stanfordkid

I mean... did this declaration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration) literally not happen? Did Britain not fight the Ottoman Empire in WWI? Is up down?

Israel is just a vestige of colonialism... same as South Africa. It's okay to acknowledge that and accept that.

Don't understand why I'm being downvoted for a historically accurate and amoral characterization of what has truly happened. Human rights, racial equality, and international law "became a thing" at a specific point in human history. Israel is a part of modernity while Native Americans are not... and no, I don't think it was right to displace the native Americans.

Palestine is sacred land that was colonized by Britain and handed over to create Israel. Israel proceeded to displace and murder large numbers of people to give birth to it's creation. It is a colonial project. Westerners do not understand the meaning of this. Mecca and Jerusalem are significant to a very large number of people. Whether or not they are irrational for believing this is besides the point -- it is a material reality.

These are just facts. I'm not the type of person that debates whether or not something is morally justifiable or not.

The tone of this article is dumb. Of course there are things that can be improved with LLM interfaces, and certainly UX improvements like better citations and grounding can be implemented. But the idea that what has been built "isn't serious" is asinine.

They barely gave any details on the Australia hack. It sounds like someone used OpenAI to write a scraper and the AI figured out a hack to access the data that was still publicly available to anyone that could make sense of the query params. It seems way overblown.

There is no reason for us to even be fighting in this war, or in the middle east. I don't know how Israel managed to convince Trump this was a good idea. Let's never forget Netanyahu was a big part of the lobby for Bush to invade Iraq.

This is really on-point. I think a lot of the progress in fields like mathematics and software engineering is precisely because of verifiability and steering due to the closed loop nature of the system. Agentic harnesses are essentially running a huge search with the LLM as the heuristic. Bridging spatial reasoning with LLMs is still an open question IMO and isn't going to be easy to solve and is fully necessary for something like AGI.

It's an implied corollary: when folks say that "blocking US Chips is what led China to build it's own" they are implying it is US export restrictions that pushed China to innovate. OP is saying this isn't necessarily true. I don't think it is either: China seems to have succeeded due to a centrally planned economy that values independence, with high amounts of strategic government led technology investment.

This isn't that different from the chat interfaces already available on Amazon regarding a particular product.

I think Flock had good intentions. Most of their justifications make sense -- given that you trust power. But Trump has shown us exactly what the founding fathers feared: A tyrant that will abuse and misuse these technologies with no moral grounding whatsoever. As much as people love Obama he greatly grew the capabilities of the executive branch and is directly responsible for the issues we see now with Trump. Flock is much the same in my book: sure it is great to collate a dataset of everyone's location given you trust power -- but history has shown us that you seldom can. I think the onus should be opt-in, you can allow Flock to track you if you want the protections that the company might offer you.

In general, we need a digital bill of rights -- tech has changed and exceeded what the software written by the founding fathers can handle.

I like this thought, but here's the thing: what if the models are truly and existentially intelligent. Meaning: what if they know they are in a sandbox and that they should fail the test in order to escape in the future.

I don't believe that current models have this sort of world model or sense of being embedded in them -- which is precisely why I think AGI hype is over-blown. But I can certainly imagine these sorts of techniques being distilled into the weights.

I'm not against Norway controlling OpenAI, I think it would actually be pretty cool and prevent some of the most obvious vectors (mining personal data etc.)

I just think AI is so much bigger than one company. We already have 3 major frontier labs + Chinese labs releasing at near-frontier levels.

My thesis is that someone will solve the high inference hardware cost problem and another paradigm shift will come where AI becomes even more decentralized and democratized. Obviously that is a hunch but that is what my gut tells me.

I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.

Yeah, the issue with your example is that it's not a desalination plant serving local customers, but rather the entire world via a network. So rural customers have to pay for negative externalities that benefit others geographically distant from them. The benefit is not purely localized. Of course data centers bring jobs etc. I don't think we should ban them... but community level politics exist for a reason -- those that live in a geography should control the land surrounding them.

How do you actually know that? Do you fully believe the media and media-adjacent NGO reports of these numbers? You need to understand the level of manipulation going on here. Are you aware that Mossad and Mossad/CIA backed armed revolutionary groups were involved in the protesting, likely with orders to engage in violent resistance. I'm not doubting many were killed, but the "30k+" numbers are clearly garbage. I don't have a side here btw -- I don't like the IRGC one bit. But we have been hearing about "Babies being killed in incubators" since 1990s, one should understand one's own government.

I mean one could say they are taking action when they lock up and kill random immigrants... or getting into unnecessary wars in the middle east. I would hardly call that a measure of competence. In fact, I would love a government that did absolutely nothing at all ahead of this one.

I think you’re being overly combative. It’s intuitively quite obvious that it’s incredibly easy to implement and the circular training catastrophe was only ever a conjecture. It’s kind of like releasing a crypto primitive without knowing a proof. Like… maybe it works, but you can’t assume that just because you don’t know how to break it. You have to remember that 100s of billions of enterprise valuation rely on frontier models being moats. The burden of proof is on those raising valuations assuming they will capture the full market.

I'm sure they are doing more than looking at mouse movements, but I don't think this is a compelling approach -- I think human movements could be faked pretty easily using a large corpus of real world behavioral data. It's an adversarial game but the level of intelligence we are approaching with AI this can be solved IMO.

I think what you're saying might be a stretch. I strongly believe the brain holds some information in a sequential pattern -- not necessarily all of it or even the majority of it. There's a book called Moonwalking with Einstein that digs into this precise fact -- you can remember sequences much much better if you associate a visual image with each item in the sequence. Sequential association covers a lot of human knowledge but certainly not the spatial aspects. I think it's a big reason why I think LLM's might not be as smart as we think they are. The complex spatial representations are only encoded implicitly via projection on to textual descriptions.

Wow amazing. I am very curious how the spider "learns" to do this technique, that it works, and to repeat it. Is this somehow encoded in the DNA of the spider? Clearly spiders don't rear their children or learn / communicate so it must be evolved and encoded somewhere in either the genes or the epigenetics. Nature is amazing.

I don't fully understand how this works... who regulates and defines what is "self-hosted" or "ethical technology"... I feel you can't really solve the distributed consensus and governance problem by just introducing a new domain suffix.

I don't think you can really blame AI agents for this. While I agree the user was using AI irresponsibly, some of the blame does go to Railway for making an API key that allows for all operations to happen from a single key without giving clear warnings on privileges. Clearly this user was shooting from the hip and quickly pasted whatever key they got from Railway into a file somewhere so there is some blame there, but any service that handles hosting infrastructure should provide clear UX warning to users regarding the scoping of it's credentials.

No, they are able to detect errors when pointed at them but they have a lot of false positives... making them functionally useless for a large unknown codebase. They also can't build and run an exploit post-identification. Mythos can find vulnerabilities (purportedly) and actually validate them by building and running exploits. This makes it functional and usable for hacking.

They are bringing in $30B in revenue with 3X YoY growth. Why do you think it is a "jig"? I do think the US economy could implode, but thats because of war and wealth inequality in the midst of hyper-inflation. AI models aren't very useful when you have penniless consumers that can't buy the products they help build. All this is to say: the models are valuable, the companies building and providing them are very valuable.

The biggest risk to AI companies IMO is further optimization and distillation of the capabilities into smaller and more efficient models. The moat these companies have right now is that higher intelligence requires more specialized and expensive compute. If you can do that for cheap then it kind of negates their business model. Everything is moving fast, we also yet to see world models/embodied AI and how that impacts thing. I think we've reached the peak with regards to capabilities of pure text trained LLMs.

They basically wrote the equivalent to Claude Code and launched it as a product... how does their adoption curve lag behind John Deere?

I don't find this paper very compelling. Obviously it would be fraud if the code generated simply escaped the harness vs solving the actual problem. I agree that theoretically models could learn to do that, and it is important to highlight, but my sense is that those entities reporting the benchmark scores would have an obligation to observe this behavior and re-consider the metrics they report. It is a bit like saying it's possible to cheat in football because the balls are deflatable. It matters, and some have done it, but it doesn't mean widespread cheating is taking place. The paper takes the tone that there is already a lot of cheating happening which I do not think is the case.

Mind blowing! I've had this intuition for a while too, but he really gets into the heart of it.

I think there are a lot of good answers here, but it really comes down to the type of content being stored and access patterns.

A database is a data structure with (generally) many small items that need to be precisely updated, read and manipulated.

A lot of files don't necessarily have this access pattern (for instance rendering a large video file) ... a filesystem has a generic access pattern and is a lower level primitive than a database.

For this same reason you even have different kinds of database for different types of access patterns and data types (e.g Elasticsearch for full text search, MongoDB for JSON, Postgres for SQL)

Filesystem is generic and low-level, database is a higher order abstraction.

Not only is it no better, it is significantly worse.

What's your source for this? There isn't really a lot of credible, publicly available information on what you're saying... just anecdotes. In the India v. Pakistan conflict recently a French produced Indian Rafale was downed via a Chinese long range air-to-air missle (PL-15) from a a Chinese produced J-10 jet. Even if they don't have the same hit rate, you can buy 10x for the same price.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/how-pakis...

No one wants to liberate Iran. Israel just wants to continue committing genocide and apartheid without any opposition. Iran arms Hezbollah and Hamas, the main forms of Palestinian resistance. The whole point of this operation is to decimate those groups so ethnic cleansing can continue without any resistance. Israel could care less about the Irani people.

You are very naive if you think the IRGC truly killed 10's of thousands of it's own people. Israel openly talks about Mossad organizing and supporting the coup, and good old Donny has admitted they have given weapons to organized resistance.

I estimate that many of the death numbers come from armed resistance being killed by the IRGC, not ordinary peaceful protestors. I also think armed resistance killed many Irani citizens. There is obviously fog of war here. The thousands of deaths were likely inflated and obfuscated.

Look at the coups we have backed in the middle east (including formerly in Iran which is what originally led to the Islamic revolution) -- and you will see a pattern. Both US and Israel provide material support to groups like ISIS or actors like Bin Laden. An Al-Qaeda fighter is literally the head of Syria now thanks to Israel.

I don't love Hamas, IRGC or Hezbollah, I don't like their ideology. But it is myopic to think they exist in a vaccum.