skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Use AI this election in ~society

    skybrian
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    I do use AI, but in a more mundane way. I asked ChatGPT to find newspaper endorsements. I might use it to find in-depth articles about candidates. Basically I'd use it as a search engine.

    I do use AI, but in a more mundane way. I asked ChatGPT to find newspaper endorsements. I might use it to find in-depth articles about candidates. Basically I'd use it as a search engine.

  2. Comment on Use AI this election in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    I’m not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I’m saying that if you - like me - spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI can aid that research very effectively. And if you don’t do that research - because you weren’t willing to waste an hour on it before - AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start.

    [...]

    This was a good enough experience that if I didn’t have an hour or two to do this properly, I would trust Claude’s endorsement over competing cheap-and-fast ways to determine my vote (party-line, newspaper endorsements, NGO endorsements, who has the funniest name). And given that I did spend two hours doing this properly, I think I’m about 50% happier with my choices than I would have been without AI.

  4. Comment on Import AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Recently, I had a revelatory experience. I was putting together data for my post about AI R&D and I simply pointed an AI system at my newsletter archives and asked it to pull out with references all the times I’d covered anything that looked like AI R&D. It did this extremely well and sped up my ability to do some analysis that was core to my essay on RSI.

    But more interestingly was what happened next: I asked it to make graphs for me by reading over the references in the newsletter, mostly arXiv papers, and then pulling in the data and compiling it and composing graphs in a nice dashboard which I could then explore.

    Then I realized I could convert this thing I’d asked it to do into a repeatable process, a skill. By giving it something of mine that was uniquely mine — my newsletter, my intuition, my taste, I had given it some kernel from which I could grow something much larger. So I made a skill. And then something strange happened: I said to it “go and make 20 more graphs like these”.

    It went away and read a few hundred papers and came back with 20 more graphs. As I looked over them I had this thrilling feeling of discovery — though I knew some of these graphs and could have asked it to make them for me, there were also entirely new graphs there tied to papers or benchmarks I’d never seen before. Through this I learned about some new primary source material to read, which I did.

    I understand at a bonedeep level just what it takes to make a graph. You read a bunch of papers. You go hunting for common measurements within them. You read the many different caveats in each paper and figure out which metrics are bullshit and which are meaningful. This takes much longer than you can imagine.

    [...]

    Now I have this bottled up skill where I can harness the absurd power of these AI systems to do something for me that I know would take me literally weeks of work. And it can do it for me in minutes. And it can do it for anything. I’m now using this as a means by which I can explore the world of biology, having it generate graphs for me and then picking the ones I find interesting and reading the underlying papers.

    But to me, this skill is also me. It is a skill grown out of my own obsession and idiosyncrasies and watching it work feels to me like a miracle because it’s me — but a version of me that runs thousands of times faster and is much much smarter and much more reliable.

    [...]

    In Anthropic, much of the work that needs to get done involves writing software, which is made out of code. This significant increase in the automation of coding has been equivalent to dropping many, many more employees into Anthropic, speeding up our overall pace of development. The result of this has been a massive rise in the amount of code being produced inside Anthropic. This trend started in early 2025 but really accelerated in the last few months. Of course, the majority of code inside the company is now written by Claude. But in addition the volume of code has exploded.

    As a consequence, more effort is going into tools for scaling up the amount of Claude-generated code we can confidently ingest and test, and more effort is going into building telemetry systems that give us humans consumable and intuitive ways of reading what this “emergent machine society” inside Anthropic is doing. I am spending more time working with teams on the challenges of observability — Anthropic and the AI platform we operate looks more and more like an ecology filled with agents running around and doing stuff. The task for us now is to figure out how to measure and observe that ecology, and work out what is normal and what is not.

    This change maps to a brewing theory among economists: that one consequence of automation via AI is that humans move to figuring out how to validate the outputs and price the operational risks of AI systems. That increasingly seems to me to be what we’re doing inside the company. The more we add AI automation, the more humans move to some “verification layer” that sits atop it. The verification layer sits atop of a much larger “virtual organization” which consists of increasingly large quantities of AI systems working on behalf of humans. This is already showing up inside the company in terms of how we as humans validate and verify AI-created outputs: Claude is now creating not just an increasing amount of code inside Anthropic, but also producing a lot of the analytical documents where people reason about strategic questions.

    [...]

    The main lesson I’d take from this is that Anthropic is attempting to “explore the future” with Claude. We are aggressively using Claude throughout the organization and trying to change our organization and how we work ahead of the arrival of more advanced systems. By comparison, much of the rest of the world seems to be in denial about the capabilities of AI systems today, let alone those that will exist in six months or a year, and so is therefore caught in a “retreat from the present”, denying the validity of the technology.

    [...]

    Tell me how the world stays normal, based on this technology and how it is showing up in the world? We have superintelligences that have shown up in the world that grant the power of synthetic workforces and nation state security skills to individuals. We also have individuals like me who are able to take work that previously took them weeks and now do it in minutes. And we have organizations like Anthropic where the way work happens within the organization is radically changing every 3 or 4 months, to the point it is causing people to change roles multiple times a year, and effectively sit themselves on top of a company which feels more like one of 40,000 people than 4,000 due to the capability multiplier of the machines.

  6. Comment on The pressure in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Recently, after I pointed out that Mythos only found a single low severity problem in curl in its first scan, countless people have repeated the claim that curl is one of the most scrutinized, most reviewed, most fuzzed and most verified source codes you can imagine. Perhaps that’s true, but I just want to mention this: that’s not by mistake. That’s not an accident or a happy circumstance. That’s the result of relentless work and attention to details through decades. Software engineering done right. Iterative improvements over time that simply never ends is an effective method.

    This does not however mean that we don’t have bugs or that we don’t have security problems left, because we do. We have hundreds of thousands of lines of source code that is doing highly parallel networking for many protocols on all imaginable operating systems and CPU architectures – in C. So we fix the problems, patch them up and ship new releases. Over and over.

    [...]

    The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the speed of 2025 – meaning that on average we now get more than one report per day. The quality is way higher than ever before. The reports are typically very detailed and long.

    In order to manage this incoming flood of submissions, we need to make sure to handle them as soon as possible as we know there are more coming. If we don’t take care of them roughly at the same speed they arrive, the backlog just grows and having that list of potential security problems in a list that you don’t have control over takes a mental toll.

    [...]

    For the first time in my life, my wife voiced concerns about my work hours and my imbalanced work/life situation. I work more than I’ve done before, but the flood keeps coming. People in my surrounding, I guess reading between the lines, have asked me how I and we cope with this deluge and want to make sure we don’t burn in the process. I am concerned for my team mates.

    I might soon have to reduce my work hours to allow myself more breathing time.

    [...]

    With about half the release cycle left until the pending release ships, we already have twelve confirmed vulnerabilities meaning twelve pending CVE announcements. That’s a new project record and it also means we will reach thirty published CVEs in 2026 even before half the calendar year has passed. The projected total amount of curl CVEs published through the whole year is therefore at least double this number!

    [...]

    Fixing bugs and problems is good. Every reported problem implies a fixed issue. curl becomes a better product.

    What is also a good trend: almost no one finds terrible vulnerabilities. All vulnerabilities found the last few years in curl have all been deemed severity LOW or MEDIUM. I’m not saying there won’t be any more HIGH ever, but at least they are rare. The most recent severity high curl CVE was published in October 2023.

  8. Comment on Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    From this article: ... ... ... So, not that new, and it has to be a corporation that owns property there.

    From this article:

    Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz said the beach town of Fenwick Island was not diluting human votes by allowing companies ​and other legal entities that own property to cast votes in municipal elections.

    ...

    The ​group said entities make up about 12% of registered voters in the town.

    ...

    The town's mayor, Natalie Magdeburger, did not immediately respond to a request for comment but told Reuters in March that the city believes "a property owner who pays taxes and is subject to our ordinances should ​have a say in who represents them on our Town Council."

    ...

    Nonresident voting in local elections has been permitted ​in Fenwick Island since it was incorporated in 1953, according to the court ruling. In 2008, Delaware's General Assembly amended ‌the charter ⁠to allow non-resident voting by artificial entities, including corporations, partnerships, trusts and limited liability companies, which must be chartered in Delaware.

    Several other towns in Delaware allow companies and other legal entities to vote in local elections if they own property in the municipality.

    So, not that new, and it has to be a corporation that owns property there.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    (edited )
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    The codebase for my personal links website has gotten messy so I spent some time cleaning it up. The Playwright tests are in decent shape now. Also, I started using Deno workspaces, which are a...

    The codebase for my personal links website has gotten messy so I spent some time cleaning it up. The Playwright tests are in decent shape now.

    Also, I started using Deno workspaces, which are a way to have multiple jsr or npm packages in a single repo. I'm moving all the database access code to one package and then I'll remove the Sqlite dependency from the other code to enforce a layered architecture.

    I've been using GLM and Deepseek LLM's to reduce costs and they seem good enough to use day-to-day, except that they can't see images.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The trouble is that the current situation looks much like an arms race. I think a lot of people would like to slow down, including some of the managers at the AI labs, but they don’t see how....

    The trouble is that the current situation looks much like an arms race. I think a lot of people would like to slow down, including some of the managers at the AI labs, but they don’t see how. There are proposals but no consensus, so they don’t get much traction. Anthropic putting the brakes on Mythos is about as much as we’re getting, and other AI firms aren’t stopping. They objected to some military uses and we saw how that went.

    It’s not yet an actual arms race like the drone war in Ukraine and Russia, but give it time. I imagine we will see some spectacular cyberattacks soon.

    I don’t see a “robot takeover” like you see in the movies because which robots would they take over? Industrial robots? Roombas? No, these would be military robots and they will be controlled by governments, or perhaps terrorist attacks.

    But there are lots of cameras out there and some of them may be vulnerable.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says in ~society

    skybrian
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    I don’t like it either and I hope the ruling will be reversed on appeal. However, I’m also wondering how much difference it would make in practical terms? It seems like it depends on how many...

    I don’t like it either and I hope the ruling will be reversed on appeal. However, I’m also wondering how much difference it would make in practical terms? It seems like it depends on how many votes they get? I would hope it couldn’t be gamed just by creating a large number of shell corporations?

    5 votes

  12. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe a few of these books will “go viral,” like happens to certain posts on social media? It depends how much we follow other people’s recommendations. But I expect that AI-written book reviews...

    Maybe a few of these books will “go viral,” like happens to certain posts on social media? It depends how much we follow other people’s recommendations.

    But I expect that AI-written book reviews will happen sooner, and as often happens today, more people will read book reviews than the books they’re based on.

    I don’t find it tempting, but I suppose you could talk to an AI about the book you read, if you can figure out a way to upload the file :)

    2 votes

  13. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think it depends what you use it for. If it’s as an Internet research assistant then I don’t think it matters that much which voice it writes in, any more than it matters which accent Google...

    I think it depends what you use it for. If it’s as an Internet research assistant then I don’t think it matters that much which voice it writes in, any more than it matters which accent Google Maps uses when it gives you directions. The trouble is when people use it as a ghost writer.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I believe the reason ChatGPT doesn’t get facts wrong so often anymore is that routinely does web searches now. It’s a decent alternative to doing multiple web searches yourself, but the answers...

    I believe the reason ChatGPT doesn’t get facts wrong so often anymore is that routinely does web searches now. It’s a decent alternative to doing multiple web searches yourself, but the answers are only going to be as good as the input.

    I use ChatGPT in “thinking” mode, though, and other people might be using a different mode?

    5 votes

  15. Comment on An open letter to the University of California Regents requesting that standardized testing be re-introduced into admissions, >200 UC Professors signatures in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    In this case, the University of California Regents doesn’t seem very responsive to the needs of UC Faculty? More generally, I don’t see why we should assume people working for one part of a...

    In this case, the University of California Regents doesn’t seem very responsive to the needs of UC Faculty? More generally, I don’t see why we should assume people working for one part of a government would be responsive to the needs of some other part of a government. It might be true in specific cases, but there’s no general rule about how well or badly a bureaucracy works.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on An open letter to the University of California Regents requesting that standardized testing be re-introduced into admissions, >200 UC Professors signatures in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Incentives are often bad and they're always a blunt instrument, but in general, wanting to be broadly seen as useful by colleges and accepted as a legimate test by the public seem like good...

    Incentives are often bad and they're always a blunt instrument, but in general, wanting to be broadly seen as useful by colleges and accepted as a legimate test by the public seem like good incentives?

    It sounds like you're hoping for a government that has good incentives, but we don't have that and aren't likely to get it. It all depends on who is in power. I do hope the Democrats get in again, but they will have their own agendas. They're likely to be interested in pleasing interest groups. Better to be an NGO and somewhat insulated from that.

    Also, I think it's good that there are many colleges, public and private, and they can make their own decisions about admissions. If it were centralized then there would be less choice.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on When did you realize you were different? in ~talk

    skybrian
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    Uh, it was the usual nerd stuff. It was probably in kindergarten when they made a big deal out of already being an avid reader and being able to count as long as they're willing to listen. I got...

    Uh, it was the usual nerd stuff. It was probably in kindergarten when they made a big deal out of already being an avid reader and being able to count as long as they're willing to listen. I got praised for it and it seemed like a good thing. And later, being bad at sports was embarrassing. But I pretty much just accepted that this was who I was and that other kids had different strengths. I didn't question it and didn't think I could become good at non-academic stuff too.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on An open letter to the University of California Regents requesting that standardized testing be re-introduced into admissions, >200 UC Professors signatures in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It would be good to have public funding so every student can take the SAT/ACT, but I don't see any advantage to having the government administer it. It seems like it's all downside? Similarly, the...

    It would be good to have public funding so every student can take the SAT/ACT, but I don't see any advantage to having the government administer it. It seems like it's all downside? Similarly, the TSA being federal employees at most airports turns out to be a bad idea, particularly for the employees, and I'm glad it's not the case at SFO.

    6 votes

  19. Comment on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This is a "pause" while severe weather is likely. The comparison is between driving in such conditions or not, rather than whether they will be in Atlanta or not. It seems similar to how airlines...

    This is a "pause" while severe weather is likely. The comparison is between driving in such conditions or not, rather than whether they will be in Atlanta or not. It seems similar to how airlines cancel flights when the weather looks too bad?

    They are relying on weather forecasts to avoid driving in severe weather, but it turns out they needed to be more conservative about that, as well as improving their cars' ability to cope when the weather suddenly turns bad.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods in ~transport

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Waymo maps the roads where they will be driving. I imagine they could predict where flooding might happen based on things like elevation to bridge underpasses, erc. Also, the cars could compare...

    Waymo maps the roads where they will be driving. I imagine they could predict where flooding might happen based on things like elevation to bridge underpasses, erc. Also, the cars could compare current conditions to what the road looks like when it's dry.

    It will be a project, but it seems doable?