But, to be fair, that wasn't the kind of critique it was talking about. If your critique guns is moral, strategic, etc, then yes, you can do it without actually trying out guns. If your critique is that guns physically don't work, don't actually do the thing they are claimed to do, then some hands-on testing would quickly dispel that notion.
The article is talking about those kinds of critiques, ones of the "AI doesn't work" variety, not "AI is harmful".
I don't know any engineers, any reports, or any public community voices who claim GenAI is bad because "AI doesn't work because I tried ChatGPT in 2022 and it was dumb." So it's a critique of a fictional movement which doesn't exist vs. an attempt at critiquing an actual movement.
I’m not redefining anything, that's the definition of "novel" in science. Otherwise, this comment would be "novel" too, because I bet you won't find it anywhere on Google, but no one would call it novel.
Show me these novel problems, that were solved by LLMs, name more than 3 then.
You're seriously insisting that the definition of novel in science only includes things that thousands of people have worked on for decades and haven't solved?
An example problem includes the "Erdos set" problems (see problem 124).
But also, LLMs have solved Olympia problems, see the results of IMO 2025. You can say that these are not interesting or challenging problems, but in the context of the original discussion, I don't think you can discount them as "novel". This is what the original comment said:
> Not so much amazing as bewildering that certain results are possible in spite of a lack of thinking etc. I find it highly counterintuitive that simply referencing established knowledge would ever get the correct answer to novel problems, absent any understanding of that knowledge.
I think in this context, it's clear that IMO problems are "novel" - they are applying knowledge in some way to solve something that isn't in-distribution. It is surprising that this is possible without "true understanding"; or, alternatively, LLMs do have understanding, whatever that means, which is also surprising.
Every time you have your work "checked over by other serious people", it eliminates 90% of the mistakes. So you have it checked over twice so that 99% of mistakes have been eliminated, and so on. But it never gets to 0% mistakes. That's my experience anyway.
Every time you have your work "checked over by other serious people", it only means it's been checked over by other people. You can't attach a metric to this process. Especially when it comes to security, adding more internal eyeballs doesn't mean you've expanded coverage.
One of the things I enjoy about Penn and Teller is that they explain in detail how their point of view differs from the audiences and how they intentionally use that difference in their shows. With that in mind you might picture your org as the audience, with one perspective diligently looking forwards.
Serious people like to look at things through a magnifying glass. Which makes them miss a lot.
I've seen printed books checked by paid professionals that consisted a "replace all" populated without context. Creating a grammar error on every single page. Or ones where everyone just forgot to add page numbers. Or a large cook book where index and page numbers didn't mach, making it almost impossible to navigate.
I'm talking of pre-AI work, with publisher. Apparently it wasn't obvious for them.
> a state conducting a Nazi-style genocide (according to the UN).
Can you provide a link showing that the UN is saying this? I kind of doubt the UN ever called it a "Nazi-style" genocide, and I don't think anyone serious is alleging anything of the kind (including serious people/groups who do call it a genocide - I don't think they'd characterize what's happening as a "Nazi-style" genocide, and nothing they say implies they think it.)
They expressed no opinion about whether the intent on the genocide was due to a culture of racial supremacy. That isnt their job. But, there is a multitude of other evidence demonstrating that it was.
This is why the people who try to downplay it on internet forums or elsewhere are exclusively racists, similar to holocaust deniers.
The UN commission report is highly controversial with a lot of questions raised about their procedure and investigative bias. It is not racist or denialism to make legitimate complaints about the legal basis of an ill-considered report. Comparing it to Holocaust denialism is way out of line.
But isn't this true of all technologies? I know plenty of people who are amazing Python developers. I've also seen people make a huge mess, turning a three-week project into a half-year mess because of their incredible lack of understanding of the tools they were using (Django, fittingly enough for this conversation).
That there's a learning curve, especially with a new technology, and that only the people at the forefront of using that technology are getting results with it - that's just a very common pattern. As the technology improves and material about it improves - it becomes more useful to everyone.
> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations.
AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc.
Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".
Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:
1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.
2. Many authors write in both genres.
3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.
Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world".
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws.
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
I think some books can cross the threshold and be both, but the majority fall into one or the other category pretty easily. That would seem to apply to the linked authors' books from a cursory glance.
What would you say is the reason for categorising works differently? Can you see differences there or do you also think it's mostly marketing?
There are clear differences, I don't disagree, I just think the difference isn't "rooted in real physics" vs "rooted in imaginary physics". The difference is more a matter of tone and general setting. Space? It's scifi. Medieval culture? Fantasy.
An author once wrote an intro to some short story. The story is part of a much larger futuristic scifi universe in which people have developed telepathy and other things through genetic means. And the specific short story was the first one he wanted to publish, and it was about a specific planet in that world, in which the whole story is basically a telepath coming into town and interacting with the population.
And the publisher returned the note that this wasn't scifi, it was fantasy. Because of course he did - stripped of the broader futuristic setting that the story takes place in, it's just a story of a wizard coming into town. Never mind that there are solid science fiction explanations for the "magic" - you don't get that in the short story.
Sure, but my point being that saying SF/Fantasy contains elements that aren't possible is a too restrictive constraint - a whole lot of SF would fall outside of that category.
While Tau Zero that was mentioned elsewhere is believed to not match the laws of nature now, the science the entire plot rests on was considered scientifically plausible at the time it was written.
It was speculative, but it explicitly did not set out to make up a world in which some scientific law is different.
In other words, that isn't a defining factor of SF.
The speculative nature of it is closer to it - hence the shared label of speculative fiction often used to group SF and fantasy.
Which, let's be fair - most science fiction does to some degree.
Even the "hard" sci-fi tends to comprise of the author's one area of expertise or hyperfixation while everything else is nonsense. You'll have descriptions in intricate detail of how the spacecraft are engineered down to the self-sealing stembolts, but biology is basically magic.
A common sf theme is "here is this change to the laws of physics, what would our universe then look like". Eg Arrival (and the story it's based on), tons of books by Egan, any book with FTL.
But, to be fair, that wasn't the kind of critique it was talking about. If your critique guns is moral, strategic, etc, then yes, you can do it without actually trying out guns. If your critique is that guns physically don't work, don't actually do the thing they are claimed to do, then some hands-on testing would quickly dispel that notion.
The article is talking about those kinds of critiques, ones of the "AI doesn't work" variety, not "AI is harmful".
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