Emacs and GNU can’t stop failing to uphold the mission of Free Software. This mailing-list post has been going around and I think that it is a very good indicator of how head-up-ass the GNU project has become. Note that this email is not from RMS; the problem can’t be blamed on a particular BDFL. The following quote from the email is sufficient to completely end my interest in contributing to GNU ever again:

The Free Software movement doesn’t pursue the goal of “liberty for all humanity”. If you think it does, you are gravely mistaken. Our goals are different, and are well described elsewhere.

While the topic is about accepting chatbot contributions, it could also e.g. be about accepting contributions from members of Suckless or other fascist organizations; in the email, our brave GNU hero says that they’d accept contributions made with slave labor, too.

To complexity theorists, this is an extremely funny situation; I bet OpenAI started by asking the bot about P vs NP and they got the worst-possible result, a useless and unexpected refutation of a conjecture. To be clear, I don’t trust Lean or OpenAI, so I don’t yet accept this result, but I hear Ryan Williams and Russell Impagliazzo are hand-checking the proof and I do trust them.

It’s too bad that Janus got cooked. They didn’t set up sufficient defenses, but also they drank too deeply. I still think that their framing, that the chatbots are simulators of conversations, is the best one; it’s honestly kind of pathetic how they then claim that the simulations are alive, intelligent, sapient, etc.

Of the numbers that are present in the document, a lot are unaudited and were not worked out according to GAAP — which S-1 numbers are supposed to conform to. There’s whole multi-page subsections of these BS numbers that you should not see in a credible S-1.

In the USA, GAAP is not optional for large businesses. GAAP is expected for businesses with thousands of customers at a minimum; Anthropic wants to scale up to millions of customers and therefore has zero excuses for non-GAAP numbers. Please be less UK-brained in the future, thanks.

LW’s contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn’t spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not “the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power”, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.

If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW’ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author’s not really joking much.

What assets? Like, yes they could acquire the database of user prompts and chats, but this is like saying that I could acquire a gently-used Playboy from the woods. And I presume that, just like with ABC and ESPN, Disney will start looking for synergy, but Character doesn’t have any character copyrights which can be extracted into theme-park attractions, nor would Character’s users appreciate a Disney-fication of their UX, nor is Character’s core service profitable on its own with no changes.

Ever wondered what kind of workplace environment Elon cultivates? Reading coverage of Tesla’s trial, where complaints were brought by Black folks who felt harassed and discriminated against, gives us an inkling.

CRD attorney Juan Gamboa asked [Judge] Borkon to bar Tesla’s counsel from contacting anyone on the agency’s witness list. He told the court the CRD had tried to reach at least four other listed witnesses over the past several days without getting a response, and that they’ve fallen “off our radar.” The agency believes Tesla’s lawyers got to them too, either with payments not to testify or by talking them out of it. Gamboa wants to stop Tesla from offering to represent witnesses “through persuasion and payment.”

You’re going to hear a lot of coverage of this trial, I expect, due to the following antics from Elon’s “hardcore” attorneys. For context, the N-word is an anti-Black slur which is, in the USA, completely unacceptable to use in court or the workplace.

Tesla’s outside counsel told the judge the N-word is a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community. … “This trial is not about the N-word — the N-word is not on trial here,” Jones said.

Huh, so what’s actually on trial?

Edwards said a non-Black coworker called him the N-word, cursed at him, and threatened to beat him up. He reported it right away. A month later, he found out his managers had written him up over the incident, and he was later passed over for promotions after applying to more than 100 jobs.

Oh, that’s pretty awful. That’s depressingly common in blue-collar factory employment, though. I wonder if there’s anything unusual about Tesla’s internal culture when it comes to race relations?

The CRD’s Brett Watson told the court the evidence will show managers calling Tesla “the plantation,” with some referring to themselves and Elon Musk as “slave masters,” and graffiti including swastikas, “KKK,” and nooses left on factory walls for days. The second witness, former regional security manager Ozell Murray, testified that his supervisor, Ray Sethna, now Tesla’s senior director of global security, told him to warn a Black Marine veteran he was hiring: “just be sure [the veteran] knows he’ll be called those words.”

I was at a loss for words for a few minutes after this. Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson together could not create such a caricature of a goose-stepping bigoted incompetent business-muppet as Elon.

I’m probably going to increase my presence on DreamHost in California, who I’ve hosted with for over a decade. They historically are First Amendment proponents known for being quietly friendly towards adult content; also, in 2017 DH pushed back on the Department of Justice’s subpoena for 1.3 million IP addresses visiting an anti-Trump protest-organizing website. That said, I’m 100% prepared for yet another Milkshake Duck Moment.

Looking forward to being able to send email, which DigitalOcean still blocks in order to funnel customers towards hosted email-delivery services.

Crosspost, hat-tip to @pnwpixel@programming.dev for finding this. Omarchy announces another patron: DigitalOcean. I will wait for DO to explicitly confirm/deny this, but if this is true then I’m going to be moving my entire small-business footprint.

Yeah, Ken’s lost it. It’s too bad, too; he used to go around saying “Hi, my name’s Ken, and my job … is just Requests.” However, Ken is actually a medium-talent hack who isn’t interested in putting the work, but in appropriating the work of others and passing it off as his own.

Ken’s goal with all of the snowy blog posts is to obscure and rewrite history. See, previously, on Lobsters, we learned from another Python community member that Ken converted some $30k USD of donations from 2018-2019. He said so himself:

Because [reasons], the fundraising funds were allocated to myself, to reimburse myself for all the time and energy I’m putting into Requests III, which I want to make a really great product.

Ken also tried to take over multiple community projects, including by vendoring their code and insisting that he was licensed to do it, putting his name on forks of Somebody Else’s Repo, and falsely positioning himself as endorsed by Python Software Foundation.

So, now a half-decade later, it’s time to try to change history for Ken. Previously, on Lobsters, we analyzed his attempt to reframe the whole incident in terms of burnout provoking a bipolar psychosis. I think that the most revealing part of this, assuming that his candor survived Claude’s extrusion process, is that he doesn’t actually deny his psychotic delusions; he merely implies that they no longer hold today. This doesn’t really accord with how psychoses are treated; it doesn’t sound like he’s built up a library of tells and hints which he can use to steer his thinking. (As the reader surely knows, Claude isn’t gonna help with this.) I think that he was much more revealing a decade ago with his retrospective on his first stay in a psychiatric ward:

I went through many stages of identity conflict at this stage as well — I realized that I wanted to leave the hospital, and not stay there forever (as I originally wanted). I felt like I was in a puzzle, and one way of getting out was to become a doctor! So, I started walking up to the doctor (and all other levels of staff) and acted like a coworker, helping them do their job. At one point, I asked one of the nurses for a Direct Deposit Form (after seeing another patient with one), believing that was the key to establishing my employment. I was keen to inform them about my understanding of HIPPA compliance and the hospital’s migration from an AS400 to a newer technology stack (EPIC).

Is this why he joined the Python community and tried to work on upstream and core stuff? A sort of Frank Abagnale adventure where he’s treated like a genuine authority with skills and knowledge? Note that this was two years before the aforementioned conversion of funds. It’s okay, though, because Ken blamed this all on mental illness. Specifically, he blamed the woman he was dating for provoking his previously-undiagnosed mental illness and starting a yearlong (!!‽) manic episode:

Around the same time, right after having gone to my first Kundalini Yoga class, I ended up meeting (and, falling in love with) a mesmerizing woman of mysticism that tenderly guided me off-the-deep-end with this style of thinking: numerology, synchronicity, Reiki, manifestation, the Mayan calendar, tarot, crystals, &c. My symptoms slowly got much worse. We shared a very deep and special bond. I heavily admired her, and felt I had much to learn from my newfound companion. We ended up spending nearly every day together, going on dates, making love, taking trips all over the world, getting matching tattoos, performing thrill-seeking stunts, and attending shamanistic ceremonies together. We had an incredible time (the best year of my life), but there was a lot of unhealthy and certainly uncharacteristic behavior for me. Over the course of the manic year I spent with her, my delusional worldview (and hallucinations) had grown significantly worse, which lead to the absurd themes of thinking featured in the above event.

At least he’s not a fascist.

On a personal note, in Numpy as Synth Engine, Ken released some slow inaccurate code for audio synthesis, generated for him by Claude. As a musician, I know that we can do better, so previously, on Lobsters, I explained how to actually make nice-sounding sawtooths and Hammond-style organs, including links to working Python code. Again, I could just call Ken a hack, but I think it’s interesting how he doesn’t aurally perceive the clear issues in the audio output; in a certain sense, he’s a producer of music but not a consumer of music. (Readers who are musicians will confirm that the typical working musician listens to more music than they produce!)

He just started deleting playlists. I feel partially responsible, so I’m dumping the part of my notes that has all of the links to the videos that he favorited over the years. Sorry Justin, cowardice won’t work.

• Justin M. Keyes
  • GH
    • Berlin!?
  • neovim maintainer
    • original forker? has access to GH neovim org, at least
  • Coward: deletes evidence, refuses to talk, avoids confrontation
  • DHH fan; had to be pilloried in two GH issues ([deleted], 2) before removing a DHH endorsement from neovim
  • Youtube favorites from playlists include some bastards:
    • Scott Adams 1
    • Mel Gibson 1 (with Joe Rogan)
    • Sabine Hossenfelder 1 2
    • Balaji Srinivasan 1
    • Peter Thiel 1 2 (with Eric Weinstein) 3 4
    • Bret Weinstein 1
    • Eric Weinstein 1 (in a playlist called “history”!) 2
    • Curtis Yarvin 1 2 3 4 5 6

I called him out and he deleted it. Confirmed as a fascist brat.

I found a reply from a Red Hat QEMU hacker who fixed the bugs:

So the real issue here was not QEMU but libslirp. And in this case it was KVM that turned out to have the worst bugs, not QEMU. Crossing fingers, the initial wave of AI-assisted security reports seems to have slowed down for KVM on x86.

Yeah, networking is such a hassle.

lab bench?

I think that this is really insightful, as it’s actually part of the magic trick. Like, normally I’d start by wondering about air-gapping, but there can’t be an air gap in the network because the entire trick relies on ChatGPT tokens flowing into the machine under test and into some system shell (in some VM, yadda yadda) and back out again, so of course this is going to be an inherently insecure setup.

An employee of cybersecurity darling Trail of Bits has published a record of their sheer incompetence in virtual-machine design and security analysis framed as chatbot critihype.

I can’t say conclusively, but evidence is that Scott’s bad at his job. Like, his old blog, which I’m not going to comb, has a post where he bemoans that he has never had a big breakthrough with a client. They never get up and dance and shout that they’ve got a new lease on life, etc. I have to admit a bias here: it would be gut-bustingly funny if Scott were just straight-up lacking the empathy required to engage with ordinary people.

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.

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!

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.

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.