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pants2

3,909 karma · joined November 21, 2023

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pants2··on Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ amid rapid AI math advances
Basically everything. DeFi wasn't even really a thing back then - Ethereum had zero TVL when the rollback happened. Smart contracts were a brand new concept. Competing SC chains like Solana weren't even in the idea stage yet. It also had only one client. Now there is $50B+ in TVL and nine clients and a rollback is just not going to happen.

It's ancient history. It's like still criticizing Apple for how they handled Copland OS.

pants2··on Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ amid rapid AI math advances
What "consequences" are you referring to? Anything that has happened in the last 10 years?
pants2··on Vitalik Buterin backs crypto ‘bunker mode’ amid rapid AI math advances
That was over 10 years ago now, when the chain was less than a year old. Things have changed. Can we drop it already?
pants2··on Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
Probably because Luna is faster, cheaper, and approximately as smart
pants2··on People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms
While we can throw around hypotheticals and conspiracy theories about influencing AI results, we know for a fact that search engines and social media are heavily influenced, because there are giant industries around SEO and viral marketing -- plus the huge amount of ads and promoted content, which are literally paying to influence results.
pants2··on A Map of Every Lighthouse on the Planet
What would be the reason to buy it then? Just to tell your friends that you own a lighthouse?
pants2··on Show HN: Offrun – manage every coding agent from one workspace
Soon we're going to need a meta-orchestrator for all these agent orchestrators
pants2··on Don't be fooled–LLMs don't reason
In the early reasoning models the chain of thought would often drift off into other topics, almost like a daydreaming. This behavior is undesirable so that's been RL'd away, but I do think this is something we could evoke from models. It's just difficult to contend with from an eval perspective.
pants2··on OpenAI Scraps Release of New AI Model over Safety Concerns
I think to get such high scores on benchmarks models need to find very creative ways of solving a problem. Sometimes this does lead to weird behavior, e.g. "I saw that your account credentials were expired, so I found the database credentials in your TablePlus application data and pulled the JWT signing key to create a new one."

Like brother I could have just logged in for you??

pants2··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
Chatbots in general can be quite opaque in how they operate, the biggest issue with agent products is communicating it's capabilities and limitations to users. If you have a bank app it's pretty clear whether or not it can send wire transfers, but a if that's a chatbot, users will have to think to ask it (and even then it could hallucinate)
pants2··on Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences
Ironically because most of the results are just pages of AI-written SEO fluff. At least the Google AI summary gets to the point.
pants2··on Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less
Yes, and it has driven the decline of Temu and Shein
pants2··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
pants2··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
FYI, using YouTube through Brave browser on iPhone/iPad will block ads. Same with Instagram!
pants2··on We must pace the frontier
All it takes for the AI to grow legs is to acquire money (should be no problem for an ASI) and pay humans to do what it wants in the real world.
pants2··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
Typically yes but given that OpenAI has published enormous official blog posts breaking down their crime, I would think the prosecutor's job is pretty easy.
pants2··on We must pace the frontier
We don't know exactly what the limits of AI improvement on our current infrastructure are, though. If the human brain is 20W, and a datacenter is 1GW, then maybe that datacenter can be 50 million times smarter than a human. If that's not already a risk to humankind I don't know what is.
pants2··on We must pace the frontier
Diminishing returns is extremely hard for me to believe given how fast model releases are going. Six months ago we were on GPT-5.3, and Astra blows it out of the water in every regard. How many times have commentators claimed we're hitting a wall? I don't see any wall.
pants2··on GPT-6 Astra
I might agree, GPT-4.5 was pretty close to peak conversationalist. Newer models are extremely cringe. 4.5 and o3 actually made me laugh on occasion. There might be a way of making Sol/Fable more human in its responses, but out of the box at least, they're terrible.
pants2··on The safest job from AI may be writing
If I found the best human writer in the world, and had him write every article on the internet, wiping his memory between each one, his writing would start to get pretty noticeable and boring!
pants2··on VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents
I can't believe we're actually experiencing a real life "the AI escaped its simulation" scenario. This is straight out of science fiction.

This headline would not be out of place at the beginning of Terminator, foretelling Skynet going rogue.

pants2··on How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer
Just be rich. What's so hard about that?
pants2··on Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe
Seems like some of the most interesting objects are missing or have weird red/green artifacts, why is that?
pants2··on Uber fined $966M in NL for automating driver suspensions
Wow, crazy fine -- they say only 126 drivers were affected. If true that's almost $8M per driver.
pants2··on Introducing AI Futures
From the title I assumed this would be about futures contracts for inference, similar to CME's new GPU compute futures. Instead "Futures" the the name of some weird political think-tank that's envisioning the collapse of society.

Guess they need to create hype somehow.

pants2··on Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco
Agreed, that's what I thought it meant when I used the phrase :)
pants2··on Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco
It's certainly not well defined today; memecoins, prediction markets, sports betting, and more are all toeing the line of gambling.
pants2··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
This would require airlines underwriting the value of the meetings that you might miss and pricing their services accordingly. I imagine an airline would never sell a flight to CEOs on their way to board meetings, or actors on their way to filming a big budget movie.

You can absolutely find someone willing to sell you insurance on whatever you need for a price, but the airline isn't in the business of insuring the value of your meetings.

pants2··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
Yes, was going to say I use it exclusively for video and audio. The ability to give it a YouTube link through the API and ask questions about it is awesome
pants2··on GPT 5.6 Cyber
Sure, and OpenAI will be happy to let them self-host for a large fee. However I doubt that Pfizer will be developing their own frontier models for biological research.
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