skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on US judge to baby: file an asylum application in ~society
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US judge to baby: file an asylum application
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
skybrian LinkHere are Scott Aaronson's comments. So if the writing quality isn't that great to begin with, this doesn't make it worse. Any of the samples would use a similar number of AI catch-phrases. ...Here are Scott Aaronson's comments.
[C]ontrary to many people’s intuitions, there’s no inherent tradeoff between watermarking and the quality of LLM output. Basically, nearly every LLM output was already a sample from a cloud of exponentially many possibilities, all of them about equally good, so there’s plenty of room to steer within that cloud without affecting anything that an ordinary user would notice.
So if the writing quality isn't that great to begin with, this doesn't make it worse. Any of the samples would use a similar number of AI catch-phrases.
I could add that, in addition, there’s recent progress (see here for example) on what I’ve called “semantic watermarking,” or watermarking at the level of the underlying concept vectors rather than the tokens themselves. This actually seems to work, albeit with no theoretical guarantees, and will hopefully make removing watermarks a lot harder—although the Barak et al. impossibility result suggests that under plausible assumptions, no LLM watermarking method will be completely foolproof.
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Nevertheless, Google DeepMind implemented something very similar to my proposal in its SynthID, deployed in all its Gemini text models. But they heavily restricted who gets to detect the watermark, which made their admirable decision of limited use to my academic colleagues, who’ve been begging me for a way to detect whether their students are using AI to cheat. (For now, I mainly send them to Pangram, a leading AI detector not based on watermarking, as a first line of defense.)
And now, apparently to comply with EU regulations, Anthropic says they’ve deployed a watermarking scheme like mine where anyone will be able to do detection (though they also say in their FAQ that they’re still working on the detection API). Even OpenAI suggests that it plans to follow suit. So, four years after I seriously thought about this, it looks to my surprise like this is actually happening. Thanks, EU!
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Comment on The war on data centres is a bit fake in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/0tDCq From the article: [...]From the article:
Data centres are a nightmare of political economy. Voters see them as ugly, dirty, noisy and power-hungry bastions of arrogant Silicon Valley companies. And—thanks to ChatGPT—it has never been easier to pen a letter to the planning department saying so. Yet the public has an awful lot riding on these windowless sheds, for the stock market is a one-way bet on them being built. Data centres are particularly disorientating for Democrats, since unions tend to support the projects. If artificial intelligence is a class war, it pits a coalition of billionaires and electricians against the office droids both despise.
Wildcatters like Mr O’Leary are a soft target for politicians who want to be seen as tough on data centres but still want them to be built. On August 18th Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, derided the developers “scaring our communities” and signed an executive order he said would squash “speculative proposals” that had little chance of being built in the first place. Of the more than 100 projects announced in the state, less than a fifth had applied for the permits needed to develop them, he said.
Imaginary scalps are easy to claim. Silicon Valley giants are the biggest backers of data centres. But beside them is a long line of property developers, private-capital firms, “neo-cloud” operators and crypto-miners, followed by international chancers, national rogues and local spivs. Most of their plans were destined to remain press releases. Analysts at Bernstein, a broker, attempted to quantify the credibility of each watt of announced capacity. Plans by Google and Amazon are taken at their word. Those by CoreWeave and Nebius, two large neo-clouds, are discounted by around half. Mr O’Leary is ignored.
According to their model, another fantasist is Vermaland, a land bank that announced a gargantuan 3GW facility in Arizona last year. In May the project was reportedly cut by four-fifths after facing local opposition—a shadow-boxing knockout. Little information is available about a 1GW project in south Florida that was supposedly shelved in February, except that the land had been bought for $15m in 2024 by an obscure investment firm. When a data-centre plan that would never have materialised is cut down, it often makes a very large sound.
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It is often said that China has an advantage in the AI race because it can build big things by force. Yet America has the power of willing things into existence by exaggeration. The grand plans of developers will be watered down. Politicians will also overstate their opposition. Often they will cancel each other out. Meanwhile, the searing pace of construction will continue.
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The war on data centres is a bit fake
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Comment on Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] Here is Andrew Gelman's commentary:From the article:
The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated.
“The economic commitment of climate change,” which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, looked at how changes in temperature and precipitation could affect economic growth. Forbes, the San Diego Union-Tribune and other outlets covered the paper, which has been accessed over 300,000 times. It has been cited 168 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
But after two commentaries published this August raised questions about the study’s data and methodology, the researchers revisited their findings. “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction,” the retraction notice, published today, states.
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Authors of the first “Matters Arising” commentary published August 6 noted the article projected the global gross domestic product would be lowered by 62 percent by 2100, “an impact roughly 3 times larger than similar previous estimates.” The authors of the critique also pointed out the PIK authors had used a dataset for Uzbekistan with “anomalies.” By removing the Uzbek dataset, the estimate in the original paper “aligns closely with previous literature,” the critique reads.
In a second Matters Arising, published a week later, Christof Schötz, a researcher at the Technical University of Munich in Ottobrunn, Germany, and a researcher at PIK, argued the analysis in the paper “underestimates uncertainty … rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.”
Here is Andrew Gelman's commentary:
It still seems crazy that the data from a single mid-sized country could have such a big effect of a global estimate. That’s something that the original researchers should’ve been aware of, and what it suggests to me is that there is a larger methodological problem that this didn’t get looked at automatically during the research process.
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Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
skybrian LinkThis is counterintuitive because we know that word choices matter when we write, so how can choosing a different word not matter? Surely there are subtle grades of meaning to consider when picking...This is counterintuitive because we know that word choices matter when we write, so how can choosing a different word not matter? Surely there are subtle grades of meaning to consider when picking one synonym over another?
That's going to depend on what words come before. In some positions, the next word will be highly constrained so it will always pick the next word the same way. There won't be any randomness at that position. At other places, the next word is a freer choice.
This won't prevent the AI labs from working on improving AI writing style. As training gets better, LLM's will become more sensitive about word choices and less likely to choose randomly. So, the amount of freedom delegated to the random number generator will drop. Probably not to zero, though!
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Scott Aaronson, while working at OpenAI, largely solved AI text watermarking together with Hendrik Kirchner.
Here is how his solution works, or see Tenobrus’s version.
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AI outputs are not deterministic. The AI’s job is to pick the probability of each potential next token. The token is then chosen at random.
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By default you use a source of pseudo-randomness for each choice, since actual true randomness is annoying.
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To apply the watermark, you use an otherwise identical private source of pseudo-randomness derived from a secret key.
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Then, given enough text, a score is derived for howe well the choices fit with that particular pseudo-randomness source, versus a different source.
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You provide an API that lets anyone check for the watermark.
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Google implemented this, including for Gemini 3.7 Flash, and they have been rolling out this feature since 2024. Google has done, for over two years, the exact thing Anthropic is now doing, except with a public detector, and Google confirmed in a test (n = 20 million) that there is no difference in user feedback.
Anthropic quietly announced a week ago they were rolling out watermarking to comply with the EU Code of Practice. Since they don’t want to have to differentiate traffic sources, the marginal cost is zero, and watermarking is pro-social, this will apply to everyone. They then offered an FAQ of how it works.
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The entire practical effect is: There will be an API that will tell you if a given piece of writing comes from Claude. That’s it. And yet.
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The rest of this post is about exploring why people are Big Mad about this, in large part as a worked example of how people get worked up over approximately nothing.
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AI text watermarking is free and good
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Comment on A study of the emissions of urban trees in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
The main VOC emitted by trees is isoprene (2-methylbutadiene, the smallest unit in the terpene pathway, which in its polymerized form is natural rubber), and it’s responsible for the summertime haze in forested areas which existed before there were any automobile tailpipes or industrial smokestacks at all. Its emission is in fact a heat-stress response in plants and it is involved in resistance to reactive oxygen species - emissions fall to low levels in darkness and/or cooler temperatures. The authors studied ozone levels and VOC emissions in Beijing, and found that trees (especially willow and poplar species) contributed about 10% of the VOC total with human activities responsible for the other 90%. So far, that’s about what you would have expected.
But on further study, it appears that the tree-derived VOCs account for at least half of the ozone-forming chemistry in the air, because of the reactivity of isoprene and related compounds with hydroxyl radicals. So the tree emissions are hitting far more heavily than that 10/90 split would make you believe, and that’s the surprise take-away from this work.
Here are the details, though, that might get overlooked if someone writes a “Trees Responsible for Smog” headline. For one thing, it’s not all trees. Some species emit far more isoprene than others (the biggest culprits are the willows and poplars as mentioned, along with oaks and eucalyptus). That means that cities in Australia (where eucalypts are everywhere) have even more of a problem with this ozone source than do most cities in China. So secondly, these results don’t mean that Trees Are Bad, because they’re actually very beneficial in urban environments, not least for shading. It just means that we need to pay more attention to which kinds of trees we’re using, and to ease up on the isoprene emitters. Third, the main reason that tree emissions are this big a contributor now is because of clean-air emissions laws that have reduced the human contributions over the decades - if you’d looked at this in (say) 1950 the tree contributions would not have looked so impressive. Fourth, this most certainly does not mean that we can ease off on regulating our own emissions. As mentioned, nitrogen oxides are a key ingredient in ozone formation, and if we can continue to bring those down (and they’re almost completely our fault), ground-level ozone will improve no matter how many weeping willows are around. We planted the high-isoprene varieties ourselves for the most part, and if we didn’t keep dumping volatile nitrogen oxides into the system it wouldn’t be much of a problem anyway. It’s up to us to fix it.
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A study of the emissions of urban trees
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Comment on ForeFront Power completes its first Erthos solar energy system for the city of Fresno in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentYes, it does matter. But the panels are getting cheaper, so if you have the room, you can install more of them to make up for it. As the cost of the panels themselves drops, all the surrounding...Yes, it does matter. But the panels are getting cheaper, so if you have the room, you can install more of them to make up for it. As the cost of the panels themselves drops, all the surrounding costs become more important, such as the cost of installing them.
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Comment on Git at any scale in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI see no reason to move, but the technical details are interesting and perhaps there will be an open source version someday? Someone could give an AI this page as a prompt to build a prototype.I see no reason to move, but the technical details are interesting and perhaps there will be an open source version someday? Someone could give an AI this page as a prompt to build a prototype.
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Comment on ForeFront Power completes its first Erthos solar energy system for the city of Fresno in ~enviro
skybrian Link ParentMy guess is they rely in part on wind being unable to get under the panels. And if they interlock, it seems like that’s a lot of weight, total? There are probably lots of interesting design...My guess is they rely in part on wind being unable to get under the panels. And if they interlock, it seems like that’s a lot of weight, total?
There are probably lots of interesting design criteria. Maybe frost if it gets cold at night? Can it handle the ground freezing?
They could do without steel framing, but they will need to prepare the site by flattening it.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
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Comment on NASA’s attempt to save the Swift telescope has failed in ~space
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
On Wednesday, NASA announced that a rescue spacecraft that was meant to grab onto the space agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and push it into a higher altitude will not proceed. With the rescue mission called off, Swift, which has observed distant, powerful explosions in the cosmos since 2004, is expected to burn up in the atmosphere later this year.
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Last September, NASA hired a small company, Katalyst Space Technologies, of Flagstaff, Ariz., for $30 million to put together a mission to save Swift on an extremely rushed schedule. That limited the amount of testing that could be conducted to prepare for contingencies.
In about nine months, Katalyst built the refrigerator-size rescue spacecraft named Link, which successfully launched on July 3.
Link was moving closer to Swift but unexpectedly started tumbling on July 25. Katalyst was able to slow the spin of Link, and company officials were optimistic the spacecraft would be able to proceed with their schedule delayed by just a couple of weeks.
But, on Wednesday, Ghonhee Lee, the chief executive of Katalyst, said the optimism did not prove out. The tumbling appears to have been caused by a malfunction with the maneuvering thrusters. Katalyst engineers used the main electric propulsion engines instead to get the spacecraft under control, writing new software using those to maneuver Link instead of the thrusters.
That, however, did not provide sufficient precision, so the thrusters, most of which still worked, were brought back in operation. That led to the next problem. The electric propulsion engines and the thrusters both use xenon gas, and Link did not have enough fuel to complete the task of capturing Swift and pushing it upward.
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Link will no longer attempt to capture or boost the space telescope but will still match the orbit of Swift, operating within a few miles to demonstrate capabilities that could be used for future missions. “I still hope that we’re going to be able to complete some elements of rendezvous and proximity operations over the coming weeks,” Mr. Lee said.
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NASA’s attempt to save the Swift telescope has failed
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkWhat it’s like to spend a weekend with more than 2,000 sets of twins [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]What it’s like to spend a weekend with more than 2,000 sets of twins
Every August, for more than half a century, siblings who first met in utero take over Twinsburg for the Twins Days Festival, the world’s largest annual gathering of twins and multiples.
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The celebrants arrive in twos, threes and fours, mirror images of each other or as dissimilar as Mutt and Jeff. Many are first-timers, but even more are repeat attendees stretching back years.
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The festival is held the first full weekend in August and always in Twinsburg, about 25 miles southeast of Cleveland. In 1819, identical twins Moses and Aaron Wilcox changed the name of the settlement from Millsville, which honored a popular mechanism from that era, to Twinsburg, which celebrated a biological phenomenon now affecting about 3 percent of the U.S. population.
The community first hosted an abbreviated version of the event in 1976 as part of a larger U.S. bicentennial celebration. Three dozen sets of twins showed up. Over the years, the festival has ballooned. It now stretches over three packed days, and the number of twins and multiples regularly exceeds 2,000 registered sets. (By Sunday afternoon, this year’s tally was 2,085; festival organizers will release a final count next month.) The identical and fraternal pairings arrive by car, plane, foot and baby stroller. A handful cross rivers, oceans and the international dateline.
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The Double Take Parade is one of the festival’s marquee events, a 1.3-mile-long processional that, depending on the theme, can feel like a march of pop culture clones.
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The twins and multiples who attend Twins Days every year say the festival is a place where they can feel normal and understood. Where they don’t have to explain the difference between identical and fraternal or A and B (first and second born). Where they can wear whatever they want, which for many means dressing exactly the same.
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The festival dedicates a corner to research. This year, three universities, one plastic surgeon and Olay set up studies, taking advantage of the large sample size of twins — a windfall for researchers. Olay is studying how skin ages when genetics are not a factor.
For 20 years, the Procter and Gamble brand has conducted facial imaging on about 100 sets of volunteers, in exchange for a swag bag of lotions, serums and sunscreen.
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Comment on ForeFront Power completes its first Erthos solar energy system for the city of Fresno in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] It's solar, but the aesthetic is rather "pave the earth." Nothing will grow there. Maybe aesthetics aren't that important.From the article:
Erthos distills the complexity of solar energy systems into a modular, repeatable design. Unlike traditional ground-mounted solar energy systems supported by structural steel, Erthos’ Earth Mount Solar system places modules directly on the earth, which allows solar project developers to eliminate all the costs required to procure and install structural steel. Leveraging Erthos technology, ForeFront Power was able to reduce its total cost to develop its solar energy system and pass those savings to the City of Fresno in the form of lower electricity rates.
ForeFront Power approached Erthos in 2023 when a combination of inflation and supply shocks caused the price of labor and materials to spike. The ForeFront Power team realized that the cost of a traditional ground-mounted system at this site would be significantly higher. This in turn would increase the cost of the electricity that ForeFront Power would sell back to the City of Fresno through a Power Purchase Agreement. Under the terms of the Agreement, ForeFront Power owns the system and charges the City a fixed, lower rate for electricity than the utility for 20 years.
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Since the system entered commercial operation in late March 2026, the system has consistently outperformed expectations, operating at an average of 101% of expected energy production and has already delivered 862 MWh of energy to the City. ForeFront Power and Erthos continue to work closely together to optimize system performance. Both organizations are encouraged by the project’s early results and outlook for continued strong performance in the years ahead.
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In addition to avoiding material and labor costs from structural steel, ForeFront Power was able to achieve a higher generating capacity per acre thanks to the unique architecture of Erthos systems. With no row spacing, Erthos offers the highest energy density of any solar architecture in the industry. Another unique feature of Erthos Earth Mount Solar system is that, although the solar modules are mounted flat on the earth, they can follow contours up to 15% slope, meaning they were adaptable to the natural topography of the Fresno site.
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Custom-designed for use on an Earth Mount Solar array, the ErthBot cleaner is deployed nightly as needed and returns to its charging dock after each use, ready to be deployed again the following evening. Erthos handles the operations and maintenance of the ErthBot as part of its Energy Services Agreement with ForeFront Power.
It's solar, but the aesthetic is rather "pave the earth." Nothing will grow there.
Maybe aesthetics aren't that important.
From the article:
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