Involution

[Involution @Involution88]

@SteveFore2 @kimmonismus Sampling era is drawing to a close. Industrial music has run its course. Started with recording, ended with synthesisers. Key skill is listening.

Instantiation era is dawning. Started with stems for dynamic music in computer games. Key skill is defining spaces.

[Kareem Carr, Ph.D. @kareem_carr]

had this interaction with claude yesterday

me: what's the cutoff date for your training data?
claude: jan 2025
me: google us news events post jan 2025 so you're up to date
claude: *searching*
me:
claude: *searching*
me:
claude: jesus christ

it literally said "jesus christ"

[Involution @Involution88]

@brigade99759 @ricwe123 It's entirely possible that China has overplayed their hand.

It is also certain that Trump has overplayed his hand.

Look mate, China has systemically removed every single dependency on the US within their economy over the last decade. They don't need the US. The US needs China.

[Richard @ricwe123]

Let’s be honest,this is the first time another country has the power to hit back and sanction the US in a way it really hurts, and Washington simply can’t handle it.

The empire isn’t used to being on the receiving end.....
😂😂😂

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

If you thought the Dot-Com crash of 2000 was bad, or the financial collapse of 2008, you won’t want to miss the upcoming AI crash. @futurism again FTW on AI reporting.

[Involution @Involution88]

@effthealgorithm The internet didn't go anywhere when the .com bubble burst. Lots of companies were liquidated though.

Houses didn't go anywhere when the housing bubble burst. Foreclosures everywhere.

AI won't go anywhere when the AI bubble bursts. Companies will be liquidated.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Here's a question I know many are wondering about: why did China wait until now to use rare earths as leverage against the US? Why not in the first Trump administration when the US started the trade hostilities? Or when the Biden administration unleashed the chips export controls 3 years ago?

I just watched a fascinating explanation by a Chinese analyst and, unexpectedly, a big part of the explanation is... helium.

I had no idea but as he explains (source here: https://t.co/eUbbU5QIHW), all the way until 2022 China imported 95% of its helium and most of it was controlled by the US. Of the world's ten largest helium producers, four were American companies, and the remaining six all used American technology.

Helium isn't just a party balloons gas: it has plenty of industrial applications for things such as quantum computing, rocket technology, MRI machines, as a coolant for chip lithography equipment, etc.

In a nutshell what he's explaining is that with helium the US had an even stronger card to play if China ever used the rare earths card.

This raised huge alarm bells inside China. In an article published in late 2022 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science (https://t.co/eZhyv438LK), several researchers from PetroChina’s Beijing-based Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development stressed that China would be greatly affected if the US imposed a “stranglehold” blockade on helium exports.

So over the past few years there were gigantic efforts in China to break the "helium shackles," with seven helium extraction facilities going into production, and China also switching imports from the US in favor of imports from friendly countries like Russia.

China's research ecosystem also went into overdrive to find solutions to the helium dependency issues, with China's Academy of Sciences awarding its annual 2024 "Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize" to a new helium extraction technology project (https://t.co/eWs163mfaO) because "these scientific and engineering achievements broke the long-standing monopoly of the US and ensured the security of China's helium resources" (https://t.co/d7YquWKFGS)

The result: by the end of 2024 China had cut its helium dependence on the US to less than 5% (https://t.co/wOxm8VRZJj). The "helium shackles" were broken.

That's what most people don't realize: power isn't about intentions or rhetoric - it's about what you can actually do. Many wonder why countries almost never retaliate when the US imposes sanctions or export controls. The answer is simple: they can't. They lack the alternatives, the technology, the supply chains.

China is the first country that systematically worked to eliminate every single pressure point, with humongous efforts. It's not just helium: it's chips, energy, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, etc.

That's why the rare earth card can finally be played now. Not because China suddenly became aggressive, but because they have developed the capabilities to say "no."

Last word: as a European, this is both depressing and inspiring. Depressing because it highlights the immense magnitude of the task at hand to become genuinely sovereign and develop our own capabilities to say "no." Inspiring because China demonstrated that it can actually be done, and relatively fast if we execute competently. Although with the current crop of folks at the helm in Europe, that last part is admittedly a very, very big "if"...

[Involution @Involution88]

@eyad_khrais @whop It's the other way around. The era of the intern is over. The era of the junior employee is over. AI can do all the intern things. AI can do all the junior jobs. AI has similar kinds of shortcomings as interns/juniors.

The entry barrier has been raised, not lowered.

[Involution @Involution88]

@kimmonismus (the system which generated and then published all possible melodies was not an AI system).

[Involution @Involution88]

@kimmonismus No. Gemini cannot compose and play original music.

Gemini, like any human can either:

a) plagiarise a melody from before 2019.

b) generate a melody out of all possible melodies. All possible melodies were added to the public domain in 2019.

No original melodies can be created

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

This is true!

The COVID vaccines have one of the best safety records of any drug. They proved *insanely* safe.

[Involution @Involution88]

@hyhieu226 Sometimes it helps a little bit.

Sometimes it's downright counter productive. Don't think of an elephant. Shoot. You're thinking of an elephant right now, aren't you?

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Rude prompts to LLMs consistently lead to better results than polite ones 🤯

The authors found that very polite and polite tones reduced accuracy, while neutral, rude, and very rude tones improved it.

Statistical tests confirmed that the differences were significant, not random, across repeated runs.

The top score reported was 84.8% for very rude prompts and the lowest was 80.8% for very polite.

They compared their results with earlier studies and noted that older models (like GPT-3.5 and Llama-2) behaved differently, but GPT-4-based models like ChatGPT-4o show this clear reversal where harsh tone works better.

----

Paper – arxiv. org/abs/2510.04950

Paper Title: "Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (short paper)"

[🟡 The tumboy 🟡 @TheTumboy]

it’s funny that the main argument for AI is usually not that it’s good or useful, just that it’s inevitable so we might as well learn to live with it. even its advocates talk about it like it’s a plague

[Involution @Involution88]

@xriskology But the good news is that your own senses, like mine, are as epistemologically worthless as the finest AI slop or the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

We don't see causes and effects, we see sequences of events. We don't perceive things as they really are, we perceive signals.

[Involution @Involution88]

@xriskology Video and audio hasn't proved much since they were invented. AI does not change that.

Demonstrative evidence (videos and audio) has never been considered real evidence (bags of cocaine or whatever)

Video evidence needed to be authenticated even before AI. AI changes nothing.

[Involution @Involution88]

@terracotta_hawk @Jesse_Brenneman There are more intelligent people than there are powerful people. Intelligence isn't the expensive or difficult to find thing. Intelligence is a red herring.

[Involution @Involution88]

@Jesse_Brenneman Ever asked yourself where all the money for AI comes from when AI companies don't actually make money? (It's not a bubble even though it looks exactly like a bubble, much as NASA wasn't a bubble during the 1960s).

[Involution @Involution88]

@Jesse_Brenneman You've hit the nail on the head. All of that surveillance footage from all the surveillance cameras needs to be processed. Self driving cars which use video feeds? Useful. LIDAR self driving cars. Useless. Image generation. Useful, it's basically image recognition in reverse.