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He was a very entertaining blogger! RIP.

However, he was also ripping people off and making up stuff: https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272


Maybe in theory. In practice, the Phoebus Cartel was a real thing, and they limited lightbulb lifespans, worldwide. The same thing exists today, albeit more because companies that sell lightbulbs want to keep selling them, instead of putting themselves out of business. So, many LED lightbulbs are intentionally designed to fail early.

The only place where this doesn’t happen is in the country of Dubai. Because of national law, lightbulbs sold there are required to have very long lifespans. That’s why there is a world-wide grey market business for taking existing LED lightbulbs apart, snipping off a resistor so that they pull about half the amperage and then putting them back together, and suddenly their lifespan is increased by 10-100x. This is called a “doobie”, after the name of the country. Check out “bigclivedotcom” on YouTube if you want to see this in action.

You will notice this if you buy Philips Ultra Definition bulbs in Dubai, versus the same bulbs sold at the same amount of lumen output from the UK or elsewhere in the world. The “doobie” version has twice as many LED filaments inside, compared to the UK version. Same price, way different life span. Philips is one of the better manufacturers of lightbulbs, and nowhere remotely close to the only one doing this.

With regards to LED light fixtures (ones that don’t allow you to screw in your own bulb), most manufacturers do the same thing. They’re designed to fail early. Who wants light fixture styling that is fifty years old, just because the LED lights inside haven’t failed yet? They want to make you buy new fixtures every couple of years, just like they do for bulbs.

Yes, there are exceptions in both cases. But they are the rare exceptions, not the rule. And if you haven’t studied up on the Phoebus Cartel, you can start with the article on Wikipedia.


My biggest problem with the data centers getting built around me are that they are building new natural gas power plants to power them, that will be greenhouse gases and decrease local air quality. I would be a lot more ok with it if they were using wind or solar. And maybe built it somewhere that didn't have a water shortage.

It puzzles me how doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable?

I'm reading If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and there's so much sheer stupidity that has to happen for their 10+ pages of extinction scenario to occur.

I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions (billions???) of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

They entirely discount human alpha/economics. In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't. If we can't build a "software factory", how can an AI automate a bioweapons lab? Let's say AI steals crypto to fund itself. Do you think hackers aren't _already_ using AI to steal crypto? Don't discount human alpha!

Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.


Per https://trace.manifund.org/ a total of $2,846,125,859 USD has been wired into 'ai safety' causes, many involving ai consciousness and p(doom).

The outcome of this 'safety' is restricting public access to AI and giving a monopoly of access to the industry. This is the ai nonprofit-industrial complex actively concentrating monopoly power in Anthropic in particular as creator, interpreter and safety regulator of AI.

Much of the $2.8bn listed is indirectly, from Anthropic and EA. Three of the four people who participated in the $125m Anthropic Series A are now folding their 1000x Anthropic return into AI 'safety'. Some is from FTX/Alameda, which invested 86% of the Series B.

Dustin Moskovitz: Facebook/Asana/Anthropic Series A, funds EA Good Ventures, transferred to Coefficient Giving, then $1.5bn into ai safety. $500m of Anthropic into an unknown foundation. Funding: $160m to Resolution (alignment research), $93m to Epoch AI (investigating the trajectory of AI), $63m to Redwood Research (oai report), $67m to MATS ( EA type alignment and security researchers), Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, Fund for Alignment Research, $53m to Kairos (building talent infrastructure for AI safety), $32m to Bluedot (online safety courses), $15m to MIRI (Yudkowsky).

Jaan Tallinn: Led the Series A, now $10bn in Anthropic. Funds $199m (85%) of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, then $161m to AI safety including $14m to lightcone (Lesswrong, Lighthouse). $10m to BERI (existential risks), Palisade Research (studying AI capabilities to prevent loss of control.) PauseAI, MIRI, METR etc. Much of what Coefficient funds.

Eric Schmidt: Anthropic Series A, $72m to AI safety via Schmidt Sciences. Over $1m per individual AI2050 researcher.

FTX: Led the Anthropic Series B, bankruptcy estate sold $884m of Anthropic in 2024; $40m to AI Safety. Same orgs, Redwood, Lightcone, etc.

Ruairí Donnelly (Chief of Staff FTX): FTX tokens plus assorted donors, $91m to AI safety via Macroscopic Ventures. $15m to Cooperative AI (currently whitewashing openai under 'multiagent safety')


I really want to understand the perspective of the other side of this case. Why did this museum care so much about this issue? They appear to have put an enormous legal effort into preventing the release of these point cloud scans. Why?

Could you have gotten it back after he passed away? Or was the kidney forwarded on to someone else?

Seeing my home country at the top of Hacker News is surreal. While I'm glad it’s finally getting some coverage, watching this unfold feels almost hopeless. The previous war in Tigray cost an estimated 600,000 lives, and this new escalation threatens to be even bloodier. It’s heading toward a complete catastrophe

A comment that caught my eye:

    this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now.
I do not recognize the world these people live in.

I'm seriously at a point where I'm opposed to talking to my doctor because the information may be digitally recorded and leaked, going on a flight because my passport may be used to aqquire a loan by cybercriminals, comparing car insurance because my phone will be called by robocallers selling me things or verifying my ID with websites because it might be used to associate my information with whatever else I do online.

I don't think, for a vast majority of cases, these companies I'm forced to interact with can be trusted with my data and it's having a real world negative impact. Even with the best intentions the information is somehow valuable to steal and I'm baffled how it's not secure.

There should be some consequences for companies asking for things like SSN/National Insurance numbers on job adverts or retaining drivers licence photos after test driving a car, they just don't need the data anymore.


It seems they simply disabled a bunch of power limits. Probably just settings, rather than an actual code update.

The world IS getting mass surveillance. The havens for privacy are shrinking. We are becoming the ants in the ant farm.

One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.


> Set up Strata on this PC for me: https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata - follow docs/AI_SETUP.md in that repository.

And I thought piping to bash was bad


I tried it and it worked surprisingly well. On my machine (Nvidia 4090, 128GB DDR5, Ryzen 7950x3d) I'm getting 124 tokens per sec, thought to share it here.

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next


A different view: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117325417843030902

> you better believe the other thing it's supposed to do aside from build a picture of your friends and loved ones is to figure out what makes you love to shop. This is actually some of the most nauseating prompt text i have ever read.


As far as I know there are still some things "the platform" actually won't deliver; for instance I'm fairly certain there's no searchable combobox that's fully accessible. One ~must leave the platform to give users the experience the expect.

That means "the platform" itself is actually teaching people to work "off platform" and arguably will always have gaps as functionality and expectations evolve.

Admittedly, the habit really ought to be 'I need to make a combobox -> does the platform have what I need? -> Research, evaluate, test -> Otherwise, make it' but I don't begrudge people for skipping the middle steps.


Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.

What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.


If it’s for agents why don’t you make this a challenge towards them? What sort of human element is desired here?

No, it's just that they're in Australia.

>We trained Kolibri with abstention data and with our Merlin-Arthur protocol. As a result, it is trained to say "I don't know" when the answer isn't in the context.

https://aleph-alpha.com/en/blog/bounding-hallucinations-merl...


Yes. As another comparison point, 13 million gallons per year amounts to 24 gallons per minute which is about 5 (five) bathtub faucets running 24/7/365.

The water bill alone would be only $100k/yr assuming average US domestic rate of $8 per 1000 gallons.


I don't know if that's idiomatic webcomponent or not but that looks unmaintainable, even for such a minimal component, imagine once it grows. It's not separating presentation from state and logic. querySelector need to match classes and elements in the markdown. Mutating textContent is going to run out of sync as soon as you have more than one event source doing the same. Those are all problems that React solve by separating state and only rendering in one path.

The thing to note here, besides the transparency and the fact that it’s actually a good model that also works well on coding and agentic tasks, is that it’s the first release by a team formed less than a year ago, with a strong focus on iteration velocity. There’s more to come.

disclaimer: I‘m part of the training team, happy to answer any questions


So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.

I think they need to investigate their safety protocols

> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.

> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.


> 4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.

I keep seeing this idea and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I think it could be a bit like saying if you showed someone 500 years ago a smartphone they would likely conclude at first it was magic. But once you had some time to let them use it and tell them how it all worked on a high level they would eventually obviously realise, no, it's not magic.

I guess just in the same way if you presented current LLM tech out of nowhere a few years ago to someone who'd never seen it, I concede they may be likely to imagine it was AGI in that first conversation, depending on their background.

But after using it for a bit and learning what an LLM is etc they'd land exactly where everyone is today - a great technology useful for some things, not AGI, not magic.


I like the idea. But it was a bit jarring that panning with my finger took ages and then pinching to zoom insta-faceplanted me into the Labrador interior.

If anyone wants to mount a rescue, I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.


That has more to do with lifestyle, than the job.

Most if not all programmers certainly would have the time to do stretching, gymnastic, sport - develop and maintain the right muscles and take brakes when needed. Most are just too lazy.

A guy breaking his back on a construction site does not have this choice - if the job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry - then his only real choice is to quit.


LeCun has been consistently wrong about LLMs though, claiming that they were a dead end and that they'd never be able to do spatial reasoning, which was disproved a year later with GPT-4 [1]. He is also opposed by his fellow Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who both signed the CAIS statement on AI extinction risk [2].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1d5ns1z/yann_lecun_...

[2]: safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk


There is a command in oh-my-pi called "/omfg <problem>". You explain what is wrong with agent's response, and it writes a hook to make sure that the problem doesn't happen again. It then re-runs your previous prompt to make sure that hook is triggered, and if not, it rewrites the hook to make your previous prompt trigger the hook. Then each next agent's response is checked by the hook, and if it is triggered, the agent receives feedback on what's wrong and what must be done differently.

He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.

Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.


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