Hansenq

> The Wednesday evening statement from OpenAI was more emphatic: “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training.”

> The statement added, “After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way.”

It's great to hear that they've investigated and concluded there was zero change Tristan's prompts made it into training data for the model that solved NS.

It would have been better for them to have done this before they announced the NS solution, so that two days' worth of misinformation would not have spread wildly.

Agree! We have both published solutions now; someone (AI?) should be able to analyze their methods and see how similar they are

This is a tragic story. But it is also a story about the lengths that parents in China will go to improve the quality of life for their only child or to "save face" to their social circle about how their child is performing relative to others.

It's quite tragic that they felt the need to lean into this treatment and quite tragic that they were led on. Just a sad story all around.

Technically, a wikipedia page of a [living] person is an unauthorized biography!

But we'd like to think the crowdsourced editing process gives it some more trustworthiness than a random person self-publishing a book

Given that everything in the book is public information, it's hard to argue that any of this is strictly _illegal_, given the First Amendment. But it's definitely distasteful to write a book about a living individual without their consent (even though this does happen all the time; technically Wikipedia does this too).

Though that does raise an interesting point: what's the difference between writing a book about someone and asking ChatGPT "Tell me the biography of X"? It's the historical meaning and prestige of saying "I wrote a book", even though with Amazon, anyone can write a book and self-publish it.

> Eamon Duede, a philosopher of science at Purdue University and one of the authors of a paper called “Why Slop Matters,” said A.I. brought joy to people who wanted to create something that very few other people would find interesting — like images of their friends in historical scenes.

> “People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort,” he said. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find “a bunch of barriers removed.”

I think there needs to be a different frame with which to analyze this scenario. Yes, it's distasteful to sell a book about a living person without their consent. But who are we to deny people the enjoyment of entertaining themselves by researching, brainstorming, and publishing a document/report/book, whatever you want to call it?

I'm glad the author mentioned it in the article, but it's definitely a different world now.

I only went to Pangram because I read through the essay and could not help but notice the Claude-like sentence structure and AI-isms in it, which distracted me and completely made me distrust the thesis of the piece.

My understanding is that Pangram is the best out of all of the AI detectors and if there is a better one I'm happy to switch to it. And it's easier to point to them than to give explicit sentences and examples about why it reads so AI-generated (and since you want it, it's these sentences in particular: "The message was unambiguous: energy is finite, security is earned, and comfort has a cost.", "That template is being applied again today — and markets have accepted it.", "One country never made the West’s mistake.", etc.)

Reading through it again, there are so many emdashes. And don't get me wrong, I was a liberal user of emdashes before AI! But just like, if your job is to communicate your thoughts to a wide audience at least respect their intelligence enough and not rely on crutches just to get an article out against a deadline.

You can absolutely level this claim against Tesla too. When deliveries dropped a year ago, the stock price didn't go down. Tesla's stock is disconnected from the fundamentals and every stock investor today knows this.

Why would SpaceX be any different? If anything it would be even more disconnected from the fundamentals than Tesla is, given how much more control it gives Elon.

SpaceX stock is a bet on Elon, full stop. It has nothing to do with space, data centers, AI, or whatever technology they're currently working on; it's a bet that Elon will figure something out.

(and if you need any example of this, just look at Twitter--he engineered an exit for his X shareholders at a higher valuation [at the expense of SpaceX, but a positive exit nonetheless])

I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs.

So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!

very fair! wild to think about though. It's both more human but also less.

I would say this behavior now no longer passes the Turing test for me--if I asked a human a question about code I wouldn't expect them to return the code changes; i would expect the yes/no answer.

if you want that kind of control i think you should just try buff or opencode instead of the native Claude Code. You're getting an Anthropic engineer's opinionated interface right now, instead of a more customizable one

Often times I'll say something like:

"Can we make the change to change the button color from red to blue?"

Literally, this is a yes or no question. But the AI will interpret this as me _wanting_ to complete that task and will go ahead and do it for me. And they'll be correct--I _do_ want the task completed! But that's not what I communicated when I literally wrote down my thoughts into a written sentence.

I wonder what the second order effects are of AIs not taking us literally is. Maybe this link??