busyant

> Is there even a way to professionally decide if a company's value is 1.25 or 1.4 Trillion?

The quote below is about valuing the bond market in the 1980s. Obviously, it's meant as a cynical answer to your question, but maybe there's a kernel of truth there, too.

"He'd lean across to Lewie [Ranieri] and ask, 'How do you like 'em, Lewie?' (referring to the bond market). Lewie would say, 'I like 'em a lot!' And Mario would say, 'Yeah, I like 'em, too, I like 'em, too.' Fifteen minutes later he'd lean across again to Lewie and ask, 'How do you like 'em now, Lewie?' Lewie would say, 'Don't like 'em at all.' And Mario would say, 'I don't like 'em neither, I don't like 'em neither.'

Taken from Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker.

> The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work

Very sorry. Dignity is important and often overlooked.

> Was the lawyer that hired you present when she made the offer to pay you?

Yes. "my" lawyer was there, too.

I tried to keep the story short, but the request was actually that I drive both of them to the airport.

I know it sounds naive, but I was shocked by their friendliness after the deposition.

agreed. both of my sisters-in-law are lawyers.

whenever some unsavory person is in the news being defended by his attorney, most of us get upset, but they say stuff like, "his attorney is just doing a good job defending his client. that's how this works."

I get it, but I'm not built for it.

I was deposed once.

It was 6 hours where the opposing counsel tried to rattle me / get under my skin with insulting questions.

To be clear, I was only an expert witness in the lawsuit (drug + pregnant lady + birth defects). It paid extremely well, but was something I would never want to do routinely.

At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME if I would drive her to the airport* (she said she'd pay me my hourly rate)!

At that point it was clear that the insults were just theater and "part of the job", but I took it all too personally and told her I had to get home.

* She was late for the flight and Uber wasn't a thing yet.

> At one point the gold standard for generating leads was using combinatorial chemistry to experimentally screen through millions of compounds.

I don't think this was ever the gold standard. I mean, some companies did employ these approaches, but they were generally viewed as low-quality, brute-force approaches (at least at the handful of companies I was associated with).

Them Duke boys are gonna be mighty happy.

> leveling up all of the DIYers

Yep. My brother used ChatGPT to guide his repair of a rusted hole in the driver's side door of his pickup truck.

He never would have tried that repair on his own. Looks good, too.

> And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.

This isn't the best analogy, but it struck me the other night that "AI" feels like Jon Carpenter's "The Thing".

Especially the final scene where Childs and MacReady are trying to determine which (if any) of them is still human.

Also, early in the movie, MacReady loses to a computer chess program and pours whiskey into the computer, calling it a "cheating bitch."

Anyway, there are some parallels there.

Where I worked, USB ports on TVs/monitors were used for wireless mouse receivers.

If I had to go poking around back there, the toilet paper would have at least piqued my interest.

Without the toilet paper, I would have simply assumed whatever was plugged in there was officially sanctioned.

I mean, Nixon bugged himself, right?

I did a poor-man's version of this a few weeks ago (inspired by reports of one of the models solving a centuries-old cipher).

I asked the ChatGPT (I think it was 5.6 medium?) to look at old paintings or sculptures that might contain previously overlooked health issues in the subject.

One of the more famous examples of this is that "Mona Lisa" likely had hypercholesterolemia. The evidence in that case is that da Vinci painted her with a xanthelasma (cholesterol deposit) on her eyelid and a putative lipoma on her right hand.

GPT churned for a few minutes and suggested that the old man in Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of an old man in profile" might have had Frank's sign (a crease on the ear-lobe correlated w/ coronary artery disease: https://onlinecollection.leopoldmuseum.org/en/object/4325-po...).

I told it that the painting was so abstract that I was unconvinced.

It "agreed" and churned a little more and it suggested that the subject in J.A. van Ravesteyn's "Portrait of a Gentleman" (1624) had a clearer sign of Frank's sign that hadn't been previously noted.

I think that one is a little more compelling (https://www.proantic.com/en/1299214-jan-van-ravesteyn-presum...).

> seeing the full list of problems would be the most interesting part of this whole situation.

This is a "complaint" that Tao had (I think it was on his blog) is that if mathematicians could see the failures, it might provide insight of where/how the models struggle. Of course, it's unclear if these failures can be addressed with more chips/training/etc.

> when the only affect is appetite suppression

You don't know this.

> These things are useful for a few months

You don't know this.

> For anyone else (most people), it's much healthier to learn how to do difficult things.

You don't know this.

> Willpower is a muscle.

I know you mean this in a figurative sense, but what exactly is "willpower"? There has to be a physical (and physiological) mechanism for "willpower", no?

Do you believe that can be aberrant physiological conditions?

I do. I also believe over-eating is a manifestation of some type of "aberrant" physiology.

> People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.

I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.

He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.

He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.

> The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

I don't think this is quite correct. I mean many practitioners of medicine will have the attitude of ... "if it works, it works". And that's perfectly reasonable.

But if you understand the mechanism of action of a drug (or other treatment), it (often) makes it easier to improve a drug.

So ... some sectors of the "medical field" understandably care only about empirical results. But other sectors would prefer to understand what's going on.

Yep. My father gets a med from there.

1 year supply from Northwest? $477 (includes shipping).

1 year supply from CVS? $1395

I have. Was that the hard part?

And what would that be?

> Terence Tao (2026) lists many goals of mathematics beyond problem solving. These include developing new theories and techniques, understanding the world, sustaining a community, training the next generation of mathematicians, contributing to cumulative knowledge, and creating works of aesthetic value. Of course, these have been positively correlated with genuine solutions.

> If, instead, mathematicians treat AI as a technology for advancing its long-standing and centrally human purposes, the technology may come to contribute to an accelerated flourishing and enrichment of the discipline.

For the longest time, people who conducted research (not just math) ranked and measured their peers (albeit quasi-subjectively) by 1.) their ability to solve difficult problems, 2.) the cleverness of their solutions, and 3.) the clarity of their explanations.

With the advent of these models, we're understandably worried because #1 and maybe #2 may be gone (maybe even #3).

Are researchers going to shift the ranking/measuring of their peers over to ... "so-and-so is a world-class explainer of AI proofs"?

If you go around telling people, "no no no. You don't understand. The important part of our intellectual work is now going to be <something that was never weighted highly>", well, then it feels like you're handing me a participation trophy and telling me I came in 1st place.

I have no idea how the next 5 years will shake out, but I think that's why there's a lot of anxiety at the moment.

If we (as a species) can genetically modify embryos to make our offspring more athletic, more intelligent, more <whatever>, is that human-RSI?

That's not a gotcha question.

I'm just genuinely curious if that would meet the definition of RSI.

> We already knew we had to do that. But the people in charge of the economy don't wanna.

I've often heard it said that <big corporations> often use consulting firms to recommend unpopular decisions they were already planning to make, thereby offloading the culpability to the consulting firm.

Maybe the LLMs are going to be the ultimate "consulting firm" for our societal issues.

I say this mostly tongue-in-cheek, but we're already offloading a lot of lower-level responsibilities (e.g., "write my email") onto these AIs.

> All of this stuff is gated by experimental effort, not AI!

My post said you still needed to run the experiments, but if you think AI can't help to improve bioweapons compared to humans alone, I disagree.

As a biologist whose PhD research was on the genetics of microbial pathogens, I am far more concerned than the author.

I think he trots out a lot of straw-man arguments (e.g., teenager making the weapon, "super"virus, etc.).

Those scenarios are purposely far-fetched so that he can ridicule them and thereby leave the impression that all the AI/bioweapon concerns are similarly far-fetched.

He spends a lot of "tokens" discussing AI-generated viruses. But bioweapons can be much simpler than a virus--they can be small molecules that inactivate essential molecular targets in humans. This is something that was discussed at length when I was in grad school and it wasn't dismissed as hyperbolic hokum.

So, is AI going to develop a supervirus? Probably not. But it doesn't need to.

Instead, I speculate that AI can "help" in making bioweapons ...

a. more potent

b. less detectable

c. easier to disseminate

You still need humans in the lab to run the experiments, but I think it's foolish to dismiss the worries about AI in such a condescending way.

> no LLM in the world can make them go faster

You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them.

But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times).

You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.

bioweapons are probably easier.

Killing each other is relatively straightforward. Keeping people alive (e.g., curing cancers) is considerably more difficult.

I imagine that AI augments both our destructive and constructive powers.

> But why would they ask the right questions without prompting?

What if the models are good enough (maybe even now?) so that all you have to say is "come up with a list of interesting problems overlooked by humans in <insert math discipline>. Then work on those proofs."

I don't think that's so far fetched. Especially given the news today about NS.

> The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.

I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.

"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."

The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.

"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."

> And without mathematicians to ask the right questions

Here, I disagree. What makes you think the AI won't be able to ask the right questions without prompting?

> and able to appreciate the results, why would AI driven research continue?

Here, I think I agree. At some level, there has to be a human in the process that must understand / interpret the results.

I gotta say, however, that I'm not certain about my agreement. I'm worried that I'm missing something where the human can be excised from the process entirely.

> we should be putting this in the water supply...

Talked to a physician last year who said the entire planet should be on GLP-1s.

I worked at a pharmaceutical start-up years ago.

* one of our medicinal chemists had studied nights to become a patent agent (this isn't the bad part).

* he landed a pretty nice job at an IP firm with a considerable raise in his salary.

* we were _in the middle of his farewell party_ when the IT guy told the CEO that during the previous few days the chemist had printed our company's entire library of novel chemical structures and their associated biological activity data.

* in the moment, i had no idea what was happening, but i've never seen someone go from looking happy to absolutely miserable at their own farewell party.

* i do remember that my boss later said she wanted him frog-marched out of the building in handcuffs.