MostlyStable

That's how several major AI advancements have happened. I have seen no evidence that that is the fastest way to make progress right now. I expect that, much like chess engines, it will not take too long before AI is significantly better than AI + human. But right now, my bet is that we are still safely within the window where an AI + human mathematician team is still better than AI alone (at least for the case where the human has learned how to work effectively with the partner....something that this event could possible be good for teaching).

The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.

Even if they don't figure out how to exfiltrate weights, someone will intentionally do this with an open model once open models are capable enough. If you ever think "no one would be so stupid as to...", you are wrong. Yes, someone absolutely would, and will.

Independent models living "in the wild" is approx. inevitable.

I think this has historically been true and is still approximately true now. But I think in the relatively near future (less than 5 years) there's a really good chance it won't be true anymore.

Once open models catch up to the current frontier in vulnerability exploitation, the cost to target people will go way down. In the past, the cost to hack a random individual person was generally high enough that if there wasn't some special reason to hack you in particular, it wasn't worth it. That may no longer be the case in the near future. The floor of what is acceptable security for the General Public probably needs to rise quite a bit over the next few years.

I don't think he's complaining about having a lot of apps, or the ability to have a lot of apps. He's complaining about being required to use apps for hundreds of small interactions every day that don't, or shouldn't, require an app. And he's correct. Companies are doing this not because they think it's better, but because they believe that if they can worm their way onto your device, and insert their cloud service (even if it's initially free), that they can turn you into a more reliable and/or recurring revenue stream in the future, either because you feel locked into their ecosystem so you will buy other products from their lineup, or, even better, buy a subscription service.

No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).

honestly curious question: do you expect this to remain true? If so, for how long? I can think of two potential reasons why it might not stay true.

1. The very best humans remain able to understand/check the proofs, but we go for so long with every proof checking out that society more broadly just decides to trust. We are already doing that with human mathematicians. I can't verify what Terence Tao tells me is correct, I just trust that it is because he (and other human mathematicians) tell me it is. How many proofs/years of them checking out before we reach this point? I don't know, but history suggests that eventually, humans might keep checking, but they will do so only as a hobby. For any purpose that actually matters, we will just start to trust and use it.

2. The proofs that AI comes up with become too difficult/complex for even the very best human mathematicians to understand, and our options become to either trust or to not use at all.

Obviously it's possible that neither of these happens if AI capabilities stall out not too far beyond where we are now, but if they keep progressing at the current rates for another few years, I expect at least one, and maybe both, to eventually come to pass.

I do not have a single hobby where I'm very far beyond the median hobby-haver in skill (that is to say: if you took all other humans who share my hobby, I'm likely somewhere near median for all of them). This may put me in top whatever percentile among all humans, since most humans don't share my hobbies and so are terrible at those things, but there are enough humans out there, and enough humans who share my hobbies, that I have always known that there are people who are vastly better at them than I am. Now yes, if I was constantly being followed around by one of the top 10 hobby-havers, pointing out to me all the mistakes or sub-optimal decisions I was making, that would indeed be annoying and reduce my enjoyment in the hobby. But why do you expect AI to be like this? I would love if I had one of those top 10 hobby-havers on call to answer every one of my (often inane) questions with infinite patience (and who would only talk about the hobby when I specifically initiated the topic). I'm already under no illusions that I'm the best, but it's now easier than it has ever been (for some hobbies, I expect others to join them over time) to get better at them....if one so desires.

Lump of Labor fallacy

Still works for me (although I always use it logged in). If they kill old.reddit, I may finally abandon the site. It's been slowly losing value for a long time and being forced to use the hot garbage of the new UI might be my tipping point.

What? No this is completely incorrect. old.reddit is a way of viewing reddit with the old (in my opinion far superior) UI, but includes new posts and comments. As for whether or not it requires an account, that appears to be something that they are A/B testing.

If streaming through a browser/open source / not the locked down app supported 1080p I would be a lot happier. My understanding from the last time i looked is that it actually only supports 720p

I had a whole long response typed out and I realized that it probably wasn't worth it. I think that I just have to admit that I find your view and understanding of the world completely incomprehensible. Thanks for humoring me, and have a nice day.

Who is this audience that thinks unasked-for and un-controllable felonies is a good message, or who wants to fund that?

I find the juxtaposition of "can't stop bragging" and "is not a good marketing term" to be fascinating. Have you considered that they know these recent reports aren't a good look for them but that they feel compelled (either because they know it would be far worse when it inevitably got out on it's own or maybe even from some moral sense) to report somewhat truthfully?

I actually don't think we should expect artists to be something bigger or more than their art. He is right that the fix needs to be consumer driven, but I think it just needs to be that we care a lot less about celebrities of all kinds outside of whatever it is that made them famous. We shouldn't be arguing about whether whatever thing an artist or sports star did or said that wasn't related to their art and/or sport is good or bad....we should all just collectively not care. Read the book, listen to the music, watch the game, and beyond that treat these people like any other stranger: someone whose actions and opinions you do not care about.

Celebrity themed oreos shouldn't be a thing, but not because we demand our celebrities think of themselves as above crass commercialism, but because no one would consider "celebrity themed" to be anything even remotely close to a selling point for oreos, and that therefore there is no value in them being hired by Nabisco.

But I may as well be pissing in the wind. Celebrity worship seems to be incredibly deeply ingrained in human psychology. Maybe he's right that we can't get rid of it, we can just change the norms around it.

I apparently have a very uncommon viewpoint on this, given the flavor of the comments.

I won't try and say that this situation is totally fine, or ideal, or anything close to it, but I think that in order for us to know how to feel, we need one very important piece of information that is missing: was the actual BIOS update itself bad in some way, or was this just the kind of error that happens sometimes, especially as hardware ages.

If it was the former, then this becomes quite bad: Framework released (even if they were not the ones who made it) a software update that bricked someones computer, and it is incumbent upon them to fix it, even out of warranty.

If it's the latter, then, I'm sorry, but that's the kind of thing that happens sometimes. Yes, having dual bios chips or some other way to recover from a failed flash would be nice, but I don't know the engineering trade offs to make that happen. Lots of desktop motherboards have it, where space is not at a premium, but do any laptop motherboards have it? My guess is that, at the bare minimum, it's much much less frequent.

I think that, in the latter situation, the main thing that I would like to have seen from a company like Framework, with their ethos, is to provide the pogo pin reflashing tool (at a reasonable price), along with the necessary instructions and files, either for the user, or for a local, inexpensive computer repair shop (depending on the users preference). So even in the latter situation, I do think that Frameworks support is lacking here. This seems like the kind of thing that, with the proper tools (which seem cheap) and instructions and files, that this wouldn't actually be that hard, especially for the type of consumer that would buy an upgradeable, modular laptop.

But, in the case that the BIOS itself was not bad/caused the bricking, then I think the rhetoric around this is overblown. I'm not sure that any laptop I've ever had before has ever told me that I needed a bios update (aka: provided that level of support post purchase).

Again, if the BIOS was in fact bad, and caused the brick (and no, a thread of people who experienced the problem is not enough to conclude this), then that's a very different situation, and the level of failure exceeds even what is described here. And even if it wasn't bad, I don't think think that "buy a new mainboard" is the appropriate service response when "buy these $20 dollars of parts and tools, and follow this guide" would likely have solved the problem.

But, as I understand it, BIOS updates are always somewhat dangerous. If Framework is on the hook for every time a BIOS goes bad outside of warranty even in situations where nothing they did directly caused the issue, then what they will do is just stop offering BIOS updates outside the warranty window. We can hold two ideas in our heads at once: Are they completely and perfectly living up to their ideals? I think that the answer here is obviously, even in the least bad case, no they are not. But are they providing better service than other laptop manufacturers? I think that as long as the BIOS file wasn't bad, the answer is yes. No laptop manufacturer would have offered to fix this out of warranty if they even provided continued BIOS updates, and for most manufacturers, their answer would have been "buy an entire new computer", and your only alternative would be third party resellers or used parts on ebay to get a new motherboard.

-edit- After doing a bit more research, BIOS recovery paths in laptops, while not universal or as common as in desktops, are also not exactly rare, and not having one, in a company with Frameworks ethos and stance, is worse than I initially assumed.

I think that, even if this isn't due to a bad BIOS or updater (which, again, would make them, in my opinion, liable for fixing it), then this is a very significant oversight, and the fact that they don't provide the support necessary to route around it (reasonably priced tools and clear, well written instructions) is even worse.

That would make sense if we already knew that, for these kinds of tasks it was significantly worse. The tests that I'm aware of for these tasks show it as still performing near the top.

Curious why you didn't try Gemini 3 pro? That is the model I've been using for OCR entry of handwritten datasheets (JPGS of datasheets, structured JSON output). At my scale, the cost of 3 pro is basically not an issue, but if there are improvements in quality, I'd definitely be willing to explore other models

Body fat percentage can't conflict with BMI because BMI is not an estimate of body fat percentage.

And I agree that it's never caused me problems, but that's because I and, as you suggest, doctors who look at the number, have understood that it's not that big of a problem in my case. That's what I mean by not looking at the BMI number naively and ignoring other physiological states.

I don't think anything you said conflicts with anything I said, and it sounds like we mostly agree.

I'm curious what solutions to Future threats you think qualify as a panopticon, and why the following set of words in this context don't make you worried about the same:

>monitoring, verification, and other early-stage deterrence tools.

At a population level, it's great. For individuals, it can fail in all kinds of ways. For me: it is not very good because my body has very strange proportions. I'm 6'2", but my waist is barely higher than my 5'1" wife, and my torso is nearly the same length as my 6'7" brother.

In other words, for my height, I have a very long torso and very short legs. I think it should be relatively obvious that an inch of leg weighs significantly less than an inch of torso, so at a given level of body fat percentage, I'm going to weigh quite a bit more than someone my same height with more typical proportions, and thus my BMI reads me as more overweight than it otherwise would.

My point is not that BMI is bad or useless or anything else. My point is that it was designed as a population statistic and that it can be fraught when one tries to apply it to any individual with no nuance. A high BMI should cause one to consider and examine your health and weight. But it should not over-ride specific details about your physiology that point in the other direction.

I would not overgeneralize from paper. Firstly: forcing JSON output is, in my opinion, a bigger change than asking it to match the above style guidelines, and secondly, as is always the case with these kinds of papers, what was true for the model tested in the paper may either be completely false, or greatly reduced, in later models. That paper is almost 2 years old and models today have been trained in very different ways (or more accurately post trained in very different ways) and are in general far more capable.

Based on that paper, I would maybe try to check if it was true for a modern use case, I would very much not assume it was still true.

Having that be there only backup solution would have been silly and dangerous. Having it be part of their overall backup solution including with something like the provider would have been smarter and better and prevented this entire problem

YouTube Kids in theory solves all my problems, the issue is that it's garbage software where the most important features are broken. For example I recently went on a long trip and grabbed the kids tablet. Only to discover after leaving the house, that all the previously downloaded videos were gone, and all the new ones that the app had chosen from among my whitelisted channels had "failed to download", despite having been at home on the wifi for weeks, so without internet connectivity, the app had nothing at all.

As others have pointed out, the things I am looking for in a YouTube kids replacement is quite specific and detailed, and the landing page provides not an iota of evidence that I will get that.

Yes, the message boards and collaborative hacking occurring during training runs was BY FAR the biggest bombshell revealed, and OpenAI doesn't even seem to realize it. The fact that they continued the training runs, with those rewarded behaviors included, and didn't wind back training to before hand, shows that they fundamentally do not understand alignment and safety (somewhat interestingly, their previous head of safety resigned shortly after OpenAI found about the message boards). I agree that, with that information, it is completely unsurprising that they hacked HuggingFace.....but that is also the Star Wars "You understand how that's worse, right?" meme.

I am flabbergasted at the complete lack of regard for alignment demonstrated here.

There is an easy solution to this: Allow the user to decide whether they want to allow for apps from outside a particular ecosystem. Then Johnny can set up Grandma's phone and (in a deep byzantine menu where she will never accidentally stumble on it, maybe locked behind a pin), Johnny can set it so that Granny's phone can only install software from "Super premium, high class, curated, guaranteed not to hack your phone" walled garden app store. And Johnny, on his own phone, can choose what to download himself, including from the "Buyer Beware, half our shit is malware" dark web app store.

In my opinion, the Apple app store should actually be FAR more curated than it is, and far less curated options should be equally available. The Apple App store (and the Google app store for that matter), should be a relatively small list of apps that have extremely high standards and guarantees. It should essentially be impossible for spammy bullshit to get into these places. User-controlled, parental control like options should determine whether or not other app sources can be installed from (including allowing for specific other sources, so that app source control can be granular and detailed. I should be allowed to add FDroid but nothing else for example).

Done. Problem solved. Everyone is happy. Grandma is safe and Johnny has control over his phone.

But of course, that assumes that keeping Granny safe is actually the reason. Facially obviously, it is not, and is in fact entirely pretextual.

You are protected in two ways:

The first, and by far most important is that unlike ground meat, your bacterial concerns are almost entirely on the surface. Unless something very very very wrong has occurred in the processing and transport chain, bacteria will not have penetrated into the meat. And if it's gotten bad enough that they have, you will almost certainly be able to see and smell it. And the surface is cooked to a temperature far in excess of that needed to kill bacteria.

And even for the interior, rare is not the same as raw. A completely rare steak should be cooked to between 120 and 130 (if you want it "blue" you might go down to 120). That's enough to get a decent reduction in bacterial count on it's own, although admittedly many techniques will not hold it long enough to get the number of log reductions that food safety guidelines recommend, in the case that you somehow did have a large bacterial infection in the interior.

So the answer to your question is that if you are buying your meat from an even halfway reputable source, the only place that bacteria might exist is on the surface, where it has been cut by tools and handled by the butcher/you and in general come into contact with the world. Those bacteria will be 100% killed by the cooking process. The odds of getting sick from a rare steak are low enough that if you are concerned about that, there are innumerable other things in your life that you should be more concerned by.

My point is that steak is very, very, very far from the hardest to get right. I'm not going to contest your argument about how hard it is to get right, I'm going to argue that innumerable other dishes are vastly harder. Because the quality ingredients are harder to find, because they involve far more steps, each of which is harder to judge, because often good recipes or instructions simply don't exist, etc. etc. etc. Every single difficulty that you imagine exists to make a truly great steak exists 100 fold for other dishes.

In my opinion, steak has gotten the reputation that it has because it's so easy to get top tier restaurant quality at home (relative to cooking more generally). It is easy enough that, with a little care, almost any one can master it if they decide to, and therefore lots of people try and end up caring, and discussing, and sharing tips, etc.

There are a whole host of dishes where true mastery, to restaurant level, is borderline impossible for a home chef, and so most people never even try.

I don't disagree that reliably getting the last 5% of quality out of a steak is non-trivial, but the idea that, relative to the entire world of cooking, it's particularly difficult is laughably incorrect.

I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy. Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master/make at a top level quality at home. Does it require some modicum of attention and understanding? Sure. But starting with a high quality cut, owning a meat-thermometer, and knowing about reverse searing is about all it takes to reliably and easily get a near perfect steak every time.

There are far, far better cooking examples out there.