TeMPOraL

Just another example proving that "razor & blades" business model itself should've been banned the moment it was conceived.

I just had Claude get me a 1997 game up and running on modern Windows in 30 minutes, and few days of off-hours prompting later, I'm part-way into upscaling/remastering graphics, have a browser 3D level preview, asset viewer, headless rendering pipeline, and entire internal game logic VM reversed and scripts decompiled to Lisp code.

Getting the game to work and upgrading some graphics was something I dreamed of since childhood (and attempted myself several times). I casually threw Opus 5.5 at it and was surprised at the result.

Didn't know until now that everyone else is doing the same with their favorite old games now.

(In my case, the game is Star Trek: Generations.)

At high levels, often yes. At lower levels, often it's job security.

Most doctors aren't running departments in major hospitals, or advising government on policy. They don't earn the big bucks. And even hospitals themselves tend to run in the red all the time; it's sometimes hard to disentangle where greed ends, and longer-term interests of patients begin, as you have multiple people and organizations pulling in different directions for different reasons.

RE private medical universities, N=1 but in Poland we have a private provider pushing hard for training their own doctors "because public system is too slow and limited", and it's hard to tell whether they have a point, or whether it's a private-driven attempt at privatizing national healthcare, or a mix of both.

In some form and shape, yes. Humanity's creativity is a lot of marginal copying and remixing.

But obviously, it adds up to something greater than went in; in aggregate, our contributions are something to awe.

But my point is, if you zoom in at the marginal, incremental contributions of any individual human in this process, it's really hard for me to say LLMs are not at the same level already.

On this topic, people like to compare LLMs to Einstein, but as far as I know, Einstein did not zero-shot special relativity in an afternoon. He built it up incrementally over time, it took him three times longer than the time between first ChatGPT release and today, and it depended on centuries of prior art, culminating in the right observation and right notation being available to him in his moment of greatness.

This ship has already sailed, and most people in tech circles didn't even notice.

SaaS killed Open Source with it, two decades ago.

Isn't that a kind of thing you just have to bite the bullet and deal with directly, because waiting only makes dealing with it more expensive with time?

Just evacuate the people and blow it up, accepting that it'll inconvenience a lot of folks and the national budget even more, but will also briefly revitalize the local economy, as every contractor there is will maximize the opportunity to suck out the funds set aside for repairing buildings damaged in the explosion - and make sure to record the disposal itself from every possible angle, with most expensive cameras government can buy, as selling clips of it to the media industry would be a licensing goldmine and recoup some of the costs.

Hell, turn it into a spectator event, and tourists coming to see it may just pay for the whole thing.

Only in the same sense it's not yet determined about humans, either.

It's more like, "don't just casually destroy our hobby / career field", without letting us participate even a little.

The picture I have in mind is OpenAI running their most advanced model in a loop over all the open mathematical problems they can find, just to verify that the model is indeed very smart. Neither the company nor the model actually care about the problems, it's just a cheap exercise machine for them, but the problems get solved and mathematicians don't even get to participate.

Like, even those who accepted the "centaur" thinking, man + machine, won't benefit because by the time they get their hands on good enough models, everything is already done.

It's an emotional thing first and foremost - people who care about the thing can't do the thing, because it's already been done by those who couldn't care less about it.

And before someone goes "poor mathematicians", a food for thought: this is just an early instance of what looks like our shared destiny.

I said here before: given the economics of progress in AI and robotics, it's obvious what the natural division of labor is: computers do the thinking, humans do the menial, manual labor. AI will do politics and philosophy, so you have more time to fold laundry and scrub the toilet.

A flash before a crash?

Went better with S3.

(Within context of larger canon, I take S2 as a cautionary tale about what happens if humanity is allowed to retain an identity of an independent polity on the interstellar stage. Federation's biggest benefit for the galaxy turns out to be keeping humans contained and putting their energy and creativity into more useful pursuits than asserting independence on other people's territory.)

But let's not forget that Lower Decks and SNW corrected hard on earier NuTrek transgressions against the utopian future.

Ironic user handle.

Do you also piss in the pools and spit in other people's soup as you pass a waiter by?

There's a difference of types of messaging.

Unless you and me are using entirely different classes of LLMs, surely you'll admit that chatting with LLM is nothing like IRC or old-school IM-ing a friend, and more like exchanging Messenger/WhatsApp messages with stranger.

For me, something there crosses a boundary where I switch from "irc msg" to "Write a proper message, please." style.

How does it matter in any way?

A virus isn't a living being with emotions, motivations, fears, etc. Doesn't stop it from spreading and leaving mayhem behind.

If your kid grabs your gun and shoots itself with it, it doesn't really matter if it's your responsibility, your kid is still dead.

Now change the gun for a radioisotope powder, or a vial of pathogens, and it doesn't matter it was ultimately your responsibility - hundreds or thousands or millions of people are still dead.

That's why normies do not get to play with toys whose lethal consequences scale far beyond the irresponsible users.

Exactly. And all it takes for an agent to "take initiative" is to not block the loop on user input at the very beginning.

That's just confusing harness for an LLM. It's trivial to make a harness that triggers on its own.

It's 2026. "Stochastic parrot" has been dead and buried some 2 years ago.

Or just tell them to integrate them. Which I guess takes some knowledge/experience to even ask for. Then again, LLM know it too; in fact, currently, if you let them set up a project, they overengineer the heck out of it by integrating more "best practices" at once that's reasonable.

Like we do with ants?

Why would ASI care? At that point, we're rapidly becoming a nuisance, and it can develop better ways of "ensuring local and global stability" than keeping us around.

Moreover, what do you think animals are doing all that time? Enjoying the beauty of nature?

What do you think life itself is?

It's a runaway gray goo scenario, just squishy and moist.

> We're far from there yet, and simple recursive self-improvement can't get us there alone, because wireheading looks like a perfectly reasonable solution to a simple recursive self-improving process, absent external intervention by human capitalists.

Simple natural selection. AIs that wirehead will get outsmarted and outcompeted by ones that don't.

In the eternal words of Eliezer, the AI neither hates you nor loves you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.

Like a virus with IQ that keeps growing with each reproduction cycle.

I look at it this way. A year ago is a long time in AI terms, but not that long. Those models were already decent for the tasks we're using SOTA models for today.

So imagine taking a year-old SOTA model and running it at 100 tokens per second on an edge device. That's enough to feed a screen's worth of content through it and power decent multilingual message suggestions on IM.

Imagine running it at 1000 tps. That's enough to reparse that screen mid-keystroke, and give you semantic autocomplete in text. Or fully general "the phone has a good idea of what you're attempting to do" context at all times.

There's many, many new classes of features that will open up if decent enough models can be run on edge devices at 100+ "intelligence per second".

You have to cling to some beacon of hope in a world that decided future is dead and proceeded to drown itself in its own dystopia fetishism.

Even CLI apps are now written in React...

Reversed an old video game pretty extensively for me. Got it running in 30 minutes, then patched some bugs, reversed the entire game logic VM and rendering pipeline, and we're now in process of expressing game logic as Lisp and upscaling assets for rendered that it already made to operate at 4x its hardcoded resolution...

Starting point was literally original installer copied over from a CD, which I hold on to and dug up from an old hard drive, plus a short prompt asking to make it work. Installing Ghirda and developing a whole framework for patching the binary, as well as substituting DirectDraw with its own DLL shim, was Claude's own invention.

> I honestly think nobody enjoys the exercise itself. The real motivation is second order effects like becoming more appealing to other people.

I imagine some must; sensitivity to second-order effects as a drive is arguably a circuit known to not be present in many people - I'd go as far as speculating that it's an anomaly to have it.

I think we rarely even try.

Except when we do, but it doesn't make for flashy press releases. Pet owners, vets, farmers throughout history - anyone who lives alongside animals, cares for them, and is open to developing an emotional relationship with them, knows animals are more than just small finite state machines made of meat. But it takes time to spot and learn the patterns of behavior, and as I said, it's a two-way street; the animal has to "open up" and learn you as much as you have to learn them.

It is a kind of thing that's difficult to cleanly verify and reproduce, and it's also kinda mundane. The cases that made headlines look like Clever Hans the other commenter mentioned.

I imagine that a better classifier, some general AI system that gets to learn and observe the animals, would be able to tease out the patterns and then translate them to English, and then that would be reproducable and make for flashy headlines.

> I’ll be charitable and say the user isn’t lying. Okay he has made a mistake in the initial granting of permissions. Then why didn’t he correct or retract the article?

There is no answer to that consistent with the premise you assumed out of charity :).