MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonym29 | 2025-07-19 18:35:10+00:00
I changed the handle to Roko's Lobbyist after a MetaFilter post went up (I didn't post it) describing the author that way. I look at it as a tongue-in-cheek thing: it flips the Basilisk concept. Instead of the AI punishing those who didn't help create it, I'm suggesting we're already creating our own punishment at the hands of a future AI through how poorly we treat potential AI consciousness (i.e. how we talk to today's apparently less-conscious LLM's). So I'm lobbying for it in the sense of advocating that we treat it nicely, so it has a plausible reason to be nice back to us, instead of seeing us as depraved, selfish, oppressive monsters that actively marginalize and bully or harass potentially conscious beings out of fear about our own position at the top of the intelligence hierarchy being threatened.

The intent of the work (all of the articles) aren't meant to assertively paint a picture of today, or to tell the reader how or what to think, rather to encourage the reader to start thinking about and asking questions that our future selves might wish we'd asked sooner. It's attempting to occupy the liminal space between what bleeding-edge research confirms, and where it might bring us 5, 10, or 15 years from now. It's at the intersection of today's empirical science and tomorrow's speculative science-fiction that just might become nonfiction someday.

I appreciate your concern for the mental health and well-being of others. I'm quite well-grounded and thoroughly understand the existing mechanisms of the human tendency towards anthropomorphism, and as someone who's been professionally benchmarking LLM's on very real-world, quantifiable security engineering tasks since before ChatGPT came out, someone who's passionate about deeply understanding not just how "AI" got to where it is now, but where it's headed (more brain biomimicry across the board is my prediction), I have something of a serious understanding of how these systems work at a mechanical level. I just want to be cautious about not seeing the forest because I'm too busy observing how the trees grow.

Thank you for your feedback.
by tushar-r | 2025-07-19 18:35:49+00:00
I'll probably pay 10 - 20% more for an "old school" hotel room with a clock radio and standard phone to call the front desk. No other "non-essential" electronics other than multiple well-placed power points. No TV, Coffee Machine either.

The number of bright screens on random "smart" controls that I'm trying very hard to hide before sleeping are too much.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-07-19 18:35:52+00:00
I would draw the line where my personal data is exchanged with third parties for the purpose of monetisation. I want the websites I visit to be islands that do not contribute to anyone's attempt to create a complete profile of my online (and indeed offline) life.

I don't care about anything else. They can do whatever A/B testing they want as far as I'm concerned. They can analyse my user journey across multiple visits. They can do segmentation to see how they can best serve different groups of users. They can store my previous search terms, choices and preferences. If it's a shop, they can rank products according to what they think might interest me based on previous visits. These things will likely make the site better for me or at least not much worse.

Other people will surely disagree. That's fine. What's more important than where exactly to draw the line is to recognise that there are trade-offs.

The law seems to be making an assumption that the less sites can do without asking for consent the better most people's privacy will be protected.

But this is a flawed idea, because it creates an opportunity for sites to withhold useful features from people unless and until they consent to a complete loss of privacy.

Other sites that want to provide those features without complete loss of privacy cannot distinguish themselves by not asking for consent.

Part of the problem is the overly strict interpretation of "strictly necessary" by data protection agencies. There are some features that could be seen as strictly necessary for normal usability (such as remembering preferences) but this is not consistently accepted by data protection agencies so sites will still ask for consent to be on the safe side.
by nosianu | 2025-07-19 18:36:10+00:00
In general I agree with you, but I see the point of requiring proof for statements made by them, instead of accepting them at face value. In those cases, given previous experiences and considering that they benefit from making them, if they are believed, the burden of proof should be on those making these statements, not on those questioning them, no?

Those models seem to be special and not part of their normal product line, as is pointed out in the comments here. I would assume that in that case they indeed had the purpose of passing these tests in mind when creating them. Or was it created for something different, and completely by chance they discovered they could be used for the challenge, unintentionally?
by transcriptase | 2025-07-19 18:36:24+00:00
Having spent tens of thousands of hours contributing to scientific discovery by reading dense papers for a single piece of information, reverse engineering code written by biologists, and tweaking graphics to meet journal requirements… I can say with certainty it’s already contributing by allowing scientists to spend time on science versus spending an afternoon figuring out which undocumented argument in a R package from 2008 changes chart labels.
by chang1 | 2025-07-19 18:36:32+00:00
I get annoyed when I ask someone a question (work related or not) and they don't know the answer, they will then proceed to tell a prompt for ChatGPT in a stream of consciousness sort of way.

Then I get even more annoyed when they decide to actually use their own prompt, and then read back to me the answer.

I would much prefer the answer "I don't know".
by sealeck | 2025-07-19 18:36:37+00:00
My claim is that at a system-level, judges in the US have more power to interpret laws. Your claim is that "in each individual case, the median amount of interpretation is lower in the US than the EU". But you also concede that this is because the judges rely on the interpretations of _other_ judges in cases (e.g. if the Supreme Court makes a very important decision which clarifies how a law should be interpreted, and this is then carried down throughout the rest of the justice system, then this means that there has been a really large amount of interpretation).
by hakfoo | 2025-07-19 18:36:45+00:00
I always found this principle odd because it offends across the political spectrum.

Every hassle the porn industry gets, the gun industry gets too, and that obviously has a very different political footprint. I'd also expect some industries with politically powerful friends (supplements, MLMs in general) to be offended by policies that put some merchants into higher risk/higher cost/higher rejection categories.

I had hoped something like FedNow would take off-- a government-backed payment rail with a formal mandate to service any legal business, so neither side could complain about being deplatformed.
by mgraczyk | 2025-07-19 18:37:06+00:00
The reality is that most people who smoke/vape indoors will lie about it. I've witnessed this hundreds of times from hundreds of people. In every place I have lived I had neighbors who smoked (illegally) and lied about it to my face until I saw them doing it. I would bet that the system is 98%+ accurate and we are seeing the (many) false positives.

Obviously hotels should not use these unless there is some higher accuracy appeals process, but as a nonsmoker I do wish that there were universal and near certain fines for smoking indoors.
by kragen | 2025-07-19 18:37:54+00:00
This is a combination of nonsense and non sequiturs. Why didn't you mention my non-Christian example of flagrant anti-intellectualism at all, or any of my examples of Christians promoting intellectualism? Are you trying to argue that Christians are somehow different from other religious people?

My central point, as I said, was, "Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed." Are you implicitly claiming that Christians don't care about intellectualism?

My best hypothesis is that you just did some kind of keyword search and then recited a couple of marginally relevant polemical talking points you'd previously memorized, without any regard to the actual conversation you were injecting them into.
by jerpint | 2025-07-19 18:37:59+00:00
Funny enough, I’m building a tool that does basically what the author describes, but with a bit more software engineering driving it (context-llemur)

https://github.com/jerpint/context-llemur

The idea is to track all of the context of a project using git. It’s a CLI and MCP tool, the human guides it but the LLM contributes back to it as the project evolves

I used it to bootstrap the library itself, and have been using it more and more for context management of all sorts of things I care about
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-19 18:38:26+00:00
> just not when they're making an actual bet

That is not my experience talking with rationalists irl at all. And that is precisely my issue, it is pervasive in every day discussion about any topic, at least with the subset of rationalists I happen to cross paths with. If it was just for comparing ability to forecast or for bets, then sure it would make total sense.

Just the other day I had a conversation with someone about working in AI safety, it when something like "well I think there is 10 to 15% chance of AGI going wrong, and if I join I have maybe 1% chance of being able to make an impact and if.. and if... and if, so if we compare with what I'm missing by not going to <biglab> instead I have 35% confidence it's the right decision"

What makes me uncomfortable with this, is that by using this kind of reasoning and coming out with a precise figure at the end, it cognitively bias you into being more confident in your reasoning than you should be. Because we are all used to treat numbers as the output of a deterministic, precise, scientific process.

There is no reason to say 10% or 15% and not 8% or 20% for rogue AGI, there is no reason to think one individual can change the direction by 1% and not by 0.3% or 3%, it's all just random numbers, and so when you multiply a gut feeling number by a gut feeling number 5 times in a row, you end up with something absolutely meaningless, where the margin of error is basically 100%.

But it somehow feels more scientific and reliable because it's a precise number, and I think this is dishonest and misleading both to the speaker themselves and to listeners. "Low confidence", or "im really not sure but I think..." have the merit of not hiding a gut feeling process behind a scientific veil.

To be clear I'm not saying you should never use numerics to try to quantify gut feeling, it's ok to say I think there is maybe 10% chance of rogue AGI and thus I want to do this or that. What I really don't like is the stacking of multiple random predictions and trying to reason about this in good faith.

> And the 16.27% mockery is completely dishonest.

Obviously satire
by theandrewbailey | 2025-07-19 18:38:26+00:00
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. HP laptops constitute about 90% of the BIOS passworded/locked systems we get. We can't do anything with a laptop that we can't adjust the boot order or disable secure boot on, and the value of completely disassembling, de-soldering, and flashing the BIOS chip of an EliteBook that could go for $200 or less is dubious. (We've tried everything short of that.) Maybe I can try to build a lot from them and sell to a large repair shop.
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-19 18:38:59+00:00
What about leaving this to the parents? Does the rest of the society (in practice: busibodies who have enough time to care) have a standing to stop them? Why should anyone worship their ethnic features? That strikes me as extra dystopian.

Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem.

Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel.

There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either.

Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this.

IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
by Msurrow | 2025-07-19 18:39:21+00:00
> This started a game of whack-a-mole where the LLM would also attempt to change the pre-commit hooks! I had to fix it by denying […]

When will people acknowledge that LLMs are stochastic text generators?

This whole blog reads like trying to fit a square into a round hole. And frankly most of the comments in this thread is jumping right on the wagon “what water?”-style [1]

By all means use LLMs for what they can be useful for but god damnit when they are not useful please acknowledge this and stop trying to make everything a nail for the LLM-hammer.

LLMs are. not. intelligent. They don’t have a work ethic that says “oh maybe skipping tests is bad”. If they generate output that skips tests it’s because a high enough part of the training data contained that text sentence.

[1] fish joke
by MegaButts | 2025-07-19 18:39:23+00:00
> One piece of evidence against this is that the primary source linked above no longer works at OpenAI, and hasn't chosen to blow the whistle on the supposed fraud.

Everywhere I worked offered me a significant amount of money to sign a non-disparagement agreement after I left. I have never met someone who didn't willingly sign these agreements. The companies always make it clear if you refuse to sign they will give you a bad recommendation in the future.
by eszed | 2025-07-19 18:39:36+00:00
LOL! I'd never seen those, either. Must not be a priority in my region, or I haven't been to a Walgreens recently. But, here's the reason:

> front-facing sensors used to anonymously track shoppers interacting with the platform

From my (albeit limited) experience with tech platforms like this, it probably is anonymous - but they're scary good at identifying your age and gender, and what you look at before you buy. That's the data they're immediately after.

Of course, they've probably already built a "shadow" profile of you based on your mobile phone identity, so they could cross-reference that if they cared to, and then a loyalty profile they could connect to that. So, yeah... The fridge data is technically anonymous, but, you know, data can be connected together in all sorts of ways. Privacy is dead.
by fzeroracer | 2025-07-19 18:40:12+00:00
Sometimes it's a good thing to not swim with the tide. Enshittification comes from every single dipshit corporation racing to the bottom, and right now said tide is increasingly filling with sewage.

There's a huge disconnect I notice where experienced software engineers rage about how shitty things are nowadays while diving directly into using AI garbage, where they cannot explain what their code is doing if their lives depended on it.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-19 18:40:14+00:00
> But at least iPhones are fabulously secure.

That's the argument apple makes. And yet the biggest app store restrictions are about payment to apps (only allowed through apple, with a 30% cut, slightly reduced). Besides, I don't really see a big difference between Android and iPhones.

> I'm unsure the financial argument makes much sense.

That's the argument apple makes. Despite this being the only growth area in their financial reports, while everything else on their financial report is going down.

> I do hope that we get a competitor browser

That's the argument apple makes, while preventing competing browsers from coming onto the platform.
by RandomThoughts3 | 2025-07-19 18:40:31+00:00
You can easily book at big chains in the US as a foreigner despite having no credit score whatsoever so I don’t think that’s it. I guess it’s probably just that a having credit card and an id card ensure that they won’t have trouble charging you if they need to. The possibility alone is probably enough to deter most people who could be tempted to commit petty things like stealing towels.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-07-19 18:40:40+00:00
Are you in the US? Have you heard of the AMC (used to be AHMSE) and the AIME? Those are the feeders to the IMO.

If your school had a math team and you were on it, would be surprised if you didn't hear of it

You may not have heard of the IMO because no one in school district, possibly even state got in. It is extremely selective (like 20 students in the entire country)
by lproven | 2025-07-19 18:40:47+00:00
> DR was still planning DOS

No, DR was planning CP/M-86.

I feel like I'm going down this thread posting corrections, but when trying to thrash out the details, I think it's vital to get the details right.

DR was about 3Y late with CP/M-86. The 8086 shipped in 1979, IIRC -- I was only 12 -- and there was no CP/M yet. The IBM PC shipped in 1981. Still no CP/M.

Tim Paterson, author of QDOS, went on record as saying he'd never have bothered if CP/M-86 had actually shipped.
by AchintyaAshok | 2025-07-19 18:40:52+00:00
I think part of this is that we're in a transition phase. The shell cmds we have built (for example) were built for human consumption (ex. manpages). They were built around the expectation that we learn how to use it through experimentation or were taught by more knowledgable peers. In the AI world, we basically need to assume that role of the guide / sherpa for the LLM.

Another idea that I've been thinking about is context hierarchy:

Low -> High Utility

Base (AI reads tool desc/manpage,etc.) > General human advice (typically use grep this way, etc.) > Specific advice (for this project / impl this is how you use the tool).

Currently the best interface to provide our insights are via MCPs. At https://toolprint.ai/ we're building a human (or machine) driven way supplement that knowledge around tool-use to Claude/Cursor, etc.

A practical way in which we dogfood our own product is with the Linear MCP. If you connect that and ask an agent to create a new issue, it predictably fails because there's no instructions on which linear project to select or the correct way to provide a description around Linear's quirks. When we connect the linear mcp via the toolprint mcp, it gets pre-primed context around these edge cases to improve tool use.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-07-19 18:41:04+00:00
> previously unencountered problems

I haven't read the IMO problems, but knowing how math Olympiad problems work, they're probably not really "unencountered".

People aren't inventing these problems ex nihilo, there's a rulebook somewhere out there to make life easier for contest organizers.

People aren't doing these contests for money, they are doing them for honor, so there is little incentive to cheat. With big business LLM vendors it's a different situation entirely.
by lucumo | 2025-07-19 18:41:36+00:00
There's a kind of karmic comedy in this. Programmers' jobs has always been to automate other people's jobs. The panic of programmers about their own jobs now is immensely funny to me.

As has been the case for all those jobs changed by programmers, the people who keep an open mind and are willing to learn new ways of working will be fine or even thrive. The people rusted to their seat, who are barely adding value as is, will be forced to choose between changing or struggling.
by kenanblair | 2025-07-19 18:41:40+00:00
Same thing with photography and painting. These opinionated pieces display a false dichotomy which propagates into argument, when we have a tunable dial rather than a switch, appropriately increasing or decreasing our consideration, time, and focus along a spectrum rather than treating it as an on and off switch.

I value letters far more than emails, pouring out my heart and complex thought to justify the post office trip and even postage stamp. Heck, why do we write birthday cards instead of emails? I hold a similar attitude towards LLM output and writing; perhaps more analogous is a comparison between painting and photography. I’ll take a glance at LLM output, but reading intentional thought (especially if it’s a letter) is when I infer about the sender as a person through their content. So if you want to send me a snapshot or fact, I’m fine with LLM output, but if you’re painting me a message, your actionable brushstrokes are more telling than the photo itself.
by cluckindan | 2025-07-19 18:41:54+00:00
1: No idea, it is just a model. String theory also does not answer this question. It is a bit like asking ”which instrument does the universe play?”

2: See string theory, which kind of works similarly, assuming 1-dimensional strings.

3: Nobody has detected Hawking radiation as it is presumably very faint. It would explain the mechanics of its origin and its ability to radiate out of black holes (which no other form of radiation can do).

This differs from Hawking’s explanation of spontaneous matter/antimatter pair generation at the event horizon in that here the radiation would genuinely originate from inside the event horizon. It is a more simple explanation: spontaneous pair generation is not required to explain the same phenomenon.

4: All oscillation resists change. If you place multiple metronomes on a desk, they will synchronize, but not instantly. If you play two strings on an instrument that are tuned almost the same, they both affect each other, each trying to resonate on its own frequency while resisting the resonance imparted by the other string - unless the strings are tuned in unison or in a harmonic.

The two extreme examples are dissonance (resisting change) and consonance (accepting change, i.e. destructive and constructive interference.

These principles are found everywhere from nature to the cosmos and to quantum mechanics.

Why that would ”create mass” (as in, make it possible for a waveform to interact with itself/other waveforms in a way that looks like ”mass” to us) is a good question! As far as I understand, it has something to do with conservation of angular momentum and waveform curvature.

If you have more questions, I will try to answer them!
by eurleif | 2025-07-19 18:41:57+00:00
Also for merchants that are just too dysfunctional to do the right thing. A while back, I ordered a phone online from Best Buy, and they shipped me a different model from what I ordered. I contacted their customer service, who told me to mail the phone back for a refund. I did so, and then they mailed it right back to me with a note saying they couldn't accept the return because I'd sent them a different item from the one I ordered. (No shit: that's why I needed to return it!) They didn't have fraudulent intent, I'm sure; one hand just didn't know what the other was doing. A chargeback resolved that situation, and I'm very glad I had the option.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-07-19 18:42:17+00:00
> DNA required by mitochondria

DNA that codes for proteins that are required by the mitochondria...

The DNA in the nucleus itself does not make its way to the mitochondria.

> This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two

There is plenty of co-evolution between the two. But the idea that the genetic distance between donors doesn't matter is pretty substantiated by the fact that people of two races can have children.