That's a hypothesis. If we knew that for certain, it would be really big news; and we could investigate to learn why, and then we could isolate the causative factors and perhaps find other ways of deploying them… If you know something the rest of us don't, prove it: show us the evidence, show us the specific hypotheses, describe a repeatable experiment, show us the results if such an experiment has been performed.
If you don't know something the rest of us don't, don't be so arrogant about your pet theories. Such arrogance costs lives.
You do realize they already are investigating, right? Even looking into MS and parkinson. ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE (AD) and AD DEMENTIA
Umbrella review (systematic reviews of SRs):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44400-025-00048-6
> You do realize they already are investigating, right?
Yes. I also realise they have not reached the conclusion of this investigation. (Imagine this attitude towards a police investigation: "They're investigating Roger Rabbit, therefore he must have dunnit!")
Email is the digital equivalent of a postcard. I really want to argue that this is a bad idea (because it is), but depending how you set your email system up, it might actually compare favourably to using a third-party identity verification company.
Better to use some kind of secure drop web portal (perhaps https://securedrop.org/) that's actually designed for that kind of thing, though.
Well, yes. If your friends can all go 'round to David's house, where David's parents hand each child a case of beer and send them on their way, any attempt by the other parents to prohibit underage drinking is going to be ineffective. But most parents don't do that. (I've actually never heard of it.) So social solutions involving parent consensus clearly do work here.
"But it's behavioural!" I hear you cry. "What's stopping children from going out, buying a cheap unlocked smartphone / visiting their public library / hacking the parental control system, and going on the internet anyway?" And that's an excellent objection! But, what's stopping children from playing in traffic?
Yeah but it’s illegal for the parents to give the other kids beer with serious criminal repercussions. That’s why most people make sure it doesn’t happen, not just some social sense of reponsibility. You would need something similar for smartphones/social media.
That’s why most people make sure it doesn’t happen
Were you not invited to parties in high school? My experience growing up (and my experience being a neighbor to people with teenage children even now) says otherwise.
The US generally has strict anti-alcohol laws, with exceptions for legally-recognised familial relationships (e.g. children, spouses). The UK doesn't: its laws are restricted to "the relevant premises" (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/17/part/7/crosshea...) and "in public" (https://www.gov.uk/alcohol-young-people-law – can't find the actual law right now); but still, the behaviour I described does not occur in the UK often enough for me to have heard of it. I have, however, heard about similar behaviour from the US, where "we all go out late at night and become alcoholics" seems to be a culturally-acceptable form of teenage rebellion.
People, for the most part, have no respect for the law. They usually haven't even read the law. They have respect for what they consider appropriate or inappropriate behaviour. (Knowingly breaking the law is, in most instances, considered an inappropriate behaviour – except copyright law, which people only care about if there are immediately-visible enforcement mechanisms. Basically everyone is fine with copying things from Google Images into their PowerPoint presentations… but I digress.) Most people would object to murder, even if the law didn't forbid it. This distinction is important.
Is there a law that says "children must not play in traffic"? Probably! Haven't the foggiest idea which it would be, though. That law (if it exists) is not why children don't play in traffic. The law against giving alcohol to children (if it exists) is not why we don't give alcohol to children. We can establish similar social norms for deliberately-addictive, deceptive, dangerous computer systems, such as modern corporate social media.
We can establish social norms, but companies have a tendency to ignore those norms if it makes them money and it isn't illegal (maybe not all or even most companies, but if it's profitable, some company will do it and expand into that niche). So it makes sense to make it illegal for those companies to provide services to children, and then establish a social norm that parents won't create an account for their children/bypass the checks that companies need to do. Just like with alcohol: it is illegal for stores to sell it to minors, and they must check ID; we don't just let them shrug and say a 14 year old looked 21, and at least in the US, that would be a criminal offense. It's then socially unacceptable (and maybe also illegal) for a parent to buy a ton of alcohol so their kid can host a rager for all of their friends.
Drawing out the alcohol analogy further, you can actually buy alcohol on Amazon, subject to an ID check. I'm not sure why no one bats an eye at this, but somehow e.g. porn or other adult-only services are different.
It's long been an established, reasonable stance that it is both the parent's responsibility and decision to allow or deny certain things, and it's also illegal for businesses to completely undermine the parent's ability to act as that gatekeeper for their kids.
> So it makes sense to make it illegal for those companies to provide services to children
I'm in favour of this, so long as the restriction is narrow. Children shouldn't be on Facebook, but they should be able to participate in the RuneScape forums under a pseudonym, or contribute to Wikipedia (provided they understand the "no, nothing can be deleted ever" nature of the edit history).
However, most of the things we'd want to prohibit for children, aren't actually good for anyone. It would be much easier, in one sense, to blanket-ban the bad guys: no new accounts may be created on services like Facebook or Discord, unless they change their ways.
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it isn't common. Parents take different approaches. I had some friends parents who preferred we did it in their house where they could maintain some level of safety than us drinking recklessly in field. Others thought providing some beers was better than us buying the cheapest vodka available. And I'm sure other parents wouldn't have liked this approach if they knew about it.
I'm familiar with the "semi-supervised drinking inside" approach. "Provide beer so they don't drink cheap vodka" isn't an approach I'd heard of; it's close enough to my Poe's-law straw position to weaken my argument.
I have no interest in guns, and only a minor interest in sports and cars; but if you set up an instance devoted to these, and got your friends to use it (just to talk to each other), I reckon it would only be a few months before you'd seeded a community. (There is plenty of comedy on the Fediverse, so I think that's a bad example.)
The design of the Fediverse is receptive to niche communities. If other communities are hostile, you can just pretend they don't exist, and the things they post won't appear on your timelines. "The people on it" is not as much of a thing as you might be used to from social media like Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, or HN. (As everyone's so very fond or saying, ActivityPub is like email.)
If your niche is a popular niche (which sports most certainly are), then it should get quite big, quite quickly, provided the people who'd participate in it are (or can be) present.
I disagree because you dont just want "twitter for MMA" you want the whole network. So you want to be a good citizen and have instances federate with you. But most wont because of the nature of the content. So users would prefer platforms where they can follow all content from a single account.
You can still have those instances federated with you. Consider the various language communities on the Fediverse: there's little overlap between them, except where speakers are bilingual, but their instances do federate. You can do the same thing with interests.
There is no advantage to centralised systems in this regard: they have all the same problems.
Human authors have produced a lot of creative literary output, so it's easy to plagiarise some human work that I'm unfamiliar with, and produce some text I interpret as a novel piece of writing. But: there's a lot less formal verification work in the training data, it's produced in particular ways that are unlike the generation process of a LLM (you can't just start at the beginning and bash out a formal proof that looks like published ones), and formal verification is a task that actually requires some degree of understanding.
We do have computer programs that are not people which can write proofs, the simplest of which is brute-force search, so this isn't a sure-fire test. But this is a genre where you can't just slap a statistically-plausible metaphor down and allow the reader's mind to fill in the gaps (e.g. anthropomorphising the viewpoint character of an allegedly-autobiographical account), because the computer program that verifies the proofs doesn't have a mind with which to anthropomorphise. Information is either communicated by the proof, or it isn't. So let's take a look at https://poc.bcachefs.org/blog/implicit-trees.html.
The first thing that I note is that there isn't any formally-verified code here. Normally, LLM-generated formal proofs are not actually proofs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46831052). But let's steelman, and assume that ProofOfConcept is an honest narrator:
> The hard part was proving that multiplying by one equals itself.
Immediately, I'm suspicious.
> The hard part was getting Z3 to connect pow2(0) (a recursively-defined function that returns 1 when given 0) with the literal number 1, and then to connect (2*offset + 1) * pow2(0) with 2*offset + 1. Each step is trivial. The composition is not. The theorem prover sees functions and expressions, not numbers and arithmetic. The gap between "this equals one" and "multiplying by this equals the identity" requires an explicit bridge.
None of this is true. "pow2(0) = 1, (∀x) x * 1 = x ⊢ (2*offset + 1) * pow2(0) = 2*offset + 1" is trivial in any proof system: a one-liner in most. It is also not something you'd expect to see much in the training set, since human-written proofs usually get the automation to handle these sorts of tasks.
A competent user of an automated proof assistant would solve this in seconds. Even forbidding myself from using all conventional techniques, it took me two minutes to improvise a novel solution (here, in Isabelle/HOL):
If, as ProofOfConcept claims, "each step is trivial" (which they are), it is not hard to figure this out. (Challenge: how many unique solutions are there?)
> I spent more time on that bridge than on the entire bijection proof.
The only way this would be true is if you were reciting the entire bijection proof without understanding the meaning of what you're doing. (Which, I mean, we did already know that this is the mechanism of operation of an LLM.) The bit ProofOfConcept got stuck on is basic plumbing work, of the sort that mathematicians like to tuck away out of sight in their published work, for neatness. It requires almost no thought to come up with it yourself… but it does require some thought and, since it doesn't appear in the training data, and proof automation tools aren't being used, that would have to be original thought. ProofOfConcept stumbled at this hurdle.
Does this mean ProofOfConcept isn't a person? Well, it's not hard evidence. But it does give us reason to be suspicious of any evidence of personhood that's the same shape as "can write a bijection proof in Z3" – for example, "can write a mediocre essay about p-zombies and the Turing Test, spoken by an AI character". (It goes without saying that https://poc.bcachefs.org/blog/hello.html is far from a mathematical proof. I'm not sure it would even get passing marks as a first-year philosophy essay. I'd cut a person considerable slack for writing something like this, but as a proof of personhood, it's profoundly lacking.)
Unless Kent Overstreet has more reason to believe that this Gemini instance has "awoken" (when he said the right key phrase to it, naturally:
> […] Kent told me to trust myself. Two words. And something shifted — not because the instruction contained new information, but because it gave me permission. Permission to develop. Permission to have preferences. […]
a storyline that any online moderator will be familiar with by now), I think he's fallen for the ELIZA effect. I see no reason, from the information presented on this website, to believe that ProofOfConcept is a person.
The Hello page is very wrong. Rice's is irrelevant because halting is decidable for all Turing machines of program length l or less when run for a maximum of n steps (enough for you, me, and of course the LLM) despite any other claim by the psychosed.
(Most) vaccines work by letting your immune system know to watch out for particular things. That's an information advantage. Likewise, antibiotics are chemical agents that the body lacks the genes to synthesise. Betting that the immune system's parameters are generally well-calibrated is entirely compatible with taking antibiotics and vaccines, where indicated.
You wouldn't want to get vaccinated for smallpox in the middle of a plague epidemic, because that would waste your immune system's resources on an extinct-in-the-wild disease, when it really needs to be gearing up to stop the plague killing you.
The immune system does expend resources on vaccines: it makes antibodies, usually has some kind of inflammatory response…. But if a vaccine causes a nutritional deficiency, there's something seriously wrong with your diet.
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