unkz's recent activity

  1. Comment on Leak exposes members of Peter Thiel’s secretive ‘dialog’ society in ~society

    unkz
    Link Parent
    I think he probably falls under the “entertainment” class of guests. This is an interesting article by someone else invited in that capacity (Noah Hawley who was invited to be a dancing monkey for...

    I think he probably falls under the “entertainment” class of guests. This is an interesting article by someone else invited in that capacity (Noah Hawley who was invited to be a dancing monkey for Bezos).

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/

    14 votes

  2. Comment on Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing in ~health

    unkz
    Link Parent
    I imagine it could be like phantom limb pain but your entire body has been amputated. Even if it were just suddenly and inexplicably appearing in a sensory deprivation chamber, this sounds like a...

    I imagine it could be like phantom limb pain but your entire body has been amputated. Even if it were just suddenly and inexplicably appearing in a sensory deprivation chamber, this sounds like a bad time though. Plus, experimental drugs being applied, and probably a good portion of your brain not working properly so you’d almost certainly be experiencing some form of dementia.

    9 votes

  3. Comment on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know in ~tech

    unkz
    Link Parent
    This was a pretty distressing policy, especially after seeing how bad they are at detecting intent in other areas of Fable’s safeguards. Who knows how many of my queries would have been mistagged...

    This was a pretty distressing policy, especially after seeing how bad they are at detecting intent in other areas of Fable’s safeguards. Who knows how many of my queries would have been mistagged and therefore sabotaged without my knowing?

    Definitely motivating me to experiment more with Qwen code so I can run it all local.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing in ~health

    unkz
    Link
    Title really says it all. They say they are sedating these brains, and I’m reasonably confident they aren’t experiencing anything, but I wonder what the limits here are. How much function is it...

    Title really says it all. They say they are sedating these brains, and I’m reasonably confident they aren’t experiencing anything, but I wonder what the limits here are. How much function is it possible to bring back to a deceased brain if that were the actual intent?

    This seems like the kind of thing that should require the explicit permission of the donor though. I don’t care what you do with most of my body parts, but I have reservations about reanimating my disembodied brain.

    31 votes

  6. Comment on What do you think is the best sandwich? in ~food

    unkz
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    It’s a toss up between a fried egg and ketchup sandwich and a BLT. I could probably subsist off either of these indefinitely.

    It’s a toss up between a fried egg and ketchup sandwich and a BLT. I could probably subsist off either of these indefinitely.

  7. Comment on Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers in ~tech

    unkz
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    Sounds like Google would have to basically pull out of that market or be faced with absurd liability? Or at least all AI responses.

    Sounds like Google would have to basically pull out of that market or be faced with absurd liability? Or at least all AI responses.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech

    unkz
    Link Parent
    Possibly try an anonymous session so it doesn’t fetch your memory?

    Possibly try an anonymous session so it doesn’t fetch your memory?

    2 votes

  9. Comment on Are there any games that had their development abandoned that you followed where you wish that continued/completed development? in ~games

    unkz
    Link
    I wish we got more sequels to all the old Sierra games. Space quest, quest for glory, king’s quest … all lots of fun. I know space quest 7 in particular was deep in development when they shut down.

    I wish we got more sequels to all the old Sierra games. Space quest, quest for glory, king’s quest … all lots of fun. I know space quest 7 in particular was deep in development when they shut down.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on 'Chill, relax, we can’t control everything' - relive Gianni Infantino news conference on eve of World Cup in ~sports.football

    unkz
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    Really what should have happened. America should be shut out of world events as long as they keep disparaging and disrupting the world. Anyone could have predicted these outcomes given their awful...

    Without his engagement and involvement, I think it would have been, simple as that, impossible to organise a World Cup in the United States.

    Really what should have happened. America should be shut out of world events as long as they keep disparaging and disrupting the world. Anyone could have predicted these outcomes given their awful and highly public positions on visitors from other countries.

    13 votes

  11. Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech

    unkz
    Link
    The safety filter clearly needs a ton of refinement. I’ve been blocked several times now for very innocuous code. Some people have also been complaining that the contents of their memory have...

    The safety filter clearly needs a ton of refinement. I’ve been blocked several times now for very innocuous code. Some people have also been complaining that the contents of their memory have basically locked them out of using Fable at all, because they work in chemistry. Also, there was a period in time today when their safety filter was simply offline and I couldn’t use fable at all.

    4 votes

  12. Comment on How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math in ~science

    unkz
    Link Parent
    Well, not entirely. A big part of this is being able to use LLM-type AI to generate testable Lean code to grind through the grunt work.

    Well, not entirely. A big part of this is being able to use LLM-type AI to generate testable Lean code to grind through the grunt work.

    Yet Tao had a way forward in mind. He didn’t think AI would replace human mathematicians anytime soon, but he did consider it particularly well suited to helping solve certain types of complex mathematical problems: ones that could be broken into thousands of small, manageable subproblems — essentially the same class of problems that worked well for Polymath projects. At that scale, mathematicians could employ AI to solve large swaths of the easiest subproblems, with its results outputted as formal proofs that Lean could check, and step in to handle the most difficult remaining questions themselves. In 2024, Tao was promoting this vision to anyone who would listen, and following the PFR project, he had realized that if he really believed in the work, he needed to step up and lead it himself. He also knew right away which problem he would start with.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math in ~science

    unkz
    (edited )
    Link
    Anything Tao says is probably worth reading, but this is very interesting stuff. The intersection of Lean, LLMs, and crowdsourcing has massive potential. Here’s the state of Equational Theories by...

    Anything Tao says is probably worth reading, but this is very interesting stuff. The intersection of Lean, LLMs, and crowdsourcing has massive potential.

    Here’s the state of Equational Theories by the way.

    https://teorth.github.io/equational_theories/dashboard/

    The article seems to say that it ground to a halt with 4 hard cases remaining. From that page it seems that they solved 2 more, leaving only 2 unproven cases remaining.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on Tildes Survey #8: What is your favorite video game? (Results) in ~talk

    unkz
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    I kind of have eras that don’t really overlap. Like my favourite childhood game was final fantasy 1, which I don’t know how you would even compare with fallout 4, which is probably my favourite...

    I kind of have eras that don’t really overlap. Like my favourite childhood game was final fantasy 1, which I don’t know how you would even compare with fallout 4, which is probably my favourite game of adulthood.

    6 votes

  16. Comment on rsync and outrage in ~comp

    unkz
    Link
    If I understand this correctly, the claude contributions were limited to rewriting the test suite, and did not actually introduce bugs in the system?

    If I understand this correctly, the claude contributions were limited to rewriting the test suite, and did not actually introduce bugs in the system?

    5 votes

  17. Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech

    unkz
    Link
    This is an interesting question to me, and I think it’s especially interesting on the broader scope of automation. The concern you have with automated kills is, I assume, the chance of collateral...

    Should robots be remotely controlled at all times or should they be automated?

    This is an interesting question to me, and I think it’s especially interesting on the broader scope of automation. The concern you have with automated kills is, I assume, the chance of collateral damage — civilians being killed by autonomous agents. However, human operators kill civilians all the time. So to me, it seems like the ethical line has a few components to it.

    • accuracy relative to human operators in killing desired targets versus undesired targets is the obvious one since it feels very apples to apples.
    • the other though, a little more difficult to quantify and that is how many innocent lives are being lost relative to invader kills. Even if collateral damage were higher on the side of Ukraine for instance, if this results in a higher total kill count of invaders than could be achieved by solely using human operators, I could still consider this to be ethical since killing a killer saves additional lives — all the soldiers and civilians that that invader would have killed. What that level of additional collateral damage is, I couldn’t give a firm answer to though.

    The more interesting question to me is at what point does it become unethical to use human operators at all? We may be heading towards that zone with self driving cars, for example.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech

    unkz
    Link Parent
    My understanding is we are basically there now. On board targeting for loitering munitions is in use today. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjp0n7rn41o

    My understanding is we are basically there now. On board targeting for loitering munitions is in use today.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjp0n7rn41o

    Ukraine's Hornet drones are equipped with an AI-targeting system which has been trained on thousands of hours of videos of Russian military targets gathered over the last four years, Nick Brown, a weapons expert from defence intelligence company Janes, told BBC Verify. They can also access the Starlink satellite network to connect to operators over longer distances, a system that is also more resistant to jamming by Russian forces.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on The fall of the theorem economy in ~science

    unkz
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    I think one interesting little thread that hasn’t been explored a lot is the actual capacity of human understanding. What I’m really interested in is theorems that may now be provable yet cannot,...

    I think one interesting little thread that hasn’t been explored a lot is the actual capacity of human understanding.

    The likely outcome is that formalized mathematics will now develop in two separate layers, an intelligible layer embodied by Mathlib, and an unintelligible layer we might call Mathslop, a library of results that are known to be correct via proofs that no human has ever understood.

    What I’m really interested in is theorems that may now be provable yet cannot, because of human absolute limitations, ever be completely understood by humans. Even when expressed in the most parsimonious form, the complexity may exceed human understanding. Yet, these incomprehensible proofs may yet resolve as simple statements that are themselves usable as elements of reasoning — perhaps that will be the final form of P!=NP: formally proven, yet still inscrutable.

    These elements of Mathslop may still find their way into being used in Mathlib — much like the four color theorem, where I doubt many if any people people have hand verified each of the 1500-odd cases, yet it is now universally accepted as true and used as a basis for other work.

    Perhaps someday: “If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of silicon giants.”

  20. Comment on Do we want to stop all crime? in ~society

    unkz
    Link Parent
    I've undergone a few significant shifts in my set of ethics, so I recognize that even what I believe right now is probably wrong in many ways and won't reflect what I think in even 5-10 years.

    I've undergone a few significant shifts in my set of ethics, so I recognize that even what I believe right now is probably wrong in many ways and won't reflect what I think in even 5-10 years.

    10 votes