beloch

My main point is that people shouldn't just swallow the noble and lofty sounding PR. These guys are the same as everyone else in the sector. Don't ignore the harmful or scummy things they'll inevitably do. Hold them accountable. If they are as noble as they sound, they should agree with me.

They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website:

"Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today."

This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (note that they do not say scientists or engineers for this part) take the credit and financial rewards for every good thing this human-free system produces.

Blockbusters and tax credits started the trend, but green-screen filming sure accelerated it. Now that so many movies are almost entirely CG, it really doesn't matter where the green screen studio physically exists.

The silver lining (for Americans) is that Hollywood movies are still very Hollywood. Canadian actors, Canadian crews, and Canadian filming facilities all combine to make utterly American films. If real locations are used, they're carefully chosen so that Vancouver stands in for New York, Calgary for Minnesota, etc.. Canadian references, accents, and values are all carefully erased.

The one thing that seems to stay stubbornly American is the money people.

"For the experiment, I started by taking a day completely off coffee."

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This is an anecdote, not an experiment. What's anecdotal evidence worth?

Yes, caffeine consumption should be appropriate and appropriately timed. Most people are well aware that you should not chug a litre of coffee before going to bed. If I were patient enough to read more of this blog I wouldn't be surprised if there's a story about the author's rediscovery of fire and the wheel.

I appreciate that everyone is having good conversations about their sleep and coffee intake, but this is a really low quality blog post to start them with. I guess we love talking about coffee and sleep just that much. Maybe we should just post a link to the wiki on caffeine periodically instead? Here you go!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine

What is theory without observation? Science was turbocharged once we recognized the need to make testable theories and then actually conduct tests, always ready to toss a theory, no matter how beautiful it was or who came up with it, if it failed the test.

LLM's don't "think" that way. They don't form hypotheses or theories. We may need an entirely new class of AI algorithms to successfully cut humans out of the loop, and that may be a very fortunate thing. The corporations currently at the forefront of AI appear to be riding a wave of gold-fever and are completely lacking in patience or good judgement.

"As such, it seems trivial to suggest that it is in our interest to continue to seed them the most human-centric bias possible. We want them to have a bias that humans are valuable. That kids are innocent. That war is bad. That life is good. And while some of you may disagree with some of the finer points, that’s the beauty of statistics: it’ll take care of itself. "

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One of the big things holding back LLM's is that they can't feed on their own output. Disconnected from human input, they hallucinate and spiral off into chaos. The author of this piece may see that as good for humanity, but it's an unintended flaw that every AI corp on the planet dreams of solving. They believe that, if they can successfully remove humans from the feedback loop, AI intelligence will charge off straight into that dreamed-of singularity and make their masters unfathomably rich.

The author is probably correct in that having humans in the loop is what gives AI values that are somewhat human, so what happens if somebody really does succeed in removing humans from the loop? Given how quickly things are likely to proceed after that point, we should ponder the repercussions in advance.

To provide a basic level of consumer protection, governments should:

1. Recognize that paying for a game implies ownership. Developers must not employ methods that remove purchased games from online stores or become otherwise unplayable.

2. Recognize the legality of cracking games to make them playable.

To put it in the classic anti-piracy "You wouldn't steal a car, would you?" terminology, we need to tell developers, "No, you can't sell us a car and then steal it. Yes, we have the right to built tools to take it back if you try."

Yes, you'll fail to find some things locally and have to order it online. The key is not to go to Amazon first, because then you're guaranteed not to find the local alternatives.

Stop using Amazon and see what happens.

I stopped using Amazon early last year (because Canadian). I was forced to find local shops for the stuff I was getting online and, to my surprise, a lot of those specialty retailers are still out there. Some are a bit more expensive. Some are, surprisingly, not. At many places, the staff are still a fantastic resource.

There's a world beyond Amazon that's still out there, alive and kicking. All you have to do is stop making Amazon your first and last place to look for things.

This reminds me of the Pangeos megayacht from a few years back.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pangeos-terayacht-turtle/

TL;DR: Pangeos was a concept for a floating free city that trended a few years back, but was never built for obvious reasons, just like how these floating data centres will never be built. Presumably some people were bilked into paying money to the Pangeos scammers, just like there will be those who "invest" in this.

The problem is that it costs a lot more to put a nuclear reactor into a permanently sea-worthy form-factor than it does to build on land and put up with some pesky taxes. There are plenty of places with lax regulations (environmental and otherwise) that will be happy to let you build whatever size data centre you want if you're willing to build the power generation too.

"But University of Alberta AI ethicist Mohamed Abdalla says the findings reflect the incentives facing commercial AI developers, rather than solely a failure to uphold scientific norms. “It’s not the company’s job to advance science, right?” he says. “The company’s job is to advance money.”"

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If everyone holds back their publications, the whole sector moves slower. Yes, it's moving alarmingly fast according to many, but is it moving fast enough that the massive investments in data centres will actually pay off?

It's more game theory. Things may go well for one selfish company not publishing in a sea of altruists who publish, but perhaps not if everyone else is selfish too.

Only if the authors pay for it.

https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...

"But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before."

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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.

Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.

This ruling might feel good viscerally, but it also reinforces Googles own scraping as perfectly legal. At its inception, Google probably viewed this lawsuit as win-win. Either they successfully sue a competitor into oblivion or establish a precedent that will protect themselves in the future. Google lost, but they still won.

If they try this, multiple random people will write bots to republish everything instantly. The cash gusher they expected will turn into a trickle and the white house will look like a bunch of greedy Ferengi that lack the lobes to pull off a basic swindle. It's guaranteed to be an instant loss. I'll laugh pretty hard if they go ahead with it.

This thing is going to be conundrum for archaeologists if historical records don't survive.

- Is it a religious site like a pyramid, church, or stonehenge? Nope.

- It sets up all sorts of star alignments consistent with constellations as they would have appeared when the site was built. Was it a facility for astronomers then? Nope.

- The local people must have overwhelmingly supported such a project for it to have been built, right? Nope.

- There must be others like it indicating some form of regionally distributed cultural practice? Nope.

- So much effort went into building it that it must have been intensively used, right? Nope.

Flock was pitched as the triumph of technology over criminality. It's surveillance network was supposed to end crime. However, when people witness extreme criminality thriving unpunished at the top levels of U.S. politics, the lie becomes evident. Flock isn't about ending crime. It's a tool of control to be used by criminals.

Who watches the watchers? Everyone.

The next time you hear people claiming that Canada's dairy tariff's are unjust, unfair, etc.* ... Bear in mind that they only kick in after a quota that's never been reached because Canadians generally perceive U.S. dairy as being of lower quality. This sort of thing probably won't change that.

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* Trump does this regularly when justifying his latest tariffs.

Given that AI exec's have been careful to lavish praise (and cash) on Trump for the last few years, I suspect bailouts will not be off the table.

Autonomous driving is still nowhere near 100%, so why suddenly jump to fighter jets? Is this more of Hegseth's foolhardy bluster and injected testosterone? The tech isn't ready. They should start with golf-karts, not fighter planes.

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Edit: Okay gang. If aircraft are easier to fly than cars are to drive, where are all your pilot licenses? If you've faced rush hour traffic, flying a military jet should be a breeze! Please, go volunteer your neighbourhoods to be the first for AI jets to be tested over. We can put a mock enemy target in an empty lot and watch them pick it off, first try, with zero collateral damage. Easy peasy!

"Our incentive structures reward conformity over bold inquiry."

This is pretty rich coming from an administration that has cracked down on education institutions for lacking loyalty to Trump, installed student monitoring programs and snitch lines, and waged lawfare on any institutions that didn't immediately conform.

Academic freedom works because it's very hard, if not impossible, to predict what curiosity driven research that everybody currently thinks is a waste of time will lay the foundations for new fields and future industries. If U.S. research is refocused on private enterprise chasing the latest trends and commercializable things at the expense of institutions that perform fundamental research, the U.S. will forever be behind the tech curve. New fields will always emerge someplace else.

Unreliability is a cost. While the U.S. was the default, cheap and reliable option, it was virtually impossible to uproot settled patterns of behaviour. You just couldn't do the volume necessary to become competitive. That's changed. Also, transport is far cheaper than it was when the old patterns were established. If China can become the manufacturing hub for the world, Canada can increase its reliance on the EU at the expense of the U.S.. So too can the EU increase its reliance on Canada.

I'm not speaking of some hypothetical future either. It's already happening. Watch the video.

It's important for Americans to realize that Carney is probably the most Euro-focused PM Canada has had in living memory. He was the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. His relationships and predilections all run more cross-Atlantic than North-South. Trump is why Carney was elected. Trump is why Carney has a strong mandate and overwhelming public support to shift Canada closer to Europe and away from the U.S.. The changes that are happening now are huge and painful for Canadians, but polls show they're begging for even more, and faster. Canadians want this shift because they see no other choice.

These new tariff's explicitly violate CUSMA/USMCA, which Trump personally signed. That treaty does include a clause for pulling out, but that isn't being properly exercised here. Failing to use the proper termination clause for the trade deal just makes the U.S. look even more unreliable and incapable of meeting it's signed commitments.

It's now clear that trade deals with the U.S. will not be honoured, so why should Canada continue granting the U.S. concession after concession? The Carney government needs to go silent and let Trump hang himself in the midterms.

As for myself, I'll never drink Kentucky bourbon again so long as I live, whether that corn swill is on Canadian shelves or not.

Full tit-for-tat retaliation for tariffs? That'd harm our own economy as much as the U.S.'s. We want fewer tariff's. Not more.

Trump is most likely just trying to distract people from his Iran debacle, the cover-up of his involvement in the Epstein scandal, or whatever it is he's trying to do with the midterm elections. He's unlikely to follow through. It's better to wait and see what he actually does before taking any action.

Maybe if Trump weren't tariffing our lumber so much more of those trees would be providing cheap homes for Americans instead of burning! We're sorry America, but you're getting out trees one way or another. We're a little fuzzy when it comes to consent. But, hey, we know you understand.

There needs to be a carrot or stick to discourage this kind of practice. Perhaps when companies sue users for piracy, the valuation of what was "stolen" should be dependent on the nature of that company's sales practices. e.g. A company that merely "rents" media in a deceptive way would only be eligible to claim small fractions of a penny on the dollar were stolen when prosecuting a pirate. This way companies would be encouraged to respect user ownership rights if they want their own rights to be respected.

Some music is a lot like abandoned video games. It can sometimes be tricky to figure out who owns the rights and, even having done that, more difficult still to track them down and get their permission. Also, it's not a given that the answer will be, "Yes.". If you ask an obscure artist to fill out forms and jump through hoops for 6 cents in streaming royalties, they may tell you to piss off.

There are likely many albums that would have met oblivion were it not for piracy.

Just to leapfrog off of the calculator notion...

There's a difference between capability and mastery. If you have a calculator, you are capable of doing basic arithmetic (probably). If you can do fairly complex arithmetic in your head, that's mastery. If all you need is capability, it's fair to say that acquiring mastery might be wasted effort. However, if you want to go on to do advanced math, physics, etc., then mastery of basic arithmetic, calculus, algebra, etc. are necessary stepping stones. If you have to go back to calculators, math programs, textbooks, etc. every time for basic things while trying to formulate and manipulate equations, you're going to have a very hard time getting along.

Sure, rely on AI for things that you merely need as capabilities, but recognize that doing so prevents you from developing mastery required to progress to other things. If you don't want to progress to those things, then it's fine. If you do, then you should rethink your approach.

Archaeology is an unusual discipline in that it incorporates so many others as tools. Chemistry, physics, geology, CPSC, you name it. It's difficult enough to figure out what people were doing based on ruins and trash pits. It's harder still when there are so many disciplines involved that, each, introduce their own uncertainties.

That being said, "We asked an AI..." is a special kind of uncertainty that goes above and beyond anything else Archaeologists do.

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"No written rules for this game survived antiquity. To reconstruct how the game may have been played, researchers turned to the Ludii General Game System — a comprehensive digital platform developed at Maastricht University that can model and simulate thousands of historic board games. The results were published in the journal Antiquity (Volume 100, Issue 409, 2025).

Using Alpha-Beta search agents — the same class of algorithm that powered early chess computers — the team ran 1,000 simulated rounds for each candidate ruleset, allowing one second of processing time per move. The AI tracked which lines on the board were used most frequently during play, generating detailed edge-usage statistics.

These statistics were then compared to the physical wear patterns on Object 04433. To account for human cognitive biases — such as right-handed players preferring to play on the right side of the board — the researchers applied symmetry transformations to the simulation results, maximising consistency between AI-generated play and the actual marks left by ancient players.

Nine game configurations matched the wear criteria. All of them were blocking games, and the most frequently matching format was a four-versus-two game in which pieces start on the board. This site faithfully reproduces one of these AI-validated configurations."

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It's interesting that they considered use-wear on found pieces as input for their AI. Still, this study made a lot of assumptions. I wouldn't be surprised if a different team could use the same methods and come up with a completely different result.