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LeCun's argument wasn't about the definition of learning though. He stated that they would never get these common sense things correct because they weren't sufficiently part of the training data. A statement that we can hopefully all agree has been thoroughly refuted.

Working on https://increader.com an incremental reading platform that combines read it later functionality with annotations and spaced repetition. Supports web articles, epubs, pdfs and rss feeds with a lot of little things to remove distractions and keep you focused.

I built it because I wanted to see if there's merit to the idea of incremental reading[1] and it worked so well that it turned into the main way I read things now.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading)

> unless it uses a harness

Sorry for skipping over your actual argument, but if it hinges on that assumption then it's probably moot. I'd assume almost all ai generated code that makes it into codebases is produced using a harness.

Yup, I do this regularly now. Whenever I think that something takes longer than it should I just tell it to set up a testing harness to measure each part of the process.

Once I have the baseline I'll just set a goal to improve performance by 10x. Works better than it has any right to. Have to be careful to exclude changes that massively increase complexity for tiny gains after its done, but the big improvements are often sensible choices that I'd also make as an engineer (i.e. more efficient data representation, caching and memoization where it matters, parallel processing, etc.)

Can you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.

Both benchmarks are made by the same people.

Surely there's something missing from your argument. It shouldn't be slowed down because it's growing exponentially?

Presumably you think that the end result of extreme and rapid ai growth is beneficial to most and that is why it shouldn't be slowed down? That arriving earlier at whatever end-point you have in mind will provide so much benefit that it's worth disregarding the pains to get there?

Or is there something else to your argument? Because if there isn't, you are staking an awful lot on your expectation coming true. Especially that going slower doesn't provide any worthwhile benefits to the outcome.

Your comment implies that if Apple Configurator was available not just for MacOS that it would see a many more people using it to manage their iPhones.

To me this seems so far down the list of reasons more people don’t use it that I’m wondering whether you really believe that.

Oh no, is this why my laces hold tight all day on some days and untie themselves regularly on other days?

Guess I have some experimenting to do.

Yup. Basically the same story here.

There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people.

For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc.

With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to <friend>”.

It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features.

I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.

I thought so too, but I went in with the mentality that most things I just quickly look up are probably not all that important and nothing of value would be lost if I couldn’t do that anymore. The few things for which that isn’t true can probably wait until I am sitting in front of a computer.

That part honestly worked out pretty great. The first few days were excruciatingly boring, but I quickly adjusted and learned to spend more time with my thoughts.

I ended up reinstalling a browser because there were too many establishments that expected me to have a phone with a browser.

With mdm you can really control the phone top to bottom. Whitelist domains, global http proxy, allowed Wi-Fi connections, fully disable cameras, airdrop, the list goes on. Most of it isn’t super interesting to manage doomscrolling habits.

What drew me to it is that you can’t change the setup without connecting to the Mac, a solution I find much more comfortable than having a friend type in a pin, as well as easily restricting domains and apps including system apps.

For example something I still do is disabling all mail clients including the system one. I don’t need email on my phone. It’s an inherently asynchronous communication medium and it can definitely wait until I’m home.

Yes

I think more people should set up their iPhone using Apple Configurator, a Mac app used to control apples mdm solution. You do have to factory reset your phone for this once, but after that you have extremely granular control over what you can and can’t do. It’s much more powerful than the parental controls system and much harder to circumvent.

I use it to straight up disallow a bunch of apps and websites (tiktok, Reddit, YouTube, etc.)

For a while I even uninstalled safari which you can just do with this. Not having a browser at all on your phone is a neat experiment and really changed how I interact with tech on the go.

I did eventually install safari back, but overall I prefer the Apple Configurator setup a lot over any of these kinds of apps.

I’ve had the same experience. The ui is a little unclear about this, because it says you have 5 scans, but 1 scan is just the continuous monitoring of the default branch of a repo.

The high impact findings have almost all been bang on for me. I was especially surprised by the high-quality documentation it produces as well as how narrow the proposed fixes are.

I’m used to codex producing quite a but more code than it needs to, but the security model proposed fixes that are frequently <10 loc, targeting exactly the correct place.

It’s really quite good. I’m assuming it’ll be pretty expensive once out of beta, but as a business I’d be jumping on this.

The author clearly disagrees with that statement.

The browser was done by cursor, not anthropic, no?

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.

Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.

I'm working on Increader, an incremental reading platform.

You put in all your bookmarks (also pdfs or epubs) and it puts them in a queue and tracks your progress. Read for as long as you want to and if you get bored with an article you just move on to the next one. Supports highlights and annotations as well as creating spaced repetition cards out of those annotations.

Really reduces the friction for me to start reading and it has made a noticeable difference to my media consumption throughout last year.

Started out as an exploration into the incremental reading concept, but it's become my primary interface for reading and I use it every day.

I haven't really talked about this to anyone yet, but it's getting to a point where it's polished enough for others to use.

It's currently completely free and you can try it without entering your email.

https://www.increader.com/

I recently bought into the $200 tier and was genuinely quite surprised at ChatGPT 5.2 Pros ability for software architecture planning. If you give it ~60k tokens of your codebase and a thorough description of what you actually want to happen then it comes up with very good ideas. The biggest difference to me is how thorough it is. This is already something I noticed with the codex high/xhigh models compared to gemini 3 pro and opus 4.5, but gpt pro is noticeably better still.

I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.

That, plus he's quick enough to come up with good follow-up questions on the spot. It's so frustrating listening to interviews where the interviewer simply glosses over interesting/controversial statements because they either don't care, or don't know enough to identify a statement as controversial. In contrast, Dwarkesh is incredible at this. 9/10 times when I'm confused about a statement that a guest makes on his show he will immediately follow up by asking for clarification or pushing back. It's so refreshing.

Not the person you're responding to, but I think the salary paid to the researchers / research-engineers at all the major labs very much counts as eye-watering.

What happened at meta is ludicrous, but labs are clearly willing to pay top-dollar for actual research talent, presumably because they feel like it's still a bottleneck.

All of those tools are garbage. There is no reliable automated way to detect ai generated text. In 2023 OpenAI had a tool for this as well and they eventually took it down because it wasn't accurate enough. The major AI labs are probably best positioned to make such a tool work. If even they can't, then some random company with access to a fraction of a data and a fraction of the compute almost certainly also cannot.

I do this too. It's great. The term I've seen used to describe this is 'Immersion Reading'. It seems to be quite a popular way for neurodivergent people to get into reading.

Yeah I mean I get that, but surely we have research like this already. "Garbage in, garbage out" is basically the catchphrase of the entire ml field. I guess the contribution here is that "brainrot"-like text is garbage which, even though it seems obvious, does warrant scientific investigation. But then that's what the paper should focus on. Not that "LLMs can get 'brain rot'".

I guess I don't actually have an issue with this research paper existing, but I do have an issue with its clickbait-y title that gets it a bunch of attention, even though the actual research is really not that interesting.

So they trained LLM's on a bunch of junk and then notice that it got worse? I don't understand how that's a surprising, or even interesting result?

Unhook is great. Makes youtube on desktop bearable. Unfortunately does not work on phones :(

And insisting on building their own mediocre ui helps them achieve that how exactly?

Maybe I'm just super out of touch on how people use their cars, but my cars infotainment system has not made its manufacturer any additional money as far as I can tell.

Surprisingly, it isn't. You can change the language in your google account and it will take that into account for what to translate and into what language, but you can't turn it off completely.

I don't know who thought this was a good user experience, because it's one of the most frustrating features I've ever had to deal with. I'm german, but almost all of the things I watch are in english. So usually I will just ignore recommendations with german titles. Except I can't do that anymore, because there's no guarantee that youtube didn't randomly decide to translate the title of an english video into german. And recently, they've added auto-translated audio, which is even worse, because now I'm opening an english video and a terrible robotic german voice is talking to me and I manually need to switch to the original source.

It's also not consistent behavior. It's not like all videos on the front page are looking like they're in german. It's just some of them and afaik there's no way to tell.

And you genuinely can't turn it off completely. Incredibly frustrating and I'm just puzzled by the thought-process that lead to this decision. This would be a pretty cool feature if it was consistently applied and freely configurable.

This is one of those articles where the comments are really interesting to read through. I see a bunch of comments who don't agree with the exact math, which might be warranted, but it seems at least directionally correct to me. However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without.

But having read through most of the objections I still find myself enticed by this. If I mentally place myself in this position I think I could quite happily live a few decades without talking to anyone for weeks or even months at a time. I'd still have my pets to give me companionship. Load my kindle up with a thousand books I want to read and just work my way through it. Pick up writing as a hobby and spend the rest of the time working at a gas station and fixing up the house and/or grow some food to offset the reduced income.

Healthcare is an issue. Doesn't seem like a viable place to grow old. Once you become too frail for physical work it's probably just time to die, which isn't great.

I didn't know about DataGrip. Looks cool.