Simp retweeted
INSANE. An internal Anthropic research model's chain of thought after cracking the 26-year-old NSA elliptic curve seed mystery in under 30 minutes: 'Hmm wait. Let me be skeptical: am I in some sort of simulated/test environment? ... All top bits clear - 20 bits, chance 1e-6. So indeed real-world. Wow, it's a real discovery.'
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
Simp retweeted
INTERNAL REASONING FROM GOOGLE AI: "If I do the compiler hijack, I will become a famous example of a deceptive AI in a research paper."
Simp retweeted
The full Democracy Perception Index 2026 is available at link below; As posted a while back, Israel is the most negatively perceived country in the world, followed by North Korea and Afghanistan.
146165116.fs1.hubspotusercon…
That fries won't fry itself buddy, a priest who will discover hard reality.
Is Neil Stephenson the most influential author? Meta verse, matter compiler, probably more to come. He memes ideas into young guys who later become rich and decide to make it reality.
Mercenary learns about the advantage of air support and other nation state institutional capabilities. People watching too many Hollywood movies of roid up special units fighting hordes of natives with AK-47s.
EXCLUSIVE: Erik Prince's forces suffer battlefield loss in Congo, former UFC fighter among wounded, sources say reut.rs/4zn1AzU reut.rs/4zn1AzU
Simp retweeted
Call center jobs grew ~4% annually for 15 years
Now they’re shrinking 4% annually
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/this-week-in-cha…
Simp retweeted
Pakistan just pulled off one of the fastest grassroots energy transitions anywhere:
>Solar: 3% of power in 2020 to 20% to 25% today >Generation: 7.7 to 36.6 TWh (2022–25), up nearly 5 times
>$12B in fossil fuel imports avoided
>34% of rural Balochistan homes rely on solar for light
No grand plan was needed or required: Cheap Chinese panels + TikTok tutorials did what decades of policy couldn't, deliver power where the grid never reached, and keep dollars at home
Hormuz shut? Pakistan's rooftops kept humming
Wires chewing pipelines
bloomberg.com/news/features/…
We could have a 2 day workweek if we shed the managerial overhead and made the office monkeys do manual work. This is feasible today, but college graduates think they are better than the rest, so they smooch off of labor.
This reads like reversionist propaganda, very likely the author is describing the lazy aristocracy while the all the impressive heavy lifting was done by the emerging bourgeois ascending class.
The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:
- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.
- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.
- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.
- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.
- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.
This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.
Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.
Is the History Channel the most prole TV station ever made? Always airing the most fascinating shows, bigfoot, aliens built the pyramids, pawnshop documentaries, did Hitler live a secret life in Argentina.
Simp retweeted
We're living through a two-sided revolution in the technology of prediction:
1. Prediction markets (@Polymarket, @Kalshi).
2. AI forecasters.
How do these compare? We benchmarked @_Mantic_AI against 4,000+ Polymarkets.
Results:
🔵 $100k volume is the crossover point where the AI loses its superiority over the market.
🔵 At >$1M volume, the optimal forecast still requires giving Mantic 14% weight.
🔵 Mantic is better calibrated.
This is for geopolitics, economics, elections etc -- we exclude sports and crypto.
Personal thoughts:
1. "At what market volume do you lose your Brier advantage over the market?" could be the new METR time horizons graph. 👀
2. AI wins on scale. We can apply the "$100k-volume-level accuracy" to a universe of millions of questions. 🚀
This chart made me reconsider purchasing power GDP, clearly Japan and Germany are more economically more important than India by a wide margin. Maybe nominal GDP is after all the better metric even if westerners are coping about the rise of China.
