kenjackson

She isn’t as big on P(DOOM), but she does worry about things like biological weapons or autonomous war vehicles. Her take is that they are worse than useless, but can be actively harmful.

It’s seems Timnit more thinks it’s dangerous (and she may be right). Emily may more be caught up in years of linguistic domain expertise that AIs seem to have just leaped over.

In fairness this is the boring stuff for a lot of people. :-)

Turns out that humans aren’t great at comprehensively consistently searching known search spaces.

Can someone post an event poster that they think is incredible? These posters all look fine to me, but the comments seem to know much better ones - but at least in my memory I can’t recall any much better.

"How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale? "

Honestly, this is because its something that is basically never discussed or reasoned about. The closest I can think of is "personal use vs commercial use". But I'd love to see more about how to reason about how laws change at scale.

> this is ABSOLUTELY not how actual mathematicians see their field

While this might be true, I think this is the big pivot that will need to happen. Math, as a human endeavor, will all be applied. We will use LLMs to do the math and discover the math, and humans will apply it to whatever problem they are working on (likely using another LLM to integrate it).

How does 1password get replaced with a Google search? I assume he built his own 1password system...

There's a key phrase you may have missed.

"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."

The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.

If the point of math is understanding then maybe our incentive structure is wrong. Maybe it should be teaching the concepts to as many people as possible rather than just continuing to write papers that 10 people in the world understand, which is the current state of a lot of math.

But one of the things AI also excels in is summarizing and can do so hierarchically. One of my favorite things to do with a concept I'm new at is "ELI5" then "explain like I'm a high school student" then "explain like a bright undergrad in XYZ" then "explain to a working professional in this domain". It's a lot of steps, but I've found it very effective (for me) to learn with -- and I've done something similar with code and math (although not math proofs -- I'm not a mathematician). But my point is that I think we can use AI to also teach us these proofs they're building in a way that I don't understand today about human proofs.

If we use AI well here we could actually understand math much better than we do now.

Best is a relative statement of quality. And in this case reflects the lack of alternatives more than anything else. But if there are better please let me know.

Maybe I have been. And how was Jaguar impacted? I haven’t seen a Jaguar ad in a decade, and almost as long one of their cars.

It does appear there have been some people who have looked at this before but it’s unclear how many(here’s an example of a request from readers in 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm).

That said there is another controversy brewing with this that is best summarized here: https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...

Honestly, I suspect most people will have no idea about these ads. I know I don’t.

Yes the Sketcher slip ons have been a game changer. Also their shoe laces seem to be constructed so that the knot doesn’t untie over time. I had a single knot lace that stayed intact over four months of daily wear.

Most comfortable shoes ever? Maybe not. But probably top 5-10 in my lifetime.

Yes. I forgot about that section. That is probably the one thing that the AI companies can and should do better on.

I didn't know this article was about that issue at all. Yeah, if the issue is properly citing work then yes, OpenAI needs to do that. But the article read like it was tackling a completely different issue.

"how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place."

That sounds like an "us problem", not an AI or OpenAI/Anthropic problem.

Good essay. The author seems to recognize his hypocrisy and why there won't be a lot of sympathy from society.

As someone who wrote his first program in 1980, I've actually been really excited about AI. This morning I already wrote two web apps for my kids. I was never a web developer, so I most of the dev work I did was in the service of backends or low level stuff -- but I rarely ever connected it to anything I could use day to day.

Now I write programs daily that I use. An example from this morning, my son is working through a workbook, but the answers are all on one page, but its hard to look at an answer and not see other answers. So I made a simple web page where you give the problem number and it gives you the answer. Super simple, but ended up being exactly what he needed. I'm finding that I'm just crafting up these 5 minute to 60 minute projects several times per day. Things where in the past I'd just say, "too bad" -- now I'm like... "hmm... what does a solution to this look like?!"

So I'm not writing much code any more, but I don't know if I'm having any less fun.

I update my phone now when the battery requires two full charges to 100% to last throughout the day. But there's no feature I'm looking for. My current phone is a 13 -- so I guess it lasted five years, which seems crazy long for it to be perfectly fine from a functionality perspective.

Everyone in my family wants one... assuming it works well. We spend a lot of time on our phones, and a lot watching video. This seems like the ideal device for that.

Strongly agree. And as one of the major AI companies, this is extremely tone deaf. If they saw a human (even if assisted) was making great progress on a major problem then you give them space. You don’t swoop in with millions in token spend to scoop them. There are tons of important problems where humans aren’t making traction - please go solve those.

But you’re seeing huge effects in three years, not a generation.

The report notes “The change in mean scores that can be explained merely by the changing composition of the student body, however, never exceeds a few points.”

So for Portugal for example about 10% of the drop might be attributable to immigration. But the other 90% to something else.

Not that quickly though.

What a great story! I'm not sure why I felt teary eyed reading it, but I was. If you're here in the comments but haven't read it -- it is worth the read.

The problem with school children is most books that are assigned have no volta for them. Part of it is that modern storytelling has a much quicker volta through tv, movies, YouTube and now shorts. It’s hard to justify to a kid a 90 minute buildup to possible payoff vs getting it in five seconds for a 2 minute video.

I actually started by saying "reasoning" is a strong statement because as you note, it's really not reasoning. It's about intuition. And yes, if you've seen it before then intuition doesn't play a role. But if you haven't had sufficient experience with it, even if you know "double each square", and even if I walk you through the first ten squares on the chess board "OK, now we're at $10.24 cents... and we're at $10 million dollars with the other method -- it's not looking too good for the doubling method is it!?".

But a philosophical question is, with sufficiently large memory -- does almost everything just reduce to a measure of memory?

Reasoning is a strong statement here. But it is fair to say that it usually is not intuitive to us.

An example is if I gave you a huge sheet of thin paper (huge so that folding isn’t an issue) - how many times could you fold it in half until you couldn’t physically do it anymore? Could you do at least 10? Try this with random people and you’d be surprised how many say they could do 10 easily.

Or the chess board question. Works to rather get the financial equivalent of starting with a penny and then doubling it for every square on the board or a million dollars for each square? Again, if you ask people to pick one without giving them the time to work it out they will usually pick the million dollar per square.

Can definitely write college level essays and have for a while. The jobs is that when LLMs first started getting popular, but aren’t quite common professors were that some of the worst students in class started writing the best essays. Now everyone complains because they can detect the slop, but most human writing is so bad. But the really good human writing is still much better.