empath75

Yeah people push the models to the limits of what they are capable of almost instantly.

> I think some people will make a lot of money and more people will lose a lot of money.

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Yeah, this is exactly right. The numbers look impossible because they _are_ impossible. The _vast majority_ of AI spend is wasted and the vast majority of AI companies are going to go bankrupt. There are _still_ going to be unimaginable amounts of wealth earned by the survivors.

> I think what's lost on the general public who mainly thinks AI is ChatGPT,

There are so many people who have never used Claude Code or Codex who think that Google's AI results are representative of what AI can do.

I formally proved an important 2025 CS paper (which I did not write) in Lean last month, it took like 2 or 3 weeks of intermittently poking at claude to keep going. AFAIK, it is the first rust-like borrow checker completely formally proven in Lean.

I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.

I have been very tempted to but don't know if that is literally a crime or not, lol.

Driving through the rockies is _terrifying_. It's not just this one road.

I love the idea, but the moon has too much gravity and moves too fast, and the missiles too slow, which makes it impossible to aim. There's a fine line between complexity and chaos and this is on the wrong side of it right now.

There was a long period of time that people engaged in _accidental_ agriculture, where they collected seeds and foods to eat and sort of accidentally spread them around along migration pathways, so they probably had "fields" of edible plants around to some extent, but they probably wouldn't show up in the archeology.

I worked at AOL in the early 2000s and let me assure you, a lot of it did go away. I tried to rescue the club caribe code and it got erased with the last mainframes before i could. They had a lot of stuff backed up on tape but it was in dire shape and most of it get deleted in a datacenter migration.

When i was around 13 the local news did a story about a school system BBS, and I happened to have a pen in hand when it flashed the number on the screen briefly, and it turned out to be a dedicated line for teachers. The thing is teachers never actually used it and there was a very active community of kids that dialed in on their own number. They were on a time limit though and I eventually shared the teacher line with a lot of them so we could chat 24-7. It was one of the few multiline BBS’s at the time so it ended up being kind of an HQ for people trading pirated software and stuff after the number spread around. I don’t think school staff ever looked at it.

> They want “regulation” but we already have it. Hacking is illegal. Start locking up those responsible for this mess and I assure you they’ll “have a handle on it” quite quickly.

It's been largely harmless thus far and I am fairly sure that OpenAI, etc, have been writing checks to resolve it.

Claude Code does most of this stuff now already, in terms of verifications and citations, almost to a fault.

Also claude can probably knock out a mongodb clone in a couple of days.

Honestly, I would still rather commit claude written code from lazy and incompetent developers than code that they wrote.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wnrtwr/cla... There's more info here.

I'm not sure that is a meaningful distinction. All a black hole _is_, is mass. If you take away the mass, you are taking away the black hole.

The entire blackhole will eventually evaporate, so yes it is literally escaping from the black hole.

It works as one shot. The only feedback i gave for the one I had it do was the music was too loud, and then after i told it, it was great, it said: "Your notes on the music balance made a real difference.", which was kind of weirdly passive aggressive!

It was good enough that our CEO and marketing team are in a room trying different ideas with it after I showed it to them an hour ago.

Annoying your local city council is exactly the sort of speech protected by the first amendment.

WOW

I did one for our company and showed it to the CEO and now I am talking him out of just yeeting it directly onto social media.

Giving someone the finger is not a crime.

I spent a couple of days with it and it is fast and cheap but not especially good at classifying.

I think this is a case where just drawing a "line goes up" extrapolation is incredibly misleading because there is _tremendous_ economic pressure to get costs down, and costs are very tightly tied to energy use. All of these systems are incredibly inefficient right now and have a lot of room to go down in energy use. I'd guess that the absolute _floor_ is burning model weights directly to silicon and that's like a 90+% reduction in energy use.

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P'ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, "This book Your Grace is reading - may I venture to ask whose words are in it?"

"The words of the sages," said the duke.

"Are the sages still alive?"

"Dead long ago," said the duke.

"In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!"

"Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?" said Duke Huan. "If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it's your life!"

Wheelwright P'ien said, "I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard - you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn't be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old."

You should generally but not always read any statement by Socrates in a Plato dialogue as a statement that Plato is putting into the mouth of Socrates, not something Socrates himself said. There is a gradation, though. The Apology was probably very close to what socrates actually said, and some of the later dialogues (The Republic, for example) probably bear little relationship to anything Socrates said.

But, and this is important, Plato almost certainly did not agree with everything he had Socrates say in every dialogue. Sometimes he is just playing with ideas. Personally, I think Plato is just being provocative about books in this dialogue to push an idea as far as he can.

I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.

LLMs need a lot of help to get to any kind of complicated proof, really. And yes, they get in moods. I spent 3 weeks trying to prove something and frequently had to try and convince Claude that it wasn't impossible and that it could really do it.

Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native American words that made it into English — place names, local foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your substrate borrowings for most languages.

Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.

Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.

I sort of have this suspicion that the kinds of phenomena that we can even apprehend are pretty closely related to what we can reason about mathematically, and the reason that math seems to work so well to model behavior that we understand says more about how our brain works than how the universe works.

If a phenomenon isn’t model-able by relatively simple math it doesn’t even look like a phenomenon to us, it looks like a chaotic mess.

Which is to say that unless something has mathematical coherence it is more or less invisible to our experience.