Diogenesian
Thariq wrote "personal software was a bit early in 2020 but in 2026, it really can be as personal as a home cooked meal, or a handwritten letter."
Ugh. The most depressing thing about the AI boom is watching tech people devalue human experience.
On the other side of the AI-reasoning fence, the disdain seems to be mutual. “These ‘scientific’ papers from last summer — I would put this in big, big air quotes,” said Sébastien Bubeck, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff (and a prominent evangelist for the company’s reasoning models among scientists and mathematicians). He called earlier Apple results critiquing AI reasoning “wrong,” claiming that they were due to a training quirk in models that are now obsolete. “Modern models starting with GPT-5.5 do not suffer from this issue,” he said. “It would be interesting to revisit those results.” (Apple did not make its researchers available for interviews.)
The “think” part is what OpenAI, for one, is doubling down on. When I asked Bubeck if the splashy unit distance proof was produced with methods outside the LRM’s own chain of thought — perhaps with Lean verifying its results — he seemed to find the question almost nonsensical.
“It’s not like we’re making a mystery of it,” he said. “We have released the chain of thought. You can just go and look at it. The whole point is that the model is reasoning like a human would. And when humans reason, we don’t use Lean.” Technically, OpenAI released a “rewritten summary” of the model’s chain of thought produced by two human experts using Codex, another OpenAI model. Since 2024, the company has not publicly revealed “raw” chains of thought from its reasoning models, a policy also adopted by Google DeepMind and Anthropic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/leopold-aschenbrenners-hedge...
I thought they were referring to the inability of the aliens to make an accurate calendar.
Or, alternatively: refuse to accept a Lean program as a valid proof. I assume LLMs are pretty good at Lean -> mathematical English in LaTeX.
Edit: oops, see the reply below... and my grumpy response. I seriously forgot about that entire plot point.
More significantly: many major advances in scientific or mathematical programming were heralded as a thinking computer! 50's numerical scientific programming, 60's Lisp+ symbolic programming, 70's logic and symbolic algebraic programming, 80's unifying all this with encyclopedias and NLP like Mathematica - all of this is clearly useful and cool, all designed to offload intelligence... and, with modern eyes, we see plainly that not a single shred of intelligence is required to execute any of it. The AI researchers of yesteryear consistently made cool computer programs and consistently overestimated their progress at cracking human intelligence. It is plain as day to me that ANN researchers are making precisely the same scientific and philosophical mistakes as yesteryear's symbolics researchers, and even Alan Turing. This does not diminish from the coolness of the computer programs. But pretending these systems are intelligent, even "verbally" intelligent, is bad for society.
It's bad for computer science, too. None of the progress in LLMs or ANNs gets us any closer to making a robot as smart as a cockroach. I doubt any of us will live to see that milestone.
But even for a steel and concrete datacenter you would want a few carpenters for the interior where humans (at least occasionally) work, more to help with scaffolding and other temporary buildings (e..g housing) during construction, and building framing for drainage ditches and other landscaping. I imagine wood-and-nails carpenters are quite in-demand for most datacenter projects.
Note I said "meaningfully" - something with LLMs that deeply concerns me is that they provide edutainment, and people actually think they're learning something. One of the comments on this thread mentioned giving a "dense linear algebra pdf" and having an LLM use the Socratic method. I guarantee they would have learned more if they read the PDF. I strongly doubt they learned anything at all with a bunch of silly "Socratic" questions about linear algebra. But it felt like they learned something!
Despite HAWK having survived two rounds of expert human review over a period of two years, Mythos was able to improve the best-known attack on it in just 60 hours of work—effectively cutting its key strength in half.
Mythos’s attack works by finding a specific, previously unexploited symmetry called a nontrivial automorphism in the lattice used by HAWK. Prior work proved that efficiently finding such an automorphism would permit an attack, but did not answer if such an automorphism was accessible in the lattice used by HAWK. The automorphism discovered by Mythos allows a faster enumeration attack that, while still exponential, means that one needs to double the size of HAWK keys to achieve the same level of security.
...and it is kind of incredible to think that they spent $100,000 over 3 days looking for an automorphism. Not the possibility of an automorphism, that was already known. Man.
[1] ... or focusing too hard on the strange use of mathematical language...
The mean value theorem isn't true for the computable reals, differentiation of computable function isn't always computable, sequences tend to behave poorly, etc. There's still a lot you can say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis but in general calculus doesn't care about computability, that's a human problem.
However, the real issue, as always completely unaddressed, isn't attempting to make a gague-invariant theory of qualia, or even defining what "qualia" is (I am totally unconvinced it is an EM field, there must be an epigenetic component). The first step is defining what "consciousness" is! Is it awareness of qualia or awareness of reality? These are not the same thing. It seems significant that any animal I would call a little conscious, even ants, are capable of being startled or curious when their sensations mismatch or incompletely describe reality (and animals that lack any sense of curiosity are at most borderline conscious). Curiosity and surprise[1] seems hard to convey in an EM field. Qualia strikes me as a somewhat technical problem of neuroscience, and the "hard problem of consciousness" is unscientific BS. The simplest basics aren't understood, which leads to totally unhinged statements like "in some ways a thermostat is conscious" because in some ways it seems to fit the hard problem. But statements like that are ideologically motivated by a sort of tech futurism: rationally, we should be deeply skeptical of an account of consciousness which insists that clocks perceive the flow of time.
[1] There's an information-theoretic version of surprise which intuitively describes "surprising" data. A sudden bright light has high surprise and is certainly surprising. A sudden realization that the vine you're leaning on is a large snake might involve very low information-theoretic surprise... and is far more alarming. So how do you systematically quantify this second form of surprise?
Yes, that's why I'm careful to qualify it with "technological", which is by implication the whole thing we do with metals and minerals and oil and all that stuff.
In particular, there don't seem to have been any dinosaurs that had anything like primate hands, so they would have never built real tools or weapons, or manipulated fires. That doesn't close off the possibility of an "advanced civilization" unless you mean "uses tools as fancy as ours." We don't actually know what 200,000 years of natural domestication would look like.
Of course we haven't discovered everything. But it seems very likely that if there were a civilization's worth of slag from 500m years ago, we would have discovered it.
A more interesting question is the civilizational technology of domestication, especially since that is short-term technology coupled with long-term evolution. It does seem possible (but purely fantastical) that Earth had talking dinosaurs with sophisticated ideologies and mythologies, feeding dumber dinosaurs and curating the growth of nutritious plants, the descendants of which all died 65m years ago.
This is snarky but I am grumpy: I wonder if there's a correlation between me refusing to use LLMs and me being happy to read a novella-sized PDF about them.
It seems like me insisting that LLMs are stochastic parrots [presumably that's what you're mad about] is beginning to draw personal attacks on totally unrelated threads. Happens a lot. I used to have an account here with my name on it. HN is simply not a safe place to disagree with prevailing tech ideology.