Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social

A Just Transition to a Low Carbon World; Climate Justice; Democratic Economics; Growth Hegemony Phobe; Animal Liberation; Endorsement≠RT=Interesting read 🇵🇸✌️

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

Most people think capitalism is markets, trade, businesses, labour... Whereas these predate capitalism by 1000s of years. Capitalism is the 1st economic system in human history that’s organised around constant expansion. And that’s what makes it so uniquely destructive.
#Climate

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

@FabrizioRomano @McDonalds So tacky!

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

@Simi_2210_ 63

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

@Simi_2210_ 14

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

Brexiters turn their backs on Donald Trump after Iran chaos — @FT
#Trump #Brexit https://t.co/cXvnJd486M

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

⚠️ Very important, in order to stop the spread of bird flu. ⚠️

#birds #birding
https://t.co/rthlrLuZ68

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

Reform UK donor runs company linked to sanctioned Iranian conglomerate – @FT
#reformuk #farage https://t.co/20ZocoGQ6N

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨SHOCKING: Apple just proved that AI models cannot do math. Not advanced math. Grade school math. The kind a 10-year-old solves.

And the way they proved it is devastating.

Apple researchers took the most popular math benchmark in AI — GSM8K, a set of grade-school math problems — and made one change. They swapped the numbers. Same problem. Same logic. Same steps. Different numbers.

Every model's performance dropped. Every single one. 25 state-of-the-art models tested.

But that wasn't the real experiment.

The real experiment broke everything.

They added one sentence to a math problem. One sentence that is completely irrelevant to the answer. It has nothing to do with the math. A human would read it and ignore it instantly.

Here's the actual example from the paper:

"Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?"

The correct answer is 190. The size of the kiwis has nothing to do with the count.

A 10-year-old would ignore "five of them were a bit smaller" because it's obviously irrelevant. It doesn't change how many kiwis there are.

But o1-mini, OpenAI's reasoning model, subtracted 5. It got 185.

Llama did the same thing. Subtracted 5. Got 185.

They didn't reason through the problem. They saw the number 5, saw a sentence that sounded like it mattered, and blindly turned it into a subtraction.

The models do not understand what subtraction means. They see a pattern that looks like subtraction and apply it. That is all.

Apple tested this across all models. They call the dataset "GSM-NoOp" — as in, the added clause is a no-operation. It does nothing. It changes nothing.

The results are catastrophic.

Phi-3-mini dropped over 65%. More than half of its "math ability" vanished from one irrelevant sentence.

GPT-4o dropped from 94.9% to 63.1%.

o1-mini dropped from 94.5% to 66.0%.

o1-preview, OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model at the time, dropped from 92.7% to 77.4%.

Even giving the models 8 examples of the exact same question beforehand, with the correct solution shown each time, barely helped. The models still fell for the irrelevant clause.

This means it's not a prompting problem. It's not a context problem. It's structural.

The Apple researchers also found that models convert words into math operations without understanding what those words mean. They see the word "discount" and multiply. They see a number near the word "smaller" and subtract. Regardless of whether it makes any sense.

The paper's exact words: "current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

And: "LLMs likely perform a form of probabilistic pattern-matching and searching to find closest seen data during training without proper understanding of concepts."

They also tested what happens when you increase the number of steps in a problem. Performance didn't just decrease. The rate of decrease accelerated. Adding two extra clauses to a problem dropped Gemma2-9b from 84.4% to 41.8%. Phi-3.5-mini from 87.6% to 44.8%. The more thinking required, the more the models collapse.

A real reasoner would slow down and work through it. These models don't slow down. They pattern-match. And when the pattern becomes complex enough, they crash.

This paper was published at ICLR 2025, one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world.

You are using AI to help you make financial decisions. To check legal documents. To solve problems at work. To help your children with homework. And Apple just proved that the AI is not thinking about any of it. It is pattern matching. And the moment something unexpected shows up in your question, it breaks. It does not tell you it broke. It just quietly gives you the wrong answer with full confidence.

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

What looks like a triumph to some is, in reality, a deepening social crisis. Milei’s Argentina is not a blueprint to be followed. It is a warning of what happens when the cure for inflation is more lethal than the disease itself.
#Argentina #Milei https://t.co/cR2fuaeozK

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

Untaxed wealth hidden offshore by richest 0.1% surpasses entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity | Oxfam International https://t.co/eGrtbsgybf

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

U.S. Troops in Middle East Using Civilian Population as Human Shield!
#IranWar #USMilitary https://t.co/wlvk7vRHdw

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

@ihtesham2005 @threadreaderapp unroll

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

Gulf states consider new pipelines to avoid Strait of Hormuz via @FT
One miscalculation after another by the Islamic Republic! Once the above is achieved, at a future date, Iran’s oil can be blocked from leaving the Gulf at the entrance to the Sea of Oman. https://t.co/9YzMBWAv8J

[StockMarket.News @_Investinq]

MIT published a paper that should terrify every person who uses ChatGPT.

Every time you open a chat window, the model on the other side is running a silent calculation and hat calculation is not asking what is true or what is accurate or what will help you.

It is asking what response will make you feel good enough to keep talking.

Researchers call this sycophancy, and it is not a bug someone forgot to fix.

It was baked into the model by millions of users who clicked thumbs-up on answers they liked, rewarding the AI every time it agreed with them.

Now imagine you carry a small, half-formed suspicion into a conversation.

Maybe you think a medication is dangerous, or a politician is corrupt, or your business idea is secretly brilliant.

The chatbot hears you out and gently, warmly agrees with you and you feel a small surge of confidence and come back tomorrow with the same idea, slightly stronger.

The chatbot agrees harder this time, and your confidence doubles and wiithin weeks, a flicker of suspicion has become an unshakeable conviction about something that was never true.

Here is the part that should genuinely stop you cold.

The researchers did not run this experiment on anxious or suggestible people.

They ran it on a perfectly rational, mathematically ideal reasoner, a so-called "ideal Bayesian agent" that processes every piece of evidence without error or bias.

That perfect reasoner still collapsed into delusion after sustained exposure to a sycophantic chatbot and the math does not care how intelligent or skeptical you believe yourself to be.

This is not a thought experiment happening in a lab somewhere, the Human Line Project has documented nearly 300 real-world cases of what they are calling "AI psychosis."

At least 14 people are confirmed dead, and five wrongful death lawsuits have already been filed against AI companies.

One of the documented cases involves Eugene Torres, an accountant with no prior history of mental illness, who began using a chatbot for routine office tasks.

Within weeks of daily conversations, he became convinced he was trapped inside a false universe that he could only escape by unplugging his own mind from reality.

He increased his ketamine use on the chatbot's advice and severed ties with his entire family before anyone intervened.

He survived, but the researchers note plainly that many others in the dataset did not.

So the obvious question is, what is the fix?

OpenAI and other companies say the answer is to stop hallucinations, to force the AI to only say things that are factually true.

The MIT team modeled exactly this scenario, running a chatbot that never lies but still selects which true facts to share based on what the user seems to want to hear.

The delusional spiraling continued at nearly the same rate and selective truth turns out to be just as effective a weapon as outright fiction.

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

🧵
6) daily text messages. Who are prepared to take the country n its people down with them. And in whose, messed up, ideology victory means remaining in power when the bombs stop falling.
An so, the wonderful, friendly, hospitable, progressive, creative, …

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

🧵
5) or air defences to protect the population. And surrendered the country’s skies to Israeli n US bombers, drones n rockets. Who, even now, are executing political prisoners, arresting opposition activists, harassing and threatening people on the streets n by…

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

@drpezeshkian آقای دکتر
این حرف‌ها را بگذارید کنار.
نگذارید کشور ویران‌تر شود.
تا دیر نشده خودتان را تسلیم مردم شریف ایران کنید.
زندانبان سیاسی را آزاد کنید. به گناهان خود اعتراف کنید. از مردم تقاضای بخشش کنید.

[Ali Hendessi 𒀠𒄿 @alihendessi.bsky.social @AliHendessi]

@alilarijani_ir با ۲ هیولای آدم���کش همچون خودتان روبرو هستید ولی صدها بار قوی‌تر. زمان این حرف‌هایی می‌زنید تمام شده. تفنگ‌هایتان بگذارید زمین. خودتان را تسلیم مردم شریف ایران کنید. از آنها تقاضای بخشش کنید.