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They're literally not upstreaming Android security fixes:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

The whole Android developer verification program controversy.

These 2 are the recent things that come to mind that are most adjacent to "power-abuse".

AlexErranton Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity

_You_ made an assertion. I questioned it. Drama ensues. Why would I find your citation lol.

AlexErranton Ask HN: What are you reading?

If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies

I'm not a doomer, but I'm trying to understand the perspective. Up to chapter 10, I'm still not convinced. There's too much hand-waving around what will happen. It's like: 1. AI smarter than us 2. ??? 3. We're dead. What happens in 2.?

I just got past the "extinction scenario" and I'm wildly unconvinced. I agree that AI can theoretically create a bioweapon. I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. I to believe that Yudkowsky was good at fanfiction; this senario did not demonstrate that. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

Come on.

Anyway. Finishing the book for completeness, but massively underwhelmed.

AlexErranton Ask HN: What are you reading?

It's gonna be a live-action TV show from Peacock. https://www.peacocktv.com/blog/dungeon-crawler-carl-tv-serie...

AlexErranton Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity

Good grief. I say absolutely nothing about vegetarianism: you're the one who keeps bangin on about about it.

> you are either doing it for moral reasons

Or red meat isn't easily available or cheap in the place where you live? There are many reasons why red meat isn't in your digestive system that are outside "morals". Beef is literally at an all-time high in the US. https://www.macrotrends.net/3141/us-ground-beef-prices

Summary of this thread:

Me: 0.5 g of creatine is small

Other: No it isn't

Me: Citation please?

Other: no

Me: null hypothesis

You: Incorrect interpretation of null hypothesis

Me: Correction

You: "citations are bullshit"

There are many people who feel morally grey about eating meat yet still choose to do so. E.g. there are science-based discussions in plant-based-diet social media; relatively few plant-based diet discussions revolve around morality. Facts matter.

I agree that n=1 experiments are important and often _overrule_ any RCT for an _individual_. If that's your point, I _agree_. But you should say so instead of me trying to infer whatever it is you're arguing...? Is that even what you're saying?

The goalpost shifting is immense. All I wanted was a citation for 0.5g creatine being meaningful, and instead I get "facts are irrelevant", "citations are bullshit", and "morals".

(To be clear: I'm not saying that you're saying "facts are irrelevant"; I'm annoyed that you seem to think that _I'm_ arguing "facts are irrelevant". See this? This is me giving you grace. I would appreciate the same in kind.)

/me throws up arms

AlexErranton Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity

You can eat meat — and still not eat red meat.

Vegetarian status is irrelevant.

> A null hypothesis is a default statistical assumption that states there is no real relationship, effect, or difference between variables or groups.

It is up to whoever to show that there _is_ a relationship. Hence me asking for a citation.

AlexErranton Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity

Ah. I guess the term we're looking for is "physiologically meaningful"; I wasn't talking about "statistical significance". Something can be statistically significant but have a clinically worthless effect size.

FYI the standard null hypothesis is that differences are not significant until shown otherwise. E.g. no doctor will prescribe 50mg metformin to a prediabetic even if it might have an effect; it will be physiologically meaningless.

> the numbers you are fixated on are for athletes or neurotropic nerds

If you have other numbers/studies to back "0.5g of creatine, I feel, is a useful amount", then I'm willing to "fixate" on those numbers.

AlexErranton Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity

> 0.5 g is not insignficant for normal health

A non-aggressive, curious question: can you give a citation for the "significant" health benefits of 0.5g creatine? That seems like quite a claim. (I'm reading "not insignificant" as "significant", perhaps a step too far?)

Note that there have also been brain benefits from creatine, but those have only been observed in ~20g/day studies (its not just athletic performance).

AlexErranton Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity

There's 0.5 g of creatine per 4 ounces of red meat.

That's pretty insignificant. Does anyone really wanna eat 2.5lbs of beef every day for the usual dose of 5g?

AlexErranton Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]

"No bitch, that's a whole new sentence."

AlexErranton Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster

Here's a simpler bug:

Claude Cowork still can't persistently reference a local dir, broken ever since they moved to their cloud project system, breaking many non-technical people's workflows.

AlexErranton AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator

Well, they're not above forking their own project to patch security holes and never upstreaming the fixes.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

AlexErranton Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

It's a memo taken out of context from Jan 2023, literally 1 month after the ChatGPT public release. All the article cites:

> The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.”

No need to add religion into this. Let MS employees write their emails. If anything, what he said a month after ChatGPT's release was prophetic.

AlexErranton Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap

It _is_ sus, but you should be willing to forgive. It's not like it was done out of animus, and I assume that an academic/foreigner is unaccustomed to how production software conventions work. Their baseline is less important, more important is how quickly they learn/adopt "best practices". Y-intercept, slope, etc.

I say this as literally the first HN comment to call them out on this.

AlexErranton Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

I mean... If you wanna build your project on a language that has no auditable history, reproducible builds, artifacts/releases, force pushes and breaks literally EVERY fork/PR, has no way to build or even see v2.0.3, and doesn't have changelogs... then I guess that's cool. You must be a trusting person; I unfortunately am not like that.

AlexErranton Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

Props. G'luck with your project, I know what it's like to work nights & weekends. Unfortunately, first impressions matter.

AlexErranton Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

Erm, because it looks weird? Do you know any other language projects that squash their repos down to 1 commit? That's a destruction of trust, which is kinda important if you want people to build on your language.

Virtually everyone has AI slop in the commit history. No one's judging you for the commit history. Everyone's code smells, but the fact that you're ashamed/hiding it is... odd.

> there's a lot of personal info

You should know that force pushing doesn't hide actual commits; it's trivially viewable if someone just iterates https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main e.g. https://github.com/bendlang/bend/commit/d184863 so like... why bother.

AlexErranton Bend – a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs

https://github.com/bendlang/bend

...did they just squash the repo to 1 commit for v2.0.4? Why? Yall should know that in this age of AI trust is the real currency... and nuking your history is one hell of a way to raise eyebrows.

> Enjoy bug-free, fast vibe-coded apps! Hints: ask it to write laws for whatever should never break, and to parallelize everything you want running fast. Bend is young: if anything goes wrong, ask it to open an issue.

Emphasis mine. I don't want to be snarky but like... come on.

AlexErranton Performance Improvements in .NET 11

Dumb Q: should a non-systems-language dev know/read assembly?

    ; Arm64
    --- .NET 10
    +++ .NET 11
    @@ -13,8 +13,6 @@
                ble     G_M000_IG04

    G_M000_IG03:
    -            cmp     w1, w2
    -            bhs     G_M000_IG05
                str     wzr, [x0, w1, UXTW #2]

    G_M000_IG04:
    @@ -25,4 +23,4 @@
                bl      CORINFO_HELP_RNGCHKFAIL
                brk     #0

    -; Total bytes of code 68
    +; Total bytes of code 60

I know C#/F# decently well, but is there any reason to actually pull out the ol textbooks and learn wtf the above is saying?

AlexErranton Performance Improvements in .NET 11

FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.

I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?

I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

This doesn't solve grinding? If it did, we'd see results by now (Published: 27 January 2026), and there's months of delay between submission and publication.

I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm just not seeing anything worth doomering over. There are multiple companies throwing AI at materials discovery; a research paper about a "data-driven framework" is about as unthreatening to my thesis as it gets. I'm willing to cede the point if say, Radical releases ~3 new materials that have commercial applicability and ~3x some useful metric e.g. tensile strength, but until then, to my amateur eye, it looks like AI+Real World is missing its ChatGPT moment.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

Agree.

Gonna note that biology is even less grindable than ordinary chemistry/physics/engineering. We'll have advancements in other real-world fields before AI-powered bioengineering becomes A Thing.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

Sup fellow Alex.

> AI with real-world competence is coming very soon

Disagree, Moravec's Paradox remains undefeated. How long has Elon promised self-driving cars? Or how long have we been seeing humanoid-robot-walking demos? Laundry folding demos?

Let's assume that a magical AI powered robot hand lands tomorrow. How long do you think it'll take to ramp up assembly/production/distribution/sourcing/materials/QA for, say, a million of them? Never mind the legal/integration/maintenance time.

And even once those have landed, and assuming they are ALL put to work on iterating on research testing to build out super-high-capacity-drone-batteries, how long do you think it would take for that to evolve into killer-insect-drones? BTW you should know that even though high capacity silicon carbon batteries exist, they haven't supplanted other Li-ion batteries for a host of reasons. A million things stand between a technology working in a lab and surviving the real world.

And during this entire process, the (geo)political/social/legal process will be churning away, changing the societal landscape in which the killer-robots land. Not to mention that mechanistic interpretability is (likely) somewhat grindable. A lab just needs to dump a billion dollars of compute into it after it declares AGI.

I'm unconvinced we get killer insect drones before we crack mech-interp.

And even once we get killer insect drones, they need to somehow have no kill-switch and then literally exterminate everyone on the globe? Can you see why I have a problem with doomers predicting human extinction within the decade?

I'm putting words in your mouth and not replying to precisely what you said, just the general vibe. LMK if I overstepped.

P.S. we do have mass production of AI designed systems today e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna There's nuance to this whole thing.

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

Literally 2 days ago, from a former Anthropic researcher:

> The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.

https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394

> The dynamics are plausible

Please elaborate: what dynamics? This is rather vague. My point is that AI can't grind real world physics/chemistry/engineering. What dynamics are in play here?

AlexErranton AI 2027 (2025)

My main issue with this timeline is that AI still has trouble transitioning to the real world. It predicts for 2029:

> There are swarms of insect-sized drones that can poison human infantry before they are even noticed; flocks of bird-sized drones to hunt the insects; new ICBM interceptors, and new, harder-to-intercept ICBMs. The rest of the world watches the buildup in horror, but it seems to have a momentum of its own.

Does anyone really predict insect drones _in production_ 3 years from now, to the degree that we need bird drones to hunt the insect drones? How the hell are these things powered?

Lean/math/millenienium prizes are "grindable" [0]. Wake me up when AI is making order-of-magnitude improvements in ungrindable real world tasks like batteries, hypersonic engine manufacturing, and stealth/silent motors that you can't hear.

[0]: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Ah derp; that's what I get for moving too fast. Genuine thanks for calling me out on my bullshit. (and this is also why I prefer auditable citations instead of casual "my reading of twitter is...")

I retract the projectnash citation; I grabbed it from the Cool World's youtube description, thinking it was a blog version of the video. It was not. I suggest watching the video instead.

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

2. Fair, and further I would agree that OpenAI not knowing if prior user prompts were part of training data is concerning and will only lead to more secrecy.

3. ctrl-f "x.com" in this thread only yields https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140 https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642

and frankly, I'm unwilling to give Elon any more traffic to dig up drama that ultimately doesn't matter. I'm not seeing anything especially childish, but y'know... I'm not sure I care.

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

This clarification substantially changes the flavor/nuance of your OP; may I suggest an edit (assuming the locktime hasn't passed)?

Separately, I disagree that intellectual work has ever been free of "dark forest"-style secrecy. Scientists everywhere have worried about being scooped; AI just magnifies that (as all tools have; e.g. Leeuwenhoek lenses).

And thirdly, if you want to make a stronger case for "I feel even less confident in them as a team to be shepherding this much capital and compute", you should give citations and arguments. From what I've seen, there's drama, it's much OpenAI trying to avoid scooping, and Tristan being stuck in a game of telephone, and Levent being incommunicado.

If you have a better analysis, you should say so instead of being vague.

AlexErranton On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

1. What does the dark forest have to do with this? Because "the most senior OpenAI researchers" are shitposting on social media, we've an answer to the Fermi paradox???

2. The dark forest is fun for scifi stories, but is mathematically bunk anyway https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-... https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1l06cnk/cool_w... https://www.projectnash.com/aliens-the-fermi-paradox-and-the...

When doomposting please actually say something substantive. Negative news always gets clicks/updoots; fight that human tendency.

AlexErranton Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

Cookie nonsense aside, the EU is mandating that AI companies watermark their output.

I'm curious if that (noticably) diminishes the quality of the output.