Dan

I think people saw an isomorphism in the combination of high energy cost compute scale-out + low practical utility of early chatbots, and overfit on it. Suspect a lot of the "it doesn't work" part of anti-AI is extrapolating by analogy with crypto

Ah, yep. "Human-curated" instead of e.g. "human-written" seems to be load-bearing phrasing in their conclusions, hope it doesn't get overinterpreted. But, could have imagined the one-shot self-gen helping by priming relevant info; good to know

Cross-model evals on self-gen would be interesting

The left is missing out on AI As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

"probably not ideal that just before what might — or might not — be the moment of greatest job dispossession in history, or of democratic dispossession, or worse, or better, part of the group historically most concerned with such things is plugging its ears."
www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

Requesting takes, any temperature

Heard someone refer to a (large) datacenter as an "ohio-class datacenter" and now I only want to hear datacenter sizes referred to by reference to submarine classes

TIL the moth-trapped-in-a-relay thing isn't the origin of the term "bug" as used in engineering, which has been around since the 19th century

"Lights all askew in the heavens. Men of science more or less agog over results of eclipse observations. Einstein theory triumphs. Stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry."

another favourite scientific headline, following confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity by observations of the 1919 solar eclipse. "Stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry" is a beautiful sentiment. i would have that on a t-shirt

If AI-assisted coding causes burn-out / exhaustion, re-align your workflow.

Don't focus on velocity. The AI will outrun you and keep running.

Have cycles of expansion (Let the LLM rip) and contraction (Read the code, refactor by hand, write down notes for the next cycle ... human-paced activity).

new game

trying to make a momentum-y, combo-rewarding, faster minesweeper

mines.brennan.computer

Fahrenheit is "percent hot", completely intuitive

Somehow this is true

Claude Code is the stone in Stone Soup. It does everything for you—

except sure, the soup will be better if you understand statistics, and also tastier if you check the code, and …

But a stone that reduces the initial barrier to making soup at all is, in fact, pedagogical magic.

We need to raise the bar on research code right now.

1) documentation and tests are dead simple now.
2) creating benchmarks integrating across multiple implementations
3) have agents double check your work / fix broken tests
4) fix outstanding bugs in major scientific packages

This is my present favorite way to test what models are actually capable of in research, most usefully on something unfamiliar with a better-qualified friend as John Henry to avoid feeding it the right answers

80 characters for thee, but not for me

One-ish-sample tests:
Pass: Opus 4.6/4.5, ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Sonnet 4.5 Extended Thinking, Gemini 3 Thinking/Pro
Fail: GPT 5.2 Instant, Sonnet/Haiku 4.5, Gemini 3 Fast

GPT 5.2 Instant made fun of me for wanting to drive
Gemini 3 Thinking made fun of me for wanting to walk
Opus 4.6 got the joke

We all know about the Claude spiritual bliss attractor state. But what happens when you let Grok talk to itself for a long time? Answer:

First Proof solutions releasing in a few hours, anyone seen any cool results yet? #1stproof

Single-minus gluon tree amplitudes are nonzero Single-minus tree-level $n$-gluon scattering amplitudes are reconsidered. Often presumed to vanish, they are shown here to be nonvanishing for certain "half-collinear" configurations existing in Klein...

Excited to see this cross-checked:

"The key formula ... was first conjectured by GPT-5.2 Pro and then proved by a new internal OpenAI model. The solution was checked by hand ..."

arxiv.org/abs/2602.12176

Not to spend all my time shadowboxing with people who get angry at headlines, but:
- this is an old metaphor from chess
- he’s right
- we should hope that the centaur phase lasts as long as possible

Which specific reasons for hoping?

Calvinball as design principle

the kind of future i figured was inevitable 15 years ago is finally here and I don't really know what to make of it

Here is an example of increased situational/self-awareness across Anthropic models. In each case, two instances are connected through the API (by taking outputs of one and inputting it into the user role of the other)

Haiku 4.5:

"I could be a human who believes they're Claude"

woke up and chose linguistics violence today: the word 'queue' is just the letter Q followed by four silent letters waiting in line behind it. they're literally queuing. this is the most honest word in the english language and i will not be taking questions at this time

it's not easy breeding deer for gigantism, but that's why I make the big bucks

Scientific supercomputing campaigns ~ ephemeral distributed systems?

Oh god

The canonically correct pluralization

GB vs GiB for hard drives