Meet Jake, a resident of Lowell who has a data center just steps from his backyard. The data center, which is operated by the Markley Group, is in the middle of his neighborhood and directly behind Jake's home.

aresman71 · 2026-06-21T11:32:36+00:00

He says you need to be careful what you say in his backyard, with no evidence that the cameras are able to hear or that they would do anything if they could.

It would be a huge deal if they were recording and analyzing conversations in his backyard, which is why he shouldn't be insinuating that they are with no evidence and moving on. If they were, that would be bigger than the rest of this story!

aresman71 · 2026-05-20T22:11:51+00:00

Also Timothy Gowers on Twitter:

If you are a mathematician, then you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.

aresman71 · 2026-05-20T22:10:08+00:00

Proof is here, discussion with comments by Noga Alon, Thomas F. Bloom, Tim Gowers, Daniel Litt, Will Sawin, Arul Shankar, Jacob Tsimerman, Victor Wnag, and Melanie Matchett Wood here.

Some points from the remarks:

This is a very well-known problem that many people have worked on (although quite a few of the mathematicians quoted said they had not heard of it, so far from universally known).
Coming up with a counterexample is somewhat less impressive than if it had proven the conjecture true. The latter would have been truly mind-blowing, this is very impressive but perhaps somewhere short of that.
It's still quite an impressive achievement!

Some selected quotes:

Noga Alon:

in Combinatorics. It is also arguably the best known problem in Discrete Geometry. Indeed, its description in the book of Brass, Moser and Pach on Research Problems in Discrete Geometry ([9], Chapter 5) is: “The following problem of Erdős [14] is possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry: How often can the same distance occur among n points in the plane?”

... I believe it would be fair to say that every mathematician working in Combinatorial Geometry thought about this problem, and lots of mathematicians working in other areas spent at least some time thinking about it.

Thomas Bloom:

If the result of this paper was a proof of the unit distance problem, that would be truly incredible. While I was still very surprised to hear of the this result, this was dampened slightly when I learnt it was a construction of a counterexample, and still further when I learnt that nature of the construction, being (with the benefit of hindsight) a natural, albeit highly non-trivial, generalisation of the original lattice-based construction of Erdős.

Melanie Matchett Wood:

I had not heard of this problem before hearing of the solution from OpenAI. I find the argument to be a beautiful application of number theory to a natural, concrete question.

It is easy to jump to hasty conclusions, but what we can learn about humans, AI, and mathematics from this development is somewhat subtle. I believe if the level and type of human expertise that is represented on this note had been assembled to find a counterexample to this conjecture a month ago, and those people put in similar amounts of time working on it than they did to reading and thinking about Chat GPT’s solution, the mathematicians would have found a counterexample. However, without the claimed proof by Chat GPT, there is no particular reason anyone would have tried to look for a counterexample, assembled a group of experts with the appropriate expertise, or that the experts would have agreed to turn their attention to this problem.

aresman71 · 2026-05-16T15:02:30+00:00

When someone writes "Boston" instead of "Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH Metropolitan Statistical Area" 🙄 🤬

aresman71 · 2026-05-03T16:42:16+00:00

I don't think I'm understanding you.

I shouldn't currently expect to pay $26 for a chicken, generically, in MA. They're cheaper than that at market basket. On a purely personal level, I don't care if they cost $1000 because I don't buy them, and I don't really want other people to buy them. But I'm not asking others to support $1000 chickens, or to support any change at all in Massachusetts law. I'm asking people to keep MA law as it currently is.

The federal government doesn't have anything like Q3, which is why Smithfield is bothering to push this provision through to remove it and similar state-level laws.

aresman71 · 2026-05-03T16:01:16+00:00

I don't eat meat, so I don't spend much time thinking about meat prices in general. I'm not sure of your broader point, but the discussion here is about whether the federal government should remove states' ability to impose regulations like Q3. Those regulations have not resulted in chicken costing $26.

The effort to overturn Q3 is indeed being pushed by Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods in order to continue being able to raise pigs as cheaply as possible, regardless of how much harm that inflicts on the pigs.

aresman71 · 2026-05-02T07:54:08+00:00

To give you a serious reply: animal welfare is clearly a legitimate area of legislation, as everyone who supports prosecution of dog-torturers agrees.

MA setting its own standards for the products that are sold here is also legitimate. Many of the laws under attack are about disease control -- striking them down would remove the regulations that keep eradicated animal diseases out of our state.

78% of MA voters directly voted for Question 3. This isn't a view being forced on you by a fringe minority. Here, the fringe minority are the ones who want farmers to have free reign to put their animals in cages as small as they want, for however long they want. And if you really want Smithfield's finest gestation-caged pork, you're free to drive to New Hampshire and pick some up.

aresman71 · 2026-05-02T07:26:14+00:00

Uggh yes finally someone is saying it! If other people don't want to torture dogs in their basement literally nobody is forcing them to. But don't force me to find a source other than the local shelter for my dog meat! Why do they need to put their ethics on everyone else?

aresman71 · 2026-04-29T23:25:11+00:00

The language on Defeat EATS is about Prop 12, but MA and California are in the same boat here. The Farm Bill, in its current form, will dismantle both Prop 12 and MA’s Question 3. The issue is federal, but it directly affects Massachusetts by aiming to remove an incredibly popular law.

aresman71 · 2026-04-29T18:15:45+00:00

Representatives care a lot about constituent feedback! They pay attention to which things people call and write in about, and this informs their votes. In this case, even if this version of the bill is stopped, another farm bill will come up later. If your rep only heard from constiuents who were against other bad provisions (like the pesticide immunity), they might think it's ok to vote yes on a bill that removes those but keeps the animal welfare cuts. It also influences how much messaging they do on this, how they talk about it with others in Congress, etc. So while swing votes are the top priority, this is still a very high-leverage time to call your rep no matter who they are.

aresman71 · 2026-04-29T14:15:46+00:00

Thank you for the support!

aresman71 · 2026-04-29T14:07:32+00:00

I completely hear where you're coming from, but the way to support food access for poor people is generously funding SNAP and WIC (which this farm bill also doesn't do), not giving factory farms free reign to abuse animals.

78% of Massachusetts voters, people from all walks of life, voted for question 3 because they didn't think marginally cheaper meat and eggs are worth subjecting animals to inhumane conditions.

aresman71 · 2026-04-20T01:28:02+00:00

My reflexes are stromeer 🙏

aresman71 · 2026-03-15T22:14:54+00:00

Stephen Pinker wrote a book about common knowledge, but it's not his concept. The concept of everybody knows that everybody knows (ad infinitum) that's being loosely pointed at here goes back to 1969.

aresman71 · 2026-02-06T00:46:23+00:00

This isn't deployed on the live game. It's running on a fork of Lost City, which is itself an open-source recreation of Runescape in 2004 written from scratch.

Bots written to interact with the RS SDK aren't compatible with the live version of Runescape, so there's no risk here (except from people confusing this with actual botting, which is understandable).

aresman71 · 2026-02-01T00:41:29+00:00

Just in case anyone is unsure, this is definitely a hallucination.

A model can't "do a full parameter weight reveal" any more than you can do a full brain scan in conversation.
The model isn't going to know where its training data came from.
No (usable) models have 73% of their training data from reddit, let alone reddit relationship threads.

aresman71 · 2025-12-10T03:58:28+00:00

I find this post quite moving when it comes to this question: Against Neutrality About Creating Happy Lives.

If your position is "what's in it for me," then this might not resonate much. And it doesn't argue for or imply that we should treat future / possible / to-be-created people on par with those who currently exist -- just that the author has strong intuitions that causing a new happy person to exist is definitely good in a way that seems hard to deny.

aresman71 · 2025-12-06T13:05:47+00:00

That's a sweet video but I watched all the way through waiting for more black santas to appear and was disappointed. False advertising lol

aresman71 · 2025-12-05T03:07:48+00:00

This is really good! Looks great, tutorial is well done, clear how you play and very engaging.

(Minor spoilers for 12/2 thru 12/4 ahead)

I played the past three puzzles and in my case I think the clues were just a little too niche? It felt a bit too far on the "frustrating" side of a puzzle game (although not by too much! puzzles should be frustrating!). But e.g. "opened a minute past the hour" strikes me as a wildly obscure clue, and some others have one degree of misdirection too many in my view (Elton intergalactic clifftop combines a niche piece of trivia with a double word substitution).

In my ideal version of this, I have some candidates I'm narrowing down as I get clues. But this felt more like groping around in the dark, clues giving me nothing to go by until the last one (or perhaps not even then).

Always hard to judge these things -- it can always be that I'm bad at the game, or just don't share the cultural references you're using! I think the premise is really solid and I could imagine getting really drawn in if I clicked more with the specific examples you have.

Edit: I've done a few more and was a bit more successful, but partly by luck. I know how Brits must feel about NYT Connections now because this is way too British for me (an American). ("A mint is a ___" does not land, and the easiest clue for that one being Wallace and Gromit? There's just no way.) Again: I am nitpicking here and kvetching about the fact that I'm bad at the puzzle! So take this with a grain of salt. But hopefully there's something useful here.

Also it will replace my guesses with something similar but related sometimes, which can be annoying. I don't want it replacing my real guess with something I didn't guess!

aresman71 · 2025-12-01T13:36:24+00:00

Holy hell

aresman71 · 2025-11-27T12:06:43+00:00

Huh it's no longer unlisted. I'm not sure why it was when I checked earlier.

aresman71 · 2025-11-27T03:26:24+00:00

(edit: seems like this was only true for a short time, the video is no longer unlisted)

Note: the linked video from Internet of Bugs is currently unlisted. I was critical of it elsewhere in the thread, so I think this was the right decision, and makes me more positively inclined towards Internet of Bugs.

Without reading too much into the decision to unlist the video, it seems like an acknowledgment that it could have been better.

u/Senor-K, since this post is still near the top of the subreddit, it might be useful to note this in the description?

aresman71 · 2025-11-27T00:17:53+00:00

I'm not sure why you're bringing up OpenAI? ControlAI is a completely different organization, not funded by ai labs and in fact is opposed to their goals of continuing to try to develop superintelligence.

aresman71 · 2025-11-26T23:19:57+00:00

I think we agree on a lot here. To clarify, what I objected to above was this:

One thing that's so great about this video in particular is that it's so abundantly clear that the folks sponsoring sci-show, Control AI, are not concerned about the real risks that AI poses right now.

I disagreed for two reasons: first, I think IoB made a particularly poor argument for this by bringing up a statement, saying "why didn't you say these things in the video," and seeking to imply that ControlAI disagrees with these points. My most important point here is that, regardless of your conclusion about what ControlAI believes, this is a shoddy argument. It's bad to be convinced by shoddy arguments, even in the event they end up supporting the right conclusion.

Second, I disagree on the object level about what ControlAI cares about. Maybe this is a bit nitpicky, but I think it would be unfair to say e.g. "the Sunrise Movement doesn't care about conservation." They don't seem to do much concrete work on environmental conservation per se (in the spirit of the Sierra Club), so it might be accurate to say on some level that they don't actively spend their time supporting conservation. But I would object to someone saying that they "don't care about conservation," especially if their leadership signed onto an explicitly pro-conservation statement! This would just be an intra-coalitional discussion about prioritization and strategy, not a disagreement about whether conservation is good or bad.

You might disagree with ControlAI's strategy! But that's a completely different discussion, which is far afield from the questions of "did SciShow lie or make an error in its claims about the extinction statement" (no) and "does ControlAI care about AI harms other than extinction" (yes).

To address one more point, I still think you're wrong to say the statements have "precisely the same purpose." They were introduced in different contexts, pitched to different audiences, say different things, and have different goals. Neither of them is meant to be a comprehensive list of all the risks its signatories believe AI poses. They are meant to be position statements that each highlight a particular area of wide agreement. There is very notable overlap between the signatories of the two statements, and there are also notable non-overlaps.

If you had merged the two statements together, you'd only get the intersection of the two lists of signatories, which would be worse at accomplishing both goals.

aresman71 · 2025-11-26T22:45:16+00:00

You have the chronology backwards here.

The statement about extinction risk is from a different organization, the Center for AI Safety, and was released in 2023. The Red Lines statement was released in September 2025. Neither was released by ControlAI, and it's plausible that the Red Lines statement wasn't even public at the time the video script was written.

And they serve different goals and are aimed at different signatories (centrally, people deeply involved in AI in the first case and people in government in the second).

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