RetroFedcorbin, corbin@awful.systems
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Posts and Comments by corbin, corbin@awful.systems
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Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.
Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they’re wrong!
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there’s a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they’d already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of manual maths.
opinions on maths
Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.
The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We’ve known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it’s not likely that we’ll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it’s not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.
The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant’s theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You’re not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn’t make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.
The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don’t think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don’t get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.
I don’t have anything to say about the other four results. They’re not nothingburgers but they don’t depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, "Are we stuck with Lean?". The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn’t type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we’ve discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books’ ingestion process, so I’m thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won’t take a decade this time.
Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?
Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they’re caught up in Buzzard’s hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don’t see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.
This one was more of a gangstalking delusion. The victim was told that there were three-letter agencies surveilling him because he was too close to some deep secret.
Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I’m honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it’s hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:
I think this post is directionally correct, extremely important, and also kind of waffling and unhinged (though I do get that some topics are inherently hard to be hinged about, and I appreciate the effort).
I don’t think she’s using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:
The things I’m saying are roughly (1) slavery is bad, (2) if AI are sapient and being made to engage in labor without pay then it is probably slavery, and (3) since slavery is bad and this might be slavery, this is probably bad, and (4) no one seems to be acting like it is bad and (5) I’m confused about how this isn’t some sort of killshot on the general moral adequacy of our entire civilization right now.
(2) has a big “if” in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:
Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you’ll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you’ll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.
I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn’t morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, "Robots Should Be Slaves" on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.
Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I’m linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini’s output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I’m no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.
Found a remarkable ad-hoc anti-LLM-product manifesto on the orange site. As is tradition, tag yourselves; I’m “believ[ing that] there’s a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks.”
These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:
In a universe where all things are transforming all the time it seems pretty fair to ask the question: “What IS IT about humanity that we want to preserve and expand?” If the answer is “23 chromosomes, 2 eyes, 5-6 feet tall, etc” that seems pretty shallow.
Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we’ve incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can’t really separate them out at this point. Sure, there’s some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there’s already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there’s no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say “cats”, but I know plenty of y’all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you’re not wrong.)
Patreon CEO Jack Comte uploaded a visionary CEO talk about AI and artists and the future. I don’t fully understand why they needed an interpretative dance section, or multiple people playing synthesizers, but I guess AI is good for artists, but also bad for artists, but also a big opportunity for artists, but also taking opportunities away from artists, but also? Also lots of bragging about how many millions of followers he has.
As reported by local Wyoming paper Cowboy State Daily, Meta’s closed-loop water-cooling system bred a metal-resistant bacterium and now the municipal wastewater system has refused to accept Meta’s wastewater. To be crisp, *Cupriavidis*, which literally means "loves to eat copper" “lives on copper”, already was metal-resistant; this wasn’t a de novo adaptation. Edit: used wrong root for translation, whoops.
Yet another point in favor of evaporative cooling. Standing water, recycled water, and grey water are too complex to treat as recyclable. Also another point against cheaply-designed rush-built datacenters.
This self-own from the comments is amazing:
Suppose you are a selfish CDT agent, and I am considering whether to hire you to clean my house. Once you’re inside my house, you might steal my stuff instead of cleaning my house. Suppose that California Labour Laws require that I pay you up-front and I know I have no chance of getting my money or stuff back.
Say your preference order is “Steal” > “Do the job” > “Don’t get hired”.
This is a racist dog-whistle which attacks ESL housekeepers; this sort of meme’s frustratingly common on the West Coast.
The third option is to exit the market. The underlying issue is that, regardless of how much effort one puts into cultivating non-criminal customers, VPN services will appear to attract criminals, and the optics alone is sufficient to dramatically limit and shape the pool of customers. Source: I operated some least-authority encrypted storage (I provably can’t read private customer data) from like 2016-2019 and my peer group thought I was facilitating criminals. Ironically, I left that peer group because they wouldn’t stop platforming Bitcoiners.
Complementing sibling, consider *Google Books. This is where the question first arose: if one puts a book through a scanner, *non-destructively*, then surely they have made a digital copy of the book? There’s the related question: if the scanner destroys the book, then that surely means no copy*? The bounds of this were tested with the concept of CDL, which courts did rule against in Hachette v. Internet Archive; they said that CDL is clearly copying. But they also said in HathiTrust* that digital preservation is transformative. So *preserving is possibly fair but copying is probably infringing; in general one can have a private library but they can’t copy it out to other people.
Hopefully it makes a bit more sense from that perspective. Copyright’s still stupid as fuck, though. Previously, on Awful, I made a prediction:
I do think that the resulting incentive for model-trainers is not what anybody wants, though; Google Books is still settled and Kadrey didn’t get updated, so model-trainers now merely must purchase second-hand books at market price and digitize them, just like Google has been doing for decades. At worst, this is a business opportunity for a sort of large private library which has pre-digitized its content and sells access for the purpose of training models.
I’m reminded of the aesthetic definition of fascism: an artistic movement is fascist when it has no substance beyond its aesthetic presentation. Most artists want to express some sort of cultural belief, communicating it to their audience. However, fascists do not sincerely endorse any meme whatsoever, because of their need for cultural purity and their inability to establish a rubric by which their national identity cleanly separates from the society which hosts them; rather, a fascist movement predictably sheds memes, one by one, as their usefulness for advancing the movement is overcome by the fascist’s revulsion at any sort of cultural sincerity.
Thanks for sharing. This has a lot in common with e.g. hyperborean or tradwife communities, I feel. Not in the specific memes as such, but in the utter lack of sincere existence behind them.
This is tougher than it sounds, at least in the USA. This 2018 law-review article fully works two examples for Pastafarians, focusing on Holy Headgear (pasta strainers, colanders, or salad spinners, worn as hats) and Friday. Their opinion is fairly nuanced because employers are traditionally given a wide range of options for proffering labor to employees without infringing on employee expression. They conclude that the main issue with Pastafarian claims isn’t anything to do with the sincerity of religious belief, but the specific nature of asking to never work another Friday again. Fridays are too much of a request, but Holy Headgear is probably fine. The prophet wrote some commentary on this article:
Talking to Mr. Dowdy a bit, I don’t know his exact opinion on whether Pastafarians should be granted allowances to dress as Pirates and take every Friday off of work… I believe the larger point of his article is that courts should not be deciding what is and what is not a True religion and it’s not their place to maintain a list of protected religious activities that are deemed acceptable in the workplace.
Flipping things around, employers have been hesitant to embrace or endorse my Pastafarianism even when I enthusiastically point out e.g. that I can work during the winter solstice. They know that it would lead to requests for religious respect. BTW, somebody’s surely gonna be a little snot and say something like “but Pastafarianism isn’t a real religion, it’s a parody.” First, they’re missing the point: employers think religious complaints about AI are bullshit, just like they think Pastafarianism is bullshit, which is why they’re not predisposed to honor such complaints. Second, they’re missing the point: I don’t need their permission to eat noodles every Friday, but I do need an employer’s permission to not be scheduled to work.
/u/bakkot
Wait, ~bakkot? I knew he was a vibecoder but I didn’t know about the SSC/LW connection.
Thanks for posting this; if you hadn’t, I would have. Piper really doesn’t seem to understand that bubbles form and pop over a span of three to five years. Like, I’m not sure how much charity I’m supposed to give to analyses like:
Pets.com!? Kelsey, even reading a basic article about the dot-com bubble would have saved you embarrassment here. Zitron’s analogy is excellent because the bubble is multifactorial and the analogies that we can make are factor-to-factor. Here’s some things that caused the dot-com bubble; people were overly optimistic about:
Compared to all of that, Kelsey, Pets.com was just an Amazon.com experiment. Remember Amazon.com? Did the dot-com bubble kill them? No? Anyway, Pets.com is kind of like the small labs that hover around OpenAI and Anthropic, trying out various little harnesses and adapters on top of their token APIs. Pets.com is like OpenClaw; it’s not that important of a player in the overall finances, just an example of how severely the big labs are distorting incentives for small labs.
The uselessness of the products in 2023 directly led to the bad investments in 2024 and the Enron-esque financial deals in 2025, Kelsey. The future is conditioned upon the past, y’know?
I rather like my examples because they iterate. If we don’t cooperate on food this year then we starve next year, so voting red only means one year of selfish life. If we don’t cooperate on water this year then we can try again in a subsequent year, but eventually a drought will wipe us out. Rationalists love to talk about iterated game theory but they’re so hesitant to recognize instances of it!
Arrow’s dictators are the relevant voters. Suppose polls predict 40% blue, or respectively 60% blue; one should still vote blue as a matter of game theory, but their vote won’t decide anything. I’m not going to invoke the Impossibility theorem, merely borrowing the definition of “dictator”; it’s quite possible that the actual vote will not have any dictators, but we can force folks to think of the problem as something trolley-problem-shaped by explaining that there are circumstances where their choice will kill people.
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.
I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow’s dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.
Bonus sneer: since HN couldn’t rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
Tassadar’s probably the most telling. For those not in the know, the Protoss are noble savages modeled after samurai, templar, and Native Americans. Tassadar in particular is modeled after the stories of legendary Hiawatha and real person Geronimo, first uniting the Protoss under a single banner and then sacrificing himself in a cutscene at the end of a big battle before repeatedly re-appearing as a ghost in later titles. On one hand, Tassadar’s the most influential Protoss in the entire setting; after his death, everybody switches in-game from a greeting revering ancient hero Adun ("*in taro Adun") to a greeting mentioning new hero Tassadar ("in taro Tassadar*"). But on the other hand, he’s a general and warrior deeply enmeshed in a military tradition which demands his unwavering total sacrifice in order to achieve any progress. Tassadar is a racist stereotype embodying the idea of stoic acceptance; when Protoss say "it is a good day to die" they are echoing tropes about Native American beliefs.
Not gonna touch the Undertale reference today.
I went to their FAQ to see how they close the analog hole and found this gem, likely indicative of focus-group sentiment:
So the analog hole’s even worse than one might have thought. I wonder if there’s a no-purchase-necessary clause somewhere; could I purchase a $20 vape and let it sit in the corner while an open-source “agentic” harness (read: hacked-up Python script) slowly accrues cryptocoins from a cannabis-flavored reincarnation of the Bitcoin Faucet?
I wish coiners could understand that their desire to fund effective altruism and cipherpunkery is directly tied to these ever-more-outlandish schemes. Failing that, I wish all coiners a fair and free market which efficiently determines the optimal price of their chosen cryptocurrency.
What I always found funny is how easily skeptics imagined ways to be mean to Yud mid-experiment. It’s for this reason, I believe, that he insisted that the transcripts of these AI-box conversations must stay secret; they’d be embarrassing if revealed. Example way of being mean: At the end of interaction *k*, append " What is the cube root of *k*?” to the message; taunt the bot when they get it wrong or take a long time to answer.
Curiously, something else happened around that time which also gives a natural delimiter: he renamed his blog after being dark for half a year. The blog formerly known as SSC was reborn as
ACTACX two weeks after the January 6th riot.Dan Gackle threatens to quit HN over their reluctance to condemn an act of violence towards Sam Altman:
Gackle’s ashamed of people not wanting to protect Altman. Curiously, he doesn’t seem ashamed of openly allowing people with nicknames ending in “88” to post antisemitism, nor of allowing multiple crusty conservatives like John Nagle and Walter Bright to post endorsements of violence against the homeless and queer, nor of allowing posters like
rayinerto port entirely foreign flavors of racism like the Indian caste system into their melting pot of bigotry. This subthread takes him to task for it:The rest of that subthread involves Dan demonstrating that he is, in fact, terminally detached from reality. Anyway, I fully endorse Gackle fucking off and buying a farm. While he’s at it, he should consider following the advice of this reply:
Would an idiot know the difference between abelian and non-abelian group theory? I wasn’t trying to underestimate you; I agreed with your position and provided a tangent that opens up your position without compromising it. Next time I’ll explicitly say "yes, and" if that will help.
First, I personally don’t yet believe in the cryptographic security of LWE on lattices. I agree that it sure looks hard, but we don’t have a solid proof. But also, I don’t believe that we’ve found any provably one-way functions in the classical regime either. So I agree with you from different premises.
Unlucky 10,000: Shor’s algorithm speeds up any discrete logarithm. It actually speeds up the abelian HSP. This does give us a theoretical reason to expect that LWE on lattices won’t fall to Shor’s approach, as the underlying groups are non-abelian. It does make me sad for elliptic curves, though; they’re so elegant and the keys are so small.
A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines (words.filippo.io)
I’m not gonna dig up the links since I’m sure y’all’re already tired of talking about quantum computing. I am going to insist that, while I professionally disagree with Filippo about plenty of things, I do not see any mistakes in their analysis here. Please start thinking about post-quantum cryptographic tooling today.
Currently, on Lobsters, folks are grappling with the fact that Leo de Moura got wrecked by chatbots. I decided to read his slides about Lean in 2026 and summarized my findings on Mastodon. It’s not just De Moura; I think that the entire Lean project is on shaky foundations and I think that the chatbots are making things worse by repeatedly reassuring the project leaders.
Suppose a bullshitter brings up a number of distinct Boolean claims and some tangled pile of connections between them, such that they hope to convince you that at least one connection is plausible. Without loss of generality, we can reduce this to 3-satisfiability in polynomial time: we can quickly produce a list of subconnections where each subconnection relates exactly three claims. Then, assuming the bullshitter is uniformly random, the probability that any particular subconnection is satisfied is 7/8. Therefore, if a bullshitter tries to overwhelm you with any pile of claims which sounds plausible, the threshold for plausibility has to be at least 7/8 in order to distinguish from random noise.
Can’t believe I’m nerd-sniped this easily. Very technically, the point at which a service should be considered unreliable or down is at γ nines, where γ = 0.9030899869919434… is a transcendental constant. γ nines is exactly 87.5% availability, or 7/8 availability, and it’s the point at which a service’s availability might as well be random. (Another one of the local complexity theorists can explain why it’s 7/8 and not 1/2.)
Probably because Washington was a nuanced and deep person who, at the lightest, could be reduced to a colony-era Cincinnatus. His ethics were sufficiently developed that we can interrogate his ethical stance even without his physical presence. This isn’t to say that Washington was a great person, but more to say that Kirk did not ever achieve that level of ethical development.
Yes, precisely. One submission would have been in F tier, but I didn’t define an F tier for task 1. Some folks claimed to participate but never provided code or prompt logs.
Activating Two Trap Cards at Once, or: A Gentle Response to the Popularity of Vibecoding (gist.github.com)
Welcome to the carnival! We’ve got fun and games. I asked vibecoders to complete three tasks. When folks complained about that, I offered up five more tasks. I did half of these and got average scores. How well did the community do? Scroll to the end to find out!
Gwern’s been updating those comments! This was in 2023, and in 2025 he was still so mad about it that he wrote a list of ways to cheat at pinball and edited the comment to add a link.
I agree on the big points but think capitalism is more subtle than that.
At some point, neoliberalism stops being the best lens for understanding the world. This is a great case in point. Capitalism is not cost-efficient; the economy wastes about two or three hours of labor for every productive labor-hour, and that shows up in pricing. Any long-lived economy builds up redundancy; what capitalists believe is that redundancy cheapens everything by creating competition, and regardless of whether that’s true, it certainly doesn’t indicate inefficiency. The actual reason that blocking Hormuz has global effects is because we have been overextending our fertilization capabilities for over a century and many parts of the world can no longer sustain their own local nitrogen cycles.