Software Umarell @KainosSoftware; forever searching for that missing semi-colon. Opinions as a Service. SWLIPDSINBFASOG.
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Joined November 2009
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Will Hamill retweeted
>math professor spends a year on one of the hardest unsolved problems in math
>"Navier-Stokes"
>his drafts for the whole project went through codex sessions
>openai had his logs in codex
>suddenly rumor leaks AI solved it
>he emails openai to ask what's going on
>openai calls within days
>"funny story, our model also solved it"
>using his exact approach
>asks openai: did you train on my sessions?
>no answer
Will Hamill retweeted
pulping rare books into a closed source AI training set is the most dystopian thing I've read in a while
Will Hamill retweeted
Meta burns $2.65B a year on AI tokens. at $300K for a Meta engineer, that's enough to pay ~9,000 engineers for a full year.
now ask yourself: since the layoffs, has Meta shipped anything that feels like 9,000 engineers’ worth of output?
Will Hamill retweeted
PICARD: Data, shields up
DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.
[camera shakes]
WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS
DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't
Will Hamill retweeted
Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.
Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.
Here's what happened:
Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."
And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.
Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.
The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."
Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.
Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.
Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.
Same playbook with Hanes:
Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."
Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.
But it gets even worse...
Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.
Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.
They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.
The mechanism is simple but terrifying:
If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.
Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."
Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.
Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.
So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.
You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.
"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."
3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.
This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.
And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.
"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.
Will Hamill retweeted
Just so everyone understands the accounting game in the AI/Cloud-space here is a very *simple* example:
1) Amazon “invests” $50B in OpenAI. Amazon records:
- Cash $50B
+ Investment Asset $50B
2) OpenAI uses $50B to buy AWS services. Amazon records:
+ Sales $50B
+ Cash $50B
Amazon is net $0 cash, but now has $50B in sales and $50B investment asset. Great deal! Thats why we see all the majors doing it, and at scale. It is a way to convert their dormant cash pile into revenue, which Wall Street loves.
Most ppl dont realize what is happening. The revenue of these large tech companies is increasing dependent on them being able to self-fund their own sales.
Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852B post-money valuation.
The fastest way to expand AI’s benefits is to put useful intelligence in people’s hands early and let access compound globally.
This funding gives us resources to lead at scale. openai.com/index/acceleratin…
Will Hamill retweeted
If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately*
Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code.
GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH
github.com/settings/copilot/…
Will Hamill retweeted
Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.
The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.
Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.
This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.
They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.
Will Hamill retweeted
You're right – this actually *isn't* a place of honor.
* I thought esteemed deeds were commemorated here, but that was wrong.
* The message wasn't about treasure, it was about danger. That's on me.
* I won't sugarcoat it – the danger is still present, and now it's in your body.
Will Hamill retweeted
The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
Will Hamill retweeted
A rare sentence that makes one laugh out loud and feel despondent all at once.
From @SamuelAlbanie’s great substack: samuelalbanie.substack.com/p…
Will Hamill retweeted
Folks, heres a list of things not happening by 2030 that you can take to the bank:
-AGI or any AI at all
-Autonomous vehicles deployed generally
-Autonomous robots of any kind
-datacenters in space
All of these technologies currently rely on regression to work. The first 3 use regression to compute predictions. The last one relies on the regression compute to be practical. All automation up until this point more or less relies on regression. It is incremental, not revolutionary, and IT DOESN’T SCALE. We are seeing this now, as models have now consumed all of the data on the planet and still can’t quite do anything correctly. In small domains with lots of data, it can be practical. Nearly all automation we have today leans on small domains to remain tractable. Once the domain expands, the problem blows up. Variance is the death of regression, data be damned. And the future is more variance than trend.
Humans excel because they are not statistical. They are superstitious. Adaption is quick, but leaves many data points unexplained. Most people who are extremely productive go their whole lives strongly believing a whole host of things that are not true. It is precisely our lack of statistical rigor that makes us effective.
So when you try to recreate human superstition with statistics, compute will blow up and edge cases will snuff it out in the night.
It is a certainty that regressive methods are a dead end. A certainty. It is not practical to require 10,000 humans worth of energy to recreate 1 human output.
Now could someone discover how the mind works and the methods it uses? Absolutely. But no one is looking for it because they are getting paid millions a year to bark up another tree. And once discovered, then a roadmap must be built to get us to systems that can perform it. We must design new chips, develop new material systems, new compute structures, how to interface them with conventional computing, and on and on and on. It’s a decade+ job once the roadmap has been developed. We don’t even know where to start!
The sooner we abandon the bankrupt religious belief that AI will save us, the better we will be. Because every day we ignore reality is another day for our problems to metastasize.
AI will not solve our problems. Robots will not solve our problems. We must solve our problems ourselves. And we could start building a roadmap for that today.
Will Hamill retweeted
NEW: Sam Altman wants to make a deal with us: he'll give us a utopian future, if we give him... everything.
$750 billion in investment. As much electricity as the population of India. And all of our data.
And if he's wrong he'll still profit off of what comes next:
Will Hamill retweeted
I’m about to give evidence in Parliament on AI & copyright.
I’ll say:
- there’s no excuse for ai companies not to pay for training data; they mostly don’t simply because a critical mass of ai companies decided not to
- suggestions that licensing is not required under the law are wildly misleading: openai lost in court in germany, and in the US the judge in a case vs meta said many instances of training are unlikely to be fair use
- the primary reason ai companies hide their training data is fear of getting sued
- governments should make ai companies reveal their training data so that people can defend their rights
You can watch here:
parliamentlive.tv/event/inde…
Will Hamill retweeted
i wonder why robotics companies would be focusing on high speed movement, crawling and martial arts instead of precision movements needed for things like doing the dishes... i wonder where speed, fall recovery, navigating obstacles and violence are the thing optimized for... hmmmm... HMMMMMMMMM.... i guess the world will never know
