If you haven't read The CIA's Greatest Hits (https://www.amazon.com/CIAs-Greatest-Hits-Real-Story/dp/1593764391), I can't recommend it enough. It's a very small/short book, written by a political cartoonist (so it's half-illustrations, and a really easy read) ... but it will teach you A TON about the history of what the CIA actually does.

Once you've read it, the fact that the CIA is giving its agents the ability to access millions of dollars in gold bars will not surprise you in the slightest.

You are clearly not very aware of reality.

There are liberal Jews, and there are conservative Jews. In fact, in Judaism there are even (literal) religious branches called "reformed", "conservative", and "orthodox".

As you might expect, the "reformed" Jews tend to be liberal, but many aren't. Meanwhile, the "conservative' ones include some of the most batshit crazy right-wing political operatives you can find!

(The "orthodox" ones, in general, are too busy hanging strings and doing other silly stuff from 2000 years ago to be really active in politics).

I am sick of these socialists and their damn unions, trying to ... um ... make my news more accurate! Those fricking commies!

Someone rapes your mother, and the police know who it was (and thus his license), but they don't know where he is.

Are you seriously going to argue "it doesn't matter if we could catch your mother's rapist using new technology"?

Look, I'm no fan of mass surveillance, but "Were the police unable to do their jobs before the Internet?" seems like a mind-numbingly stupid way to think about it.

Crimes go unsolved every day! Serious crimes, like rape, child abuse, torture, or murder. And with crimes like that, you don't want the perpetrator running around free and able to continue committing crimes!

So yes, people have a very good reason to want to make the police more successful, and no that is not a bad thing! It still doesn't make mass surveillance the right answer ... but please, lets not turn our brains off, and ignore the real and serious issues people are (misguidedly) trying to solve here.

No, not hinting :)

Literally no one has expressed that, as far as i can see, in this thread. You're fighting a straw man.

What I said, and stand by, is that we should be skeptical because Sam Altman is a sociopathic liar, and there is a long history of examples to support that. It has nothing to do with whether Open AI (or any AI) can create proofs.

Neither the summary nor the article said anything about price. I guess it's not announced, but Gemini thinks:

Less than a Steam Deck!

Right, so you could make a claim like "all mathematicians leveraged (say) 95% prior knowledge". If OpenAI similarly leveraged 95%, and "discovered" the rest, it'd be (at least somewhat) legitimate to say "OpenAI invented a new theorem".

But, if OpenAI actually leveraged 99.9% existing knowledge (remember, my post said ""95+%"), then it's NOT fair to compare it to a human discovery. If a company claims as much, they're dishonestly promoting their product.

Again, I'm not a mathematician, and I did not read the paper. But given Altman's history of deception, I think any disinterested observer should lean towards assuming that he is falsely promoting the competency of his product, before assuming he's invented a machine that can out-invent humans.

I don't think anyone is contesting that. What they are contesting is a sociopath's claim that his tool solved something humans couldn't ... when really 95+% of what it did was just leverage existing human knowledge.

Caveat: I'm not a mathematician and I didn't read the paper ... but Sam Altman is VERY well known for lying (constantly), so everything he says should be taken with multiple bags of salt.

Honestly, I think the more everyone in the system talks about it honestly (and that includes calling humans "human capital", which is what we are in the economic system) the more informed everyone in that system will be.

You can't get people fighting for government to ensure they have a livelihood (ie. becoming socialist) if no one understands that we're all just capital, and we're being replaced with a different kind of capital.

Also, many popular online games (like EverQuest, WoW, Star Wars Galaxies) have proved they can live on decades after they stopped being supported by their maker. This includes games that ARE still supported ... but an earlier version of the game isn't ... so fans have made servers to support that earlier version (see Project 1999 for EQ or "Classic" WoW).

I just wish this bill had a requirement that, if a subscription game ended, the client had to be open sourced within X months. Even with the current legal risk from not having that, we've seen that the community will step in for popular games to create a fan-hosted solution. All that's needed is to remove that legal risk.

Look, I never said I had this problem: I don't even keep most subscriptions (e.g. I cancel TV subscriptions as soon as I sign up).

But again, so many people DO have this problem that the stupid phone app can advertise nearly 24/7 on every channel I watch! There are lots of people who have subscriptions they've forgotten about ... and more generally, even more people that just don't have a good understanding of where there money goes.

A safe/trust-worthy AI could be an amazing partner to help improve everyone's "financial literacy".

Let's not forget: personal financial management/analysis is hard!

Have you seen those ads for that stupid phone app that finds and cancels your five different Netflix subscriptions? Obviously most people don't have five subscriptions with any provider ... but there does seem to be enough people willing to pay for this stupid app. It's because wading through your bank's records of all your purchases (and actually making sense of it) is challenging: many people can't even (easily) determine what subscriptions they have.

This was what was so great about Mint ... but now Mint is dead, and even before it lacked the intelligence to categorize many purchases, so you wound up having to hand categorize them. LLMs are the PERFECT solution: with the right MCP I have zero doubt that Claude could compile an easy-to-understand report of all my spending for me, and even suggest what I might want to cut (like my five Netflix subscriptions, /s).

So yes, Altman is a pathological liar, and that means you can't trust anything from OpenAI ... but the core idea, of having AI help you understand something that's hard for humans to understand ... is an incredible one!

"There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure -- especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same, ... We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)

How did you not build a rat's nest BEFORE AI?

AI increases output: it magnifies existing issues, but it does not magically create new ones. I strongly suspect when you had hundreds of other programmers hand-writing code (without a good system of review and testing) you ALSO were building a rat's nest ... you were just doing it more slowly.