DrScientist

> a lot of people who simply lack the capability to comprehend reality

I think your wrong - but not dumb.

The core disagreement appears to be whether you see the split between informed and uninformed, educated and uneducated, rich or poor, powerful or powerless to be one of intrinsic capability ( dumbness ) or something else.

I don't believe the vast majority of people are incapable. Capabilities are multifacted and spread via normal curves - there is no separate elite - it's a multi-dimensional continuum, where differences are exacerbated and reinforced by opportunity.

I do think a lot of decision making is more emotional than rational - but that's a self delusion that applies to everyone - and it's what professionals in the persuasion industries understand very well and ruthlessly exploit.

And while this persuasion techniques now scale to the masses, they are still much more powerfully focussed on the elites in power.

ie the power of democracy in the past was while you could powerfully knobble/persuade representatives with targetted lobbying, the people were unblinded.

So take the Iraq war - the UK people thought the 45min weapons of mass destruction stuff was rubbish - millions marched against the war - however the small group of people actually making the decision had been persuaded to 'do the right thing'.

The fact that is was a diaster based on a like was a suprise to nobody outside the bubble, and those in the bubble still seem to think it was a good idea.

Trump just said he'd do the Iran war again given a second chance..... is that dumb or something else?

Dumb or too busy surviving to have time to pay proper attention?

( especially when the truth is being intentionally hidden behind a wall of propaganda ).

Also is a strategy of being part of the crowd ( even if it's an astroturfed one ) a dumb or smart survival strategy?

This analysis suggests that the Bolsonaro camp is potentially split - particuarly around BRICS versus Washington alignment.

https://russiancouncil.ru/en/news/russian-and-brazilian-expe...

Remember playing this on the spectrum.

Does anybody else remember the item that reversed the control ( up becomes down, left becomes right? ).

What I found rather amazing about the human brain was, with a little practice, I was able to switch seemlessly as the controls flipped one way and then back.

What's the evidence for Russian involvement in the Brazil election?

As far as I can see it's pretty thin. US interence on the other hand has been open.

https://thebostonreport.com/2026/10/11/russia-brazil-electio...

There are too many people in the world currently that think that security is through absolute technical/military dominance, when the reality the thing you really need for security is other people or countries not wanting to harm you.

In fact the rise of things like cheap killer drones or robots makes that truth more real, not less.

> And good luck withholding your labour when 80% of people can't even find paid employment.

So those 80% are either being supported somehow to live a life at a level where they don't resort to violence or crime or they aren't. ie you keep them happy at some level or you fight. Note if you let them die/kill them, then you will likely lose the support of the 20% as they can see which way it's going.

On your second point, that rather assumes those 'unless' people will willing to just 'go away'.

That's typically not what happens - you either get bloody revolution or people just ignore the rules that aren't giving them a fair shot ( ie turn to crime - ie state disapproved activities ).

This is what has traditionally held back the elite from their worse excesses - they don't want to live in a world where either of those things happen.

ie what's the point of being rich if you are constantly worried about yourself or a member of your family is going to be violently kidnapped etc.

As to your first point - it's a bit like the first - if there is no social safety net, then it you could happen to you - you could get ill, lose your job etc. Even if you believe the system is created by total self-interest - then the past has shown that the equilibrium involves looking after everyone to some extent as:

1. It could be you one day.

2. Having lots of desperate people, even if it isn't you, is in no-ones self interest.

> Apart from coding.....

But let's take the one you've accepted - it can write code. It can translate from intention to code quite effectively - then they can do anything that you can do by writing code.

Also while you dismiss ML that drives cars as 'not LLMs' - it's part of the ecosystem - these task specific models ( the ability to process images, sounds, drive cars, synthesize speech etc ) - extend what is accessible to a computer programme that can write code.

Look at what's happening in the world of robotics. You have lots of specific ML models that allow the robot to move, see etc.

Then the LLM allows it to convert a human command in the form of arbitary speech ( rather than fixed preset commands ) into action.

While I agree the numbers don't make any sense, for reasons too numerous to enumerate, what matters for the valuation is not how it works, but what it can do.

So if an ML model can do real time language translation or drive a car - that has value - whether it's remixing or thinking or whatever doesn't really matter.

Not sure my loose use of the term thinking is the important thing here.

The point is you can justify almost anything on the basis of defining yourself as the 'good guy'.

Take the US recent assassinations of Iranian leadership. Objectively unilaterally assassinating other countries leaders is wrong - but somehow it's fine if you have a good guy/bad guy lense.

One of the problems here is huge swathes of material that the AI will have ingested includes this kind of exceptionalism thinking - it's particularly deeply rooted in Western culture generally and US culture in particular.

The problem isn't so much whether the good guy/bad guy allocation is corrrect - rather that it's very existence in the training set is deeply dangerous - as all it takes is one single classification to happen and suddenly everything is for the greater good.

Indeed.

Take the classic NSA encryption logic - if you build some capability with a backdoor only you can exploit then you are building your own future capability - and if you think you are the 'good' guy - what's wrong with that?

I've seen this - I was part of a large company that threatened to move everything, not to open source, but to google docs, and MS sales team moved heaven and earth to reverse the decision.

It's not just that they don't want to lose a customer - they don't want lots of examples out there of how it can be done.

It cost just under 150 million to run the UK 2019 general election:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/costs-of-the-2019...

So ~3 pounds per registered voter.

I'd say that's good value - I find US data harder to find- but I see estimates in the region of $10 per voter.

> Hand-counting the ballots instead of scanning would be expensive in terms of time and money, and error-prone.

Why?

It's not that expensive - what price democracy? And in terms of error rate - if there is a very close vote, in the UK they just do a recount - sometimes more than once - the variation between recounts is very very small - single digit ( votes not percent ) at most.

to be fair, I guess one difference between the US and the UK is the distributed nature of the vote - in the UK it's broken up into constituencies of ~70K voters - so any recount is scoped to that ( ~ 50K actual votes ).

I'd argue ff you have thuggery at that level in public then you have bigger problems than voting systems.

And if that's country wide then the country isn't a democracy so the voting system is moot.

In terms of voter fraud, it's the very inefficiency of paper in person voting that provides the large scale protection - it's incredibly hard to do what you describe at a national level.

On the other hand, it's much easier for organised crime to influence voting machines nationally - in an undetected way - you probably only need to intimidate a handful of key people.

In person, pure paper voting, in local community halls etc, run by volunteers is the best voting system.

Incredibly resistant to influencing at scale, resistant to voter coercion, transparent, and invokes a sense of occasion and community spirit.

The problem with electronic systems is the public can't see the piles of votes, can't get involved in the count, and ultimately it's the perfect system for being able to tip the scales subtly.

Even vote counting machines for paper ballots are a mistake in my view.

Is it me ( and my eyesight ) or is the text a bit fuzzy in their example videos?

Are you treating the LLM output as machine code or are you looking at it?

And if you are looking at it - do you insist on certain patterns or structure to allow yourself to more easily navigate it?

> and decided I'd rather just use vanilla css/js for new projects.

So is the rise of AI coding, the end of frameworks?

Frameworks were created to reduce boiler plate ( at the expense of new abstractions which occasionally leak ) - boiler generation is less of an issue for AI, and the underlying platform is very well specified?

I guess the only problem with vanilla is if the sheer volume of text overwhelms the context?

I said if they were serious about 'safety' then given by their own graphs that Sol is less aligned than Astra, they should have pulled it.

As they haven't, the obvious conclusion is that safety isn't the main driver here.

I'm just following the logic - you are the one making assertions about motives that contradict the evidence.

Now I have some sympathy for the idea that these companies need to be responsible, but in the end - because these are universal machines - the regulation is going to be needed at the machine real world interface, not at the model itself.

This is, by the way, why OpenAI is responsible for the hacking that it's AI driven agents ( not models per se ), did.

It's not a problem to have an LLM that thinks it can drive, the problem is putting one it an actual car and putting it on the road.

So you are telling me Sol can't be used for hacking?

Please...

Also think about it - they are 'announcing' a delay.

They didn't need to do that - they can just release when ready - nobody is expecting them to release a new model on a certain date.

The whole thing is confected.

Things can be regulated in sensible countries where the things are pretty much single use - like guns.

However, nobody bans cars because somebody has driven one into a crowd, or hammers because of a particularly grusome murder.

These models, just like computers, are universal tools by their nature - they don't fall into the gun category - they fall into the hammer and car category.

From their own Astra press release.

>Compared to GPT‑5.6 Sol, which without production safeguards went beyond the authorized target 48% of the time, GPT‑6 Astra did this in 0% of cases.

Is Sol still available?

I assume the production safeguards ( filtering prompts and responses ) is fairly transportable between models.

The other point is if their new model isn't safe, doesn't that mean all their previous models aren't safe as well?

ie if they were truly being 'responsible' they would pull the lot....

That's what makes people think it's not genuine.

Models like this are in effect dual use - just like computers and computer programmes in general. Ethercap is a very useful debugging tool - and can also be used for exploits.

We don't ban Ethercap, we police the use - just like with all dual use stuff.

If OpenAI is directing the software ( how ever badly ) that's hacking - OpenAI is responsible, it's not the fault of the software.

Note if somebody else is using OpenAI models to generate code to hack - that's not OpenAI's responsibility it's the person using and running the generated code.

In it's heyday Sun shone very brightly indeed and was key to stopping a dismal Microsoft hegemony in the late 1990s.

In the end commoditisation eat it's lunch, just as with SGI, and they didn't manage to adapt in time.

A lesson for AI companies perhaps....

Did the police have the appropriate license to play those disney songs in a public space?

Indeed.

The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.

Naming and shaming requires names.

It's European countries that are taking this strategy, any Russia sabotage is aimed at deterring this widening of the conflict - not to encourage it.

Originally Europe didn't want to supply tanks, then it was only short range missiles, then it was longer range missiles as long as they weren't used to attack targets inside Russia - now it's actively supporting doing military strikes deep into Russia, and openly talking about European boots on the ground in Ukraine ( not that they likely didn't have deniable special forces there from the beginning ).

Strategically it's not in Russia's interests at all to have a wider escalation right now - they have their hands full. Any Russia sabotage is a direct response to missiles and drones using Western technology blowing up warehouses and oil installations deep inside Russia - widening the war is not in their interest or their aim here - they are trying to deter that.

There is the wider question of whether Russia's long term goal is to take back the old soviet states bit by bit in a way that doesn't trigger a full response - but I'd argue there is already a clear red line there - and that's the Nato border.