Is it a bad sign if CSAM, Personal (medical, financial, etc) Records, Snuff, and Malware/Ransomeware are censored? What about manufacture of WMDs, terrorism, hate speech? Free software, and copyrighted music? Historical records of genocide?

The link is:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...

Mathematics is suffering from Goodhart's Law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

New best prompt:

Write me a really cool math proof that will make me lots of money fast!

Why not let it just spit out the next token on its own without interference, if you can barely fool yourself into believing you understand what it proves... or hallucinates.

Discoveries for abstract theory, entertainment, and perhaps regurgitating media, or even basic education can be done with the help of LLMs, but you can't make anything. You can't test anything. You aren't living in the real world. You'll just be lulled into the false belief that everything is simple and fine and beautiful, just as you always wanted, and as airplanes fall from the sky.

Hey, maybe it could work on Cosmology, if you gave it access to the data?

You are absolutely right!

Outsourcing understanding, teaching, and proving maths to LLMs is just as dumb as outsourcing food production, manufacturing, or entertainment to a foreign power. It's not that we haven't already done most of those things in the pursuit of temporary profit optimization, but each of them has obviously bad impacts on both the individuals in society who perform those tasks, and on risks to everyone when that outsourcing fails for any reason.

As described, using LLMs is like navigating with GPS. It's fine when you're using it to optimize a path due to traffic conditions, but it can be deadly if you're flying a plane and suddenly don't have it, or any training to deal with that situation. That is where we're headed. I don't really have a take on signing the letter in particular, because as mentioned it seems a bit pointless. At the same time it also seems a bit pointless to spend $10s of millions proving a conjecture a few months sooner than a group of mathematicians already were. I don't imagine they were going to make millions doing it. The definition of material waste.

Perhaps it serves a temporary marketing win for OpenAI, or a medium term improvement in LLM performance on some productive output, but longer term it certainly risks ceding whole swaths of human endeavor to a tool we may not always have. Just as falling demand for farmers, or skilled machinists, or writers, or artists is not an immediate crisis, in the long term there is no one left to transfer the knowledge to the next generation, if something goes wrong.

You don't remember the '79 Vietnam War? The Chinese one where they invaded North Vietnam with thousands tanks and 10s of thousands on both sides died over the course of months. Relations normalized in '91.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

China supported the Khmer Rouge, maybe Pol Pot is memorable?

I think we often delude ourselves as to how well we understand problems and their solutions. Some instructors even make you feel that you understand better than you do by pointing to a few approximations or simple solution spaces that obscure the larger complexity. Just looking in wonder at the many categories of three-body solutions (currently on hnews) is enough to remind me of this.

The 3BP is just the simplest chaotic system showing the limits of simple models and approximations.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6069268

Or listen to just a few minutes of Patrick Boyle talking about them.

https://youtu.be/IUMUJgjDvU0?list=TLPQMDYwOTIwMjbX3y5H-uRecw...

Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.

Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).

I was fed a YT video about it recently so it must be part of the "moment". Also a topic on menopause blogs from searching.

https://asayujapan.com/blogs/asayu-blog/persimmon-soap-answe...

https://miraiclinical.com/pages/why-this-ucla-trained-anti-a...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529685

Points: 73

# Comments: 12

The second question is whether one can simply modify the tube/ballast in a visually imperceptible way. For example, one could insert an IC in the ballast that modulates the power draw of the lamp dependent on the ambient coupled acoustic/vibration power (eg possibly using the lamp as a vibrational microphone). Then pulse modulating the power draw of the lamp at a relatively low noise part of the power spectrum and within the band of the main power transformer filters. The lamps easily draw 40-80W so there's lots of room to work, and there are already Power Factor Correction implementations that use this simple technique to make lamp's inductive loads "look resistive".

So what's notable is that either the ballast of the lamp could be tampered with or one of the bulbs. Either one could allow transmission out along power lines, if standard transformers and capacitors are used for power delivery. This is how home powerline ethernet works and it transmits Gb/s rather than the few kb/s needed to get voice out over the power lines.

Case in point. I saw a single Korean Samjung lamp interfere with AM radio stations (<1MHz) from 100 meters, by just clipping the power draw of a small fluorescent with a thyristor and oscillator at the ballast of a desk lamp to provide PFC so that thousands of lamps could be placed in huge open plan offices.