doctorpangloss

Indeed.

"Can reconstruct [scenes from Unreal Engine]"

For mathematicians in the US, it's because their parents like money.

Deepfakes are kind of the point though.

[left hand emoji] you have very strong feelings about something, you're sharing it with others on a public forum

[right hand emoji] "their political stance"... "they should keep them to themselves"

on the flip side retro games are almost completely and entirely an aesthetic experience. like if something totally subjective and personal like nostalgia is not just a valid reason, but the #1 reason, to be engaged with retro gaming, why isn't some random condition about the process of resurrecting the games also valid?

i think you agree that there is. but it should change your language about this idea of "consumers" and "benefits" - like this is the difference between making code and making a product. nobody NEEDS retro games. in my opinion, they aren't even that good! they are completely and utterly an aesthetic experience. the process IS the product.

for example, their people think that GB300s are twice as fast as B300s, when really their benchmarks just incorrectly divide GB300 instances on azure by 8 instead of 4, since they don't read or verify any of the code that executes their benchmarks.

the problem is they're so cryptopilled, surprises are what they want. they don't look at surprises and think, "that's wrong." they look at surprises and double down!

personally i reject any frame of mind that makes stubborn, labeled generalizations about kids based on one or a handful of interactions. the people who conduct their business this way: they are always projecting.

when florida banned phones from schools, a gold-standard causation study found a benefit of 0.9 percentiles on standardized tests between students who were under the ban and those who could use phones freely. this is about the same impact as studying for a standardized test for 1 hour.

we have had a lot of chances to study this stuff, and the results - like the teen sleep study and the teen wellness studies, both conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.

so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.

it may be possible for some people, I don't know.

does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.

so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.

that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.

i'm aware of this one. clinical evidence - do moderately high CO2 levels CAUSE a disease? afaik no. the test in this study: they measure something real, but it is not used to diagnose someone routinely (despite what they say). they had a surprising result where performance on one of the subtests increased, and some were not affected (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23008272/#&gid=article-figur...). i am basically saying that, CO2 levels - do they cause headaches like the user is saying? I don't know, nobody has investigated that. 2500 ppm is very high concentration. it merits more study but not a panic.

The semianalysis people have scripts which incorrectly count their numerators and denominators all the time. All their benchmarks are flawed. It is such a slipshod operation and they charge exorbitant amounts of money for it.

There isn't really any clinical evidence for CO2 levels impacting stuff beyond so called "sleep efficiency," where the effect is small (above 1000 ppm is 5% reduction in sleep efficiency) and it has the counterintuitive effect that less efficient sleep is sleeping longer, which is usually what people want. That said, placebo effects are still real.

Legitimately a much better game than actual Wordle.

there are a lot of completely free file sharing services for authentic activity (e.g. github, google drive)

inauthentic activity seems to move from one product space to another. in 3 years we'll be hearing about stripe shutting down openrouter for example.

hardest for claude and chatgpt, which will refuse to do this task haha

i'm not saying they reflect how much you study. they reflect a lot of things, including that. but you ask the people who write the tests, they're going to say, how much you know or how much you study, but nonetheless, they are limited. i agree with you. that's part of my point.

let's imagine a different study. we instead compare AI-users and non-users on a Wechsler (IQ-adjacent) test.

overall, it would be surprising if AI usage impacted your Wechsler scores. someone has done this study and the impact is quite quite small. BUT. do we care? We don't use Wechsler scores for admissions, we don't use them for jobs, we don't use them for... are you getting it now? A Wechsler family test is measuring something real, just like a university exam measures something. But what do we USE them for? Wechsler and a typical university exam are, in some senses, EQUALLY vague in terms of their fitness for purpose for answering a question like, "should we hire this guy?"

Like there is an association between IQ and earnings but it is actually surprisingly small! There is an association with math education and earnings and it is also surprisingly small. And consider how many people get by just fine without using a single piece of math education once they have finished school - like what if maximizing your earnings isn't all that it is about? Are you getting it now?

The issue isn't the AI usage. I can find tests that are immune to AI usage. The issue is using tests for things that they are not designed for. We pick and choose, for some subtle but nonetheless pervasive cultural reasons, which tests we use for which purpose, and very frequently, not because they are calibrated for the chosen purpose. This is coming from someone who scores very well on all these tests, and have kids, so I have a very strong incentive to buy into the status quo, and I'm telling you: academic testing has been fucked up for a long, long time.

at least in my experience in university - i didn't really ask this question, since it is obvious to me, but some students have asked it during lecture, or some instructors have volunteered the answer ahead of time - if you ask how to perform better on the exam, usually the instructors say, "here's what you should study." they never say, "know more." the thing i am talking about is consistent with the paper. really, your takeaway should be, exams can't see how much you know!

well most university exams are designed to measure how much you study. so we didn't really need a study to tell us, "Exams continue to measure what they are designed to measure."

they're not designed to measure general aptitude, or function as admissions criteria, or screen for job applications, or any other numerous things they are used for.

there can be many questions of pedagogy. one of them is, what do our exams measure and how do we use them? professors who say, "My exam is designed to measure who studies, not be used for all these other purposes that they are actually used for" - I don't buy it. It's the same as late night comedians saying they are not responsible for solutions, even when spending 90% of their air time making political jokes.

THIS is the pedagogical issue, that pedagogy has NEVER caught up with the scope of responsibilities. This is acute in STEM - I mean, the humanities departments are generally pretty well run, all things considered, in this regard. Generative AI is accelerating that pre-existing crisis.

do you have any evidence that CalTech's pedagogy is immune to today's threats and trends in education everywhere else? (no)

> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.

this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.

The consensus among copyright lawyers is Google lost Authors Guild v Google, but for some reason the media and Wikipedia do not clearly report it that way.

> or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that);

one thing's for sure, there are certain spaces for people who lack people skills, and that seems to be associated with "STEM" skills

the range of dollar signs... it sounds like MLC doesn't know haha

while i do not think you should be downvoted for your comment - I think it is pretty representative of creatives in the music industry, who just seem to be more pissed off in general than others - the thing that is too good to be true is your monetary estimate of value. Of course, if your tool reported the honest answers (nearly "zero" for everybody), people would not pay attention, and this lead gen tool you have developed would not be very interesting.

In your own words:

> We take your Spotify stream count, estimate what that means across all services, take the US portion, and multiply by the US mechanical rate.

As someone who models stuff for part of my living, I understand the spirit of what you are achieving here, but there are too many assumptions / genuine unknowns. Like just in terms of the things you said: you would need the real premium and and supported stream counts over time, the relative market share and stream counts in other services over time, broken down by country, and of course, what "mechanical rate" really means, because there's what Spotify pays versus everything else, and what Spotify, for example, pays, is really fluid.

For other readers: Artists certainly think in terms of pay per stream, but that's not really how Spotify pays, for many payees (the MLC and the other categories). So even though this guy making this website is a professional in the music industry and knows all this, he is so focused on lead gen that he keeps things simple - fine, that's valid - but nonetheless wildly inaccurate.

okay, i get that as a lawyer who wants to make money, every client is "heckin cute and valid." and you can hypothesize that this thing is something that clients want: "terms escaping into the wild," whatever that means - are you saying that you think copying and pasting an agreement into an LLM makes its contents escape into the wild, by some mechanism?

Look, I understand, you don't have to explain to me the theory for how that happens, I know it already. Since I know your a smart guy, to some extent you care about that only because you imagine that clients do. But in reality, in the real world, every email you send is read by at least two people, every contract you sign has multiple parties, etc. You make some obfuscated thing or whatever, but eventually, someone has the real text of the document - it might be YOUR client, it might be the person you are negotiating with, and you rarely represent ALL the sides. You never own ALL the information and all the parties and IT systems in totality. Eventually someone will put the text into a chatbot. Or maybe they put a salient piece of the pre-final text, like some legal theory or merely a question, into the chatbot.

So I see this font stuff, or watermarking stuff, or all this provenance and control stuff, as deeply illusory. It is the worst circlejerky kind of aesthetic experience making. When you mess with anti AI fonts you are trying to compete in the same business DocuSign is in, that is, in the business of selling holistic social experiences - a whole 7000 person company whose main competition is a fucking pen - but it's not like you're doing something creative. If you care about aesthetic experiences, write a short story! Are you getting it? The itch you are scratching with this weird thing, nobody wants.

Seems too good to be true (because it is).

Flock cameras can be easily defeated with a long stick. They're a terrible technology.

it only takes ~445 GB300 NVL72 (about $22b) to run ALL of openrouter demand for a year. Microsoft rolled out $32b of DC 2026Q1.

imo the issue is that most openrouter demand is inauthentic activity (things that anthropic and openai models will refuse to do like pretend to not be bots when interacting with humans)

most of a passenger car's performance and handling is its tires