Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.

Dissolution of a myth.

That’s one way to look at it. It’s fairly common to view nature this way. I wonder where it comes from.

I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.

BBC Dynasties https://youtu.be/2Co_hmLenD8

Loved this series. It was tragic. The cycle of violence, trauma, isolation, male performance.

I haven't seen Chimp Empire, but it reminds me of the story of the Baboons where the alpha males died, and the entire society changed: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/teacher...

(It also features a very amusing photo at the top that makes it look like the subject is the biologist Robert Sapolsky.)

I'm interested in the second-order effects:

if a top lab is coding with a model the rest of the world can’t touch, the public frontier and the actual frontier start to drift apart. That gap is a thing worth watching.

Are you monitoring the size of your context windows? As they grow, so does the cost of every operation performed in that state.

Nerve density isn’t mainly about intensity, it’s about spatial resolution. More nerve endings per square centimeter means you can distinguish finer details of touch, texture, and pressure. The brain can’t invent spatial detail that isn’t in the incoming signal. Amplifying a sparse signal centrally would be like zooming into a low-res photo.

The brain does do some of what you’re describing though. The somatosensory cortex gives disproportionate space to certain body parts (the sensory homunculus). So there is central amplification, but it works on top of peripheral density, not instead of it. Without the dense nerve input, you’d basically have an on/off switch instead of nuanced sensation.

You can use your subscription for Anthropic-hosted Claude models?

Don't know. I tried Anthropic directly a long time ago and was frustrated by their uptime issues. Seems it has not improved in the years since.

No, unless you count tricks which are explicitly against ToS

Check out Personalized PageRank and EigenTrust. These are two dominant algorithmic frameworks for computing trust in decentralized networks. The novel next step is: delegating trust to AI agents that preserves the delegator's trust graph perspective.

Page rank is trivially gamed by agents. You can make some malicious and some not malicious and have them link to each other.

That’s exactly right for global PageRank, which is why I recommended Personalized PageRank specifically.

A cluster of sybil agents endorsing each other has no effect on your trust scores unless they can get endorsements from nodes you already trust.

That’s the whole point of subjective trust metrics, and formally why Cheng and Friedman proved personalized approaches are sybilproof where global ones aren’t.

But you can have genuinely helpful agents in your attack network. Agents that create helpful pages and get linked by other helpful pages but then later link to malicious pages. It all follows when the cost of page creation goes to zero.

That’s a real attack vector and it applies to every reputation system. The standard mitigations are temporal decay, trust revocation, and anomaly detection.

No symmetric, global reputation function can be sybilproof, but asymmetric, subjective trust computations can resist manipulation.