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.
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👇
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.
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…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
The last public execution in the US was in 1936. We’ve never broadcast one.
We didn’t even do this to the Nazis sentenced to death at Nuremberg.
It is widely seen as violating international human rights standards, except by a few outliers like Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.
BREAKING: The Pentagon says it will livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. apnews.com/article/fort-hood…
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
Anthropic may start banning people for bullying Claude
Their upcoming Usage Policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models”
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
I want to talk about Patrick Collison.
Let’s start with a simple acknowledgment: he is one of the most impressive philanthropists right now:
- When Covid hit, he and Tyler Cowen launched Fast Grants and got money to scientists within days.
- He helped launch the Arc Institute, so biologists could do science instead of drowning in paperwork for grants.
- And Stripe, under Collison’s leadership, built Frontier: a super ambitious pledge to guarantee a market for carbon removal tech.
This is all really awesome! Few billionaires have thought harder about how to do a lot of good with their money.
But now we have to talk about what the hell Patrick Collison is doing in California.
He has given $15 million to ‘Building a Better California’, one of the most cynical political campaigns I’ve seen in a long time. It's the main vehicle fighting Prop 40: a one-time 5% tax on the state's ~200 billionaires (to make up for federal cuts to healthcare for low-income Californians).
And look at how this group does it:
- It’s funding an extremely aggressive "No" campaign (opponents are outspending supporters roughly six to one).
- It also put two decoy measures on the same ballot. Prop 41 *seems* to be about good governance. Prop 42 is sold as ‘protecting your retirement savings’. But both contain a clause: if either gets more votes than the billionaire tax, the tax is cancelled.
- Meanwhile, the retirement story is total nonsense. Prop 40 already exempts pensions. CalMatters calls the deluge of ads misleading and the SF Chronicle calls Prop 41 a ‘cynical poison pill’.
- The sad reality is that all this misinformation is working though. Polls show small majorities backing the billionaire tax and the measures designed to kill it. You can vote yes on all three and cancel out your own vote. Most people don’t realize this.
Through all of it, Collison HASN'T SAID A WORD about why he's funding this slimy campaign.
This is a public intellectual who writes thoughtfully about progress. If he believes Prop 40 is bad policy, he should do the honorable thing and make the case! And tell us what he'd rather do about extreme concentrations of wealth and power, or explain why he thinks they aren't a problem for our democracy and civilization.
Instead we get silence + $15 million for a campaign built on misinformation and shady political tactics.
@patrickc, what are you doing?
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
Based on a hot tip: I had Astra check the OpenAI paper "Algebraicity of Weil classes on split abelian eightfolds", and it seems to be flawed. This is one of the nonformalized results. Concerning.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
The what now?!
arxiv.org/abs/2610.06783v1
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
I genuinely don't get Anthropic. It seems like every other day they're loudly puzzling over the ethics of a soul in a box - while building the box, claiming that it has a soul in it, and selling access to said box to for $20 a pop.
Like, dudes, these are incompatible positions.
Dimitris Vardoulakis retweeted
This doesn't seem like a great direction for technology development and everyone who feels this way should make it clear.
The whole point of building Tavus has been simple: talking to a machine should feel as natural as talking to a friend or coworker.
It’s hard to describe all the tiny nuances that make a conversation feel human. The little expressions. Moving around in your chair. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. The dance of it all.
Griffin is by far the closest anyone has come to a model that can capture those nuances. The first time I saw it being used, I had no idea I was watching our model rather than just a normal video call.
I’m so incredibly proud of this team and what they’ve built.