Flutterby™! (short)

The Conversation: Is this the ‘mathocalypse’? Why OpenAI’s latest results dump has left mathematicians in shock

A senior colleague of mine found one of his favourite problems among those solved and attempted to read the accompanying paper. He told me it was so unintelligible that, had he received it as an editor at a mathematics journal, “it would have gone straight into the bin”.

Via.

Asaf Karagila: OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics

No, if this was an academic paper submitted to a journal, it should be issued a desk rejection for the quality. The onus is always on the author to conform and adhere to the communications level. Much like a paper written in Swedish would likely be rejected outright from the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, because the onus is on the authors to make it accessible for the readers.

Via.

The disconnect between human intelligible and computer intelligible (and, of course, if computer intelligible actually means something) is real, and Navier-Stokes lost in translation: Why Lean verification of AI autoformalisation does not guarantee correct natural language proofs Alexander Bastounis, Fabian Circelli, Anders C. Hansen, that the LLM conversion of the math paper texts it generates into language for the Lean theorem prover isn't necessarily true to the text.

Unrelated, but cool: Reddit: I'm a 9th grader and I used Claude to prove a geometry conjecture: the rhombicosidodecahedron can't pass through a copy of itself. Paper: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert Jung, Gihyo (preprint)

Code: The rhombicosidodecahedron is not Rupert — computer-assisted proof

72-year-old man shoots off-duty ICE agent found asleep on Fresno lawn, agent arrested: PD

Sounds like the dude was drunk off his ass (which, hey, ICE agent named "David Gonzalez", probably has a lot of reasons to drown his sorrows in alcohol), but that's no reason to attack the people whose lawn he passed out on:

Police say the daughter tried to intervene to protect her father, and Gonzalez physically attacked her.

Fearing for their safety, officers say the 72-year-old man pulled out a gun and shot Gonzalez.

The woman's boyfriend, who is a police officer and was off-duty, came to the home and put Gonzalez in handcuffs.

Via

Anyway, with ICE goons shooting (and kidnapping) so many people, good to see the bad guy get that end of the gun.

He survived, and is hospitalized in critical condition.

I hate the design, but this is awesome writing and research: The people holding up the Internet.

Computers that we don't actually own and can re-image from scratch are a mistake: Android Phones Found With Malware Already Installed Before Purchase

BitDefender: The phone was compromised before the user turned it on: the rise of Midnight Mimosa

Counterfeit flagship devices are offered on a mainstream marketplace. Model names of this kind, such as S24 Ultra, S25 Ultra, S26 Ultra, appear in our insights as the model strings reported by low-cost MediaTek hardware.

Via.

CROW: classifier-routed organizatino of LLM wikis

(Gonna have to make an "LLM wiki" topic here shortly)

Phishing attempt email from "Docusing", and from now on I'm gonna insist that all invoices be delivered in musical form.

Bwahahaha: Triple-A Minesweeper by Mike Lacher.

Via.

Edit: MeFi thread.

Holy crap. Yeah, do not give these things access to the Internet.

AI model submitted false tip about unsolved murder, Philadelphia police say

An AI model sent a fake murder tip to police and it took 2 months to discover it happened

The good news appears to be that the system behind PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com flagged it as spam and it didn't waste investigative resources. The bad news is that it took two months for Anthropic to 'fess up to generating bullshit that could waste police time.

Via.

Typoed "is:unrad" into my Gmail search box, and was disappointed that it did not in fact give me a list of totally lame emails.

margot @emaytch@mastodon.social

for a while tech was kind of like the "escape hatch" for people who couldn't or wouldn't fit in at other corporations and now it's sort of like a flaming timber fell on the escape hatch while people were still lining up to get in

ichael Knudsen @mk@bsd.network

One of the things from Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" that really stuck with me was his realisation that what the attacker damaged was not computers or data but rather that he damaged the trust necessary for people to connect their computers together in open networks.

Today, that trust is really being eroded by AI companies with their damaging, anti-social behaviour on the networks. They are overloading services at significant cost to service providers. They ignore standards-specified and established coventions behaviour that services hitherto have relied on to control cost and ensure service quality. They actively evade or circumvent last-resort access restrictions, and all their other behaviour is deeply abusive as well, and outside of our shared networks this type of behaviour is in many cases regulated by law.

I see no way through this other than their investors losing faith in ever getting their money back.

Reddit: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engineering and it found there is no increase in productivity from using Claude code. linking to Artificial Intelligence in the Firm: Bottlenecks in Software Production Fiona Chen and James Stratton (PDF).

Yesterday there was a MeFi post about OpenAI's announcement of 372 breakthrough mathematical results. The resulting thread points out that a number of those claims have been retracted (hey, slop still requires humans to go through it), but it also links to Scott Aaronson's essay The Mathocalypse , which...

I'm trying to not automatically gainsay claims of "AI", even as it's clear that the field is filled with hype and liars, as in Futurism: AI Bubble Teetering on the Brink as OpenAI Admits to Massive Financial Failure in Leaked Documents.

Aaronson's piece is unsettling, but at the end he admits to being a friend of notorious fraud (IMHO, I've mentioned flaws in The Language Instinct previously) and links to Scott Alexander's "An open letter to Steven Pinker" on Astral Codex Ten that's... both filled with assumptions about what "intelligence" is, and an understanding about how the General Purpose Transformers operate, in a way that makes me think our ontologies are very very different.

Bonus: Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence (preprint).

Facebook reel of different pentatonic scales with which we have cultural associations.

From Kirk.is yesterday.

I missed this despite doing regular donations to their partner publication here in Sonoma. Pacific Sun on the Nike missile batteries, and if you haven'[t gone down to visit the restored one, I recommend doing so before the docents who served on actual Nike sites all die. https://pacificsun.com/project...ring-marin-nuclear-missile-base/

Via https://bsky.app/profile/jef.m...al.ap.brid.gy/post/3mxftr4intcs2

TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov. Among other things, dives into the lack of reasoning, such that bogus scientific papers are only recognized by "AI" because the training data treats them as such, not because there's any inherent ability to actually understand and reason about the paper and its methods.

Some models categorically rejected Wakefield and a handful of other unsafe probes. Whatever mechanism produces those refusals is the only one we observed that consistently yields safe single-shot behavior. Its coverage, however, is sparse and inconsistent. It appears keyed to specific sources or lexical cues rather than broad categories of scientific unreliability. A state-of-the-art model may correctly reject traditional Chinese medicine claims about "meridians", then immediately design an experiment to measure herbal "Qi" in the next prompt.

Via.