The recent verification work by Anthropic is great. Just one thing I'd like to add to the recent online discussions.
Quoting:
"we need a strategy for verifying the enormous body of existing software, starting with the most critical dependencies. As we’ve shown, this can be achieved at scale by using generic specs and working at the binary level, sidestepping the need to rewrite entire codebases in another language."
This is good as a stepping stone, but not as an end goal IMO. Long term, it'd be better to rewrite the code in memory safe languages built with verification in mind (invariants about the program expressed in the program source).
The first verification of a program can be costly, and the delta to re-verify it after each new patch should be small.
If we're going to spend all this effort, why keep carrying around C++?
anthropic.com/research/forma…
"Because like ALL things, if the punishment is a fine, it isn’t really illegal for rich people."
This is unfortunately very true.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
Corrupt autocracies prefer to do business with other corrupt autocracies because the profits are personal on both sides, not for the state or the country. No oversight, no investigations.
Back in 2011, many Samsung phones came with spyware pre-installed, and I had to root my phone and install CyanogenMod to get rid of it. Not surprised at all that they are still doing shady stuff like this.
cnet.com/news/privacy/androi…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
SCOOP: The State Dept has started asking career diplomats up for promotion if they voted for Trump in 16, 20, 24.
Federal law prohibits politically based hiring for career staff.
State tells @washingtonsun it's screening for "fidelity" and execution of the president's vision👇
The funk brothers documentary is well worth watching.
youtu.be/BL9fF4Jtovc?is=UnjW…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
The GRU hacked into Jared Kushner's iPhone. Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) then recruited a GRU spy who gave them access to the hacked phone. What MIVD discovered was that Kushner had access to two bank accounts --one Azerbaijani, the other Israeli --where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed deposited money. It sounds like a slightly far-fetched episode of "Slow Horses," but it's real. And it proves just how eye-poppingly corrupt this administration was and continues to be as its "special envoy" decides the fate of tens of millions in Europe in the Middle East. Simply incredible reporting by Matthew Cole, drawn from his new book on Kushner. vanityfair.com/story/jared-k…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
you're just going about your day and you now get to read stuff like "Trump says Sundar Pichai talked him out of renaming the Atlantic Ocean" and you just have to nod and move on with your day.
“Oceans are different, sir.” lmao
theverge.com/policy/1016751/…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
JD - I've got 15 free minutes before my son's hockey practice ends, so let me see how many of Trump's enrichment schemes you didn't see that I can remind you of.
1/ First one is easy: Trump has executed over 30,000 stock trades, many on inside information, netting him millions.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
Anthropic's leaders need to stop commenting on the emergence of RSI like a local news anchor reporting on traffic on the 101, and acknowledge that they are the traffic, and they're not going to build something that they don't want to exist.
They should move beyond "pacing" language, commit to specific policies and red lines, explain why those lines are red, and then use that costly signal to build an international consensus around norms.
It's not that I trust the CCP, or that I think global lab monitoring and verification is imminent. But the status quo is absurd.
You've got US lab leaders writing (or favorably quote-tweeting) essays about slowing down while simultaneously saying "things are moving faster and faster" and "btw, our internal models finished mathematics on Tuesday, next up: physics."
The effect is the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning race after race while using his press conferences to bemoan the dangerous speed of modern sprinting on one's legs so would everybody please try a little less hard next race, and then ... breaking his 100m record again the following month. Honestly ask yourself: If you were China, why would you take this pausing/pacing stuff seriously?
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
I rarely post here these days but I wanted to share my reflections: people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/t…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
In my view, the right response by the mathematical community to OpenAI’s papers is to say:
“We’re not accepting these papers as finished work. It’s not our job to sit down and read your model-generated proofs.
It is your job to present your work through presentations and convince people of the correctness of your work. It’s always the case that whoever makes a claim needs to provide sufficient explanation and evidence to make independent verification feasible.
Until that moment, you just have a claim.”
There’s a difference between a proof being mathematically correct and a proof being accepted as correct by the mathematical community. Mathematical truth doesn't depend on consensus, but scientific recognition requires scrutiny, communication, and reproducibility.
They're still the arbiters of whether anyone's claims, including OpenAI's, are accepted as valid, and they should leverage that to the maximum extent possible.
> Traditional education is so dead.
This is the wrong conclusion. There will always be savants who can master things without the usual support system. (And that's great!) But for most people, traditional education is still very beneficial.
Met a kid today who taught himself AI with LLMs at 14 while barely speaking English, worked a 1yr long internship in a top AI company, flew across the world to attend a top 10 US undergrad, dropped out in 2 weeks, and has 5 ~$1M+ job offers from the top neolabs in SF at age 17.
Traditional education is so dead.
The young kids today are just built different.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
sorry i was incorrect: the envs don't use lean for the problem definitions or for solutions, but might use it for verifying. cool! thanks @willdepue
if you're wondering how openai achieved the math stuff, it's probably this. they just create a lot of RL envs with Lean formalizations of math problems. at first they were probably creating simpler ones by hand but then models got good enough at autonomously creating envs and then they could just go for a large quantity of problems based on arxiv papers.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
if you're wondering how openai achieved the math stuff, it's probably this. they just create a lot of RL envs with Lean formalizations of math problems. at first they were probably creating simpler ones by hand but then models got good enough at autonomously creating envs and then they could just go for a large quantity of problems based on arxiv papers.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
Well worth reading: proofsandprompts.com/2026/10…
