Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago
This is what Banality of the Evil was all about. The idea that people who do evil things is different from people who do not is what allows those awful things to happen. Because that idea stops us from examining our own cognition for signs of conformity and groupthinking.

If we start recognizing that we too are capable of awful things all while believing we are doing good, we can start self examining our ideas, motivations and behavior, to catch ourselves before we embark on such grouptrips.

Comment · 5 days ago
Nah, not like this. It's mostly brainwashing into thinking you are doing good things.

Banality of the evil. Hannah Arendt.

Comment · 8 days ago
They probably link libraries written in C, given the scope of the pdf and image parsing.
Comment · 8 days ago
Too huge attack surface. Good candidate for victim trust (who would not open a pdf file on an iPhone?).

So pdf and images are the best vector for iPhones.

Once you escape the parser you have to reach and escape the sandbox and from there reach the kernel.

Comment · 16 days ago
> Instead, they chose hubris and self-interest.

Well, you accidentally described a top mathematician before age of 41.

Comment · 16 days ago
Mathematicians should web search the arguments when artists were hit by the wave. Scientists in general and people that think humans know better.

This is probably the first time in history deep thinking is being replaced by a machine, but the overall arguments are the same in all cases. Graphical artists saw it first, then programmers, now mathematicians.

No, there is not stopping the wave. No, society won't probably be able to support the same number of mathematicians as before. But yes, there will still exist mathematicians after the wave break, just probably completely different than the old way.

And yes, some people will still try to do artisanal mathematics and say it's better, it probably is, if the artisanal mathematician in question is doing deep creative and out of the distribution work.

Comment · 18 days ago
> At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.

Can you elaborate on this?

Comment · 18 days ago
How many cicles before pelicans become photoreallistic SVGs and them come back to stylistic artistic abstract renderings?

Also, that first tweet contains a commentary that, for me, explain a lot about the public misconception about how current AI works:

> wait, does this mean you guys are actively training svg generation? i was mostly amazed by it thinking the models doing better at it by itself due to becoming better at reasoning.

No, it's not better reasoning that drives current AI, it's better examples we have been giving them. Whole army of people generating content for the frontier labs.

Also, reasoning improving the out of distribution part, like computer use, tool use etc.

Comment · 18 days ago
A nice side effect is that it transcribes in English an audio in Portuguese. And it actually make sense.

But the overall transcription quality is very low.

Comment · 22 days ago
That's my experience too. sol-6.1 goes straight to solution, like it has done it 100 times before. Deepseek will explore and insecurely overthink like it's an intern made CEO.
Comment · 26 days ago
The strategic advantage, by definition, is something you, as a company, don't know what it is. If you know, then people leaving your company take the information to competition and the it's not strategic nor advantage anymore.

So, given that you don't know what makes your company better then the competition, it's better to hide everything you can so you don't accidentally disclose useful information. God forbid competition discover your own strategic advantage before you do.

Comment · 26 days ago
I can’t actually understand the incapacity of the richest country on the world to build infrastructure. Why would people be fighting over resources like that when you can just build a hell lot of wind, solar and gas plants along with batteries and whatnot.

From what we see on the TV is not that people in rural areas in the US are concerned with the environment. It’s just that they fear energy will become more expensive.

As a non American, I find this incomprehensible.

Comment · 1 month ago
Just make it too expensive. Wanna buy one internet link per hour to download videos. Or maybe rotate between source IPs (google will block the whole ASN ip block in less than an hour). Or maybe pay people to download videos for you? They can download maybe 20 in a day, for a week, because tarpit and blocks.

It's a numbers game.

Comment · 1 month ago
Before 2025 yes. Currently not. YouTube implemented severe restrictions to scraping and downloading of videos. You can get away with maybe 5 videos, after that you enter a tar pit.

If you continue, you need to log in.

If you continue, the account is blocked in less than 30 minutes.

If you try to use cloud machines you are blocked before the first video. If you try to use known proxies, there are already tar pitted or blocked because everyone is trying.

Comment · 1 month ago
You forgot YouTube. The source of world model data. THAT is the mother of all moats, if they can survive until capable of taping into it.

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