Data scientist. Recovering economist. Currently snobby about cheese. Trying to learn how to persuade people instead of just being right.
London, England
Joined September 2007
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Tobias Schmidt retweeted
The US midterms offer a clear winning strategy for the European left:
- Don't be in government.
- Have an extremely unpopular and delusional incumbent.
- Hope he starts a war nobody understands.
- Hope for soaring gas prices and inflation.
- Face historically weak candidates.
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
Riots in the '60s really did screw up neighborhoods permanently. Building on astonishing data, this paper shows that large negative shocks are sufficient to tip cities into new equilibriums altogether, while small shocks can be recovered from. 1/
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
ANTHROPIC: "we may imminently meet our Responsible Scaling Policy’s definition of 'dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.'"
"we do not anticipate being able to safely use Claude to fully autonomously design and build successive generations of frontier models"
Anthropic updated its S1 this morning. Notable additions re automated AI R&D and human oversight of it:
"[...] our internal estimates and our expectations regarding future models, rather than our current models, indicate that we may imminently meet our Responsible Scaling Policy’s definition of 'dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.' We have not designated any of our current models as exceeding this threshold, and we continue to assess the underlying data. We are also evaluating the implications of meeting the AI research and development capability threshold and will release further reports in the future as we set forth in our Responsible Scaling Policy."
"We are also considering additional measures, including updates to our Responsible Scaling Policy, to require human review and approval of certain decisions in our research and development processes as our models perform an increasing share of that work."
"We believe our investments in safety techniques will enable us to manage these risks and responsibly realize substantially more leverage from Claude than we do today in developing AI models. However, we do not anticipate being able to safely use Claude to fully autonomously design and build successive generations of frontier models without meaningful human supervision or understanding, if and when that becomes technically possible. Accordingly, we are considering updates to our Responsible Scaling Policy to keep humans in control of frontier model development at Anthropic."
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
Been using Claude for planning 5 weeks of traveling across Japan. It's been great. Great for booking things, keeping track of todos and dependencies, and for finding things to do. Except... in some cases it's hard to endow it with some travel street smarts.
Those people will flock to one of two places that everyone flocks to, and buy a knife that's flashy rather than a knife that's good at knife work; Damascus steel, cool Japanese character engraving, nice wood handle, etc.
This raises the question if how good we would/could have been at picking technologies ex ante.
There's a vogue for what I call the Techno-Optimist Fallacy, wrongly inferring "all instances of technological progress are good" from the true premise "technological progress has been very good on average."
There are many counter-examples.
slowboring.com/p/the-techno-…
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
I wonder if data quality issues, data cleaning choices, underpowered pre-trends, or endogenous treatment timing would flip results more than 0.6-2.1% of the time
Nahhh let's keep focusing on negative weights
How different are different differences-in-differences? The answer may (or may not) surprise you
New working paper, building on a dumb tweet from earlier this month teapawt.org/instrumenthull/status/…
A short summary follow:
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
We have discovered a substantial number of vulnerabilities in the German legal system using LLMs.
These may enable access to confidential documents, travel without an otherwise required visa, enforceable leave for soldiers at NATO’s JSEC, and more.
Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation. In our blog post, we share a selection of vulnerabilities, and present potential exploits for each. To our knowledge, none of these have been previously recorded. We share only those vulnerabilities whose exploitation we believe would not cause serious harm.
blog post: felixringe.com/legal-exploit…
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
This is fascinating stuff - what happens when you boost exactly one neuron in a small LLM and see which ones change the answer to "Who are you?" neuronpersonas.com/
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
I am retracting this. It appears that the article is miscoded. The month labeled as the month of Ramadan in the paper corresponds to the month before Ramadan in the data. More below:
This quoted post is unavailable.
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
The finding has large implications in itself (US productivity growth may have peaked before WWII rather than the postwar boom), but what fascinates me most is the method.
The authors use LLMs to extract prices and product characteristics from 5.1 million Sears catalog listings from 1900 to 1990. That lets them estimate how much prices for consumer goods rose after accounting for improvements in quality (e.g. icebox → electric fridge).
This opens up obscenely broad research agendas. Old books, catalogs, newspapers, imperial records, archives full of evidence that would be almost impossible to structure manually can now become datasets. Questions in economics, history and politics that were previously prohibitively labor intensive to investigate are now practical research projects.
Excited to share our new working paper: how much did the US standard of living really rise over the twentieth century — and when? With @bhwittenbrink
Using 5.1 million Sears catalog listings, we build a quality-adjusted price index for consumer goods, 1900–1990. Two headline findings: growth was much larger than official statistics imply, and its peak came before WWII, not after. (1/9)
Lots of very dark things in Samsung TVs
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
I think this oversells what formal verification can hope to achieve and is not helpful. @hillelogram, who has spent a lot of time in FV recently summarised it like this: teapawt.org/hillelogram/status/210…
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
OpenAI says the PHP security flaw (found with GPT-5.6 Sol) is the tip of the iceberg, and they have several more discoveries to announce.
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites.
Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors.
Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact.
This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare.
openai.com/index/coordinated…
Tobias Schmidt retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
In Japan, very amused that the dimension along which trash is separated is "combustible" vs "non-combustible".
