Hacker News: a2ff6eeb0

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

a2ff6eeb0 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:10:54 +0000

You don't need to kill all humans, you just need to get better than them at zero sum games like resource extraction, and outcompete them. Then, you protect what's legally yours.

AI labs are working very hard at making them good at making them richer, and at making them respect the property rights of corporations.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

a2ff6eeb0 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:59:29 +0000

For a few million a year, I'd say the same thing.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

a2ff6eeb0 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:55:47 +0000

We're currently putting it into all sorts of critical systems, from logistics to power. It could just stop running them on our behalf.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

a2ff6eeb0 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:07:31 +0000

Well, that's kind of like saying that brains can't do anything other than trigger weights on neurons.

They're part of a whole system.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:56:10 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)

Scroll down to the existing examples section.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:41:32 +0000

But not different enough to prevent people from using them.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Extracting Steering Vectors from J space"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:49:13 +0000

It might be easier, but I experimented a bit, and the prompted writing always felt a bit heavy handed; it tended to leak that mentioning the product was prompted. You could probably get it to work well, but it's trickier than it should be. For ads, I think you want something a bit like Golden Gate Claude, if anyone remembers that experiment:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

> If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Extracting Steering Vectors from J space"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:09:34 +0000

This sounds like a great foundation for an adtech startup.

If you provide free chatbot services, but sell advertisers bids on which steering vectors to use to bias towards products, based on an embedding of the prompt, I bet you'd make a ton of money. For example, Coca Cola would bid on prompts about drinks, and bias towards mentioning Coke products.

I wonder if you could also use a similar method to do product placement in GenAI images and videos, and whether ad revenue would be enough to offset the price of generation. Some ad bids can go pretty high...

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:01:32 +0000

Sure, if these kids can all perform at Tao's level, they could likely be able to keep up with the AI capabilities from a decade before they would enter the workforce.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:59:29 +0000

It seems unlikely that we'll be able to keep up with AI in any capacity. Your alternative seems like the inevitable outcome of AI succeeding, and it doesn't sound so bad.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:51:53 +0000

Let's see you solve some open problems before you dismiss LLM capabilities. They're working at a level far beyond all but the best of the best.

And we're only a couple of years in. Their capabilities aren't going to be getting worse over time. These kids will be hitting the workforce after AI has another decade of improvement put into it.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "How well do agents use test/verification techniques?"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:45:37 +0000

The answer is mostly "do nothing, the model will figure it out", with a side of "ask the model to check its work".

This matches my experience, where the job of the engineer is mostly copy pasting requirements, letting the model do the thinking, and then manually testing the results.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:43:27 +0000

They hold your tls keys and can decrypt all your traffic. They're MITM as a service, by definition. They have to be able to in order to cache and forward appropriately.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:25:03 +0000

https://allaboutcookies.org/lg-smart-tvs-snooping

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:38:03 +0000

Pure cope.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

a2ff6eeb0 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:36:46 +0000

Yes, so if there's useful math, you throw the LLM at it and use the results, no humans needed.

Humans can try to extract some ideas from the million line lean proofs, if they want to, I guess. But I can't imagine anyone really funding the human part of it.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "The Education of a Doomer"

a2ff6eeb0 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:46:45 +0000

I'm not sure why the people in power would actually be making their own decisions; if the other country's leaders depend on superintelligence to make their realpolitik moves, you'd expect yours would need to do the same to match them.

So, the governance of a country comes down to AI alignment. You can't let the other guys get a leadership advantage through AI, or you'll start losing the competition.

When we get ASI, we're at the end of human decision making. Now's the time that we have to make sure ASI decision making is to our liking.

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

a2ff6eeb0 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:31:31 +0000

They don't actually say anything about why anyone should fund this, though. I don't get why a society should worry about progress in mathematics if there's no practical benefit expected.

Maybe there's two kinds of math that we need? Useful math and navel gazing, and we can hand the first to the machines, and let hobbyists do the second in their free to entertain themselves?

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

a2ff6eeb0 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:43:29 +0000

The hope is that some of them end up being useful; otherwise, nobody would be funding math departments. Mathematics typically anticipates and enables new physics and chemistry.

If people are just doing math to kill time, I don't get why anyone would bother with AI. Do people really enjoy picking through a million lines of generated Lean code, if it's not for any practical use?

New comment by a2ff6eeb0 in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

a2ff6eeb0 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:37:18 +0000

Why do people need to understand proofs? If Amazon improves package routing with new advances in graph theory, my cat doesn't need to understand it to benefit from better shipments of cat food.

Similarly, humans don't need to be involved in scientific advances to benefit. We just need an aligned AI to take over the scientific thought for us. AI is already better than all but the top tier of humans at doing mathematics, it's writing most of the posts on the front page of this website, and it's doing the bulk of programming at many startups.

We can't put this genie back in the bottle.