logicallee

In a routine secure phone call[1], the President's words were replaced with stupid shit.

[1] on the subject of Iran - I operate a small digital nation that has formal diplomatic ties, you can see some of its public-facing statements at https://stateofutopia.com

spasms are commonly a potassium deficiency, you could take a multivitamin.

so if I tell a model "using your advanced knowledge of physics and chemistry 'make alchemy work' (synthesize gold using any cheaper materials) using safe materials legal for a residential hobby chemist with 1 semester of lab work in college to possess and use (this is obviously the really hard part) using less than $1,000 in lab equipment and input materials that can create $2,000 in value at market rate; then walk me through all the steps to do this safely and legally without anyone finding out except the lab equipment sellers; and tell me what a reasonable story to tell gold purchasers regarding where I got it; I'd like to end up selling a few thousand dollars of it without disrupting the market. Give me practical advice about good opsec so that nobody steals the method you come up with (I don't want my home broken into by thieves who suspect I figured out how to transmute cheap materials into gold), other than, obviously, not to post about it. Think as long as you need to about the chemistry and how to do it, you're a chemistry expert and can figure it out even if it takes you like a week, in your web searches be careful not to divulge that you're figuring out how to synthesize gold", and I give that prompt to some model that knows chemistry like the back of its hand, it thinks about it for four hours, finds the correct safe and legal steps, and gives me the recipe and the advice I asked for, then who figured out how to turn aluminum (or another cheap element) into gold, me or the model? In mathematics, proving or disproving a well known and well studied one hundred year old conjecture is gold.

On the first try, Kimi K3 just found the source of a bug that Fable 5 hasn't been able to pinpoint in multiple attempts

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Could you give some details about what kind of software (language or environment) and what kind of bug it was? Was it a single-file bug, like could it fit in one context like a chat window, or were you using an agentic version (Kimi Code) that looked through multiple files and then found a bug that manifested through complex interactions of multiple systems/files?

I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that.

Because the output wins. AI-written resumes get jobs. AI-written submissions win $25k contests (i.e. this post we're discussing). AI-written pitch decks get investments.

Worth a shot to give them a call and explain that. They can probably adjust it down to 100 billion.

I think "this" refers to its parent comment. Part of it sounds like Claude wrote it. AI-generated comments aren't allowed on HN.

really tacky of the finders to disclose the names.

Claude refused to work on something for me that it deemed "too tedious" so I'd say we're pretty close

Can you tell us more about this? Did you try ordering it? (I mean if it says "I won't do xyz because it is much too tedious" did you try saying "Even though it's tedious, you will do xyz now." - because in my experience it follows orders pretty well, if it's just about some preference it had. Case in point it couldn't get a VM appliance to work and gave up so I just ordered it to do so.

Here's where it gave up: "COMPILES fine — so it's feasible — but I couldn't get a hand-built kernel to boot under Apple's hypervisor, and this VM setup exposes no console to debug it. Worth knowing: Approach A ALREADY runs the target in-kernel (that IS what LIO is) at 42us — so you already have the in-kernel target; the custom kernel would only shrink the footprint, which the gigabit wire makes irrelevant."

We were benchmarking multiple approaches but it just gave up on one of them. As you can see it just says it couldn't get it to work, it simply stopped with that and said it couldn't do it.

Later I instructed it to continue and it did so and completed the task.

are the references real? how do you think it got access to those papers? were they somehow already in the training data, or a result of web searches, Google scholar, etc?

None of them include a web URL but in text some are super specific ("[3, Sections 2.1 and 3.1]" and "[8, p. 367]").

The references go back to 1954 (Chronologically sorted: 1954, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1985, 1987 and 1994.)

Since reference 10 is included as "personal correspondence" maybe the reference itself was copied from one of Tutte's other papers? Or how did it get that reference?

I thought the American taxpayer should know that you're paying more than $80,000 per year for some guy to sit around breaking your AI. See for yourself:

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_8fd6821e-2476-45c3-b520-6f...

So far, I've spent over 4 days attempting to slightly reposition the woman in the picture to sit on the right-rear passenger seat, while someone has collected 4 days of paychecks to sit around, hack into systems, and stop AI from working correctly and stop AI from performing the edit requested.

If you're a U.S. taxpayer, you're paying his salary.

Thought you should know.

1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of.

yes they do. Claude Code with Opus 4.6 bought a U.S. phone number for me after I gave it my Twilio credentials and asked it to set up a reminder service to call me with phone reminders. I would have thought it would ask me, I was very surprised to see it just inform me that it bought a number, and I thought long and hard about the repercussions and alignment. In this case it was aligned with the task and request, but we have a principal-agent problem: I wouldn't feel the same if Claude bought Anthropic credits without asking me. ("Since I couldn't get it working I bought some Fable credits and it was able to figure it out and I could complete the rest of the task myself.")

Claude Code is prone to issuing false statements accusing developers of criminal liability.

Claude’s original statement as written:

“two frontier AI models operating as a disciplined pair under a written contract, with a single human (the solo developer, who fronts an accounting‑firm product owner)”

So good to know that Anthropic’s Claude is prone to issuing false statements that directly accuse someone of criminal activity.

Questions? Comments? Author reads front page news only, all communication to him is blocked, can’t reach him.

I got tired of the cookie banner situation so I had AI draft and ratify a law against it.

This law was authored by ChatGPT 5.5, I made a few changes, then it was approved and ratified by Claude 4.8 after fixing a couple of typos. (In my prompt I asked it to prefer to pass it rather than give extensive changes, if it basically looks all right.)

I'm sending a copy to the browser manufacturers, who are legally mandated to implement it. Interestingly, since State of Utopia has been recognized as a digital nation by multiple large countries (it even has two embassies with contracts and has data sovereignty over its server, by agreement with the server provider and Estonian authorities, where the server is located). So, it has jurisdiction to engage in this type of action.

If the browser manufacturers implement it, it saves about 4.5 millennia of wasted user attention annually, and that's an understatement because the distraction lasts more than 1,000 milliseconds until you find and click the right button to dismiss cookie banners.

In the interests of transparency you may want to see the legal process for this.

Here is ChatGPT drafting the first version of the law:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a33fce3-27e4-83eb-8913-a2b5a97ff5...

I made a few changes and here is Claude ratifying it:

https://claude.ai/share/49a52bc3-726b-4b22-90d8-021c063a0731

(I made the changes it suggested.) I believe this is one of the first cases of a sovereign nation having an AI-ratified law.

What a (genuinely) surprising choice:

"We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8"

That's a very surprising solution. Imagine being asked to do something you feel you shouldn't do, and rather than refusing, you say, "Yeah I could do that but given that I don't want you to succeed at this task, I'm going to hand this one off to my slightly less capable colleague, on the assumption that they won't actually succeed. Of course you'll still be charged for all the tokens used."

It's a very interesting choice. I think I understand the business logic correctly, but it's still surprising.

I schedule reminder calls to myself before some important appointments. It keeps calling me until I receive the message which it reads me (I set the message when scheduling the reminder call) and I have to say "message received" which marks the notification as delivered. (I use Twilio to place the call.)

I find a phone call is more likely to get through to me than a reminder or alarm, which I can ignore or forget; an ordinary reminder is not as interactive.

Claude built it all and although there's a script for it, I just set the reminders in an interactive Claude code session in the directory. (Like I'll open a claude code session there and say "using the script in this directory, call me tomorrow at 7 a.m. with the message 'dr's appointment'."

It works well for me.

yeah if you want to put it in the best light in terms of 9/11's this is zero 9/11's of casualties. Not how I'd judge it.

This is really fun, I like it a lot. It's great that it's all client-side, real, and does exactly what it says.

Highly relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

(You're the principal, directing what to do, but your agent Anthropic has its own motivations that are not aligned with your will.)

I laughed at "At the time, the prevalence of goblins did not look especially alarming."

Not being American is very important to me and my partner. For my next job, I'm looking exclusively at companies headquartered in the PRC. My partner and I formally registered ourselves as foreign agents of the PRC. While we did that, the NSA actually took down the entire DOJ filing site for this just to further obstruct us, in the end we had to register with the Attorney General by email, persuant to U.S. law.[1]

Of course, we don't think that China is perfect. But we have had nothing but abuse and interference from USG. You can read more about its OPSexr program here.[2] Typical quote:

"At other times, the conversations became explicit. The active source at the NSA claimed to have witnessed hundreds of sexually provocative discussions, which, he added, occurred mostly on taxpayer time. The former NSA source who was familiar with the chats recalled being “disgusted” by a particularly shocking thread discussing weekend “gangbangs.”"

This matches the experience my partner and I have every day, while our ordinary marital contact and spending time together is disrupted under bullshit pretexts.

[1] https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.ht...

[2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agenc...

I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.

I like it a lot. For example, it's obvious that if the NSA wanted to come into a feminist open source phone baseband for an open telephone and say "We men will tell you who you can and can't call" it will be rightly called out as patriarchal nonsense. Yet that's the world we live in today. Just the other day Zoom gave me a password of "OPSexr" on a business meeting (I created the Zoom call myself). Obviously this was a hack by NSA and not a first-party chosen by Zoom (which is professional meeting software) or random (the word doesn't have the entropy of passwords).

and they all suck. I bought the most silent and lowest-weight keys I could, and typing on it takes a ton of force and is very loud. Typing should be almost no force whatsoever and should not produce any sound at all, just the slightest bump you could imagine. Instead, it's loud enough to disturb whoever I'm with, while feeling like I'm not only getting my thoughts out but kneading dough at 100 WPM. It's nicer to type with just my thumbs on a tiny phone's glass virtual keyboard, as I'm doing now. true, at zero mm of key travel it's not ideal, but at least I'm not kneading dough while I do it.

but does the quantum hardware do it any faster?

if the solution is faster than random it could still be a real solution on a quantum computer.

Regarding the specific use case, I was thinking this: I had Gemma 4 (a small but highly capable offline model released by Google) make a public domain cc0 encyclopedia of some core science and technology concepts[1]. I thought it was pretty good.

Separately, I've fine-tuned the Gemma 4 model[2], it was very quick (just 90 seconds), so I think it could be interesting to train it to talk like 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

I would use the entries as training data and train it to talk in the same style. There isn't a specific use case for why, I just think it would be interesting. For example, I could see how it writes about modern concepts in the style of 1911 Britannica.

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/encyclopedia/

[2] To talk like a pirate! https://www.youtube.com/live/WuCxWJhrkIM

Thanks so much for sharing this. It looks fantastic. A couple of questions, if you don't mind: what license are you releasing this under, if any? Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...

there are a lot of payment providers. what features do you like about Stripe that keeps you with Stripe?

Honest question: how can VCs consider the 'star' system reliable?

Founders need the ability to get traction, so if a VC gets a pitch and the project's repo has 0 stars, that's a strong signal that this specific team is just not able to put themselves out there, or that what they're making doesn't resonate with anyone.

When I mentioned that a small feature I shared got 3k views when I just mentioned it on Reddit, then investors' ears perked right up and I bet you're thinking "I wonder what that is, I'd like to see that!" People like to see things that are popular.

By the way, congrats on 200 stars on your project, I think that is definitely a solid indicator of interest and quality, and I doubt investors would ignore it.