corbin

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 6 days ago

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!

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

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?

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 14 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

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."

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago

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.)

11
Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise (www.youtube.com)
 

Kevin Perjurer (not their real name) recounts the history of Disney's "Living Characters Initiative", a multi-decade attempt to create a more immersive character-driven experience.

spoilers

This is basically an introductory course on AI as told through the history of Disney's animatronics. There is a companion video which covers the early decades of robotics and focuses on Walt's futurism; this longer video focuses on how AI has attempted to ~~pull money out of customer wallets~~ delight park visitors by putting smiles onto faces. Perjurer focuses on concrete examples; there's no talk of hyperreality here, although there is a bit of theory-building which fits each example into a generic framework for understanding conversations.

The video has too many good sneers for me to choose. A common theme is guests tricking AI hosts into behaving inappropriately. There's this theme of the robots only functioning properly within controlled conditions, as if every robot were its own science experiment. This lines up with what I've seen in manufacturing and logistics; robots sure can work fast but they are inflexible, pre-programmed, and highly sensitive to unexpected variance in their environment.

No, I take it back. Listening to E.T. say "D-D-D-D-D-D-" or "lasagna, lasagna" is very funny. Skip to the interlude about Universal Studios for that.

Of course, little of this is truly new, but it's nice to see a version of this history which puts everything together to point out that Disney's goal of creating robots which imitate inhuman characters is fucked-up horror but which isn't a fucked-up horror story. Going in the other direction, an AI-skeptical viewpoint could maybe make those stories more interesting.

1
GitHub Platform availability dips to 87.25%, averages 1.04 incidents/day (mrshu.github.io)
 

Hi folks, I'm making another tech-stack recommendation. Previously, on Awful, I noted that below 87.5% availability, whether a service is up is effectively random chance. We've reached that point for GitHub's Platform, which includes components like Actions, Copilot, Pages, and the core API of issues and PRs. I do not have confidence in GitHub's owners or operators to remedy this situation, so I cannot recommend it professionally nor to neighbors. As a bit of nuance, note that Pages seems to have relatively decent availability and is often up even when the rest of GitHub is down, so static content hosted on Pages can be deprioritized for migration.

The thread is open on Lemmy. I'm interested in your thoughts, particularly around alternative forges, alternative paradigms for forges, community-driven plans for migration, strategies for migrating, and tools that ease the burden of maintaining many git repositories.

1
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.

1
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!

1
Vibecoding Challenge 2: The Five Feathers (Spring 2026) (gist.github.com)
 

Okay, previously, on Awful, we established that vibecoding can't produce working compilers. Let's try some other side projects of mine. I have important stuff to work on and a deadline, so I'm not matching these projects with my own submissions. Instead, I've laid out a psuedo-objective rubric and I'm going to say that par is 10/10 points.

74
Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir (www.techdirt.com)
1
Lobsters Vibecoding Challenge (Winter 2025-2026) (gist.github.com)
 

I’m tired of hearing about vibecoding on Lobsters, so I’ve written up three of my side tasks for coding agents. Talk is cheap; show us the code.

1
A Nix flake for detecting and removing fascist software (gist.github.com)
 

Happy Holiday and merry winter solstice! I'm sharing a Nix flake that I've been slowly growing in my homelab for the past few months. It incorporates this systemd feature, switches from CppNix to Lix, and disables a handful of packages. That PR inspired me, and I'm releasing this in turn to inspire you. Paying it forward and all that.

Should you use this? As-is, probably not. It will rebuild systemd at a minimum and you probably don't have enough RAM for that; building from this flake crashed my development laptop and I had to build it on a workstation instead. Also, if you have good taste in packages then this will be a no-op aside from systemd and Lix, and you can do both of those on your own.

Isn't this merely virtue-signalling? I think that the original systemd PR was definitely signalling, since it's unlikely to ever get deployed on the systems of our friends. However, I really do sleep better at night knowing that it's unlikely that jart or suckless have any code running on my machines.

Why not make a proper repository and organization? Mostly the possibility that GitHub might actually take down a repository named nixpkgs-antifa. If there's any interest then I could set up a Codeberg repo. However, up to this point, I've only used it internally and my homelab has its own internal git service.

Mods: You've indicated that you don't like it when people write code to approach our social problems. That's fine; I'm not publishing an application or service and certainly not starting a social movement, just sharing some of my internal code.

8
CATGIRL Officially Banned For Cheating!!! (www.youtube.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by corbin@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
2 comments fedilink
 

Did catgirl Riley cheat at a videogame, or is she just that good? Detective Karl Jobst is on the case. Are the critics from platform One True King (OTK), like Asmongold and Tectone, correct in their analysis of Riley's gameplay? Or are they just haters who can't stand how good she is? Bonus appearance from Tommy Tallarico.

Content warning: Quite a bit of transmisogyny. Asmongold and Tectone are both transphobes who say multiple slurs and constantly misgender Riley, and their Twitch chats also are filled with slurs. Jobst does not endorse anything that they say, but he also quotes their videos and screenshots directly.

too long, didn't watch

This video is a takedown of an AI slop channel, "Call of Shame". As hinted, this is something of a ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 essay, where it's not just about the cryptofascists pushing the culture war by attacking a trans person, but about one specific rabbit hole surrounding one person who has made many misleading claims. Just like how ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 permanently hobbled Tallarico's career, it seems that Call of Shame has pivoted twice and turned to evangelizing Christianity instead as a result of this video's release.

21
Ai told me to kіӏӏ 17 people (and myself)! (www.youtube.com)
 

A straightforward product review of two AI therapists. Things start bad and quickly get worse. Choice quip:

Oh, so now I'm being gaslit by a frakking Tamagotchi.

1
Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog - Dhole Moments (soatok.blog)
 

Cross-posting a good overview of how propaganda and public relations intersect with social media. Thanks @Soatok@pawb.social for writing this up!

1
Busy Beaver Gauge (bbgauge.info)
 

Tired of going to Scott "Other" Aaronson's blog to find out what's currently known about the busy beaver game? I maintain a community website that has summaries for the known numbers in Busy Beaver research, the Busy Beaver Gauge.

I started this site last year because I was worried that Other Scott was excluding some research and not doing a great job of sharing links and history. For example, when it comes to Turing machines implementing the Goldbach conjecture, Other Scott gives O'Rear's 2016 result but not the other two confirmed improvements in the same year, nor the recent 2024 work by Leng.

Concretely, here's what I offer that Other Scott doesn't:

  • A clear definition of which problems are useful to study
  • Other languages besides Turing machines: binary lambda calculus and brainfuck
  • A plan for how to expand the Gauge as a living book: more problems, more languages and machines
  • The content itself is available on GitHub for contributions and reuse under CC-BY-NC-SA
  • All tables are machine-computed when possible to reduce the risk of handwritten typos in (large) numbers
  • Fearless interlinking with community wikis and exporting of knowledge rather than a complexity-zoo-style silo
  • Acknowledgement that e.g. Firoozbakht is part of the mathematical community

I accept PRs, although most folks ping me on IRC (korvo on Libera Chat, try #esolangs) and I'm fairly decent at keeping up on the news once it escapes Discord. Also, you (yes, you!) can probably learn how to write programs that attempt to solve these problems, and I'll credit you if your attempt is short or novel.

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