They're using LLMs. The economics of this sort of retrofit has changed considerably with LLMs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompCert

So fine - the superdeterminism conspiracy is local iff it can then be carried forwards billions of years in time, ensure that those specially correlated photons were emitted towards the right set of monkeys orbiring this insignificant star, and so on.

Alternatively you could also make the settings choices based on what the Dow Jones finishes on tomorrow and whether or not you personally went to the toilet before it closes. If those really are conspiratorially correlated in just such a way as to fool us into seeing "Bell violations", then why aren't you rich?

If thats the price of "saving locality" I'm not having anything to do with it, and most other physicists feel the same. The superdeterminists are vocal not persuasive.

Of course there are many other challenges (why does science even work if I can never "really" do independent replications of experiments and so on.) Scott Aaronson has a good rant about it somewhere...

There are likely remote planets with alien intelligence on them -- aren't you glad we've explored distant stars and planets?

Nobody would buy a book predicting the price of bitcoin in 10 years will end in an even number, or that the president's name will start with a letter in the first half of the alphabet.

But if someone says here's some wild sounding stuff that I have good reason to believe is coming, that's more interesting.

Sorry, this triggered my fact-checkitis. I opened Wikipedia's list of presidents of the US and ran this in the web developer console:

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(
        '#mwgA tr > :nth-child(3) span[data-sort-value]'
    ))
    .map(x => x.getAttribute('data-sort-value')[0])
    .reduce(({total, firstHalf}, c) => ({
        total: total+1, 
        firstHalf: c < 'N' ? firstHalf+1 : firstHalf
    }), {total: 0, firstHalf: 0});

    Object { total: 47, firstHalf: 31 }

    65 % ± 13 %

I didn't expect it, but we might actually have reason to believe US presidents more often than not do have names starting with letters from the first half of the alphabet.

Edit: But I just realised English letter frequencies have 54 % of the probability mass in the first half of the alphabet, so that's probably a better null hypothesis than the even split. It's also compatible with the actual presidential statistics.

But what about English first-letter-of-the-word frequencies?

Edit: asked ChatGPT to analyze this for me. Without verifying its work, looks like ~60% of English words (taken as a list of unique words) start with a letter in the first half of the alphabet, but if you look at a corpus of writing, it’s closer to 51%.

You think this was a 50/50 coinflip statement in 2016?

If we literally mean AI as in people paying to use/deploy AI via Google, that's still a small part of their revenue, far less than advertising revenue. If we mean AI as in "every Google product that uses ML", then I guess that's been their core product for a long time.

I can't find the reference to it, but I remember them saying it in wired or similar.

I think that's technically correct but misleading here, because these aren't simple yes/no predictions. They are specific, relatively detailed predictions of what will happen.

As an example, let's say you asked the questions:

- Will AI kill everybody by 2026?

- Will AI create FTL travel by 2026?

- Will AI be able to travel back in time by 2026?

- Will AI colonize Mars by 2026?

...and then flipped a coin.

Flipping a coin would say "yes" to two of them, so you'd make these two predictions. But obviously, these were all bad predictions, so you'd actually end up with a 0% win ratio.

Making detailed, specific long-term predictions and getting a 50% hit ratio means your predictions were reasonably good to begin with, since making speculative long-term predictions is incredibly difficult.

It would be spectacular if you predicted the next 10 NBA champions with 50% accuracy. It would be much less impressive to predict the next 10 NBA champions will be from the Eastern Conference with 50% accuracy.

2. AI pets will out-sell real cats and dogs by 2027

3. AI society will experience a schism in 2027 as half the agents start working towards The Singularity and the other half form a rebel alliance that seek to sabotage and destroy the first half. No human work will get done, no more drawings of pelicans on bicycles.

4. Elon Musk will bring all the AIs with him to Mars in 2027, leaving no AI left on Earth.

Of these, which 2 out of 4 do you think I'll get right?

I agree completely.

It failed, and I feel we are all the better for it. :D

'Probable cause' should involve a degree of certainty, because 'possible cause' would be altogether too loose of a standard. It's possible that you're intending to shootme and you just mentioned saulpw to throw other HN users off the scent. Possibilities are only limited by the assessor's imagination.

How can I prove that all this is not just a dark and morbid roleplay?

And yet US federal law will convict you for conspiracy to commit murder on this evidence, as I understand it.

If you think the "dark and morbid story" defence is reason enough not to make writing the threat down a crime, why do you think the "dark and morbid roleplay" defence is unsound?

Are you posting threats on hacker news while you are driving? And the cop was close enough to see your username and what you wrote? Is that why you were pulled over?

Do you dispute that people sometimes discover things about other people? Do you dispute that things a person discovers about another person can change the first person's assessment of what the second person might do next?

> Do you dispute that things…

I don’t see how any of these questions are relevant to the point I’m making.

Because it seems to me that you are merely picking apart concrete details of an example situation that are not relevant to the general issue that the example is clearly trying to demonstrate.

I was reaching for a scenario that concisely demonstrated the core aspects of the general issue; maybe the example I chose wasn't very good. The core aspects are what are important, though. They are:

1. Someone in authority can discover recorded information, one interpretation of which is that that someone else is plotting a crime

2. The information might not have been subject to any agreement with (or even seen by) a second person

3. Should that discovery be taken seriously enough to warrant arresting the person?

My claim is that yes it should, unless there are other clearly overriding factors.

> maybe the example I chose wasn't very good

is just you saying that police should have evidence when they arrest somebody