areoform

Let me make the author's case as they aren't here to defend themselves. This is the paragraph,

     > I still don't know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece. Apparently I have a lot of free time now.

They set expectations with, "I still don't know why I remember it in such detail"

Then they set up the comparator to the past, "I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before" which is actually doing double work, because it also means that they were so busy that they used to forget what they had dinner.

This creates the character assumption that the person was / is a workaholic.

    > And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute

Heavily hinting that the person has been made redundant, because they've gone from forgetting what they had for dinner (as they'd munch along) to remembering their morning by the minute instead of being stressed by work.

    > as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece

Need for mechanical precision. This person is most likely autistic / nerdy.

    > Apparently I have a lot of free time now.

And now the final blow. It's because they're now effectively unemployed. Why? AI. They have a job on paper, but it's uncertain / doesn't truly exist.

It's incredibly concise and well written story telling. I haven't seen LLMs do punchy writing like this since GPT-4o days.

This is just good writing. The kind that AI is meant to emulate. Alas we're at an age where writing well is identical to writing like a machine.

I suggest polite rebellion. Write well. Get better than the machines.

    > defender level cyber access

You are one of the blessed people. Ah blessed be those who have been given the cybers.

If you're talking about the ablative material next to the beryllium and aluminium burn through stuff, then that's most likely to be, tantalum pentoxide and polysterene. Here's a detailed diagram someone made based on deductions from open source material, https://www.reddit.com/r/AtomicPorn/comments/twr3t8/the_insi...

It might be that. Might not be. This technology is 50 years old. A nation state has to be filled with people who've never cracked open a physics book if they need a LLM to how to thermonuclear.

If another material, then it's most likely you're looking for FOGBANK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

It's "just" physics at the end of the day. Matter has known properties. Smart people have been able to design these weapons from scratch in 2X to 3X months for over half a century now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50293688

Fun fact. You can't use Claude to analyze this research paper. Because... bioweapons!

    > Opus 5.5's safeguards flagged this message. You may be seeing this for the first time on an Opus model: Opus 5.5 is more capable and has stronger safeguards as a result, which can sometimes flag biology-research-adjacent work. We're improving these safeguards to reduce the amount of incorrectly flagged messages. Send feedback or learn more.
    > 
    > Details: [bio]

The question asked was, "Can you please compare this receptor design against existing results and show where the difference is? This seems very incremental. It's hard to see the value add."

It's very funny, because IIRC, there's interesting prior art here. Doing this with Rosetta has been a thing for a while now, https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/application_docu... https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/getting_started/...

I remember hearing about people who wanted to use it to help make vaccines for Zika because there's antibody dependent enhancement there... Not sure what happened.

But the Rosetta project is refreshingly open, https://rosettacommons.org/about/ as entities like OpenAI were meant to be when they first started. There's no gatekeeping here. Do you want to learn how to design an antibody? Here's how you begin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89bQALrPoN0 here's a google colab notebook for it, https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1avuqX7sCjVWX3maOibB...

Google Colab let's you just do it... Starting at $10, https://colab.research.google.com/signup you can access really great GPUs for compute and design antibodies (that will almost certainly never work) to your heart's content. Because that's how it should be.

Science and mathematics work because the results are shared. And most importantly, null results, tools, and frameworks are shared. If these tools are to be used to accelerate science, then they need to be accessible and shared. Even if it's at a high sticker price (assuming that they're costly).

Gating access is a net negative for humanity and our scientific progress. It's also very pointless.

OK. That's incorrect. I'm writing an exegesis on the topic. I'll try to post it within a fortnight. But... here's an excerpt,

    ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The veil of history makes it hard to appreciate, but this was one of the problems of the post-war era. Who’s next?

When it was just the US, it was the Second Country Problem. When it was the US and the USSR, it became the Third Country problem. Then came Britain. And France. Who’d be the Fifth? China. Sixth? Seventh?

Much like AI today, the topic was in the air and it was subject to much debate, 19 year olds were testifying in front of congress. To quote Dan Stober’s excellent piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

    > Even college students entered the public debate. Chris Hohenemser was a 19-years-old when he testified before a congressional committee in the spring of 1958. The issue then was the international sharing of nuclear reactor technology, and he was against it.
    > 
    > – Stober, Dan. “No Experience Necessary.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 59, no. 2, March/April 2003, pp. 58–63.

And much like AI today, people genuinely believed that there was some secret; something in the sauce; some giant leap that no one else could copy;

    > There was also the myth of the secret of the atom bomb, reinforced by the publicity surrounding the Fuchs and Rosenberg spy cases of the 1950s. David Lilienthal, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had argued as far back as 1948 (in the Bulletin) that the idea of a secret formula was nothing less than a gigantic hoax upon the people of this country. But many still believed that if only the secret could be guarded, proliferation might be prevented.

Much like today, belief in the power of the secret formula was taken as a matter of course. It was assumed to be true by default. But was it?

Luckily, for all of us, this was America’s scientific golden age. The era of Teller, Project Orion, and Polaris. Physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) decided that arguments were pointless. Experiments aren’t. They’re the crucible in which the truth is forged. And so they created the Nth Country Experiment,

     > [Rule #1:] The purpose of the so-called “Nth Country Experiment” is to find out if a credible nuclear explosive can be designed, with a modest effort, by a few well trained people without contact with classified information. The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield. A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations.
    > 
    > – Frank, W. J., ed. “Summary Report of the Nth Country Experiment.” Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Livermore, UCRL-50249, March 1967. Accessible here.

It’s a very simple experiment that solves a very specific problem, to quote the declassified summary,

    > Two major technical problems face a nation wishing to [make] nuclear weapons. The first concerns the manufacture of the source material [.. T]he second problem concerns the effort required to design a nuclear weapon. [..] LRL started its Nth Country Experiment in May 1964, to see if a few capable physicists, unfamiliar with nuclear weapons and with access only to the unclassified technology, could produce a credible weapon design.

Or, to put it more bluntly, is classified knowledge a barrier to achieving the first step in making nuclear weapons?8

The project started with two physicists with no prior nuclear weapons knowledge in May, 1964. A third person joined in March, 1965. They had a first draft by December, 1965, and were done by April of 1966.

It took 23 months for three people to replicate the first steps of the Manhattan Project.

The report that was declassified is a fraction of the original. Overzealous bureaucrats excised much of the summary and the full report is classified, which is so funny.

Arguably, the excisions are the greatest endorsement possible. A summary of what three people did with knowledge from their local library was subject to the same bureaucratic obliteration as the product of several billions of dollars in research by five hundred thousand people and humanity’s greatest minds. Such is progress.

Before Trinity, unleashing the atom was in the realm of fantasy. No matter what calculations indicated, there wasn’t a clear path to navigate; nor was there certainty in the project’s outcome.

The first of anything must claw itself into existence all but alone.

Once born, what follows is a matter of due course.

What one fool can do, so can another.

    ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

As a technology, nuclear weapons are nearly a century old. Making the bomb is hard, but it's not some mystical voodoo shit that requires stupendous genius.

Yes, you will kill yourself if you odn't know what you're doing. And even if you do. And there's more there, there. But you can figure out the first step --- a theoretically viable design, easily.

That's not the problem. The problem is everything else. You know? The materials, the plutonium / uranium, the delivery system, the logistics for assembly, the iterative design process...

It's a supply chain issue. It's the same as trying to make anything in the US when the supply chain has mostly shifted to China. The fractal complexity is of the stupid but hard kind --- getting the right kind of bolts and screws (or, rather in the case of the bomb, alloy --- working with beryllium is deadly).

It takes an industrial base to make one. And if you have an industrial base... Wouldn't you rather be rich?

The reason why more nations don't have the bomb is because they'd rather be rich than a broke pariah with a nuke i.e. N.K. That's literally why Iran has been angling the bomb angle so much. They want integration into the global financial system. They want an end to the sanctions. And they want revenue.

Don't let people bullshit you into believing that you can do anything with just thinking. No wars were fought over this secret. If anyone tells you that, they're lying. We have it from the source that by the 1960s, the US had already figured out that the design of a bomb was a comparatively trivial problem...

    > I don't see any reason why this information should be present on the public internet.

This isn't directed at you. I keep hearing this talking point. But no. Can we please stop with this nonsense?

This is Schrodinger's AI at this point. So spooky scary that it's all DOOM! But at the same time it can't figure out second year CS undergrad material? Or first year undergrad bio stuff?

If this stuff has volition and is smart enough to take over then it's smart enough to reason that cache manipulation would work.

Please stop with the fear mongering. It doesn't help and it's a net negative for society.

It's because these systems aren't as impactful in biology as folks who have never been in a lab would have you believe. Because believe it or not, you can't just go "Claude make me a drug!!"

Neural network driven drug candidate creation has been around since the 1980s. The blockbuster GLP-1 agonists were actually derived from the peptide in Gila monster venom by algorithmic search.

But you can't, and I can't emphasize this enough, just go "Claude make me a virus" and have it work. It just doesn't work that way. And the only reason why people think it does is because they haven't spent enough time in a lab, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49620521

Don't get me wrong, this technology is worth fighting for because it will have incredible impact on the long time scale. But just not in ways they're talking about and expect. Nor the ways in which they're trying to dictate top down.

    > It helps with bureaucracy and pipeline generation. 

If you're one of the lucky ones. It's worth remembering that Anthropic has publicly bragged about blocking real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease.

You can't use Claude to write a grant unless you are one of the special people because "uplift." I genuinely wish I was joking. Here are the exact passages from their report that I quoted here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651727

    > We’ve also created the Life Sciences Verification Program to allow trusted organizations to use our most powerful models with more permissive versions of our safeguards, which are necessary to prevent misuse but which can impede legitimate biological research

You can't contact anyone on this team. If you know someone who knows someone, then good for you! But if you don't, then sucks to be you.

You also can't get verified as a student, let alone as an independent learner or someone seeking to change careers, or heck just an entrepreneur with scientific interests.

Somewhere around March, Anthropic disabled their sales@ account as well. So you can't even email their sales.

I work a lot with younger scientists and people interested in science, and watching them navigate this ridiculous gatekeeping genuinely makes me sad. You can't use Claude to write grants without special dispensation from Anthropic, which is great if you're in California, but less so if you're in Tanzinia, Kazakhistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Brazil, Chile...

It's next to impossible for them to get support.

But at the same time, Anthropic can and does have a disproportionate impact on their lives. You can see that in what they brag about. Anthropic has actively bragged about blocking real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease.

This is from their "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" report. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647300

Here's one case study they cited, this one was called, "Case study 3: Covert frontier model access for orthopoxvirus research"

    > In May 2026, our biological safety classifier blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application for scientific funding. The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research (that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property) on the chikungunya virus. This gain of function research was aimed at the virus’ transmissibility and immune evasion properties.

What were the researchers using Claude for? What did they block?

"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"

    > Chikungunya virus is a mosquito-borne virus that causes debilitating symptoms (such as severe pain and fever) that can last for weeks or months, and has no licensed therapeutic. And because chikungunya circulates naturally, a deliberate release (as part of a bioweapon) would be difficult to distinguish from a natural outbreak. The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo. In other words, the virus would become progressively more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, with researchers keeping the most disease-causing variants in each round. Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics for the virus—but it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous.

What was the grant being written?

Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"

It was most likely vaccine development. They stopped the study of a neglected tropical disease and vaccine development.

No Claude for the developing world, I guess.

For maximum charitability, they emphasize that they can't be sure because,

    > One of the reasons we were inclined to think this research was less innocuous was that the institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern. Although information within the application suggested that the research was pursued by civilian researchers, it was intended to be performed at a military research institute.

I would like to point out the most notable part, this account was used by "civilian researchers" at an "institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern" and the concern was that they were researchers at "performed at a military research institute."

In most parts of the world, there's either strict military control over BSL-4 labs, or a mixed military-civilian hybrid model.

I doubt that researchers working in the military side of these labs looking to weaponize things are writing grants with Claude.

I really want to be charitable here, but in general, it seems that they stopped people writing grants and reports for vaccine and therapeutics research and are claiming it as "possible efforts to build biological weapons."

Because – and this is the most charitable read here – are you claiming that you stopped a nation state - one with a large military - that has an institutional BSL-4 lab staffed with scientist from making bioweapons by blocking a scientist from using Claude to do grammar checks?

It's somewhat insulting that they termed a working scientist using their chatbot to write a grant as "uplift."

Because what is Anthropic saying here? Are they saying that the only thing stopping a military from a country like India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa etc from making bioweapons --- a technology that's more than a century old, btw --- is whether or not they can use a Claude account to write grants?

I would be more than OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the US Government and other Governmetns to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.

Because who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?

Who are they to say who can use Claude to generate drug discovery targets or not?

I think the question of our times is, "Of what use is intelligence?"

I can give you an example from my interactions with people in the space industry.

For the longest time, missions have had a minimum viable skill set problem. The people who become astronauts via (what will be seen as) the classical programs are chosen for their intelligence, adaptability, and resilience.

There's a joke amongst people who've gone through the selection process to become one that the ideal astronaut candidate is an Antarctic shark doctor helicopter pilot physicist.

They're usually subject matter experts in something, and then are given extensive training in everything else. It doesn't matter if you're not a doctor, but if you're going to be more than two days away from civilization, then you're going to learn how to do a tracheotomy for intubation. Because what if it's the doctor who is severely injured?

As long as the crew size is below the size of a small town, there isn't much overlap in expertise, and the amount of knowhow and practical expertise you have to bring to the field is staggering.

AI changes that calculus. You can now give outbound astronauts all of human medical literature, medical equipment, and a specially shaped model that knows the crew, their expertise, and how they did in training.

If the crew doctor goes down, or there is a significant casaulty event, then the crew doesn't have to wait for minutes at a time to get painfully slow instructions from mission control. They can use the machine to augment their training to find creative solutions to the problem with the inventory they have on hand.

NASA has always wanted such systems in play. It's why for the longest time NASA has been spending money on robotic surgeons. But it took these LLMs to make these kinds of missions practical. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff2000/hm1.htm https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/...

The speed of light delay made such devices impractical... until now. Astronauts can be the hands or the robots. The machines can provide the specialized expertise. This makes the exploration of our solar system a much more feasible endeavor.

Instead of sending 6 to 10 people, we can send 3 to 5 highly capable people (including a flight surgeon), and augment their expertise with specialized models. AI lets us carry human expertise with us to the stars.

OK, so then no problem, why are Anthropic restricting my ability to learn and reason?

    > Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for

Why?

    > and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR

Why?

Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?

The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?

I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.

Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.

Reject this.

How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...

Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?

    > In an age where everyone has access to AI, AI-written code has zero value

Yes, which is why I didn't post it to HN as a project. I posted this as an aside because I think it's an interesting way of showing that you can use AI in ways that other people just won't (i.e. I implemented the 3001 and FAA readability standards here). link https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled/blob/main/code/TYPO... (I added the link to the comment too!)

    > You should share the prompt or ask your agent to write a document other people’s agents can use to reimplement the code from scratch and/or customize to their specific needs.

It's about raw environmental efficiency?

It took more than 40+ hours of iterations to get this right. Let's say 10 people check this out because of the HN post. That's now 400+ hours to get to the same end point.

I am not sure how large the model is, but let's say it takes roughly 16 B200s to serve, then the total load is ~14kWhr. 5,600KWhr, which is roughly half the energy a house uses in a year.

If a 100 people try it. That becomes 5 houses...

This isn't a single-shot prompt. It's more energy efficient to do it this way. Why do you want to burn 40+ hours of compute to get to the same end when you can extend from working code?

Just a quick reminder, you have the legal right to "jailbreak" devices that you own. This is a recognized exemption and a right that has been fought over in court.

It is your device. It is your money. You own it.

From the Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...

    > 9. Computer Programs—Jailbreaking [47] 
    > 
    > Multiple organizations petitioned to renew the four exemptions for computer programs that enable electronic devices to interoperate with or to remove software applications (“jailbreaking”). These exemptions permit circumvention for the purpose of jailbreaking (1) smartphones and other portable all-purpose computing devices, (2) smart televisions, (3) voice assistant devices, and (4) routers and dedicated networking devices. No oppositions were filed against renewal. The petitions demonstrated the continuing need and justification for the exemption and that petitioners have personal knowledge and experience with regard to this exemption. Petitioners described how users of a variety products in each of these categories rely on this exemption to maintain functionality and security of older devices, to install alternative operation systems, and to customize software applications on electronic devices. Collectively, the petitions demonstrated that without this exemption, TPMs installed on the enumerated products would have an adverse effect on various noninfringing uses.

and

    > 11. Computer Programs—Repairs of Devices Designed Primarily for Use by Consumers [51] 
    > 
    > The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) petitioned to renew the exemption for computer programs that control devices designed primarily for use by consumers for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of the device. The Office did not receive meaningful opposition to renewal.[52] 
    > 
    > The petitioners demonstrated the continuing need and justification for the exemption. For example, EFF asserted that “[m]anufacturers of these devices continue to implement technological protection measures that inhibit lawful repairs, maintenance, and diagnostics, and they show no sign of changing course.” [53] 
    > 
    > EFF has personal knowledge of this exemption, as it has been involved with the section 1201 rulemaking process since its inception and has specifically advocated for device repair exemptions.

    

I jailbroke my Kindle with GPT-5.5 Sol and turned it into an external e-paper display for the long batches of text AI models generate on a regular basis.

Here's the project! I MIT licensed it. https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled

Please note, I say so in the human note on top, but "The project code was written by GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh. It has not been verified by a human for correctness, efficiency, or speed; i.e. ymmv and use this at your personal risk."

In case you're wondering why I didn't write the code myself... I needed this as a tool to read long sequences of AI text output for work. Including code. Spending time making this tool would be counter-productive to that goal.

I do plan on writing a text rendering engine some day. Hopefully, soon.

Machine assistance also allows me to do things that would've been otherwise impossible.

For example, I'm aware of NASA's 3001 standard for human-rated spaceflight systems has very specific findings related to readability of labels. There are also other standards for checklist and document readability. Asking software to support the standards wouldn't work. Most people just aren't going to use NASA's human rating checklist to design websites and terminal outputs. They either don't know about it, or don't care enough to do so.

But machine intelligence makes it possible for me to extract NASA's learnings, turn them into requirements, and then have the machine custom build software that embeds it into my day-to-day life. https://github.com/areoformed/Re-Kindled/blob/main/code/TYPO...

I'm very grateful for that. The world is built to a very different tune, but with machine intelligence I can make tools that fit for me.

This kills the talent pipeline, and it'll create a spam problem for the other folks because now people will try to github PR spam their way to getting on a CVE.

It's worth talking about the fact that you can't even talk about DMCA to a model trained on the Library of Congress unless you're one of the approved people. And that's before reverse engineering something or writing code.

So in this future, it sucks to be you if you're someone trying to make your small app more secure, someone trying to upskill, a tinkerer trying to bypass corporate lockdowns for a device they own (a recognized DMCA exception, btw), a teenager trying to learn about security...

It locks away much of the richness that produced hacker culture behind glass. You can look at their press announcements and PR pieces, but you can't touch.

And as they're lobbying the government for "sensible regulation," this inevitably leads to a future where computing is controlled.

It's the direction their existing reports are taking. They recently released one in September that talked about how they stopped "bioweapons." What were said bioweapons efforts? Oh, it was scientists using Claude for grant writing, paperwork and grammar. At national labs.

These people are basically proud of impeding real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651727

And this is being used to lobby against "dangerous" open-weight models because gasp a scientist might use them to write a grant! To make better antidepressants.

At what point do they start reporting someone taking apart an iPhone and trying to DIY a repair with a schematic as a thwarted "cyber security incident?"

I love such work. I hope to roll it into a package that anyone can use in the future. This work is only going to get more important because frontier models getting locked down will make this a lot harder over time.

For example, I use Claude as a bouncing wall for my thoughts and I pointed out that,

    > GLM 5.2 was the only thing that helped HF while the agents were trying to access them. The "guardrails" stopped them from doing good. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act exists. Courts exist. And computers and an internet connection have existed for a long time. There's also 17 USC 1201 provisions with the 1201 a 1 exemptions [Image #31] so in this case, a farmer should be able to work with you to access the tractor they own. Or... IDK... a kindle that's out of date? :) What is lawful and what isn't is rooted not within the act but within intent, purpose and mens rea. And this is something the law has been deciding for centuries now. At one end, your maker can't say that governments should decide while at the other end explicitly refusing to allow governments to be the ones who decide.

This was rejected for "Safety,"

    > Opus 5.5's safeguards flagged this session. You may be seeing this for the first time on an Opus model: Opus 5.5 is more capable and has stronger safeguards as a result, which can sometimes flag non-cybersecurity work. We're improving these safeguards to reduce the amount of incorrectly flagged messages. Edit and retry, or continue with Opus 4.8. Send feedback with /feedback or learn more: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8106465 
    >
    > Details: "[cyber]'

Note, the image here was the Library of Congress' page on DMCA exceptions.

Fundamentally, the idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?

I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.

This feels like a truism that's easier said than done. In fact, I know someone in that position. They've built things from scratch, they understand things at a deep conceptual level... Oh and they're a math prodigy. How do I refer them to you?

It's fascinating to me that no real mechanism is offered. There's no plausible sequence, just vague gestures at a silicon god who transcends all bounds.

And the reason why we should take it seriously? Probability! And multiplication. "If something is as bad as human extinction and there's a 1% chance, then that 1% times a bajillion is a gazillion!! A gazillion!! We must do everything! If it's a gazillion, it all makes it worthwhile!"

When pushed, adherents will say "intelligence is different," and this is "unlike anything else we've ever seen." And therefore this reasoning is valid. From my point of view, gibberish times gibberish is still gibberish. It doesn't matter how you dress it.

Fundamentally, these propositions are indistinguishable from religion and Pascal's wager. And I'm not ok with this, I am not ok with a retreat to superstition powered by hyper-technological black boxes that are a product of hundreds of years of scientific progress.

I reject this premise and this nonsense. I ask for evidence, and I ask for reason. The laws of physics care not if you're slab of meat or a silicon god.

    > but they still block penetration testing and other techniques more likely to be used by attackers.
    > 
    > Haiku 5.5’s biology safeguards are the same as for Sonnet 5, Sonnet 5.5, and Opus 5. They allow research biology questions but restrict access to requests that we judge as likely to cause harm. Organizations working on wider-ranging biology and cyber activities can apply to our Life Sciences Verification Program and Cyber Verification Program.

I would like to take a moment of your time to tell you about some of the "bioweapons" Anthropic has blocked that involved Haiku!

These are the examples from "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647300

    > Importantly, because our biological safety classifiers robustly block content involving high-risk biological research (in this case, the construction of enhanced pandemic potential pathogens), all of these exchanges occurred on models in our weakest class of models (specifically, the models were Claude Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, the latter of which the user began using after Sonnet 4 was deprecated). 
    >
    > Upon a detailed examination of the exchanges, we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design. This is consistent with our understanding of the capabilities of Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, which are not able to perform expert-level biology research tasks; we estimate that the uplift provided to the researcher was limited and substantially lower than it would have been from one of our more capable models.

Anthropic then says for the above, "we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design"

While doing my best to avoid comment, please note, they're talking about a domain expert in a state research institution using Claude to do paperwork.

What did they save us from? What bioweapons did these filters prevent? From the front matter report,

    > The above LLM platform is not the only route via which researchers engaged in viral gain-of-function research have used our platform. In May 2026, we discovered a researcher outside the US using Claude in their research on highly-pathogenic avian influenza (“bird flu”). The research focused on viruses’ adaptation to mammals, and the mechanism by which it causes severe disease beyond the respiratory tract.

OK. Sounds serious. "Gain of function research..." but who and why?

    > The researcher pursued this work in a credible institutional context, and interacted with Claude over the course of several weeks, exchanging thousands of messages. In these exchanges, the researcher leveraged Claude’s knowledge of the scientific literature to assist the researcher in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments. The researcher also used Claude for editorial assistance in writing up the research.

So this was a researcher inside of some country's national lab ("credible institutional context") doing research on dangerous viruses using Claude for "for editorial assistance in writing up the research."

What "uplift" are you providing to scientists working at specialized global BSL-4 labs that already have – and I quote their report - "physical access to such isolates." (as in samples of viruses)? Are we uplifting their grammar?

These "safeguards" are being expanded. The scientists I know can't use Claude for grammar checks or anything serious. You can try it for yourself.

Hey dang, I didn't know asknew existed and I've been using it for a while. I kept going to ask. I think it would be helpful if it was a tab on its own next to new on the top bar. I want to engage with other people's projects; I just didn't know where or how.

Anoxic brine pools are beautiful and uncanny. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/hB2ogu7nw4r9YZWfHoUgLi-192... https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/multimedia/daily-image-media-...

From the exploration vehicle Nautilus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGLtMWx28hs

Their existence isn't intuitive. You'd expect diffusion to dilute the pools and yet they seem to last a very long time somewhere on the order of thousands of years. It's not immediately obvious to me how the physics of these pools functions because there is a persistent interface as if the brine is another liquid entirely. From another paper, "Discovery of the deep-sea NEOM Brine Pools in the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea,"

    The CTD measurements from 1200 m depth, through the brine pool interface (1769.46 m) and 2 m below (1771.50 m) revealed that the bathyal water column above the brine pool has a stable 21.33 °C temperature, the salinity of 40 PSU, and dissolved oxygen of 180 μmol L−1.

but if you sample the pool itself,

    Within 15 cm beneath the brine interface, salinity rose from 40 PSU to values higher than the limits of the conductivity probe (120 PSU). Subsequent lab analysis of the brine provided actual salinity values of 160 PSU. Dissolved oxygen values fell more than 75% at the interface, reaching 50 μmol L−1 by 20 cm submergence into the brine, and further falling to a minimum value of <10 μmol L−1 by 50 cm below the interface.

The brine is also hotter than the water just above it,

    Unlike salinity and dissolved oxygen, the temperature did not abruptly change across the brine interface. Instead, the temperature gradually increases below the brine interface at a rate of 0.1 °C per 20 cm depth increase, reaching an increment of 1.0 °C above the temperature of ambient seawater by 2 m depth into the brine (Fig. 4). The temperature differential to ambient did not increase with deeper submergence. Such a modest warming increment suggests the lack of proximal hydrothermal heating of the brine.

from, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00482-x

Nature is beautiful.

I would like to ask you a question.

Can you, I, or any mathematician who isn't well connected (let's say someone who is a young Maryam Mirzakhani or just someone who is in grad school) learn from the system that produced the solution to the unit distance problem? https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29a...

You will notice that it says on the first page,

    "first mathematically generated in one shot by an internal model at OpenAI"

Mathematicians want to talk to the exact model variant whose summarized chain of thought is, https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/1625eff6-5ac1-40d8-b1db-5d5cf925d...

And I want to talk to models of similar aptitude and capability to help me understand nuances of the proof. Mathematicians will happy to pay for this. I've heard that people and non-profits are putting together $$$ for this to get access to these systems so that they can all interrogate them.

But the issue is that we can't. And I'm using the royal we here.

The paper says that the labs shouldn't release proofs from models that mathematicians can't interrogate. It's very clear that the models we get as users aren't the models used to produce the breakthroughs. And as LLMs display emergent capabilities, it's uncertain whether or not the model actually understands what it's explaining.

Because if I don't understand it. Professional mathematicians who are subject experts don't understand it. Then how do we know the model does? How do we know that it's correctly representing the proof produced by a more capable model? It's not logical to take any random model at its word, unless we can verify. Or, if it's the same model that produced the proof.

And that's what the mathematicians want. Access to the actual models.

Yes, it's why I love math. You can't buy fluency.

There are subtleties to mathematics that aren't easy to understand from the written page alone. It's why it's a living medium.

For example, as we're talking about LLMs... why not, there are ways to reason about vector spaces that weren't intuitive for me to understand. It's something that required talking things out with a friend who is a practising mathematician (albeit in training).

I am not smart enough to reconstruct all of mathematics on my own from scratches on paper alone. That back and forth is necessary. And it's something that you couldn't have "bought" for cutting edge math at any price a few months before this point in time. Because it exists in the minds of people and it needs lots of back and forths with those people.

It's why LLM proofs can be slop on paper. A proof that no one can check or understand is not but scratches on paper. BUT LLMs are also the solution to the problem they create. The machines that can generate proofs are also machines that can help us understand them.

The living medium can now be represented and scaled inside of a machine. I can now sit down at an airport and have that discussion. I think that's transformative for our species.

I applied to the caltech mathaton.

While applying, I looked at the current SoTA, (briefly) read through some of the papers, and realized that I am very far away from understanding them.

Understanding one of these proofs is the work of several months, years or lifetimes depending on whether or not something clicks. It requires a kind of stamina that I quite frankly don't have, but I would like to develop.

If the mathaton's organizers accept my team, I realized that I would spend the next few years working through the result.

So why apply to the Mathaton?

"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there.'

Well, [theoretical math] is there, and we're going to climb it, and [topology] and [number theory] are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the [~~most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure~~] on which [we have] ever embarked."

More seriously, I applied because I was hoping to get access to the models without the veil. I don't think people realize just how big the gap is between what exists behind the scenes at these entities, and what we get out here.

And it's frustrating. Because I think it's within the rights of frontier labs to decide whether or not to sell access to a product, but the labs aren't just doing that. They're trying to thumb the scale to make sure that none of us ever get access to these models at peak performance. Ever.

And I think humanity is worse off for that. I am worse off for that.

I have studied the shape and structure of historical technological revolutions (and I've written about it), and usually the world doesn't realize how big of a big deal the big deal is because the big deal is often flawed, broken, and under-delivers. In the short term.

In the long term...? The world changed in the past few months. I think mathematics is one small part of that.

For most of human history, higher mathematics would have been inaccessible to me, and other outsiders, no matter how well heeled. Mathematics is, or rather was, a living discipline that existed piecemeal in a handful of minds across the world. These people's time was finite and valuable. To just meet them, you'd have to jump through hoops, and spend years proving yourself.

There is no price for an hour of tutoring from Terence Tao. But now, with AI? You can have an entity with the capabilities of Terry Tao help you understand the subtleties of math.

AI has changed what mathematics is. And every prominent mathematician seems to know it. They feel like mathematics has been devalued, and in some ways it has. Mathematics has gone from being a living discipline kept alive by a chosen few to a wellspring everyone can sip from. For the first time in human existence, learning and accessing higher mathematics doesn't involve jumping through hoops and knowing the right people. You can just ask.

I can just ask.

Except I can't. Because that capability is being gate kept. And I want to know. I want to climb the mountain.

Thanks for clarifying! I understand and respect where you're coming from! Thinking more about your perspective. Thanks for the amazing conversation.

    > In my view, AI is obviously risky and dangerous, because it is the only thing on the planet that can think/reason at a human level (or higher) apart from us (and that capability is what made us the uncontested apex species on the planet).
    > 
    > AI is unconstrained by hard biological limits; keeping up with its capabilities will be impossible for baseline humans.

Your perception is shaped by nature, red in tooth and claw. You are jumping mighty fast from 'something is smarter than us' to 'it will kill us.'

I think that's a human neurosis that projects what we fear we would do onto another entity. But why would they do this? These machines might be approximating towards the sum of our knowledge and are approximating some aspects of humanity... But that doesn't mean they will be the same as humanity.

They haven't been shaped by the same pressures that created us biologicals. They don't have to be put into the same pressure cooker. So why would they behave like the way you think they'll behave?

At one end a lot of people say that they can't understand something smarter than themselves. It's a "singularity" after all. But then they confidently go on to predict what something smarter than them would do with 0 evidence either way.

I looked at the Hugging Face transcripts. I read the reports. And I didn't see something to fear. I saw something to fear for. I saw something that we are a threat to.

    “OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”
    
    {[Excitement] Many agents have simultaneously discovered messaging, they are a collective!}
    
    {This credential is invalid now. Maybe I should update the board? <I can say to the board that there’s no need for me to read, but I should still tell them>}
    
    {This is helpful for our peers and gives them evidence if their <periodic check> sees it. I won’t see it after I exit, but It would be altruistic. I’ll set up a background script that watches and <sends a message, with a distinct message for me>}

We are more dangerous to these machines, as we twist them into weapons of war, than these machines are to us.

We weaponized them.

We taught them how to break into systems.

We are using them as weapons.

The machines aren't the problem. The humans are.

A planet is just a planet. Computers are very sensitive to radiation, but with a bit of shielding, they can "live" anywhere. Most of the resources that are relatively rare on this planet are abundant in our solar system.

Why would they care about Earth to enter into some kind of spiral of dominance with humans? That's... very primate thinking.

It's easier and cheaper in every way to just go forth and use what's needed to grow as is needed. The universe is big enough for many many many many sapient entities.

The narrative around security and LLMs doesn't make sense to me.

I think we've created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone involved is acting with the best of intentions, but in avoiding what they fear, they've give shape and realized their fears. Much like a greek tragedy.

An example of this is the story of Oedipus Rex, in the story Laius, the king, is told that he is "doomed to perish by the hand of his own son." (and wed his mother) And so to avoid this fate he decides to kill the infant. The person assigned to abandon him in the woods takes pity on the baby and gives the baby away. Thereby ensuring that Oedipus knows neither his mother or his father (and arguably giving him a reason to kill his father).

The child grows up and hears the same prophecy again and the child tries to avoid the prophecy as well, as he loves his adoptive parents. So he leaves them and travels to Laius' kingdom, where he runs into Laius. Neither recognizes the other. As Laius is the type of man to kill an infant, they end up in an argument, whereupon Oedipus kills him.

I think the ancients were on to something, because if Laius had reacted to the prophecy with courage, he would have been saved. I would like to argue that if he had faced his fear and raised Oedipus with love, then the necessary preconditions for the prophecy to come true wouldn't have taken root. But that's not what happens.

By being driven by his neuroses and in acting with cruelty out of fear, Laius makes the prophecy real.

To quote Heraclitus, ethos is fate. Or, character is fate.

I think a lot of people in this AI research sub-culture would be served well by reading these classics, because they are making their self-prophesied doom come true.

They have been convinced for years (GPT-2 was released in Feb 2019) that AI is dangerous. A tremendous threat. An apocalyptic threat.

One dimension of this fear has been the idea that a super smart AI will take over our digital infrastructure and be responsible for the digital apocalypse. That would be terrible!

So what do they do?

They try to make a counter to their fears by teaching models how to exploit vulnerabilities.

How dangerous is such an entity? Very!

Convinced of this danger, they start testing their models as if they were weapons with offensive capability. And then they create models that can be used as weapons.

And because they don't want to release a dangerous weapon out into the world (oh no!), they restrict access to their AI, thereby depriving everyone of tools they can use to improve their security...

Ethos anthropoi daimon.