Tuesday, August 12
Daily News Stuff 12 August 2025
Needs More Fish Edition
Needs More Fish Edition
Top Story
- Thomas Dhomke, the GitHub CEO who just told programmers to either adopt AI for development or leave the industry, has left the industry. (GitHub)
He'll be leaving GitHub at the end of the year.
Tech News
- Wikipedia lost its challenge against the UK government's requirement that all the site's moderators must be registered with the government. (BBC)
This is required by the Online Safety Act which ostensibly was created to prevent children from seeing porn. It's obviously complete bullshit because there is no porn on Wikipedia, and the moderators aren't children.
Almost as if this was never about the porn.
- LLMs aren't world models. (Yosef K)
A friend who plays better chess than me — and knows more math & CS than me - said that he played some moves against a newly released LLM, and it must be at least as good as him. I said, no way, I’m going to cRRRush it, in my best Russian accent. I make a few moves – but unlike him, I don't make good moves, which would be opening book moves it has seen a million times; I make weak moves, which it hasn't. The thing makes decent moves in response, with cheerful commentary about how we're attacking this and developing that — until about move 10, when it tries to move a knight which isn't there, and loses in a few more moves. This was a year or two ago; I’ve just tried this again, and it lost track of the board state by move 9.
This aligns with recent posts of leading AI tools losing chess matches to an Atari 2600.
The Atari doesn't know much, but it does encode the rules of chess. The LLMs... Don't.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: I forgor.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:02 PM
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Post contains 302 words, total size 2 kb.
1
Wikipedia does have porn sorts of stuff, but you kinda have to be looking in the places that people would put those images. I'm not talking Michangelo's David, but you could count those as well. (Some porn is objectively porn, but it can also merely be in the mind of the viewer.) I generally think Wikipedia sorts are bad, and at the same time understand that this UK initiative is bad.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, August 13 2025 01:27 AM (rcPLc)
2
"LLMs aren't world models."
I'm waiting for someone to convince me they're more than fancy Markov chains.
I'm waiting for someone to convince me they're more than fancy Markov chains.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 13 2025 03:20 AM (3E5Rg)
3
Exactly, Pat. I mean, sometimes porn is in the eye of the beholder. (check the BDSM entry, and related ones). Of course, in the UK the Beholder is from the government and named Dolores Umbridge.
Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 13 2025 01:39 PM (QE7eq)
Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 13 2025 09:26 PM (oJgNG)
5
J, it's a somewhat novel use of the word "bondage", but it checks out, thanks to stone to flesh spells.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 14 2025 01:10 AM (VW9lJ)
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