aanet

Tech leaders have lost touch with people. And the top leaders — take your pick — have normalized shitty behavior.

I used to think Proton was good.

Not so, anymore.

I’m not supporting their products anymore. Cancelling my subscription

Now confirmed.

I also find LLM-voices extremely jarring, boring, and dense. And very, umm, mechanical, if you will.

But I want to make an observation.

Folks are not-Ok reading the LLM’s output for prose.

But folks are completely Ok, even downright blind, to accepting LLM-output of code.

I see that dichotomy everywhere.

LLM-driven code: great, valuable, all-ok LLM-driven prose: not ok

Understood completely that the audience for consumption is two completely different entities (machines vs humans) but something about this doesn’t sit right with me.

More particularly: if we don’t prefer LLM-prose, why should we prefer LLM-code ??

Anybody else feels that ??

...that it makes the $5K Mac look more palatable

I truly love it when I see fractal broccoli (so pretty I dont want to eat it, lest I disturb the beautiful pattern), the golden spirals in sunflowers and aloe plants (one of my fav!!), the arrangement of ferns, the hexagonal cloud storms on Jupiter, the musical notes that are euphonious, the geometric structures of snowflakes (so many different kinds!!), and on and on...

Marcus du Satoy is a wonderful writer and science communicator. I've loved his _Music of the Primes_. Highly recommended!

...

> The resulting documents reveal:

    > Explicit plans by Meta to discredit psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been raising alarms about social media and youth mental health. 

    > Frustration by internal researchers because Meta lawyers were stopping them from researching youth mental health and their platforms. (Why would lawyers stop these studies? Because they risk finding something. The researchers respond by asking "“if the study only included questions about social support/positive outcomes would legal approve?”)

    > Explicit plans to work with the National Academies of Sciences on social media and youth mental health with goals to “get credit” for proposing the assessment and “greatly shape the nature of the questions they will explore.”

    > Alternative plans to work with another group if they cannot adequately influence NAS research, and “ensure product feature evaluations are excluded” (i.e., their product features that might be causing harm)

    > Discussions of which study questions are most likely to yield benefits for the company

> Although the new result doesn’t necessarily translate to a transformative breakthrough about P versus NP, the potential effects are so sweeping that OpenAI has tapped outside experts to vet its claim. Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi, two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, who first suggested ETH, as well as Ryan Williams, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are now working with OpenAI to perform an independent investigation of the result. The company will also sponsor a computer science conference about the proof as part of this investigation, according to Williams.

> The result hasn’t been without controversy, either. Mere hours after OpenAI’s announcement, Anthropic posted its own independent result disproving ETH, based on work by an internal Anthropic model.

Anthropic's result: https://hexagonmath.org/2610.00577v1

WTF

Of course, somebody had to do it. (not mine)

> Thus, the promotion of AI music-generation software tacitly construes music-making as what I’ll call a “purely telic” activity. (I’m drawing on the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya’s discussion of “telic” activities here, telos as in “end” or “goal”, in his excellent book Midlife.) A purely telic activity is one directed at a terminal state of having done something (the “telic” part), where the activity has no value beyond that of achieving the terminal state (the “purely” part). Construed as a purely telic activity, music-making has no value over and above that of having produced a piece of music, and so the more efficiently you can get to that point, the better. AI music generators make perfect sense on this view. The problem, of course, is that the purely telic view of music-making is false. For a musician, the point of making music isn’t merely to end up having made a piece of music: the actual making is part of the point.

Curious to hear more about the stack for your blog? Thanks

A bulk of my retirement (and non-retirement) account is in S&P500 index funds, along with other, tech-heavy investments (VGT, AAPL, GOOG, some NVDA, BRKB, etc). Every time I've diversified (whether on emerging markets or FTSE or elsewhere), I've "lost", so to say, compared to the S&P500 (and tech, of course).

Which is why the bigger question above ^^ is top of mind.

I dont have any great answers myself :-/ Just hoping to hear different perspectives.

Thanks

[update] And how does the selling affect your tax liability (of course it does)

Realizing (not just now, btw) that some folks have such a complex setup in their home networks... Make me go :wide_eyed.gif:

I dont even know half (most?!) of the apps/services listed there, let alone know why one would use, or even self-host, them..

/Aside

https://theonion.com/man-who-drinks-5-diet-cokes-per-day-hop...

How soon till we know any concrete results??

And not just at that AI company. At every AI company.

Workplace monitoring was already draconian...

/s

> A paper called “On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices” would not normally attract headlines. But when it was posted on social media this week by another researcher in the field, online observers took note for an unusual reason: The author, John Urschel, had a previous life as a professional football player for the Baltimore Ravens.

> Urschel, 35, is now a tenure-track professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He quit football in 2017, partly over concerns about sustaining the kind of traumatic, degenerative brain injuries that have scarred a generation of players in the National Football League. He went on to finish his PhD in mathematics, wrote a memoir and now says he’s enjoying life as a regular mathematician in the academic sanctuary of Cambridge, Massachusetts, far from the spotlight.

His paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06785