CJefferson

I could make a non-deterministic chainsaw fairly easily. I’d also get sued into the ground if I sold it, and I wouldn’t be able to claim ‘Oh, it’s just an unavoidable part of progress’.

I mean, are you saying ‘but more RAM?’ because obviously yes that’s true but not a solution if you already own a laptop, and have you seen ram prices? Also swapping to a fast SSD isn’t like it used to be on spinning discs. I’ve been amazed how responsive Mac neo laptops are and they are swapping all the time.

Wow, that is widely disingenuous, I don't really think there is any excuse for that, I don't believe someone deep in compression algorithms wouldn't know they could adjust the block size, and 512GB is a huge block size for bzip3, as it needs to basically all be in memory so you can't pretend that's just 'the standard value'.

What’s interesting is it’s not obvious how this is leveraged to ‘cure disease’. But I’d love to know.the advantage of this is there is a clear measure of success. Here is a rule language. Prove this. You are done when your proof passes. You can sit quietly and spin for billions of tokens.

How does that work for drugs? We can’t let AIs make millions of test drugs and try them out on people.

I don’t attach a raw dump of all the conversations I have with colleagues to my commit messages, and wouldn’t want to work in a place where I did.

Sometimes I tell Claude ‘don’t trust file X, it was written by a colleague who writes awful tests’. I don’t want that in my commit messages.

I worry this doesn’t check correctness. I’ve been finding Claude is lately awful at folllowing instructions, I’ll ask it to implement the algorithm from a paper and it will do something simpler and slower and when challenged do it’s stupid apology thing. It can’t be trusted with anything I’d put in a paper, it lies too much. 4.6 couldn’t do as complex tasks, but it would do what was asked.

This is completely different to my experience and my reading of the research. Please link me to any of this research you are talking about.

Much less than that. Anthropic won’t let its best model discuss my digestive system issues, or how to install apps on my own Peleton exercise bike.

I dislike all censorship, but US models are much more censored, I often find myself using Chinese models to get answers I want.

Now, of course I’d prefer no censoring, but I live in the world we live in.

I’m working in the assumption that (like today) there will always be somehow on openrouter, or similar, who will host a model I want to run.

My big problem with leaving Google is I’ve clicked on far too many ‘login with google’ boxes. In retrospect this was a mistake as it now ties my own domain to google basically forever, but lots of sites don’t even have the option to undo it.

I'm a software developer. This is clearly bad, and we can decide what it should be called. It might not be 'hacking', but you are clearly abusing the computer to steal a space in a class you shouldn't have.

My gym class operates on 'write on a piece of paper, cross off your name if you want to cancel'. I could cross someone else's name off and write mine in. They would have trouble figuring out it was me who did the malicious cross-off.

That wouldn't make it remotely acceptable of course.

I find it amazing people don’t believe this. I lost about 50kg and people treated me better. They didn’t randomly shout ‘fat fuck’ in the street for a start.

P.P.S.

Assuming you are replying to me, you seem to be projecting very powerfully. Rust isn't my favorite language, and I just asked about how much of your code was safe vs unsafe.

Do you find most of your rust code is unsafe? Because I also find I do some unsafe stuff, because of the algorithms I work on I often end up with some unchecked array accesses and a couple of raw pointers into those arrays I pass around. But 98% of the code is safe and I find this makes it easier to reason about.

Except it's 1,000x worse with the American models, because Trump might just decide that everyone in Europe get their access cut off, or gets a 5,000% tarriff. Or the companies just all agree to hike prices 10x one day. With open Chinese models, we can, in principle, run them ourselves.

The problem is you can't ban open models.

All you can do is say that Americans have to pay whatever stupid prices OpenAI / anthropic / Google / Grok wants to charge you, while China uses, and attacks with, open models.

I'd much prefer NFC if I could see how much I was paying and had to always confirm it -- I understand this wouldn't have worked with physical cards but I wish it was an option on my phone.

This type of thing (scan QR code) is how basically all payments were done when I was recently in China, via wechat or alipay (either you show your QR code for big shops, or scan their QR code for small shops / vendors. They can just print them out if they want and hang a copy).

I found it superior to other systems I've used in basically every way. Particularly for small market stalls -- I scan their QR code, I enter how much I want to send them. They never get my details, I don't have to trust they didn't fat-finger the price. It also makes it amazingly easy to send money to friends, just scan their code and send them their share of dinner.

This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone.

Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.

From the article there's this. If this isn't proof, well, I don't know what would be:

A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”

That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”

Because most people can't set up a DNS blocker. There are lots of things we, as a society, decide we want to ban. I think social media is closer to illegal drugs.

We don't need to let multi-billion dollar companies maximise profits while ruining people's lives. We can just decide to ban them, as a society.

No, not at all. Students all have different voices. Yes there are similarities but if I read two pieces of work that sound in the same voice I assume there has been cheating — except this year everything is in the same voice.

This is my biggest concern. Speaking as someone who recently had to read 60 AI generated reports (the whole issue of how much students are using AI is one discussion), it was genuinely soul-destroying reading the same phrases, seem sentence structures, same arguments over and over. Depressed me the whole of the next day.

I feel this is on of those examples of where humanities and the softer sciences can teach us things. This is exactly how 'normal' languages work. New things are introduced and people (particularly older people) hate them. Over time common words (or even sounds) become shorter, in some cases disappearing entirely when they are 'understood from context'.

Has writing secure C really changed that much? Lots of the world still writes in C99, 27 years old at this point. I think they can use a 9 month old AI model is they want.

Wow, that might be the worst name for a project I’ve ever seen. I think every programmer who sees this is going to assume it’s a Python thing.

With regards the library itself —- I think it’s generally known the c++ standard library is a poorly designed mess in places but if you make an entirely new one you lose all the software already written, at which point why use C++ nowadays?

They are going to make it a thousands times worse.

It wasn't perfect before, but it at least took some time to fake a paper. The problem is now people can produce a very plausible looking completely fake paper in minutes. Peer review is in the process of completely collapsing, in fact I think it's already basically done.

The only way this might fix things is if we require all papers are completely reproducable (that doesn't help in subjects like biology of course. They can still provide all the experimental data in the rawest format possible which doesn't break any laws).

I think what upsets me the most isn't that companies do this, it's that no government seems to have any interest in stopping them.

To me, it should be a fairly easy, short, and extremely popular law that if you say you are 'selling' someone something, with a time-frame extremely clearly specified in a simple way, at least the same size as the price (say), you can't take it back later without giving a full refund. If they want to offer a multi-year rent, call it rent.

So do we get rid of all laws which distinguish children? Why bother with limiting selling alcohol to children if we can just let the parents do it?

My problem is I don’t think anyone is (seriously) suggesting we get rid of the laws protecting children in the physical world, and having nieces and nephews, they nowadays spend more time in the virtual world than the physical world, often with their friends so it’s hard to track what they do.