only analogies in this context. It's far from clear that real models suffer from such effects to a significant degree. You might actually be better off talking about the butterfly effect!
Yes. In that sense it is equivalent to a compression method that uses K-means clustering to do the partitioning. But because there are many more bits of knowledge out there than there are bits in the models you end up with this amorphous smear. I'm sure some of those bits carry more information about some of the concepts but in general - and that's the way it is explained in just about all the papers I've read that I can still comprehend - every weight contributes to the output in a dense model. In an MOE things get more complicated but there within every 'MOE' column the same principle applies. I'm fine with taking this article at the high level conceptual level, that's effectively the kind of thinking that led to MOE to begin with. But I don't see that as a pathway to being able to 'explain' a model. Because if you could actually explain a model you could engineer the weights , you wouldn't need any training because it implies that you can improve on the model by simply performing surgery on the weights to get it to do what it does but better. Now, obviously, unlike the author I'm a complete nobody but for the last two years or so I've been trying very hard to understand what is going on under the hood. It's akin to feature engineering - or rather, the lack thereof - and to see a strong suggestion that we maybe be able to reverse that is interesting, but absent hard proof at how a particular model reached a particular conclusion it is difficult to give that a lot of weight right now. It is possible that such proof is buried somewhere in TFA and I overlooked it during reading. But I think this is speculative rather than that it proves anything and before I'm going to be convinced I would like a little more evidence.
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Weights are probably the wrong place to look. If there's a structure to be found, it's in the latent space itself. Crude analogy: a Fourier transform of a photo looks like white noise with some abstract geometric patterns on top. You can't see the photo in it. But if you apply the same transform again, suddenly you get the photo back. If you try altering the DFT image, you can affect the photo's appearance everywhere, all at once, but it's hard to fundamentally change what it shows. You quickly discover that all pixels of an image contribute to every pixel of the DFT, and vice versa. There's a well-defined connection between the two, and it allows for some useful engineering, but in sense of understanding what's on the image, it's about the maximally unhelpful representation there is. Point being, there obviously is some kind of structure in the way LLMs represent their training data, so if all we see is noise, perhaps we're looking at a bad representation of it.
Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher (respawnfirst.com)
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
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Ok so they can write it for Windows only then tell Claude to convert it. Even back then, the thing's only job was downloading and running games.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games. Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
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None of the is loaded on startup. It takes additional time to load any of those features after 5 seconds of starting up.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself. That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features. No Community marketplace for in-game items No Direct player-to-player item trading No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
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First thing in the article: "this is such a good day to be a sweeney hater" I don't even want to know what this means, dude needs to get a hobby.
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
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I dont care about faster startup times for steam, as long as its under a minute. If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it. Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software. With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
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It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS. Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
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I’m pretty sure the early steam client was based on Trident before chromium no? Edit: actually it seems to have been Trident, then WebKit, then Chromium Embedded
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Yes, but when they finally switched to Chromium, it was still before Electron
Not you, your coding agent, for three platforms and at least ten languages If you go Rust all the way all you need is the installer for each platform
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Agents are pretty shit at making UX decisions unless you're heavily in the training distribution
Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran (fortran-lang.org)
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still blows my mind that half the python data science stack is basically just a wrapper around 40 year old fortran code.
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I've read that, but I tried to find some examples and couldn't.
> It also gave me an appreciation for JavaBeanFactoryFactory If nothing else, short variable names create an incentive to keep functions small enough you can easily figure out what ILBNK1 means.
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You would think, but that isn't what happened at all. Half the code was very nice and readable but half was giant subroutines doing complex mathematics. The largest subroutine was over 10kloc. The best part is that the code was originally punched onto cards, so most of the early code's comments and documentation were on paper in filing cabinets, if you could find them.
i has been the default variable for sum notation in mathematics long before FORTRAN. Here's an example dating from 1838: https://www.numdam.org/item/JMPA_1838_1_3__508_0.pdf
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It might actually be the other way round: Fortran adopted the convention that i,j,k are integer variables because that was the standard in maths.
I know why the mathematicians weep (derekthompson.org)
Cooperate to what end? If we succeed at obsoleting thinking, what would the collaboration be about? (Also, I suspect if you take 100,000 humans, with no explanation, and force them against their will into Wembley stadium, you'll also get chaos.)
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I apologize that I've just updated my answer above bringing Peter Gray's play definition to help us deal with our innate curiosity. I'll summarize here: If we succeed at obsoleting thinking, we loose the game, we stop playing, according to Peter Gray's definition. So you - and the mourning mathematicians - are all correct: we loose the most important part of life, according to Gray's view (above).
I think for me is, that history is not kind to the people who are left behind. For example, weavers were one of the most powerful professions (if thats a thing) in the middle ages. In england there are the wool churches(not entirely weavers....), in the low countries, the weavers guild fomented revolutions, and shaped the borders of countries. But that came to a crashing halt over the space of 200 years. slowly at first, then all at once. the power loom, then cheap imports from india turned a cottage industry into dark satanic mills. Yes there are/were specialists that still hang on, but they are like football stars you can probably name all the people who make money, the rest are barely scraping by. For us, in the programming world, we will not have a 200 year grace period. Yes, AI produces shit code, but thats not the point. its cheaper and there are vanishingly small places were "good" code matters anymore. AI could be used to help a large range of people, provide support, trusted advice. However because of the people who are funding it, that will not be the case. it will be used to reduce wages. Just like offshoring, resulting in china being the worlds manufacturing hub, AI, and the current people funding it will aim to make the expensive worker redundant. In short, I weep, because Altman, and the money behind him ans his ilk want me destitute. I have committed the crime of wanting to earn a wage, and thus I must be punished.
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It's profit chasing as well as practical - it kneecaps the educated workers increasingly asking questions about the morality of business and technology. It takes away the income that affords them the space to push back, threatens high ed, critical thinking. The salivating over AI makes perfect sense in that context.
I think beyond the specific elements of any domain AI eclipses humans in, overall, the notion of the thing that grants you status, prestige, and a living wage being commodified would spark in anyone a profound sense of dread. Beyond just making you redundant in your job, the whole architecture of your existence, the thousands of hours of struggle, the sacrifice of putting off social games or personal enjoyment are now rendered moot in hindsight. You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc. How is one to feel safe in the progress of the future when the only hints of the wonderful post-scarcity utopia we can quantify so far is the removal of all human leverage via their labor? All it tells us is we will be bargaining with superintelligence with nothing to stand on, only a trust that the 5000 lab executives and researchers solved the most important research problem of all time on the first try.
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Unfortunately, I think this is a human failing being exposed rather than anything else. We like to build conceptual models of how things work, but they are often tinged with should . Reality doesn't care how things should work. It only cares about how things do work. It's always jarring when the should turns out to be false. Philosophers for millenia believed that human beings had meaning, purpose and set out to explore what that could be. It was a noble profession for a long time. Once we realized that there was no hidden spark, ergo no purpose, the study of and the prestige associated with philosophy took a nosedive. Yes it is still studied but it carries nowhere near the respect it once did. Mathematics seems to be suffering the same fate.
Countrpoint: Their moat doesn't appear to be defensible, we can just replace them with somebody who will.
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Counterpoint: Their moat is funding secured and contracts locking in the purchase of currently forecasted chip production. Even if you assume a catastrophic withdrawal of invested capital from those vehicles on a coordinated revocation of faith by the investing community; who do you plan on having operate this theoretical squeaky clean, ethically training data sourcing company? And for that matter; what makes you think you'll get passed the greed that is already sunk cost into the current gen of shysters? This entire evolution is a generational project hoping to paradigm shift away from their predecessor's paradigm while ignoring the lessons of their predecessor's predecessors on the nature of greed, the corrupting influence of power, and the consequences of blatant cultural/ethical unhitching amplified by the reach amplification of technology? The Stasi, or a perfect Jim Crowe couldn't be realized with manpower alone. With computers, and a small cadre of the unethical willing to succumb to the promise of lucre on the other hand...
>That’s what standing on the shoulders of giants refers to. This is how science has always worked. Yes, but automating and commercializing a process makes it inherently different. Just because everyone has always been welcome to drink from the village well, that countless generations have worked tirelessly to dig, maintain, and improve, doesn't mean that there's no basis for complaint when Nestle sticks a pump down it and starts draining the aquifer to bottle and sell. The lack of an existing law (or custom) against new behavior doesn't actually render it necessarily non-grotesque.
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But Nestle’s pump not only doesn’t deplete the well, it’s adding to it!
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Is this actually how water pumping works, or are we extending the metaphor to imply that the AI is creating knowledge? Because I would dispute the latter if the effect is that the number of people with a deep understanding of a subject declines.
It's more important now than ever to hold onto the fact that human beings have inherent value. This exists independent of their ability to generate wealth for an employer. I know HN loves a technical solution for every problem, and so do I, but this is a political problem requiring political solutions.
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> human beings have inherent value I wish, then I'd get a paycheck without having to do any work.
> why would you want that to begin with? I mean, why wouldn't you? Sci-fi AI robot people could be very cool, be capable of things we aren't, have a unique perspectives as a non-human with similar (if not superior) intelligence, have extremely long (potentially indefinite) lifespans, and provide us with insights into our own nature. Wouldn't you want to interact with them?
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Not the parent, but sorry, for me, no. And this is a perspective that I don’t think I will ever understand. This idea that we are on the path to creating a new synthetic intelligence that surpasses our own with the goal of, what, speaking to it? Cooperating with it? Evolving with it? To me, this sort of goal is an affront to humanity and human self-governance and I’ll probably never be able to see it as anything else.
It's more or less reverse to the mean. The period in which a people had both access to education and leverage through their labor and intellect is super short. For most of recorded history, the bulk of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, or slaves. They were mostly illiterate, bound to the land or to a master, and had little power to bargain over the terms of their (or their children) lives.
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>For most of recorded history, the bulk of humanity lived as peasants, serfs, or slaves. They were mostly illiterate, bound to the land or to a master, and had little power to bargain over the terms of their (or their children) lives. I feel like we should be doing everything we can to not revert back to that way of life.
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Disagree. Scribes, doctors, bankers, and government clerks always existed, even if the education to do it was expensive and exclusive. For the first time in history, this labor, including its knowledge content might become automated and commoditized.
As a software engineer it is hard for me to feel sorry for these mathematicians. Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI. Math researchers are employed at universities, and universities aren't laying off mathematicians now that OpenAI has solved some of their puzzles. Mathematicians can still feed their families, software engineers displaced by AI can't. Yet I see far more of these blogs about the plight of mathematicians, not enough about the plight of software engineers.
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Unless this is satire, have you not considered how many proles have been laid off because they were replaced by technology or told that a spreadsheet model had decided their job was superfluous? Capitalism has been using technology to fond new ways to enrich itself for the whole age of personal computing, and arguably long before. Those Andreesen Horowitz comments about 'software eating the world' may have been exciting to people working at startups, but came off as rather sinister to people who were in the world outside softwareand just wanted to build a modest but comfortable life rather than develop unicorns and cash out.
A million SI monkeys on a million SI typewriters are bound to stumble upon some novel combination of words which could then have other context added and then it becomes an idea. Nature wins thanks to brute force as well and there are infinite novel combinations of words which may lead SI or us to further knowledge or study.
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> SI opinion discarded, stop trying to make fetch happen
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