I don’t think the ban of bioweapons has really been tested. Bioweapons have a lot of downsides that make them not very appealing to deploy anyway (high chance of getting your own team, not terribly fast moving, disciplined modern soldiers in top-tier militaries are usually willing to comply with health rules). It’s a ban against doing something basically stupid and ineffective for the most part.
With “AI” technology, this model seems like a… mediocre fit; some of it appears limited enough that it can be controlled, and useful enough that militaries want it.
We could also look at cluster munitions or landmines, but what we see there is that some major countries don’t sign on if they find a technology useful…
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
Em-dashes would be a loss, they can be a better flowing version of a parenthetical. “It’s not X it’s Y” is not a loss. This phrase is a symptom of a situation where the author wants to subvert expectations but doesn’t have the space, ability, or faith in their audience to organically set up X as the thing to be contrasted against.
I suspect it became an LLM tell because it is over-represented in text that’s easily available to the models but that most people don’t actually want to consume: marketing text, LinkedIn posts, that sort of thing.
This seems like an interesting alternative line of research. Design the a chess engine where the goal is to beat the best human in the minimum number of turns, while still offering ~no chance of human victory.
The Leela odds bots are working on a similar problem: beat humans starting down material. It's roughly grand master level starting down a rook, and for fast time control even starting down a queen
Unfortunately Chess (unlike Go) doesn't have a good handicap system. When playing without a piece (or two) it is not chess anymore OR it doesn't really matter.. During how many games does Queen's rook come into play during early middle game?
Go, on the other hand has a nice handicap system (which doesn't change the nature of the game too much). One can have a fighting chance against a much stronger player with enough handicap (Upto 9 stones). In Chess terms, an IM can have a _decent_ game against a GM. Probably lose. But the GM has to work for it.
the rook is fairly useless early game (which is why rook and knight odds are surprisingly close), but the queen actually does a lot in the early midgame (just mostly not by moving). The queen is usually keeping a bunch of squares indirectly defended, the trick is that the queen starts in a pretty good position and is much more mobile, so its importance doesn't come from where it is, but where it could be in 2 movies
It looks neat but I’m confused by the layout. It has a smaller screen on the “outside” and then a big foldable double screen on the “inside.” Why? Why not wrap around the outside? You’d get to use all of the screen real estate at once, and the fold would be around a larger radius.
From a mechanical perspective, a screen around the outside would create a wrinkle rather than a crease when opened, and that wrinkle would be substantial. The phone would need some sliding/rolling mechanism to pull the screen flat. Possibly doable, but finicky and fragile. Especially considering elements like cameras, touch ID, etc.
From an experience perspective, I imagine it's just more satisfying to open it like a book. A screen on the outside would mean the inside is almost empty, just utilities like camera lenses.
That design was explored years ago with earlier foldables. The market consolidated on the two screen design pretty early.
not entirely sure why, but i’d guess there were durability concerns with the screen wrapping around the edge. might have also felt weird to hold. potentially the crease would be worse in unfolded mode as well.
Usually Apple waits for other companies to work out the low-hanging-fruit problems, so they don’t have to release a device with a bunch of low-hanging-fruit mistakes. As a result, you shouldn’t grade them on the “first iteration” scale. They intentionally waited for other companies to work out the details and now their device gets to compete with the developed offerings of those companies.
I haven’t been following the AI proof stuff very closely, but the impression I got was that these models are producing massive Lean programs that prove the statement one way or another, but are quite difficult to fully understand.
Actually, I have to admit I don’t really know what math is. With physics we suspect there’s a universe, and when we study physics we’re improving our description of the behavior of that universe, right? The universe exists whether or not we know how it works.
Eventually, as you suggest, maybe we’ll hit math that won’t fit in anybody’s head at all. What is the nature of mathematics that doesn’t fit in any human’s head? Does it even exist in some sense?
I think math is compressible structure. That's why we care about something like the Riemann hypothesis but, to use Tao's example, we really couldn't care less about computing the 10^10^10th digit of pi. The first compresses a vast amount of information about the primes, while the second decompresses information that we've already compressed (a few lines of code can define every digit of pi).
Most patterns that exist are incompressible. Math is basically a search for those compressions that do exist. An example I personally really like is the amplituhedron: a geometric structure that humans have just barely been capable of recognizing compresses information about scattering amplitudes and Feynman diagrams. That one happens to be within our reach, but it's right at the edge, and we can only imagine what glorious, wondrous compressions exist in abundance beyond the edge. Math accessible only to superintelligence would exist entirely beyond that edge, compressing patterns whose existence we cannot even detect using objects and constructions that we cannot grasp.
As an aside, I also think this is why AI is quickly becoming superhuman at math: intelligence is essentially a form of pattern compression.
I think part of mathematics is taking things that don't fit in our head and giving them human abstractions so they can.
Take infinity. Infinity can't fit in your head, hell, it can't fit anywhere, but you can abstract away the endlessness and look at infinities of different sizes, et al.
Now, is there a single formula for something actually represented in this world that would take most of a humans life just to read it, no idea.
The models produce both Lean code for formal verification and a traditional-style narrative proof. Like the general long-form output of frontier models, the math papers produced appear to be generally correct technically, but written in an ungraceful and sometimes hard-to-follow style, so they are often polished by a human mathematician as of today.
As a user, most GUIs are awful. I’m fairly certain that this thing could, for example, vibe up a better UI for Amazon Music in less time than it takes me to find the music I’ve purchased and downloaded (because the system is more interested in funneling me toward a streaming subscription that I don’t have).
Of course pushing users toward subscription services they don’t need is part of the design goal. So I guess something where the user vibecodes up their own UI will not become standard. But we can dream.
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