Currently, on Lobsters, folks are grappling with the fact that Leo de Moura got wrecked by chatbots. I decided to read his slides about Lean in 2026 and summarized my findings on Mastodon. It's not just De Moura; I think that the entire Lean project is on shaky foundations and I think that the chatbots are making things worse by repeatedly reassuring the project leaders.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Delve removed from YCombinator
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634690
IIUC, it looks like Delve lied to YC about stealing another company's Apache 2.0 licensed slopware. This is appatently a bigger sin than selling a product that does fuck-all. I guess they weren't tall enough for this ride.
Delve claims to offer "Compliance as a Service"
https://delve.co/ (absolutely unhinged)
A link to the expose that precipitated the divorce:
https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a-service
My God this is so bad. So in addition to lying about AI what they actually offered wasn't speedy compliance as a service to get you certified, it was speedy certification as a service by bypassing actual compliance. This is such a silicon valley move and I honestly suspect that a number of people using and investing in these asshats knew exactly what was going on and simply didn't care.
what they actually offered wasn’t speedy compliance as a service to get you certified, it was speedy certification as a service by bypassing actual compliance.
I mean... Yeah. I think if you read it any other way you're a massive rube. Like it's obviously not possible to do the former in "days" as they advertise.
Doesn't surprise me in the slightest that all the companies listed in that substack as having used Delve are also AI slop companies (vibecoding, AI "customer service", AI "video meeting assistant" (whatever that would be))
At best it's the same shitty arguments we heard from crypto grifters and their suckers. Let's take a process that's complex and manual by design to allow for independent validation and securing against fraud and make it faster by cutting those parts out and throwing some high-tech nonsense at the problem that we can claim replaces all the verification and validation. (The fact that they called their system "trustless" in the face of this is deeply ironic.) But maybe it's the cynicism talking but I'm even less inclined to give anyone other than maybe the author of that sub stack the benefit of the doubt that they actually believed it.
The ideal customer for this service is the kind of "Visionary Leader" with the "Founder Mindset" and "Drive to Innovate" that lets them see that all those privacy, security, fraud prevention, anti-embezzlement, and whatever else those standards and their associated compliance mechanisms are meant to provide are just pointless obstacles on the path to making obscene amounts of money by burning the world behind you. Often the shit we talk about here makes me think the world has gone mad or stupid, but every so often I feel like I'm staring at the face of capital-E Evil and this is one of those times.
From that substack:
Even though we knew we’d technically be lying about our security to anyone we sent these policies to for review (clients, auditors, investors), we decided to adopt these policies because we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to rewrite them all manually.
Ye man, then you're complicit. If I were one of the clients, auditors, investors, I'd be printing that out on an A1 sheet and rushing to file as evidence, this is just plain fraud
@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984 TF covered these clowns the other week
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/the-tetsuo-economy-feat-wendy-liu/
While I tend to think Yudkowsky is sincere, some things like his prediction market for P(doom) are hard to square with that https://manifold.markets/EliezerYudkowsky/will-ai-wipe-out-humanity-by-2030-r (launched June 2023, will resolve N/A on 1 January 2027 if the world has not ended yet. It has not moved much since 1 January 2024)
Does it still count if it turns out that Trump invading iran was based on Claude or ChatJippity advice and things escalate to global thermonuclear war? AI technically wiped out humanity because our dumb leaders were dumb enought to trust it?
On the one hand, Yud's vision of AI doomsday is specifically "AI turns sentient/superintelligent and kills us all because reasons", not "Humanity wipes itself out because they trusted lying machines".
On the other hand, the absence of sentience/superintelligence hasn't stopped AI from causing untold damage anyways, as the past two to three years can attest.
Technically yes, but Yud probably wouldn’t count that, since the AI didn’t have the express purpose of destroying everyone
So if Bender took over he wouldn't count. As he wants to 'kill all humans (except Fry)'. Seems like a loophole.
Bender really takes the "intelligence" out of "artificial superintelligence". "Yeah, kill all humans. Except Fry, he's my friend or pet or something. And I guess Leela because he'll be whiny about it and also I owe her for the thing. And Hermes because he still owes me money. And I guess the professor is okay..." And so on and so forth through all of humanity.
I will never understand why people seriously bet “yes” on these types of things. Like you either loose the bet and loose money or you win the bet and die
Eliezer is trying to get around that with some weird conditions and game on the prediction market question:
This market resolves N/A on Jan 1st, 2027. All trades on this market will be rolled back on Jan 1st, 2027. However, up until that point, any profit or loss you make on this market will be reflected in your current wealth; which means that purely profit-interested traders can make temporary profits on this market, and use them to fund other permanent bets that may be profitable; via correctly anticipating future shifts in prices among people who do bet their beliefs on this important question, buying low from them and selling high to them.
I don't think that actually helps. But Eliezer is committed to prediction markets being useful on a nearly ideological level, so he has to try to come up with weird complicated strategies to try to get around their fundamental limits.
If you have to set up that many rules to get around the inherent flaw of “gambling on everyone’s lives” just run a normal ass poll. gets rid of unnecessary financial incentives
It feels like a teenaged argument about Batman v. Superman or the USS Enterprise v. a Star Destroyer. I think many LessWrongers are not serious about the belief system as something to act on, but the problem is that when they are serious you get Ziz Lasota. Its also similar to how they love markets in theory, but don't want to start a business or make speculative investments.
prediction markets being useful on a nearly ideological level
At this point, I would say prediction markets are now an explicit ideological plank of what's left of the libertarian movement. Darkly amusing that they're desperately trying to pump life and legitimacy into something the GW Bush administration thought was too corrupt to use.
An early hint of Gwern's rejection of chaos theory in the sequences from 2008 (the "build God to conquer Death" essay):
And the adults wouldn't be in so much danger. A superintelligence—a mind that could think a trillion thoughts without a misstep—would not be intimidated by a challenge where death is the price of a single failure. The raw universe wouldn't seem so harsh, would be only another problem to be solved.
Someone who got to high-school math or coded a working system would probably have encountered the combinatorial explosion, the impossibility of representing 0.1 as a floating-point binary, Chaos Theory, and so on. Even Games Theory has situations like "in some games, optimal play guarantees a tie but not a win." But Yud was much too special for any of those and refused offers to learn.
This is what happens when your worldview is based on anime.
(A lot of anime has heavy themes, but most people understand that it's not real life, just like all such art. Unlike Yud, most people's worldviews on coding and math are based on actual coding and math.)
Not just anime but also science fiction. See also all the people who love 'hard' science fiction (science fiction more based on real world physics), which often isn't that hard at all but just has a few real physics element, see the expanse for a good example of non-hard sf that feels hard (im finally reading the book series so be warned I might expanse post a bit).
content warning discussion about sexual abuse thrope
A similar thing happens with people who confuse edgy/grimdark/vile fiction with realistic. (A while back I played a video game which had a reference to women being captured for breeding and men for other sexual abuse (which made no sense in the setting, as these slaver faction already were resource starved, and poisoned so they died quickly, so no way they could raise kids into maturity in that environment (also iirc the slaver faction was less than 20 years old)). Which some players described as very realistic (people do the same about 40k, almost like it says something about their ideas of how the world works not the setting). I was just rolling my eyes and didnt comment. Apart from that it seemed ok. Crying suns is the name of the game for the people who want to avoid it for this reason (it wasnt a big plot point).
Sorry for being a bit offtopic and talking about entertainment again.
I will never forget the time I calculated the energy output on one of the torpedo engines of The Expanse and realized it was higher than the total wattage of all human civilization in 2020
Ah the Epstein drive. (oof that aged...)
Small note however, iirc James S. A. Corey has mentioned the expanse is not hard sf. I don't have a quote for that however.
Not sure if I should post it here or under the pivot article, somebody went through the claude code https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 (via @aliettedebodard.com and @olivia.science on bsky)
13 butts pooping, back and forth, forever.
This is somehow even more of a shitshow than I would have predicted. Also it continues the pattern that these systems don't fuck up the way people do. One thing he hasn't annotated as much is the sheer number of different aesthetic variants on doing the same thing that this code contains. Like, you do the same kind of compression four different places, and one is compressImage, one is DoCompression, one is imgModify.compress, and one is COMPRESS_IMG. Even the most dysfunctional team would have spent time developing some kind of standard here from my (admittedly limited) experience.
Even the most dysfunctional team would have spent time developing some kind of standard here from my (admittedly limited) experience.
My experience has been vastly different. Prior to LLMs I have seen all sorts of horrors of this sort and others writ large across many codebases. It's so awesome that LLMs offer the ability to make the same sorts of code but at a much faster speed. In times past it used to take devs years to build up the kind of tech debt that LLMs can give you in days.
Yeah realized a while ago that vibe coding is a massive technical debt creation machine.
I mean I guess "developing" in that sentence is doing a lot of work replacing "arguing fruitlessly about".
It is great, that means the system is vulnerable to hacks if you find an exploit in any of those methods, but only 1/4th of the time.
Somebody described AI agents as very enthusiastic 14 year olds, and looks like they certainly code like one.
GitHub have finally achieved zero 9s stability for the last 90 days. Congratulations to all involved
Hold on now, the uptime number contains two digits that are nines! The image itself has four nines in total!
Can't believe I'm nerd-sniped this easily. Very technically, the point at which a service should be considered unreliable or down is at γ nines, where γ = 0.9030899869919434… is a transcendental constant. γ nines is exactly 87.5% availability, or 7/8 availability, and it's the point at which a service's availability might as well be random. (Another one of the local complexity theorists can explain why it's 7/8 and not 1/2.)
... why 7/8?
Suppose a bullshitter brings up a number of distinct Boolean claims and some tangled pile of connections between them, such that they hope to convince you that at least one connection is plausible. Without loss of generality, we can reduce this to 3-satisfiability in polynomial time: we can quickly produce a list of subconnections where each subconnection relates exactly three claims. Then, assuming the bullshitter is uniformly random, the probability that any particular subconnection is satisfied is 7/8. Therefore, if a bullshitter tries to overwhelm you with any pile of claims which sounds plausible, the threshold for plausibility has to be at least 7/8 in order to distinguish from random noise.
Bravo. The farthest i could get is 2/3 assuming the following model: x₁ is a random number between 0 and 1, x₂ between x₁ and 1, and so on. If the service breaks at x₁, gets fixed at x₂, breaks again at x₃, etc. availability is 2/3.
We can see that one 9 of availability is 90% = 0.9, two 9s is 99% = 0.99, three 9s is 99.9% = 0.999, etc. In general, for positive integers n, n 9s of availability is 1 - (1/10)^n, and we can extrapolate that to non-integer values of n. The value γ needed for 87.5% availability is the solution to 1 - (1/10)^γ = 7/8, or γ = log_10(8) = 0.903089987. γ is transcendental by Gelfond-Schneider (see this for a reference proof).
Right now, Sora is at zero 9s of availability.
Alas, foiled again! Nobody said they had to be leading 9s!
For my own services I’m aiming for .999999% of uptime
89.90999999...% uptime 🐐
If you had told this to the me of 20 years ago I wouldnt have believed you.
Here's a headline I never expected to read:
Tl;dr A whole load of media outlets believed an X account asking for crypto donations which claimed to be Jonathan the 194 year old tortoise's vet. Jonathan was found safely asleep under a tree in the governor's paddock.
Putting "Novelty Purposes Only" on my psychosis suicide bot after I laid off 80% of my legal (replaced them with the psychosis suicide bot)
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