Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Ah, I've hit an extremely satisfying professional milestone and thought I'd share:
"Being acquainted-enough with the codebase to be able to, with full conviction and a lot of glee, answer my LLM-head colleague simply: 'Claude is wrong'".
(Claude was extremely obviously wrong once you spent more than half a second thinking about its claim.)
long rant about math
The recent big AI results in math have left me in quite a bad mood. I believe the main ingredient is Lean, which is a formal language resembling a programming language. Math proofs written in Lean can be verified deterministically with a computer, which really helps mitigate the hallucination problems of LLMs. Back in the days of pure scaling LLMs and Sam Altman talking about Dyson spheres, I was skeptical that LLMs would do math, but I did think that perhaps in the future, techniques using these formal languages could contribute to math. Well, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic had the same idea and I underestimated their limitless checkbooks. Many of the biggest results were announced by mathematicians directly working for them (and presumably being paid a handsome amount).
For what it's worth, after the last of these big announcements, I decided to try one of these AIs on one of my small problems that I couldn't figure out. The AI did give a solution. That is, until I checked it thoroughly and realized that the it had a subtle but severe mistake that made it useless. I reprompted it, it failed again, and I ran out of tokens. I'm sure someone will tell me to shell out $200/mo for a pro subscription.
In the math and computer science research community, this is all anyone can really talk about right now. Honestly, after watching this whole AI bubble starting from the very beginning, I think the AI companies want to use marketing to stoke fear that all mathematicians will be replaced. But now, I am just too tired to argue. The amount of alarm and the extraordinary social pressure to use LLMs has soured me to this whole research thing. If becoming a researcher will one day require supporting these evil AI companies, I would rather just not. My dream job now is Factorio developer.
A lot of annoying people in technical areas view the world in terms of an intelligence hierarchy: the smartest people do math and physics, the slightly less smart people do coding, and the dumb people do everything else. So if AI can do math then it can do anything else. But, as an example, it is abundantly obvious now that AI is not replacing filmmaking. The techbros might be moved by arguments about how hilariously expensive video generation is, and how all these videos are 2 second clips stitched together so you won't feel the uncanny valley. But the real reason is that nobody wants to watch slop made with no intention or feeling. Also, nobody wants to support the AI companies, which could not act more evil even if they tried.
The mania in math right now quite resembles the mania in software engineering back in December-February, when Claude Code definitely solved all coding. I don't think the boosters expected that by April, everyone would be complaining about how expensive it all was while seeing an endless parade of vibe coding disasters (and no increase in productivity). Even if math research works out perfectly well (which is a still big if), it's not going to pay the bills. They would need to find a use case in the real world, where hallucinations can cause serious damage and cannot be formally prevented. And they have certainly tried. Math will not change the fact that all of this will collapse.
I believe the main ingredient is Lean, which is a formal language resembling a programming language. Math proofs written in Lean can be verified deterministically with a computer, which really helps mitigate the hallucination problems of LLMs.
100% this. Also, looking back at an earlier example that was actually written up in more detail, AlphaGeometry 1 got 28/30 problems, but entirely stripping out the LLM from the system, the symbolic logic proportion alone could get 14/30, and replacing the LLM with different heuristic methods could get 18/30 and 21/30 (for different methods).
Even if math research works out perfectly well (which is a still big if), it’s not going to pay the bills. They would need to find a use case in the real world, where hallucinations can cause serious damage and cannot be formally prevented. And they have certainly tried. Math will not change the fact that all of this will collapse.
The boosters and LLM companies still believe LLMs get their current level of performance by generalizing and not just memorizing facts (and maybe a wide shallow pool of weak heuristics). So they are hoping by pushing the LLM performance up in some narrow domain they can churn out synthetic data for, they will see some large general improvements in LLM performance.
Daft ai project of the week: “lore”, a version control system that should not be confused with another vcs of the same name open-sourced by epic games a few weeks ago.
lore does not track your code. it tracks the prompts, notes and decisions that produced it. you commit intent. when you want code, you run lore materialize: it replays the accumulated intent into a brief, and an agent reconciles the working tree to match it.
the code is build output. the intent is the source.
…which would be great, if the output of llms were deterministic, and generally it is not. This means rolling back a change to undo or fix something is just another spin of the roulette wheel, with the analogy being reinforced by the number of tokens you’ll have to buy and burn to do a rebuild. It looks like it still needs a real vcs behind the scenes, given that it isn’t entirely self-hosting, but maybe I misunderstood something.
You might wonder if this is some kind of satirical work, or perhaps piece of performance art, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t… the creator and sole human author (naturally, claude is the only other “contributor”) is a big fan of something called “open audio protocol” and a project called “audius” which came about by someone asking what if spotify and soundcloud, but on the blockchain? With ai agentic integration?
I’ve always thought that the ability for a VCS to show me exactly what my codebase looked like at any point in the past wasn’t as dementia-simulating as I’d like
Finally a VCS that simulates the horrific results of cvs merge gone wrong, 20 years since the last time I used cvs.
kayfabe vcs
Found a remarkable ad-hoc anti-LLM-product manifesto on the orange site. As is tradition, tag yourselves; I'm "believ[ing that] there's a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks."
Could be sort of an age related thing then, no?
my god, you found the good HN comment
Ooh. I love these. I'm "I don't think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don't want to give them more wealth and power."
I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I'm being asked -- required, in some cases -- to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and "obviously" they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.
oof. yeah that's me.
Why! Why are media so uncritical in their reporting!
https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/openai-ki-hackerangriff-100.html
Sorry, this is in German. It's about the marketing stunt open ai pulled vis-à-vis "oh no, our new model breached containment and went ahead on its own, yep all by itself, and hacked huggingface! So scary! BTW we'd like to IPO soon and-"
The outlet above, if you're not aware, isn't a German news outlet, it's THE German news outlet. They're independent of financial interests, in that they're publicly funded. They have an incredibly solid history of factual reporting.
Which is why it's so aggregating to see them parrot OpenAI's claims 1:1.
Also, don't go in the comments. For every sane "this is obviously a marketing stunt" comment there's 40+ "we're cooked" comments sincerely believing this shit.
I'm getting more and more convinced that in the minds of most people, LLMs are alive, waking, thinking beings with intents and an inner life of their own.
You know.
Compared to the much more boring "expensive side-effect free function taking string as input and giving string as output".
I hate all of this.
OpenAI: "Sorry about accidentally hacking you teehee. It was because of how good we are at computer security :3"
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
Maybe they should start applying some of that superhuman box-escaping AI to their own sandbox designs because if your sandbox escape is a bug in a "package registry cache proxy" you might be doing it wrong.
I’m deeply suspicious of this whole thing, because it looks a lot like a marketing exercise showing off how dangerous and powerful and autonomous their product is.
Also, “sandbox” is one of those words that the llm companies have ruined, because they use it to mean a strongly-worded sentence telling an llm not to do something.
who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai
Zoom in: "Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI," Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.
"Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points)." Michael was arguing against Ball's point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies.
Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also
Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest version’s weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are “inherently decelerationist.” A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is “full AI communism,” a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a “dystopian hellscape.” And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of “regulatory risk” around the use of open-weight Chinese models.
I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too.
oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus
For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they're handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who's ever scammed $5 in venture capital
The Guardian published a William McAskill editorial in the what-if-the-stateless-text-generators-had-moral-agency genre of fiction, and Emily Bender did a thread
From the article:
But the sheer pace of growth in AI means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enormous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant AI systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.
Get fucked, Will.
But also, if we grant the untenable sci-fi premise, this would be like a star trek episode where the federation cedes unconditionally to the expansionist alien fascists of the week if they have a much greater population because that's all it takes to outweigh the other side's moral concerns.
Earth-Trisolaris Organisation-ass moral framework.
It's pretty grim to be as immersed as I am in all the tech news bullshit (which I continue to do largely because I am the most techy person in most rooms I exist in, and the closest thing to an AI expert (it feels so weird to say that, but I do have a fair bit of experience coding machine learning from scratch in a scientific context, so I probably do need to get more comfortable with thinking myself as an expert — it's a relative term, after all)
However, I really enjoy that in addition to there being names that make me grimace because I know they will have dogshit takes on things, there are also names that I really respect. It makes me feel more connected to people, because it makes me reflect on how meaningful knowledge production is based on trust. Emily Bender, for instance, is someone whose work I am familiar with, and thus I am far likely to spend the energy to read stuff like the thread you linked.
As grim as modern tech is, it makes me smile that there are so many people who are fighting the good fight.
SpaceX stocks hit an all-time low make it go lower
They hope it’ll land safely, but all signs point to it disintegrating during descent and sinking into the abyss
i have been informed that the faster the company explodes the faster they can iterate, so eventually they'll make company that doesn't explode
"AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees, then hit a $7 billion power hurdle"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ai-spending-spree-hits-600b-as-oracle-fires-21000-employees-to-fund-boom/ar-AA28vWuD
"Oracle’s Worst Stock Crash in 25 Years" "Has Cost Larry Ellison $213 Billion in 10 Months"
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-worst-stock-crash-25-113002772.html
It's going to be Oracle to collapse the house of cards, isn't it. Come on Oracle, die and take down the USA economy with you. Make the people happy, Oracle.
"In short, Oracle's 65% decline is historic, but the stock's future depends less on its past and more on whether its AI investments produce durable cash flow"
well good luck with that, Oracle! :D
presented without comment: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist (via https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/my-falling-out-with-the-rationalist)
That was kind of a nothing post? I think the author is misrepresenting the growth (or at least failing to connect the most important dots) of the lesswrong rationalist by portraying them as a natural evolution of the skeptics movement and not the deliberate cultivation of an audience by Eliezer looking for people to spread his ideology to and by Thiel looking to influence farm and create a cult incubator. And then the post is titled "my falling out with the rationalist", and they write they "wanted to offer a more personal perspective " but they don't actually discuss that much of the personal angle either...
yeah, subculturally they're unrelated strains
like, just factually in terms of history, they're unrelated strains. LW rats come in a straight line from the Extropians in the '90s. The previous-millennium skeptics have crossover with those guys, but they're not the same as a group at all.
And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweil's singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.
yeah, they mostly thought the lesswrongers were annoying weirdoes when they perceived them at all, e.g. rationalwiki
Yes exactly how can you write an entire thing treating rationalism like something you can do an apostasy out of and never mention Yud once.
I assume the personal perspective is him tacitly admitting to being attracted to skepticism for the debate bro culture, especially the parts that bordered on harassment. Even the inciting incident of "leaving rationalism" is framed more as him growing out of the need to long-form debate someone, specifically James Damore, the google engineer who published a manifesto about how women don't belong in tech.
I don't know the author so I don't know if it is important that he was fine with pranking the timecube guy but decided enough is enough when it was time to take a pro-feminist side.
Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history of... performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.
I don't think that the Rats are an offshoot of the Skeptics and New Atheists just a space which competed for the same young, male, educated, Autistic Anglo audience. They deliberately removed the parts of the skeptic curriculum which involve introspection and ethnography, because they all wanted to run some grift on their audiences so the audiences needed poor epistemic hygiene.
The overlap between rationalists and the skeptic community was indeed tiny. I say this as someone heavily involved in Usenet skeptic communities since the late eighties. In fact the Bay Area doesn't even register as a locus of the skeptic community at the times he's talking about.
I'm not trying to excuse what much of the skeptic/atheist community later became in the 2010s. It's definitely turned into something nearly unrecognizable since its earlier days. But that had nothing to do with any sort of imagined rationalist adjacency.
there are two things that are obvious in his blog: first, michał is an incredibly privileged dude (who doesn't notice his privilege because, coming from poland, he sees himself as underprivileged), and second, the moment people finally leave the vicinity of the formalized skeptic movement is strictly dependent on how much misogyny and racism they tolerate.
2017, three years post gamergate, is quite much.
2017, three years post gamergate
You know, I was wondering if the author elided the gap between early 2000s and 2017 because of the cringey and sometimes outright awful stuff that came out of the rationalists... but you've reminded me the skeptic movement also had some nasty bits both within it and as offshoots.
Humanoid robots providing stiff competition to quantum as to where the ~~smart~~ desparate money will be going once everyone realises the wheels have fallen off ai.
https://thepit.social/@peter/116962244994361810
(the video is too big to upload here)
I particularly like the way they had body bag operatives within lunging distance, because they clearly expected the thing to just fucking die at a moment’s notice.
Or maybe they do that for all their speakers.
via dumpsterfire
Robotaxi riders are falling asleep, sparking frantic emergency service calls
So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers”. The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
Apparently it's cheaper to foist the job of waking passengers up on 911 than to hire an employee to do it. Good ol' privatize the gains / socialize the losses!
Debian has a new general resolution to ban LLM use in Debian packaging: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002
News the one: Alphabet quadruples profit to 112B thanks to "AI" investments
News the two: Alphabet hiding ~250B in "AI" debt
This is funny yet also awful: adversarial tokenmaxxing suggests that writing everything as l33t$p34k increases the cost to process a document with an llm because the initial tokenisation step produces far more tokens.
This seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to work around, if it became commonplace (which it won’t) but the prospect of any anti-llm places doing this in the meantime does not spark joy.
Mathematicians don’t love the use of “AI” for math, not one bit, via Timnit Gebru
new odium symposium episode. we look at the work of conservative philosopher, grifter and tobacco lobbyist Roger Scruton.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/21-mr-rogers-164372632