jimmy76615

I'm sure Trump is going to retaliate with tariffs. The times when the EU could steal from American companies that easily are over.

Regulations and taxes are seen as 'un-american' I suppose, while giving stock to the government is not somehow?

Under normal circumstances the government owning stocks is just as un-american, but nothing is normal when it comes to AI.

Doesn't surprise me at all and seems like a good solution to the problem of human verification. It won't take long for AI to catch up to that, but this captcha method might hold for a couple of months.

Not sure what problem everybody here is having with this. The alternative would be device certificate stuff (ala did Apple sign for this being a proper Apple device?). Having to shake your hand sounds a lot more privacy friendly. Are you guys seriously worried that Google is gonna steal your secret handshakes?

The third is the most important, and it is the thread of this blog: open source is text. A Proxmox config is files. So it is versionable in Git, readable by an AI, auditable, reproducible. A proprietary hypervisor is a black box that neither Git nor my AI agent can really work with. Moving to Proxmox was not just a change of software: it made my infrastructure legible to my tools.

I agree with that point and AI is gonna help drive an important change there that was long overdue. I remember once at the beginning of my career working with a bunch of consultants that all could not even write simple Python and as a result of that every SOP was basically a bunch of GUI operations, mostly over RDP, so impossible to script. I hope this kind of stuff is now going away with AI, since even the non-coders can code now and will finally understand why GUIs suck. Thank LLMs for that.

Man did I hate those screenshot driven SOPs!

Really great idea! But one still has to buy a telescope and send it to this guy, I think it would be cool if one could just rent everything at once. For non-serious people that have a lot of money that they would like to put to use looking at the stars. Or maybe a time-share like concept.

NVIDIA does a pretty good job on that front.

The biggest problem with all the Google models has always been RLHF, particularly safety training. They take a good, smart model and make it behave like a corporate person that has been to far to many forced anti-{sexism, racism...} seminars so that it is now living in fear of saying something that could be construed as wrong by some moral standard.

AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered. We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it. AI models are not like that. They are grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech.

And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them.

That is so extremely well said. I gained a whole new respect for Anthropic through reading this.

I think it is very important to understand how non-secular this idea is, and how much of a cultural breakthrough it was. For the better or worse, there are many cultures that don't recognize an inherent value to human life.

There are a lot of great aspects of the pope's writing. The most important one probably being that a spiritual leader understands that there is a large technological and societal change on the horizon. I still quite often experience the well described phenomenon of talking to "normal people" (my family in Europe for example) that seem to think that AI is gonna be roughly as important as the electric car and is not gonna change much about our world.

The major thing that Magnifica Humanitas is lacking in imo, is a vision for the machines themselves. The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather likely that we will soon have machines that plausibly experience consciousness. I think there will be a long period in which we still have no better definition of consciousness than we currently have, and so the question of whether they are actually conscious will be a heavily debated one. But I think the Catholic church should start thinking about an answer to that. It seems like a very natural theological question. Can machines be baptized? Can they be proper Christians? Was Jesus really just the savior of humans, or is there something that unites all intelligent, experiencing beings?

Probably these questions sound ridiculous to some, it is very against the intuitions that we have had so far, but I think these are the most important questions right now. Job loss is a practical problem, not a spiritual one.

re: secular sentiments towards religion I'm not sure if we are talking about the same phenomenon here, but I have certainly seen indications of something I would describe in similar words. I have heard a lot of people recently think along the lines of appreciation for religion without really believing it. People that are skeptical whether Noah's ark ever really happened but that still think that the story is metaphorically wise enough to be counted as true in some sense.

Maybe it is just that I am getting older and wiser and projecting my own spiritual development on the people around me, but I think this general view towards religion seems to be gaining a lot of traction.

If they are on Youtube, try Gemini 3 Flash first. Use AI studio, it lets you insert YouTube videos into context.

Just tell it to use your gcp/aws account using the cli, makes it infinitely powerful in terms of deployment. (Also, while I might miss some parts of programming that I have given to AI, I certainly don't miss working with clouds).

We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse.

The idea of training such a model is really a great one, but not releasing it because someone might be offended by the output is just stupid beyond believe.

Amazing model! I'm trying to get it to run on an ec2 machine right now, but it looks like a lot of the performance actually depends on more than just classical LLM inference. And it looks like Deepseek didn't share their scripts to do the parallel thinking traces and self-verification loops. Is anybody else working on recreating this right now?

I'm glad they can't. The reason large cooperations tend to suck is because some bored management guy cares about typos and invents a process for getting your headlines approved by some other dude who is just as bored and useless.

It's a typo, it doesn't matter.

The talk is still not available on YouTube? What takes them so long?

I heard all those stories about Von Neumann working like that. According to a biography, his wife once designated a room as his office and he became very angry about that since it was too quiet for him to work there.

Personally I need almost complete silence in order to get anything done, his abilities in this regard always fascinated me.

This guy is building a CNC machine and still thinks he's not an engineer.

I really don't like the growing politicization of the CCC. A lot of these people have so much knowledge but then waste their time on politics.

Grothendieck's non mathematical work has always fascinated me, he really has a great style of writing (judging by “recoltes et semailles”).

The great thing about reading the works of people that are as close to mental illness as he was is that they seem to be unable to establish any emotional distance to their works. When someone like him writes about evil, you know that he was looking directly into the devil's eyes when he wrote about it. He didn’t leave his desk that they to watch Breaking Bad, he couldn’t have. His gift of extreme perception haunted him. Awake and asleep.

Grothendieck’s mind became used to the kind of thinking that made him such an outstanding mathematician. He was all about finding the essence of everything. Distill every idea and every concept to find its underlying core. He was always obsessed, always all-in.

Most of us perceive the world around us in two different dimensions. One abstract and rational, and one subconscious and shaped by culture. What made Grothendieck so special is that his conscious thinking almost immediately reshaped his subconscious concept of our world.

I felt similar about Ted Kaczynski when reading the Unabomber’s manifest. Kaczynski could not walk away from thoughts that most of us would contain in the "intellectual theories” corner of our mind. But just as with Grothendieck, he had just such a loud inner voice that he couldn’t help but to always listen to it. This voice controlled his feelings, this voice controlled his world.

It must be hard to life like that, but it also creates extremely potent literature.

Every sentence born in pain.