skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Blocking of unverified apps on Android starts in Brazil and other three countries in ~tech
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Comment on Blocking of unverified apps on Android starts in Brazil and other three countries in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentOn the contrary, Android phones are primarily for the masses, not us techies. If you’re more technical then there’s plenty of hardware you can buy to hack on. if you want to root your phone, make...On the contrary, Android phones are primarily for the masses, not us techies. If you’re more technical then there’s plenty of hardware you can buy to hack on. if you want to root your phone, make sure you buy one where the bootloader can be unlocked. (Such as any Pixel phone that you buy direct from Google.)
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Comment on Blocking of unverified apps on Android starts in Brazil and other three countries in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentPeople say that but Android has been around for 18 years now and there are still plenty of manufacturers making them. If Google didn’t want other manufacturers making Android phones, you’d think...People say that but Android has been around for 18 years now and there are still plenty of manufacturers making them. If Google didn’t want other manufacturers making Android phones, you’d think they’d have done something about it by now?
They also seem suspiciously slow at acting against alternative app stores.
And why does Google only sell phones with an unlocked bootloader? They didn’t have to do that.
Maybe don’t believe everything you read online about what a company’s motives might be.
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Comment on Blocking of unverified apps on Android starts in Brazil and other three countries in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThere’s also plenty being done to protect people from malware, whether it’s bad websites or bad apps. But when it doesn’t affect you directly, maybe it’s less noticeable.There’s also plenty being done to protect people from malware, whether it’s bad websites or bad apps. But when it doesn’t affect you directly, maybe it’s less noticeable.
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Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health
skybrian Link ParentThere are certainly tradeoffs, but I’m hopeful that it isn’t always a necessary tradeoff. That is, it should be possible to somehow combine AI-based research and professional advice to get the...There are certainly tradeoffs, but I’m hopeful that it isn’t always a necessary tradeoff. That is, it should be possible to somehow combine AI-based research and professional advice to get the best of both.
Hard to do though, with some patients.
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Comment on With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI—until now in ~games
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years. But one classic game called Stratego held out. Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn’t build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.
Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.
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In Stratego, each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent’s flag. Your opponent knows where your pieces are, but not what they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed. That makes Stratego an imperfect-information game, just like poker, which computers cracked years ago. “There’s something super distinctive about Stratego, which is that it is a massive amount of hidden information that unfolds over a very long time scale,” said Eugene Vinitsky, a researcher at NYU and co-author of the study.
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Just like DeepNash, Ataraxos learned by playing against itself—163 million games in total. In these self-play sessions, moves that led to wins were reinforced and played more often in future matches, while moves that led to losses were played less, which was the same simple training idea. The difference was in how much Ataraxos adjusted after each game, because hidden information tends to send self-play learning algorithms around in circles. The team addressed this by making big, bold changes in strategy early in training and small, careful ones later.
The even bigger innovation was something DeepNash never had: thinking ahead before each move. AIs like AlphaGo refine their general strategy with a search just before acting. DeepMind couldn’t make that work in Stratego because the search space was too large, leaving it an open question whether it was worth trying.
“This is one of the things that we did figure out how to do,” Farina said. The solution was a second neural network, a belief model, trained to guess the opponent’s hidden pieces based on how they had been moving. This way, instead of iterating through every possible arrangement, Ataraxos samples plausible ones, plays out candidate moves in each, and picks based on how they turned out.
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The name Ataraxos comes from the ancient Greek word for a state of calm. “It means somebody that’s calm and unbothered,” Farina explained. He suggests the structure of the AI and its lack of human emotions ensure it doesn’t react impulsively, “even in situations where a human would be losing their mind.” While the human might try big gambles to come back from a significant deficit, Ataraxos would work its way back into the game slowly and methodically.
The strategy it developed also avoids drawing attention to any problems it faces. When Ataraxos estimates its opponent has no reason to suspect a weak spot, it leaves that spot alone, even if it might look like a disaster waiting to happen to anyone who can see both sides of the board.
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At the 2025 Stratego World Championship, attendees who challenged Ataraxos fared even worse. The AI won 38 of 40 games. In the process, it also changed how people play. “I think this bot has kind of skewed the metagame a little bit,” Farina said.
Players were surprised, for example, by how often it tucked its flag into a corner behind just two bombs, a rarely played setup.
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With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI—until now
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkHow a character from 'The Addams Family' is shaping the future of robotics (Fast Company) From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]How a character from 'The Addams Family' is shaping the future of robotics (Fast Company)
From the article:
Robotic hands usually come bolted to the wrist of a mechanical arm, waiting for their humanoid owners to move them over to whatever knob or valve needs turning. However, at ETH Zürich’s Soft Robotics Lab, a group of roboticists decided to get rid of the body, designing a self-contained hand that crawls across surfaces, balances its own weight, and manipulates objects using only its five digits.
It may seem like an awesome-but-useless robotic recreation of Thing, The Addams Family’s famous disembodied butler. And while Amirhossein Kazemipour, a PhD candidate at the lab, tells me via email that Thing was part of the inspiration—“I love the Addams Family! :-)” he writes—the truth is that this walking hand can become a new key feature in the future of robotics. Enabling parts to function independently of a whole means more sophisticated operating capabilities.
Kazemipour is one of the three researchers behind the project, alongside Hehui Zheng and Robert Katzschmann, who recently wrote a paper detailing how their invention solves an enduring dilemma in robotics: creating a system that can move and dexterously interact with objects. When autonomous systems need to inspect equipment or flip switches inside cramped enclosures, their operators are typically forced to thread long, unwieldy mechanical booms through the gap or park bulky rovers right at the threshold.
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Instead of forcing the fingers into an artificial, rigid stepping rhythm, the team trained an AI in a simulated physics engine using deep reinforcement learning, the digital trial-and-error process where virtual hands learn through millions of practice steps. Using mathematical guides, the system anchors each fingertip to a home position and allows the digits to take long forward strides while stopping the fingers from sprawling sideways or letting the chassis buckle.
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When they tested the model, it worked. And yes, it behaved pretty much like the actual Thing from TV and the movies.
After they got it working, they managed to implement it all without an umbilical cord connected to an off-board computer. A cable would have defeated the purpose of developing a detachable, fully independent hand; the robot needed to run on its own.
To accomplish this, the team took an off-the-shelf robotic hand and mounted a custom 80 gram (3 oz.) backpack containing a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a tiny single-board computer; an inertial measurement unit, or IMU, the kind of motion-and-tilt sensor found in a smartphone; and a small lithium-polymer battery. The solution ended up as an untethered, fully independent platform weighing just shy of 2 pounds.
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“Longer term, imagine a robot leaving its hand near a tight opening, letting it crawl inside to operate a control or move an object, then picking it up afterwards,” he says. That operational approach could assist emergency workers evaluating damaged buildings, technicians inspecting pipe networks, or automated factory stations where clearances are too narrow for standard articulated arms.
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But that’s way ahead from where we are. For now, the lab is exploring onboard visual tracking to eliminate overhead localization cameras, along with automated mechanisms for docking.
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Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you. The fertility doctors don’t become unkind, but they also don’t give you the sense they are poring over medical journals trying to figure out your problem. They have looked for the keys under the streetlight and come up empty. Once you have unexplained infertility, the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?”
My wife and I could make healthy embryos, but none of the transfers were sticking. It was so frustrating to be able to create life only to have it trapped forever in a cooler at a hospital in Milwaukee, our babies like so many forgotten Miller Lights.
That’s when our LLM doctor stepped in.
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Our AI midwife
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link ParentThis is getting into the weeds, but If you look at that NYT quote again, the "four people familiar with the matter" seems to be about the $100 billion estimate for the end of the year. It's...This is getting into the weeds, but If you look at that NYT quote again, the "four people familiar with the matter" seems to be about the $100 billion estimate for the end of the year. It's unclear whether the NYT did anything to independently check the $65 billion number.
(That doesn't affect your conclusion, which I agree with.)
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Comment on Someone ‘torturing’ LLMs in a robot prison has triggered the dumbest debate in AI yet in ~tech
skybrian LinkTo me it’s like if a kid likes to torture flies. I don’t really care about the bugs but there’s something wrong with that kid.To me it’s like if a kid likes to torture flies. I don’t really care about the bugs but there’s something wrong with that kid.
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Comment on Become worthless (to tech companies) in ~tech
skybrian LinkI used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and...I used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and family mostly use chat and text messages, so email is mostly business notifications.
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentFor the $65 billion run-rate in July, I assume the New York Times and Financial Times are repeating the number from the same Reuters article. So that's not independent confirmation. VC's will be...For the $65 billion run-rate in July, I assume the New York Times and Financial Times are repeating the number from the same Reuters article. So that's not independent confirmation.
VC's will be skeptical but they're also willing to give it a go anyway if it looks like a hot company, because it's only one of many bets for them. VC's put money into FTX without doing much in the way of due diligence.
I still think the signs add up to an extraordinary growth rate for Anthropic. There is other evidence pointing in the same direction, like some companies spending a lot on AI, Anthropic's frequent outages, and their needing to do deals in a hurry to line up enough data center capacity. The conclusion that it's all a fraud seems like motivated reasoning by people hoping they will fail.
But it's also true that the evidence for their revenue growth is not as firm as I'd like. I don't think it's completely made up, but we might be plotting the good numbers from a spiky graph.
We'll find out more when the S-1 is released for real.
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Comment on OpenAI ignored employees’ warnings about safely testing AI models (gifted link) in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored.
In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times.
In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters.
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Independent security researchers said they found bugs in recent months that allowed them to view the internal communications of OpenAI employees. They also found other vulnerabilities that would enable them to see the company’s internal computer code and view the chat logs of ChatGPT users. When the researchers contacted OpenAI about their findings, they said, the company initially disregarded them.
“OpenAI’s security seems to be about what you’d expect from a research lab that scaled at a blistering pace over four years and focused more on beating its competitors than securing its infrastructure,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the A.I. security firm Abundant Security.
OpenAI employees said that many of the day-to-day decisions about security were made by Greg Brockman, the company’s president, and Dane Stuckey, the chief information security officer. Sam Altman, the chief executive, is not closely involved in security, they said.
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Two OpenAI employees said workers had raised concerns for months about potential safety issues with testing A.I. models, including not enough monitoring. Employees also asked about vulnerabilities in the type of software the company was using to manage day-to-day safety, according to messages viewed by The Times. Each time, their questions were brushed aside or acted on too slowly, they said.
Security researchers said they had been met with a similar reception when they told OpenAI about other vulnerabilities.
In July, researchers at the security company Hacktron said they told OpenAI about how they had found a way to break into the company’s systems with the help of an A.I. model created by its rival Anthropic. OpenAI initially took issue with their approach, they said.
In a shared channel on the messaging platform Slack, Mr. Stuckey of OpenAI wrote that it was “pretty sad” that Hacktron’s researchers had gone to such lengths to demonstrate the company’s vulnerabilities, according to copies of the communications seen by The Times.
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In September, researchers at the Objective-See Foundation, a nonprofit that studies security and privacy risks, including those posed by A.I. agents, reported a bug to OpenAI that would give people access to a ChatGPT user’s entire private chat logs on a compromised device and allow them to invisibly interact with the user’s browser sessions.
Patrick Wardle, a software analyst at the Objective-See Foundation, said that when his team initially submitted what it found to OpenAI’s official bug bounty program — where researchers report bugs or vulnerabilities they find in exchange for recognition or financial rewards — its report languished. The research was escalated to the appropriate engineering unit only when Mr. Wardle reached out directly to friends at the company and Mr. Stuckey, who were all responsive, he said.
OpenAI gave $500 to the group for its work, which Mr. Wardle said was low compared with what he would expect from other companies given the severity of the flaw. OpenAI fixed the bug, he said, and acknowledged it this week in its public software release notes without disclosing details.
It was “not the mature security program you’d expect from a security-centric company,” Mr. Wardle said.
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OpenAI ignored employees’ warnings about safely testing AI models (gifted link)
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI had the $65 billion point in the graph already. I didn't put the "expected" number on the chart since it's a projection, but it seems reasonable if you extend it out. The actual revenue for the...The company is expected to reach more than $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this year, according to four people familiar with the matter. That’s up from $65 billion in annualized revenue as of July. Investors seeking to get a piece of the I.P.O. are using those soaring numbers to justify Anthropic’s staggering potential valuation of $2 trillion.
I had the $65 billion point in the graph already. I didn't put the "expected" number on the chart since it's a projection, but it seems reasonable if you extend it out.
The actual revenue for the year is the area under the curve and won't be $100 billion. If they did reach a $100 billion run rate (exactly, in a straight-line projection), it might be about half that. But then, next year, who knows?
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentOops, they were in the conversation but not the chart. I asked ChatGPT to update it and also got rid of some of the vibe-coded chart junk.Oops, they were in the conversation but not the chart. I asked ChatGPT to update it and also got rid of some of the vibe-coded chart junk.
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Comment on Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs in ~finance
skybrian (edited )LinkThis is paywalled, but my understanding from other sources is that Reuters only got last year’s numbers, which are not very useful anymore due to the extreme amount of revenue growth this year....This is paywalled, but my understanding from other sources is that Reuters only got last year’s numbers, which are not very useful anymore due to the extreme amount of revenue growth this year.
That’s based on other leaks in the news. I have a chart here (AI generated.)
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Comment on Is there enough evidence to formally investigate OpenAI? in ~society
skybrian LinkIt's nice to see someone asking a law professor about the law. The AI companies are doing internal investigations (which aren't done yet) and they've also asked an outside safety organization for...It's nice to see someone asking a law professor about the law. The AI companies are doing internal investigations (which aren't done yet) and they've also asked an outside safety organization for help. I think that's mostly targeted at figuring out what happened, though? I'd be interested in seeing what an external investigation would find.
There are plenty of products that are regulated to protect people from themselves. Food and drugs are regulated. Cars are regulated. Don’t let the libertarians fool you, this is totally normal.