kenjackson

But you’re seeing huge effects in three years, not a generation.

The report notes “The change in mean scores that can be explained merely by the changing composition of the student body, however, never exceeds a few points.”

So for Portugal for example about 10% of the drop might be attributable to immigration. But the other 90% to something else.

Not that quickly though.

What a great story! I'm not sure why I felt teary eyed reading it, but I was. If you're here in the comments but haven't read it -- it is worth the read.

The problem with school children is most books that are assigned have no volta for them. Part of it is that modern storytelling has a much quicker volta through tv, movies, YouTube and now shorts. It’s hard to justify to a kid a 90 minute buildup to possible payoff vs getting it in five seconds for a 2 minute video.

I actually started by saying "reasoning" is a strong statement because as you note, it's really not reasoning. It's about intuition. And yes, if you've seen it before then intuition doesn't play a role. But if you haven't had sufficient experience with it, even if you know "double each square", and even if I walk you through the first ten squares on the chess board "OK, now we're at $10.24 cents... and we're at $10 million dollars with the other method -- it's not looking too good for the doubling method is it!?".

But a philosophical question is, with sufficiently large memory -- does almost everything just reduce to a measure of memory?

Reasoning is a strong statement here. But it is fair to say that it usually is not intuitive to us.

An example is if I gave you a huge sheet of thin paper (huge so that folding isn’t an issue) - how many times could you fold it in half until you couldn’t physically do it anymore? Could you do at least 10? Try this with random people and you’d be surprised how many say they could do 10 easily.

Or the chess board question. Works to rather get the financial equivalent of starting with a penny and then doubling it for every square on the board or a million dollars for each square? Again, if you ask people to pick one without giving them the time to work it out they will usually pick the million dollar per square.

Can definitely write college level essays and have for a while. The jobs is that when LLMs first started getting popular, but aren’t quite common professors were that some of the worst students in class started writing the best essays. Now everyone complains because they can detect the slop, but most human writing is so bad. But the really good human writing is still much better.

They don't all suck equally.

Here's the order, from best to worst.

Amodei

Google

SamA

Zuck

Elon

I agree. LLMs write really well, but probably too consistently in terms of style. That said, I did recently ask AI to do an editing pass over some writing I did, and I was surprised that it missed a tense mismatch that I had (not within a sentence, but within a paragraph).

> honestly curious question: do you expect this to remain true? I

It's already the case that it's becoming not true. For example see this post from Lin Yang: https://x.com/lyang36/status/2092092709251293611

"Throughout the process, I felt that my only role was to teach the AI how to write things in a way that I could understand. Its initial language was extremely condensed—so compressed that I could barely follow it—but somehow the AI agents themselves seemed to understand it perfectly well."

It won't take much longer before AI is consistently better at validation than humans, and at that point, why continue to have humans do the validation? I think we're being naive about the end game - admittedly I don't know what it is though.

If Cyclospora is listed on the label then sure.

I don't use the builtin speaker on my laptop -- can I get refund on that too?

There also seems to be some state logic as well. The card knows when I’m in the middle of a trip and doesn’t update the balance until a future tap when it can determine the extent of the trip (presumably). Very cool that it’s all done locally.

“It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field.”

What bucket should I put this advice in?

What I still struggle with is the huge percentage of people that support the behavior. Seeing what the Tate brothers did and seeing the sheer number of people who cheered on the crimes and exploitation they did was shocking. The fact that Epstein is just a minor talking point now. Did I miss when we became so evil? I actually know a kid who went down the red pill path following Tate -- he seemed like a good kid, but to do the things he has done is something that I can't imagine any person with any heart doing.

I fear I've lost so much faith in the goodwill of many people. At the same time, I know that so many people are good. But there numbers of truly bad people are much larger than I thought.

A property of lack of intelligence though is stopping too soon. The wisdom to differentiate is probably rare at the extremes.

Yes. Or even to go a step further -- once we exclude all the things that aren't hard to predict, we're left with the things that are.

He's not wrong though. In the 80s I'd watch video shows and over the course of a week I'd probably see some videos 10 times. And it wasn't background filler - I'd actually be sitting in a chair/couch and watching the videos. Kids don't do this anymore. First many/most songs are made popular through TikTok memes, not videos. And videos really are mostly just played in the background as they do other stuff. No one is just tuning into Yo MTV Raps or Headbangers Ball anymore.

To be clear -- this wasn't meant to be a GPT vs Claude post. This is more that frontier models continue to incrementally get better. No human steering for this level of math is crazy. Go back ten years and ask anyone in the field if this would be possible in ten years -- and you would have gotten "no" from every major AI researcher in existence.

GPT 5.6 Pro apparently solved all the IMO 2026 problems (competition happened July 15/16 in China). It was done with no human steering and on first attempt. I wasn't involved at all, just ran across this and thought it was impressive (the bar for impressive keeps rising rapidly though).

Italy was it for me. The train station in Rome was crazy. And just Venice in general. I was probably just in the touristy areas, but it was definitely the most hardcore non-stop street scamming I'd been around.

Hmmm. What other cars have you tried? I wonder if it’s the DSP path used for CarPlay. Or could it be the Audi system is clipping this source? I’d find it really surprising if Apple is doing something here.

Have you tried Android Auto?

Your use case sounds like exactly the opposite of what I’d prefer.

And, I personally find the quality of YouTube Music Premium (256kbps AAC) superior to FM radio.

I think this partially buries the lede: "As a single hiring vendor comes to dominate screening for an industry, it may be more likely that candidates are shut out."

If we move to using just a small number of AI models to help do things like hiring, we will amplify biases and possibly completely lock out portions of the population. We need to be very careful when using AI systems to evaluate people in general -- not because they might be biased (which they might be), but because even a small bias, if used by virtually everyone, can be damning.

How is this not an improvement?

I actually don’t think most consumers care about that at all. Consumers loved Napster. They have no problem stealing from artists outright, let alone indirectly.

I think to consumers AI denotes lack of accountability or oversight. They think it might work - but it might not and no one will care.

For example, I’m doing work in standardized test prep and there are tons of new AI products and no one likes it. Consumers feel as if they will get subtle but important things wrong. Most of these companies are now trying to hide that they are using AI generated questions.

I agree. Why is this a problem?

But so does Windows…

Probably some amount. I agree Windows is strategic, but do definitely could see them giving it away and/or fully open sourcing it.

It’s already no longer their golden goose. It’s about 6% of total revenue (see http://bullfincher.io/companies/microsoft-corporation/revenu...).

Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.

What market is hotter than AI models? Do you think their energy would be better making games or image editing software?