7 ms·
A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Clau
by redfloatplane 21d ago
A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy.
> Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]
I had a visceral reaction to these three words.
- lowbloodsugar 21d agoI have a very high p(doom \/ utopia) so pretty much feeling like I won’t have to worry about the future.
- SwellJoe 21d agoGiven how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me, but I doubt it'll be the autocomplete machines that do us in.
- ben_w 21d agoRenewables growth is so fast that it will exceed 100% of electricity in the early, and 100% of all form power in the late, 2030s. It's the meat methane and cement CO2 that's now a big question.
- MichaelNolan 21d agoI think your prediction is a bit early. Maybe a decade early. 2033 is 7 years away. The transition is happening really fast, faster than most people (or political leaders) know, but not that fast. We will hit 1TW per year of new solar soon, but to get to 100% electricity by the end of 2033 I think we would need closer to 3TW per year.
- ben_w 21d agoExponential growth curve(s) has yet to flatten; but you do also need to account for capacity factor, which is different between wind and PV.
- MentalM 21d ago> Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me Or it is simply implies that most of decision‑making agents has formed a consensus that climate change isn't that big of a problem.
- SwellJoe 21d agoSure, but that doesn't make it true.
- dalyons 21d agoFor them maybe - rich enough and or old enough to avoid the problem. Big problem for the rest of us
- fragmede 20d agoThe irony is not lost on me, when I go down a ChatGPT rabbit hole, on how humanity could reverse the effects of burning all those fossil fuels, that I'm using more fossil fuels in order to research solutions to the problem.
- aforwardslash 21d agoYou can run doom on anything these days; running it on humanity's eulogy is no surprise :)
- flyinglizard 21d ago[flagged]
- ReflectedImage 21d agoThat's an artifact of it not using A-Z as it's alphabet. What you type gets translated before the AI sees it. The seventeen word the AI sees does only contain three 'e' s.
- Thrymr 21d agoIs this true? If so, does it mean anything? Sure, it is tokenized in processing (tokens don't really have an alphabet either), but this means it did not correctly parse the problem at all if this is the case.
- flyinglizard 21d agoReading your comment, I asked it to count how many characters are in the word. It answered correctly: 9. It then also said it skipped an E in the prior chat and corrected it count to 4. It spun for 52 seconds so maybe some Python was involved.
- notpachet 21d ago> It spun for 52 seconds so maybe some Python was involved. Come for the AI doom, stay for the programming languages (remember those?) catching strays
- GaggiX 21d agoJust tried on Astra low and it gave 4.
- flyinglizard 21d agoI used the 6 Pro setting in the chat. Too smart for its own good, I guess.
- mapontosevenths 21d ago
- flir 21d agoI've done something similar to your formal garden map. It's work that no professional historian would ever do because the data entry would be such a slog for a relatively small reward. GPT reduced the task from "infeasible" to "annoying", and once I had the data transcribed I learned a few things, so I walked away happy. Whatever happens commercially, these models have been a real boon to hobby projects. > I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison. Wait. Wait wait wait. Are we supposed to be giving them pep talks?
- kay_o 21d agoon older gemini models ide have to actively give them encouragement and/or easy bait problems that they can correctively solve without issue to avoid runaway spiraling into "i'm useless and i want to kms" behaviour with complex use case. I have not seen this in other models.
- Sophira 21d agoI assumed it was more because the LLM might echo an understandable human claim of "if it's been unsolved for 370 years, it's unlikely to be solved now/likely to need expert knowledge", which is probably a mindset that appears in its training data. The LLM likely needs to be reminded of its abilities.
- steve_adams_86 21d ago> The LLM likely needs to be reminded of its abilities Like when it tells you something is 3 days of work but it can do it with some degree of guidance in a couple hours
- jgilias 21d agoIf it’s 3 days it’s something like 15 minutes, if it’s 3 weeks, that takes a couple hours lol. Seems like there’s some sanity to the estimates after all when you think about it, it’s just the scale it gets wrong due to estimating human time.
- trallnag 21d agoWe have always been back
- elahieh 21d ago"Caveats, stated plainly" You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago. Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication is still pending." arghhhhh https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-solves-a-historical-cipher.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-...
- huflungdung 21d ago[dead]
- stavros 21d agoAstra told me yesterday: > The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it. > Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change. No clue what the fuck any of it means.
- mikestaas 21d agoReminds me a bit of VXJunkies
- zenoprax 21d agoHave you tuned your Retro Encabulator recently?
- ramigb 21d agoIt was only when native English speakers—or those I presumed were—started calling out how bad "GPT/Claude speak" has become that I realized I wasn't actually losing my grip on English as a second language. For a second, I thought, Oh, I learned this language on my own, but it seems I've hit a wall and need to study further. It didn't help that I've also been trying to acquire Swedish as a third language for a while now.
- genxy 21d agoBaby shoes, never warn. It is a threat. We need to run.
- rzzzt 21d agoFour sail: the story is clearly about the Olivebank (née Caledonia), a four-masted barque that hit a mine and sunk in the North Sea in 1939.
- avazhi 21d agoI don’t worry so much about AI wiping us out as much as I worry about whether I’m being gaslit into thinking these glorified autocorrect bots are more clever than they are. I still don’t know the answer.
- talon8635 21d agoI too vacillate daily, sometimes even multiple times in a single day. It’s kind of nauseating and (for my brain type) crazy making
- nullbio 21d agoThe model you use is not the model they use.
- Waterluvian 21d ago> thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast I've been wondering what exactly the point is for being the meat proxy who pays for these things. I mean, obviously there's personal satisfaction and maybe some glory. And there's the fact that someone has to be the first to do a thing. But I've been thinking about it like a sort of lazy loading of knowledge. AI has brought us to a new frontier for some amount of undiscovered knowledge. Do we discover it for the sake of discovering it? I think for the most part we've been lazy loaders: we discover all kinds of stuff when we need to. Whether it's a war or a space race or chasing wealth. Then again, there's all kinds of academics who do it for the sake of doing it.
- scotty79 21d ago> I've been wondering what exactly the point is for being the meat proxy who pays for these things. Are people only now discovering that the absurdism is the correct philosophy of life, thanks to AI? On your other point... Aren't the point of machines, at least inital one, to do the work we were too lazy to do by hand?
- josh2600 21d agoFor what it's worth, people also felt this way about the printing press and the Internet (also books). Information propagation mechanisms are often seen as malicious before they're commonplace. To be fair sometimes they are, but by and large humanity has benefitted from increasing the number of bits of information we can consume on a per second basis.
- za_creature 21d ago[citation needed]
- razodactyl 21d ago[flagged]
- noduerme 21d agoNot to be too negative, but as for p(utopia) you might need to weight in the mass murder records set by every other utopian movement in the past 200 years. p(actual_utopia) is like zero and p(utopia_becomes_doom) is at about 1.
- nfujd7 21d agoConfusion is because people are using the tool to get answers. Its how the edu systems trains most people in tool use. Heres a saw and here is a block of wood. Do x y z and you get a table. But if you are interested in why the saw looks like it does or the entire process behind generating that block of wood, or why x y z instead if a b c good luck to you using the current edu system. You have to live in an extremely rich country, with surplus resource to entertain those exploration. This has now changed. The answer the tool gives has never been the real reward. The real reward is the path taken through a complex landscape to get to Maxwells Equations for example. At the end of that story what we get is not just the equation but a map of the landscape explored. That map has larger influence and value than the equations or answers themselves. Because all future exploration find it super useful. People are just learning they can start asking for maps rather than answers.
- ta20240528 21d agoYes, asking a first-year physics student why they are studying a spring, and why its called Hooke's Law leads down a rabbit hole that ends with the entire British Empire.
- dingdongditchme 21d agoCongrats on your map! I am leaning more towards the optimism side. Like you I've had some real breakthroughs myself. Personal akin your garden map, no where near solving millennium problems. My take is that all these (Fable solves this, OpenAI does that, AI will take over the world) Marketing Stunts will fade some day when the true cost of tokens hits the market. You and I may have to contend with lesser models, but will probably get work done just fine.
- weinzierl 21d agoFor me it's more that I roll out of bed thinking how glad I am that I have Claude solve my problems and do my work, only to be pushed back into harsh reality when I sit down and try to do actual work. I'm glad to have AI, but it is by no means a panacea, and correspondingly my p(doom) = ε.
- latentsea 21d ago> I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade I find myself increasingly feeling like the burden of the lows doesn't justify the presence of the those highs. Like even if does cure all forms of cancer, but everyone feels like their life/existence lost meaning, then... I'd rather just have cancer be a thing.
- scotty79 21d agoWow. That's bleak. For me the the initial joy of building software with AI caused possibly two happiest months of my life. And cancer caused many darkest ones. Snap out of it.
- latentsea 21d ago> , but everyone feels like their life/existence lost meaning Did you miss this part? Because to me... that's fucking bleak. You snap out of it.
- neom 21d agoI appreciate reading this, for the past year or so as it pertains to AI, I've just not been able to settle my mind, and it's become a bit exhusting. I presumed I wasn't the only one who swings back and forth and it's comforting to read someone else post the same thing, makes me feel a less nutso. :)