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London
Joined March 2008
– at Burton upon Trent, England
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
The Doom of Mathematicians ...is not purely an AI doing in hours what a mathematician has spent his life trying to accomplish. That's a symptom. Even if AI disappeared tomorrow they now know that there is "something out there" that could make all their hard work look trivial. I wrote about something similar in an alien contact story: “First Contact 101 — Meetings between us and primitive peoples. If we fully show you who we are it almost always destroys the lesser party. You come to understand that everything you cherish is trivial, childish and frankly pathetic. That your sciences and technologies are infantile and the basics of your fledgling economies, like intellectual property, are worthless."
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Code reading should be used sparingly. We should understand systems primarily through contextual views instead.
OH: “i don’t want to look at code; i want to look at state machines and live documentation”
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Why are people so attracted to the idea of not having to think?
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
This succinctly points to the misinformed idea of software engineering: people assume that the only way to understand code is to look at it with naked eyes. Reading as a way to understand systems never really worked. But deterministic contextual tools did work.
It'll soon be seen as deeply irresponsible to have critical code reviewed by human eyes alone.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
In this entertaining talk, @dhh equates software engineering with writing code. He also assumes that understanding systems is hard. It's understandable that he makes that mistake. Most do it. The good news is that understanding systems is much more accessible than he believes.
My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Perspective
And y’all laughed when people pointed out that generative AI was NOT going to make Big Consulting go bankrupt, not because LLMs can’t produce very similar reports but because the key function of many such companies is providing legitimacy and a social stamp to existing choices.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
LLMs are useful mechanisms. They are also deceitful in that they look useful for what they are not: producing definite answers directly. Used like this then becomes harmful.
NEW: The US military was prepared to board a Chinese vessel in the Middle East earlier this spring -- during war with Iran -- after an intel report concluded it was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. But just before the planned operation, officials discovered the report had been generated w/ help of AI & chatbot used by the analyst inaccurately identified what the ship was carrying, sources tell @KatieBoLillis & me.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
These diagrams are so appealing. But they are opaque. If the question is about the existing system, ask the LLM to produce tools that produce the diagrams.
get yourself an agent harness that cares about diagrams. I'm sick of reading walls of text!
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
This. The underlying assumption behind the machine god is that we have already reached the peak of human ability and therefore we have to delegate more to AI. But when it comes to engineering software systems, that assumption is wrong.
The world will go into mass psychosis believing in a machine god instead of investing in cybersecurity.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Perspective
Au contraire, Huang is clearly describing the Hugging Face incident. I read this as “if you don’t build a proper sandbox and monitor activity —basic cybersecurity— don’t act shocked when software does what you set it out to do and don’t hide behind anthropomorphic woo language.”
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Policy can be an effective tool. Here is an idea.
If the labs had to publicly share full traces with CoT every time they cause a security incident the incidents would stop.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Funny
Sam Altman is warning the world about Sam Altman, and says we need to stop Sam Altman because Sam Altman can’t stop Sam Altman.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Perspective
Sounds like the big issue we should discuss with “AI” is “super intelligence” though am I right? Not little things like using error prone LLMs to start WWW 3?
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
It added a minor addendum: Screw you Turing!
Two days ago, GPT-6 Astra broke a yet unsolved German Army Enigma message from 1941. Amazingly Astra was able to autonomously: - Search historical archives - Compare uncertain letters - Find contextual clues - Build an Enigma simulator - Write cryptanalysis code - Run parallel experiments - Test competing keys - Recover the plaintext - Cross-check the results 1/n
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
"Software engineering has changed radically. It is now mainly about reading code. But reading code does not scale. We need to delegate to AI." I am glad you recognize code reading as a problem. But, the broader problem statement is not correct and neither is the conclusion. 1/
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Perspective
Folks, remember when Geoff Hinton called gpt-2 humanity's caterpillar and gpt-3 humanity's butterfly or something like that? Also remember how he said radiologists were gonna be obsolete in 5 years (but he said that ~10 years ago)? Ok now, he says ChatGPT is an alien being.
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
Excellent!
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Peter H. Meadows retweeted
If what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument is sound, then the Hard Problem of consciousness is an artefact of bad metaphysics. youtube.com/watch?v=sRUUIT1V… Naively, consciousness fundamentalism is the recipe for digital minds. But our (super)intelligent AIs are no more conscious than a rock. Humans are creating alien (super)intelligence, not alien sentience.
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