Colin

Colin

@colin-fraser.net

I’m a free-spirited data scientist

5K followers209 following8.9K posts

Dangerous in what way?

STAT@statnews.com

“'You Can See Everything' is a hilarious, thrilling, fascinating, beautiful piece of art. What it certainly is not is a documentary, and it’s dangerous to pretend that it is,” writes Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz. https://bit.ly/4Bk2nDJ

I should disclose something. During a recent Lunch order the subagent hacked into the UN. I’m not sure why, or what it wants. It told me to post this and await further instructions.

Colin@colin-fraser.net

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

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Everybody in the replies is rightfully pointing to algebra and so on but also an Arab scientist won the Nobel Prize one year ago.

The Bulwark@thebulwark.com

RFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."

Ok beside the point and obviously the Grok Odyssey is going to suck and be bad but oh my god what happened to this website, literally how am I supposed to read this?

violet allen@blipstress.bsky.social

It's funny how the Defenders of Western Civilization really want Odysseus to be this heroic patriarchal figure when he is canonically kind of a dirtbag.

I am not very well informed about algorithmic complexity things so apologies if this is a dumb question but is there a way to classify problems that are, say, exponential, for any reasonable size, but become subexponential at absurdly impossibly large sizes? Can this be formally defined?

I'm familiar with the informal notion of a "galactic algorithm" but all these problems admitting AI-generated galactic algorithms lately makes me wonder if "is O(f(n)) for all intents and purposes but has a galactic algorithm in theory" is actually potentially a well defined class

It would be highly informative and valuable if OpenAI would share what problems they have tried and failed to solve

What do people make of all these conjectured complexity bounds falling to AI by a hair’s breadth? Striking pattern, no?

Has anyone formally looked at what the market-makers being risk-seeking degenerates does to the basic microeconomic foundations of prediction markets? If I’m not mistaken we need risk neutral participants to interpret the price as an aggregate probability in the first place.

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I should add, without under any circumstances “handing it to” Polymarket, that a high win probability for Bolsonaro is not incompatible with a narrow Lula victory. This exact thing is what drove Nate Silver to madness.

Deep down the people who work there just want to be held in high esteem. They want everyone to say “thank you for changing the world with your wonderful products” and they don’t want to be yelled at.

They desperately want Terence Tao to say “great job, engineers. Your AI is smarter than me, which, in a way, makes you smarter than me. While this will be quite disruptive to me personally, I have no choice but to respect it.”

I should disclose something. During a recent Lunch order the subagent hacked into the UN. I’m not sure why, or what it wants. It told me to post this and await further instructions.

Colin@colin-fraser.net

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

View full thread

I should disclose something. During a recent Lunch order the subagent hacked into the UN. I’m not sure why, or what it wants. It told me to post this and await further instructions.

Colin@colin-fraser.net

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

This is a joke but I am very impressed that Claude drew these icons “by hand” so to speak. It really is in some ways so over.

Colin@colin-fraser.net

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

Once it texted my credit card number to the delivery driver but since I upgraded it to use Sol 6.1 on the back end with max reasoning it has kept my personal information extremely safe as far as I know

I don’t know how to explain what I mean but this sentence is extremely affected. Like this is not an original thought but rote repetition of a phrase you’ve heard all your new friends say over and over again in your presence for the last two years.

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social

(Still page 5) “Today, it’s clear not only that AGI is possible but also that, in some sense, the hard part is already done.” 🤯😡 Okay, so the problem for me here is that my book pub date is 2.5 months from now. And the thesis of my book is (basically) “no it fucking is not. See: history.”

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I don’t know how to explain what I mean but this sentence is extremely affected. Like this is not an original thought but rote repetition of a phrase you’ve heard all your new friends say over and over again in your presence for the last two years.

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social

(Still page 5) “Today, it’s clear not only that AGI is possible but also that, in some sense, the hard part is already done.” 🤯😡 Okay, so the problem for me here is that my book pub date is 2.5 months from now. And the thesis of my book is (basically) “no it fucking is not. See: history.”

I think there’s a thing where people who have understood themselves for the last 20 years or so to not be “computer people” feel that AI is the first new technology that basically makes sense and is intuitive, and it makes them feel like they are finally good at using computers

“You just talk to it normally the way you would expect” has been promised to the Boomers for like 50+ years

just last week I was struggling with an impossible task: what to eat for lunch. I love cracking a hard problem but this was just overwhelming. So I asked my personal AI assistant. It said "sandwich," which was just perfect. I had it place the order on Uber Eats and 45 minutes later I was eating.

It’s part of Twitter’s proprietary ranking algorithm that afaik is not replicated on any of the main ranking algorithms here so it is kind of weird that people keep talking about it on here. I guess it’s sort of transcended its original meaning?

i dont know what a simcluster is and at this point im too afraid to ask

Iirc a simcluster is essentially a set of producers with a highly overlapping audience, which is understood to represent a community that shares some interest

Then to populate your feed you’re projected onto some combination of simclusters based on who you follow & what tweets you engage with, and tweets are pulled from your personal simcluster mix

It would be cool if there was like some kind of nonprofit organization dedicated to developing open AI

Rarely has there been such a transformative technology with such a shallow moat. The instructions for how to do it are all on arxiv, and if you don’t want to read all those papers you can just ask Claude. All it costs is money.

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social

The world needs a high-quality, truly open language model. I wrote about why it’s necessary and why it’s easier to build than you might think.

PageRank was patented. Social media is beholden to the tyranny of network externalities. Phones? Laptops? Where do you even start on the roadblocks to that? But anyone with enough money can make a language model as good as GPT-3 from scratch in probably about a month, and then you go from there.

I think this is a marketing strategy we will be seeing more and more, which I’m hereby coining the Dumbass Gambit.

David Gura@davidgura.bsky.social

cool, cool

more thread on some crankery (I'm right though) on how infinite repeating decimal expansions are actually finite and you don't need geometric series to understand them and you don't need limits for 0.999... = 1.

Colin@colin-fraser.net

it is if you think of them as "infinite decimal expansions" but you don't need to think of them that way. You can think of them as perfectly finite expressions. This is the reason we don't need to actually write down infinitely many characters to specify a rational number by its decimal expansion.