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magicalist

> A cynic might opine that they've realized how easy it is to grab headlines and attention by putting out research that feeds people who are hungry for negative stories about AI.

This is kind of gross. Make the claim or not, don't do this pseudo-sealioning thing. Moreover, engage with the actual content (or you could just not engage at all!), not this shallowest possible dismissal.

At that point, though, you could make the same argument about a rock. Prove that this rock is not conscious.

The context, though, is that Data is both credibly conscious and self aware, and they all know a plausible mechanism for him to have consciousness and self awareness, in a way that's recognizably human in form. The more alien a (supposed) consciousness is, I think the more work you'll have to do in justifying the application of those labels.

Re:The importance of communities around software on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:46PM (#50295652)
Seems like you aren't actually disagreeing at all?

First you're just disagreeing about the relative importance of "community" vs the license used. This does not seem like an important distinction, blog rhetorical structuring aside, since the value of each is really "it depends" (in the extreme, neither community or license matter if no one ever sees or hears of the code, for instance).

Second:

> If I publish my code under an open source license... If I keep my code proprietary...

That isn't even the distinction that the author is making. They're only talking about communities around open source code. They spell out the dichotomy quite explicitly:

> This is why I don't care as much anymore about a project being under a copyleft free software license or a non-copyleft free software license.

Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build on Saturday October 24, 2026 @09:27PM (#50227309)
> It's the same thing I feel when I hear Terence Tao speak about AI

Which talk of his gave this impression?

Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build on Saturday October 24, 2026 @08:26PM (#50226924)
Also, "ok, and now I've cloned your hard work overnight, no need for any decisions on my part, I just had my agent use yours and reverse engineered it and/or used it as an oracle. Why the frown? I thought you were in this for intellectual curiosity and exercising your creativity, not just stroking own ego, right?"
Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @07:58AM (#50179439)
> Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate

Read what you quoted again. That's not what it says.

Re:Tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:04PM (#50168437)
> That doesn't hold anymore? AI doesn't care how hard or easy a migration is if a test suite exists.

Sure, but that only matters if migration is going to be the last thing anyone does on a project. Unless you think typescript 7.1 ought to be enough for anybody, it also matters what the typescript team wants to write/read/reason in.

Re:Tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:49AM (#50168200)
Well, no, not exactly. The article says vscode is compiled in 5.28s in typescript 7.1 (nightly), and in 1.73s in tsrs (dev), which is 3x faster.
Re:Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:32AM (#50167945)
This is for Facebook Pages, not for users. Average facebook daily user can keep posting 35 links a day to their favorite slop site.
Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math on Sunday October 18, 2026 @09:36PM (#50147365)
> “I’m on a war footing,” he said

So not remotely the same thing.

Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math on Sunday October 18, 2026 @06:48PM (#50146291)
> Similarly, Tao being ‘on the warpath’

Do you think that this is a quote from the article you just read?

I swear half the comments here are just from people reading dunks on r/singularity and x and getting real mad at strawmen.

Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math on Sunday October 18, 2026 @06:28PM (#50146143)
> basically both sides now dislike that he flip flopped

No, the dumb thing is the idea that there are "sides".

> basically both sides now dislike that he flip flopped

Literally the only people with this opinion of Tao are internet forum warriors who have no expertise in the field and who's opinion of Tao don't matter in the slightest.

Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math on Sunday October 18, 2026 @06:07PM (#50145984)
> wouldn’t that only offer a new view from such a mathematician

Don't invent things to get mad about, please.

Re:Butlerian Jihad on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:02AM (#50131275)
> The Dune Encyclopedia, which was not written by him but which he said he considered canonical

No, he literally wrote in the intro to the book that it wasn't canon. It was a fan project and he thought that it was great there were fans doing things like that.

edit: and like with the terrible Dune prequels, the impulse to say "here's what really happened" usually diminishes what's interesting and powerful about oblique allusions in SF meant at least partly to function as a mirror on humanity.

> As someone who is building one of these referred to systems in a major vertical in the Fortune 500, these LLMs are very much being used to eat major legacy systems and processes

> Senior Director of Product in Insurance Tech

anakin_padme.jpg

Re:Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf] on Sunday October 11, 2026 @04:21PM (#50047435)
> This is a "you" problem for the math establishment, not a problem for the AI companies

This was a talk given to other mathematicians about the future of mathematics; sounds like only "you" have a problem for some reason.

> But the scientists on the ground getting accused of the “deception” are some of the smartest, most caring, and highest-integrity people I’ve met.

This is a strawman (and a weirdly strong appeal to emotion for unclear reasons).

The claim is that their scientists were loudly saying internally their PR campaigns and climate claims were false and contrary to their findings. Executives read these memos and chose to do these anyways.

For instance:

> The new disclosures in the Massachusetts case add to the evidence with excerpts from a deposition by an Exxon scientist who worked on the program.

> Asked whether a 2018 press release, which said Exxon anticipated “10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025,” was misleading, the scientist said “yes,” adding, “All the clauses in there are patently false.”

edit: the single memo (one of many the article is discussing) that you linked is not supposed to be some smoking gun, it's useful to dispel any ignorance that there's no reasonable claim of ignorance on Exxon's part, and the date is especially notable: 1988. Basically any PR, legal, and lobbying work for at least 38 years is suspect because of what they actually knew.

Re:3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit on Sunday October 11, 2026 @09:41AM (#50043213)
lol, I'm sorry, you're claiming that Russia, who started this war in the first place and could stop literally any time, also has only started targeting civilian infrastructure in the last two months?

> Wildberries (essentially Russia's Amazon)

And military supplier newly owned by Putin's buddy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_strikes_on_Wildberri...

Re:Sharing AI progress in mathematics on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @08:35PM (#49986292)
> the top 500 open problems in math

At least put a disclaimer for the ad for this site, and maybe disclose how you came up with a total ordering for "top" open problems (vibes)?

> How problems are ranked. LLMs compare pairs of problems. A reliability-weighted model combines those judgments into the ranking, with calibration across model families. The model-family weights are OpenAI 1.00, Claude 1.00, GLM 0.95, and DeepSeek 0.90. These are modeling choices, not measured probabilities of correctness.

Re:Erdosproblems.com Succumbs to the AI Onslaught on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @05:50PM (#49984621)
Erdos never had a list of all the problems he posed, and the people who have compiled lists at times had to do guesswork for what were actually problems or not. So there is no precise list of Erdos problems, just to be clear.

What I think you might be missing, though, is that Erdos was inherently playful with these problems. He'd sometimes just drop in the middle of a paper "hey, this variant of this lemma is neat, I bet it's true, but I'll give cash to anyone who disproves it" and move on. Or challenge a colleague while visiting and collaborating with them, and the problem would get spread by word of mouth. The problems often weren't things he thought long and hard about individually, but they appealed to his sense of aesthetics and curiosity and play. I think that's maybe close to what Bloom is talking about there. It's handy to have a catalog, but fundamentally, creating a set of unsolved math problems was not what Erdos was doing.

Seems like that's begging the question at best, motivated reasoning at worst.
Alternatively, sounds like you're a user of the glasses and don't like what these comments might reflect on you if more people agree with them?

Was my comment incorrect? You admit it's both possible to work around it, people are actually doing that, and the comment does indeed give themselves a little pat on the back for working hard to unsuccessfully solve a problem with the product they themselves choose to make and market? So what's the reactionary part?

> Since the introduction of this safeguard, we’ve seen some people go beyond using tape to sophisticated efforts to modify or destroy the capture LED. We are continuously improving our ability to detect tampering, and now we’re updating the glasses to disable the camera if they detect the LED was physically tampered with or destroyed. No other kind of camera has done this and we’re proud to lead the industry forward.

Yes it's true people have figured out how to disable the safeguard, but we all agree the important thing as we try to sell millions more of these is that we tried, right?

Re:I am often wrong on Sunday September 20, 2026 @05:05PM (#49780069)
No it's not, though?
> Grothendieck was almost certainly wrong about his gifts here, and even if not, your mathematical ability and output isn't fully explained by your ability ceiling

lol, see, it's unfalsifiable. No true abstraction ceiling.

> Making my complaint more general: I find modern math is exploring areas that are interesting to mathematicians, but increasingly irrelevant to society.

Is it, or is it only the parts you hear about/pay attention to?

> People spent over a hundred years arguing whether a continuum approximation of a particle system would behave oddly. In the mean time, other folks went ahead and completely revolutionized the world of computational fluid dynamics (with multi-billion $$$ impact on society) by just doing better numerics (Kahn-style numerical analysis).

Yes, maybe famous solving famous conjectures is just trivia and trophy collecting and the real value is the intuition and techniques you develop along the way to solving them which you can then bring to bear on things like CFD.

> This sounds a lot like you may have in fact succumbed to your abstraction ceiling

It sounds more like you're turning a vibes based theory into a tautology.

Hofstadter struggling with math for the first time in graduate school isn't a unique story, nor is his self introspection about this event a good basis for an apparently unfalsifiable theory about human cognition.

Re:I Vibed a Proof of Conway's Conjecture on Friday September 18, 2026 @02:57PM (#49758645)
> Computation and computability is "the final frontier". Math is a "subset" of that.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you point, but I don't know how widely this would be held as true. Are you defining "math" as _only_ what can be proven under some particular formal system?

Re:A Beginning for Mathematics on Monday September 14, 2026 @03:07PM (#49702265)
As they go on to explain, a human understandable proof is different than a human actually understanding the proof. That actual human understanding (like, in a brain of a human) is one of their stated goals.

Producing human understandable proofs is possibly a job best for humans today, but the author appears to agree with you that this is probably fleeting (and argues that even if you disagree, it should probably be treated as if it is fleeting when planning for the future):

> Right now AI systems arguably underperform us at theory-building, asking questions, exposition, … so we could prioritize and reward those skills. I think this is unwise: compare the speed at which the academy adapts to the speed at which model capabilities improve. We need to consider the endgame. If the models remain incapable in some domain, we can adjust later.

Re:Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master – John Carmack on Sunday September 13, 2026 @11:44AM (#49685257)
> The second was just for fun; it is fun. This is very far from the code we roll out at customers though.

Which is fine, great even (I do the same thing!), but in trying different things outside your day job, it seems like you do understand why people working on different things than you might be "reporting all these negative AI experiences"?

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