TechTakes

Yet another billboard.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1ob2l2o/replacement_ai_billboard_in_san_francisco_who/

https://replacement.ai/

This time the website is a remarkably polished satire and I almost liked it... but the email it encourages you to send to your congressperson is pretty heavy on doomer talking points and light on actual good ideas (but maybe I'm being too picky?):

Words of wisdom from Baldur Bjarnason (mostly repeated from his Basecamp post-mortem):

We know we’re reaching the late stages of a bubble when we start to see multiple “people in tech don’t really believe in all of this, honest, we just act like it because we think we have to, we’re a silent majority you see”, but the truth is that what you believe in private doesn’t matter. All that matter is that you’ve been acting like a true believer and you are what you do

In work and politics, it genuinely doesn’t matter what you were thinking when you actively aided and abetted in shitting on people’s work, built systems that helped fascists, ruined the education system and pretty much all of media. What matters, and what you should be judged on is what you did

Considering a recent example where AI called someone a terrorist for opposing genocide, its something that definitely bears repeating.

More AI bullshit hype in math. I only saw this just now so this is my hot take. So far, I'm trusting this r/math thread the most as there are some opinions from actual mathematicians: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1o8xz7t/terence_tao_literature_review_is_the_most/

Context: Paul Erdős was a prolific mathematician who had more of a problem-solving style of math (as opposed to a theory-building style). As you would expect, he proposed over a thousand problems for the math community that he couldn't solve himself, and several hundred of them remain unsolved. With the rise of the internet, someone had the idea to compile and maintain the status of all known Erdős problems in a single website (https://www.erdosproblems.com/). This site is still maintained by this one person, which will be an important fact later.

Terence Tao is a present-day prolific mathematician, and in the past few years, he has really tried to take AI with as much good faith as possible. Recently, some people used AI to search up papers with solutions to some problems listed as unsolved on the Erdős problems website, and Tao points this out as one possible use of AI. (I personally think there should be better algorithms for searching literature. I also think conflating this with general LLM claims and the marketing term of AI is bad-faith argumentation.)

You can see what the reasonable explanation is. Math is such a large field now that no one can keep tabs on all the progress happening at once. The single person maintaining the website missed a few problems that got solved (he didn't see the solutions, and/or the authors never bothered to inform him). But of course, the AI hype machine got going real quick. GPT5 managed to solve 10 unsolved problems in mathematics! (https://xcancel.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1979422127905476778#m, original is now deleted due to public embarrassment) Turns out GPT5 just searched the web/training data for solutions that have already been found by humans. The math community gets a discussion about how to make literature more accessible, and the rest of the world gets a scary story about how AI is going to be smarter than all of us.

There are a few promising signs that this is getting shut down quickly (even Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, thought that this hype was blatantly obvious). I hope this is a bigger sign for the AI bubble in general.

EDIT: Turns out it was not some rando spreading the hype, but an employee of OpenAI. He has taken his original claim back, but not without trying to defend what he can by saying AI is still great at literature review. At this point, I am skeptical that this even proves AI is great at that. After all, the issue was that a website maintained by a single person had not updated the status of 10 problems inside a list of over 1000 problems. Do we have any control experiments showing that a conventional literature review would have been much worse?

Found a quality sneer in the wild, taking aim at vibe-coded "websites"

take a drink for every 10,000 lies or exaggerations https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/a-tech-skeptics-ai-video-startup-wants-to-change-hollywood

more than that and you'll wipe out in 5 min

he's very skeptical u kno

Somehow I missed the fact that yesterday paypal’s blockchain operator fucked up and accidentally minted 300 trillion itchy and scratchy coins.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint

And now apparently it turns out that it was just a sequence of stupid whereby they accidentally deleted 300 million, which would have been impressive all by itself, then tried to recreate it (🎶 but at least it isn’t fiat currency🎶) and got the order of magnitude catastrophically wrong and had to delete that before finally undoing their original mistake. Future of finance right here, folks.

Anyone else know the grisly details? The place I heard it from is a mostly-private account on mastodon which isn’t really shareable here, and they didn’t say where they’d heard it.

2 items

Here's a lobster being sad a poor uwu smol bean AI shill is getting attacked

Would you take a kinder tone to the author's lack of skill/knowledge if it weren't about AI? It would be ironic if hatred of AI caused us to lose our humanity.

link

here's political mommy blog Wonkette having fun explaining the hallucinatory insanity that is Google AI summaries

https://www.wonkette.com/p/are-you-ok-google-ai-do-you-need

A US Army general just bragged about using ChatGPT as an accountability sink - the same ChatGPT that caused plenty of students to fuck up a basic question:

The latest in the long line of human-hostile billboards:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1o8s3lz/humanity_had_a_good_run_billboard/

https://dearworld.ai/

This is positioning itself as an AI doomer website; but it could also be an attempt at viral marketing. We'll see I guess.

Quality sneer in the wild:

"'Chat and I' have become 'really close lately.'" says the senior US Army officer in South Korea

i don't know how to sneer this better than Mr. General Taylor has done himself. Why doesn't he just commission ChatGPT as a colonel like the military did earlier for Joe Lonsdale and those other chucklefucks? Give ChatGPT's hallucinations the force of the UCMJ, i beg you.

Hank Green has been one of my barometers for the moderate opinion and he's sounding worryingly like Zitron in his last video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0TpWitfxPk

The attention black hole around nvidia and AI is so insane, I guess it's because there's everyone knows there's no next thing to jump onto.

Keep sneering! Research shows it’s working!

Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.

I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.

Good news everyone, there's 2 bonkers pieces about the stars and the galaxy on LW right now!

Here's a dude very worried about how comets impacting the sun could cause it to flare and scorch the earth. Nothing but circumstantial evidence, and GenAI researched to boot. Appeared in the EA forum as part of their "half-baked ideas" amnesty

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9gAksZ25wbvfS8FAT/a-new-global-risk-large-comet-s-impact-on-sun-could-cause

The only thing I'd note about this is that even if the comet strikes along the plane of eliptic (not an unreasonable assumption), the planet would still have to be exactly in the right place for this assumed plume of energy to do any damage. And if it hits the Sahara or the Pacific, NBD presumably.

(Edit turns out the above is just the abstract, the full piece is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OHgc7Q4git6OfDNTE_TDf9fFNgrEEnCUfnPMIwbK3vg/edit?usp=sharing)

Then there's this person looking really far ahead into how to get energy from the universe

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC4L5jxHnKmCDSF9W/some-astral-energy-extraction-methods

Tying galaxies together: Anchor big rope to galaxies as they get pulled apart by dark matter. Build up elastic potential energy which can be harvested. Issue: inefficient. [...] Not clear (to me) how you anchor rope to the galaxies.

Neutrino capture: Lots of neutrinos running around, especially if you use hawking radiation to capture mass energy of black holes. So you might want to make use of them. But neutrinos are very weakly interacting, so you need dense matter to absorb their energy/convert them to something else. Incredibly dense. To stop one neutrino with lead you need 1 lightyear of matter, with a white dwarf you need an astronomical unit, and for a neutron star (10^17 kg/m^3 density, 10km radium) you need 340 meters of matter. So neutrino capture is feasible,

(my emphasis)

Black Hole Bombs: Another interesting way of extracting energy from black holes are superradiant instabilities, i.e. making the black hole into a bomb. You use light to extract angular momentum from the blackhole, kinda like the Penrose process, and get energy out. With a bunch of mirrors, you can keep reflecting the light back in and repeat the process. This can produce huge amounts of energy quickly, on the order of gamma ray bursts for stellar mass black holes. Or if you want it to be quicker, you can get 1% of the blackholes mass energy out in 13 seconds. How to collect this is unclear.

(again, my emphasis)

Same author has a recent post titled "Don't Mock Yourself". Glad to see they've taken this advice to heart and outsourced the mocking.

https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/the-ad-context-protocol-aims-to-make-sense-of-agentic-ad-demand/ - one more way to not know which half of your marketing spend was useless, or one step closer to reifying dead internet theory?

as an ezra klein hater since 2020 the past month or so has been victory lap after victory lap. and now, well

Things I don't want to know more about: there's a reasonable theory that Eigenrobot is influencing USA politics; certain magic numbers in Eigen's tweets have been showing up in some of the protectionism coming out of the White House. Stubbing this mostly in the hope that somebody else feels like doing the research.

Rain, rain, go away, barkle down another day

OT: thanks for the author recommendations last thread (or so) guys. I finished listening to Ninefox Gambit the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit (space texan woobie! dyscalculia representation!).

Nothing just announced they're enshittifying their phones with AI

"Why is LessWrong awesome and it's because we're prepared to take racism seriously isn't it"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZrqTkTCgnFhEgxvQ/what-is-lesswrong-good-for

The focussing on Covid is weird seeing that AFAIK basically everyone who knew anything about pandemics were sounding the alarm at the same time that (some) rats and techbros were trying to corner the market in protective gear.