sobellian

I ran into (2) when trying out nanoclaw many months ago (turned out to be useless, I ditched it). I wanted an LLM to sort my email like an EA might, what I got was an LLM writing regexes to attempt to sort my email. If LLMs have been trained to be the ultimate programmers, the one pitfall is that the best programmers tend to be lazy.

Aviation is an example of how there's no way to have zero mistakes, or even zero fatal mistakes.

I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in some programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.

I get plenty of spam in the snail mail. And from what I gather, fraud through mail occurred all the time.

ETA: some of these companies are chopping down a whole god damn forest to send me furniture catalogs. Please stop!

I would not be so opinionated, modern coding agents derive from chatbot technology. Very different problem domain. They share language but language is universal so that doesn't say much. Then they figured out that the pretraining is a good starting point for RLVR. Who's to say a more cinematic imagination can't be a good starting point for a world model? It doesn't need to be the whole solution.

Sadly the bullshit asymmetry principle has been supercharged in the AI era though I think many imagined it would be the AI's doing rather than jealous, paranoid humans. Now we have incorrect but widely applied folk wisdom that OAI's tech is just rehashing old research.

It also failed to properly model the physics of knights riding wyverns into battle.

There's a large logical leap from "we have very useful raw research data" to "we should give this data only to a small group of people." They explain that "the collaborations empower experts to foster unpacking the results and contextualizing them in the broader academic community" but we are left to wonder why the experts need to be empowered to foster anything. In the case of immediate release the experts will have their hands on the same data as the rest of us peasants, and then they can go right on fostering.

The tax applies retroactively to the 2026 tax year, even if you moved out sometime this year.

Yes math was my best subject in school, most of my software engineering touches on optimization for automated design. I program various math-flavored things in my spare time.

The only definition given for "we" is "the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software". I can assure you that includes me.

> the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form

Discusses more than their own feelings, they generalize it to any nerd who was attracted to math or software.

AI methods are improving all the time. People think that modern chess engines are more powerful due to hardware advances but search refinements are enough - SF on a Pentium II would destroy even Kasparov and Deep Blue. In a like manner the guys at the frontier labs discovered an indirect method for attacking many problems and we can expect it to receive considerable refinement. It will not permanently require expensive training.

In some amount of time (centuries? decades? years?) it will be trivial for any shmuck to train their own automated theorem prover. If people think they are competing against monolithic data centers they are wrong. The brain consumes ~20W and it carries out theorem proving mostly as a side effect. We should not be surprised if the core algorithm requires much less than this.

> > Like who are we kidding, the type of nerds who were attracted to math and software were into it because we saw it as an art-form, it was a craft, it was being the only one in your city to be able to solve a complicated math problem, it was immortalizing yourself because you discovered a proof and added to the ever expanding human knowledge.

This is definitely projection. It might be why that particular person was attracted to those disciplines. I definitely don't recall thinking I should go into software so I can make better programs than anyone else in my city. Actually, it was kind of an accident - it was a hobby that turned into a career through serendipity. If one wanted to go into math or software to demonstrate superiority they probably should mourn. They were out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs in the end.

Right so this goes to the other alternative; there's still useful work for mathematicians after all in dissecting, distilling, and generalizing these results. But according to some we now inhabit an excluded middle where the AI produces useless results but also makes these problems useless for mathematicians to study further.

> I cannot say what was missing from the trial because I do not know what was presented there in detail. Most of those claiming utter certainty, know as little as I do.

Okay but can you see how this is a different point than, "The access to the information required for that is not available to most people, we have no basis to judge the narrative for accuracy"? The latter implies that most people literally could not obtain access to the necessary information. The former states that you have not looked into it that much and you doubt others have either. The trial is public record; it is available to everyone.

Your math is pretty good, Tesla actually gave the storage tank capacity as 250kg

ETA: this is a horrifying amount of energy to be sitting on top of.

> This aligns with my own lived experiences — I didn’t become a theoretical physicist to learn about the universe or better appreciate the beauty of nature myself (that’s philosophy, which I would never be a doctor of).

If one truly philo's sophos, then wouldn't one at least be curious what the computer says about a difficult problem? Like, if you've been wrestling with an especially troublesome integral for years then I feel like that somewhere along the line you should have plugged it into a CAS - even if you want to clean up the derivation afterwards it would be foolish to ignore every tool at your disposal and even rail at the Mathematica authors for the temerity to write a symbolic integrator.

I feel that the article is so preoccupied with clever sarcasm that it doesn't really engage with nuanced views and is instead happy to just spend a few KB of text tearing down vibe research strawmen.

Well I think you hit upon an excellent point and one that I'm rather close to, which is legalization. Adopting a uniform procedure to deal with various cases and accord defendants some recourse is admirable. That doesn't make it law, but legalizing those types of proceedings is still valuable. I think Nuremberg rested on shaky grounds as a court, but it was still preferable to either summary execution or disclaiming any punishment on the accused.

Likewise I think where I'm uncertain with Putin is that while he's undoubtedly a nefarious guy and we have written down rules and norms he has broken, those norms do not apply to the Russian world. We claim they apply, but we could only make them apply through force of arms which runs opposite to the rule of law. That is rather the rule of "might makes right."

I don't really think there's a need to be so hostile. I don't really know how I feel about subjecting international citizens to US law to be honest with you. Certainly in some cases it's appropriate. But in others it seems strange to me.

And undoubtedly I agree that if Putin or Netanyahu pass through Europe they should be arrested. But I'm not sure if that's a legal decision or a political one.

Right and you can imagine how much authority the average Russian lends to an American arrest warrant.

If the point is that anyone can tell anyone else anything, that's vacuously true but a court typically wields the power of a state and its code of laws. For treaty countries ICC is perfectly unproblematic but for nontreaty countries there's a strong difficulty in calling it a court as it bears no legal legitimacy.

Seems to be a rather silly, pedantic point if it even passes. GP was clearly talking about sovereignty etc. which is exactly the caveat that you granted - that ICC may have no enforcement power over non-treaty countries. For the record I have no axe to grind with the ICC, but you and GP literally agree on the main difficulty facing the institution.

> Anyone can decide anything, the question is whether it is on their power to enforce their decisions.

You seem to have arrived at a suitable definition of "authority"

Current models have undergone massive amounts of RL to "get shit done." There's incentive toward reasoning, but probably little toward elegance. Every engineer is familiar with the impulse to just hack things together.

But this need not be a permanent state of affairs. The model labs are probably already examining the elegance problem, since it is such a common complaint of researchers reading these machine generated proofs and papers. And I haven't seen anything disproving the notion that elegance can be RL'd.

Ah thanks for pointing this out, for some reason I had always equated radix sort and bucket sort (with 2^k buckets) in my head. But I learned today that this isn't true!

If you sort n k-bit items for a total time of O(nk logn), that scales more poorly in n than multiplying n-word integers. Of course if k is constant you can do radix sort, but I genuinely don't know under what conditions radix sort is more/less galactic than this multiplication algorithm.

I am fully braced for it to be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm

Very surprising result though! Multiplication is easier than sorting.

The repo claims they tested with an FPGA. To be fair it is not the same as an ASIC, and we have no idea what errata abound, but it actually did make a thing that spat out tokens.