fidotron

We should be grateful there are at least two serious competitors, and hope for more. (Come on Europe/Mistral, please do something interesting . . . )

If ever the competition reduced it would turn into an absolute shitfest of nonsense very very fast, and that is a prime reason not to allow them to "pace the frontier".

My neighbours regularly remind me that AI is quite different in French - despite being Francophone they tend to use it in English for what they think are better results.

It's entirely plausible detection is totally different in different languages.

> from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS

Nokia had at least three tiers of OS: Series 30, Series 40 (which had subseries) and Series 60. It was S60 which was the smartphone Symbian based one which is where they went especially nuts.

S40 was actually really good and solid, and if someone remembers the UI of a Nokia fondly it's almost certainly a S30 or S40 device. A bit basic, but for a feature phone of that era it was great. The reason SonyEricsson started gaining market share was their phones were more like improved S40 devices (like higher fidelity UIs) than Nokia's S60 lines which were . . . not.

The irony, for those that missed it, is Nokia did a lot to make WebKit usable on S60, thereby setting up the foundations for mobile Safari in the first place.

Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.

Let's cut to the chase here: the root problem is now a critical mass of the population simply won't believe the government blame for virtually any incident since false flags are now such a widely recognized concept.

The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.

> The point is moot anyways. All info about everyone is out there for the taking now by a half-competent AI prompter. What do we do about that is the real question?

It's like filing your gov tax return in a five eyes country: you guys actually know the answer already, just save me the trouble. But we have to act like they haven't been spying the whole time.

If we actually distributed the benefits of mass surveillance and privacy invasion (and now add wilful copyright infringement) then it would be enormously less objectionable.

So this is the new line around state led irresponsibility? That pointing out they're irresponsible is defending rapists?

Come on. If "AI Agents" (scare quotes) could do it then in practice anyone could have been doing this the whole time and no one would have known.

Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).

The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.

The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.

Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750

The subsection https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgl73pxgndwt?post=asset%3A5d6... is ridiculous.

"Cyber experts believe these systems were poorly protected - but that's not the point" is the actual subheading.

Yes, it's the point. Lots of people have been rightly saying all this stuff was inadequately secured for many years and this promotion of the idea of perfect security being even possible is a major problem.

The real story here, unsurprisingly, is government website was poorly operated and got hacked.

"This was just the latest case of AI agents ignoring laws around how to safely access online information and perhaps the most serious yet given the information was government controlled."

So who was actually running the agent? Was it sandboxed? These people, and many apparently in these labs, that believe if you just tell the agent in English what the rules are then it should follow them are at best utterly naive, and at worst deliberately dangerous.

But the fact these governments making the noise are the ones promoting mandating everyone giving up their information to be then stored so incompetently, while they point fingers around at everyone else is just beautiful. And then deploying midwit armies to tell people what to think about it . . . the AI takeover can't happen soon enough.

Looks like superb hardware, and contrary to many others the use cases this is designed for look actually worth it. "AVP but lighter and cheaper" or "looks designed for trains or planes" . . . well, obviously.

The key problem is it's Meta. People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware, and the way they dealt with Oculus users was just grimy. From basically any other company this would be a very welcome device. Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first, because there's no such thing as a killer product good enough to overcome this hurdle.

> Alternative possibility: Is it that people are using AI to craft their replies? Also yucky.

Or they have OpenClaw using claude to karma farm, for . . . reasons.

The amount of absolutely bizarre comments you get on here these days is nuts. It always used to be a bit special, but this year is something else.

At this point it should be clear that Anthropic are determined to create the doomsday scenario as the most idiotic "I told you so" gotcha in history.

The entire m/o of Montreal cops is to act as bait to raise money from fines.

If they haven't made enough from fines for a particular time window they all start messing with the traffic to get people to drive over reds in frustration, or get pedestrians to cross against the light. I've seen them leave people at intersections for over five minutes trying to do this.

Never seen it taken to such an extremely obvious level anywhere else, along with their bizarrely over the top body armour for what is in reality a very safe place.

Your Gimp Agent is ready.

The astonishing thing with the Halo franchise is that 343 kept being given chances to go again, and again, when it clearly just wasn't working. By the time they get round to releasing a great new Halo people that loved the original will be taking out their pensions.

It cannot be understated the extent to which the console industry, including third party publishers and devs, needs Sony and Microsoft to both stay competitive. In that light the drastic moves being done at MS are long overdue, but maybe not sufficient. It's also an open question if consoles (outside of the Nintendo universe, which is a very different audience) have a future at all.

In the games industry I was tech lead of teams of hundreds of devs and had to deal with their estimates of this sort on a daily basis. 6-10 weeks for a total renderer rewrite is on the low end.

But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!

Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.

Even those of us that are pro AI need to acknowledge this is the current reality.

The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.

The whole "multiplatform" portability business has been one of the most conspicuous victims of the agent wave. Porting is now primarily a QA exercise, not a development one. (Development too, generally, is heading that way).

The problem all these products have is these blog posts that describe in enough detail what the patterns are, out of necessity, also provide the information for the product to be cloned into a form that is then more dynamic and malleable for use by other developers.

It's clearly existential for JetBrains, and it's revealing that the opening goes for the fear with "but it hasn’t changed what it costs to be wrong" while ignoring that this hasn't exactly been a major concern for most software people for a scarily long time, including JetBrains themselves.

The Claude models definitely felt more susceptible to moods, like you could leave them for a few hours, come back and it suddenly was unable to do things which it was doing just earlier, which tellingly is never an experience I've had with an open model.

Honestly I lost patience with Anthropic both clearly messing around with things like this and their agitation over regulation. They aren't good actors, and quite why so many blindly trust them with their company crown jewels is a mystery.

Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene.

Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.

What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.

Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy.

I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.

So when we could move to Dell we did.

Yes, in my case "intuition" comes a lot from visualizing things spatially, manipulating them, and being able to capture their properties in equations/proofs, and it's that which is (currently) conspicuously missing when dealing with LLMs. (And may yet appear with world models).

With the alternate view of intuition that many of you are describing it is clear LLMs are somewhat either there or heading there now.

Yes, I think the augmentation of LLMs with (hopefully eventually higher dimensional) world models will prove very interesting for all this.

> Maybe LLMs do not need intuition because they can scale their “cognitive capacity” with hardware and brute force their way through these problem spaces.

My view is that is certainly true of smaller LLMs but becomes less true as they scale up.

To quote the parent bananaflag in a sub-comment:

> I believe the LLM weights have some internal representation of math in the same way brains do that allow them to produce proofs

I think as the sort of spare space adjacent to pure language processing in LLMs grows the probability of the sort of reasoning bananaflag is getting at (or spatial reasoning, or anything else) emerging in that space grows enormously.

One of the questions for AI development over the coming months or years is going to be if deliberately cultivating the architecture of those sub models for specific reasoning types beats any emergent reasoning mechanisms or not.

You realize the commenter has now confirmed my interpretation was right?

What is up with this whole sub thread of obvious hole digging?

That's easy: basically all the spatial ones.

I used to be a game dev, and one of the interview questions someone came up with consisted of working out the surface area of a variant of Menger sponge to some given level of depth. The bifurcation for people that could do this vs those that couldn't was incredible, and did not follow obvious trends for academic achievement. (The same interview also included the gem "How wide is a pointer?" which also catches a frightening number of people).

Appreciate the clarification, even if I disagree!

I think we differ on what "mathematical intuition" is then. I've seen people that do well in undergrad math degrees simply by massively memorising things and learning how to join them up to some level of degrees-of-separation, but seemingly completely fail to understand, for ezample, why even calculus is how it is. Because they are able to regurgitate the results and "produce proofs" this is never questioned.

The Euclid example also shows my bias towards spatial intuition of mathematical concepts (which is deeply unfashionable) but also exposes exactly where at least current LLMs break down; they do the symbol based pattern matching version, but they cannot leap outside of that, at least today.

Why? The entire subject of conversation is triggered by things which are not humans producing proofs.

If it's possible for a machine to produce a proof without intuition then clearly a human could also do it too. (And in fact I'd argue I've seen many people like that, simply very good at pattern matching over memorised items).