alt Hacker NewsA very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy.
> Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]
I had a visceral reaction to these three words.
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I've done something similar to your formal garden map. It's work that no professional historian would ever do because the data entry would be such a slog for a relatively small reward. GPT reduced the task from "infeasible" to "annoying", and once I had the data transcribed I learned a few things, so I walked away happy. Whatever happens commercially, these models have been a real boon to hobby projects.
> I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.
Wait. Wait wait wait. Are we supposed to be giving them pep talks?
Anytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves
> thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast
I've been wondering what exactly the point is for being the meat proxy who pays for these things. I mean, obviously there's personal satisfaction and maybe some glory. And there's the fact that someone has to be the first to do a thing.
But I've been thinking about it like a sort of lazy loading of knowledge. AI has brought us to a new frontier for some amount of undiscovered knowledge. Do we discover it for the sake of discovering it? I think for the most part we've been lazy loaders: we discover all kinds of stuff when we need to. Whether it's a war or a space race or chasing wealth. Then again, there's all kinds of academics who do it for the sake of doing it.
Not to be too negative, but as for p(utopia) you might need to weight in the mass murder records set by every other utopian movement in the past 200 years. p(actual_utopia) is like zero and p(utopia_becomes_doom) is at about 1.
Confusion is because people are using the tool to get answers. Its how the edu systems trains most people in tool use. Heres a saw and here is a block of wood. Do x y z and you get a table. But if you are interested in why the saw looks like it does or the entire process behind generating that block of wood, or why x y z instead if a b c good luck to you using the current edu system. You have to live in an extremely rich country, with surplus resource to entertain those exploration. This has now changed.
The answer the tool gives has never been the real reward. The real reward is the path taken through a complex landscape to get to Maxwells Equations for example. At the end of that story what we get is not just the equation but a map of the landscape explored. That map has larger influence and value than the equations or answers themselves. Because all future exploration find it super useful.
People are just learning they can start asking for maps rather than answers.
For what it's worth, people also felt this way about the printing press and the Internet (also books).
Information propagation mechanisms are often seen as malicious before they're commonplace. To be fair sometimes they are, but by and large humanity has benefitted from increasing the number of bits of information we can consume on a per second basis.
I too vacillate daily, sometimes even multiple times in a single day. It’s kind of nauseating and (for my brain type) crazy making
The model you use is not the model they use.
I have a very high p(doom \/ utopia) so pretty much feeling like I won’t have to worry about the future.
We have always been back
I don’t worry so much about AI wiping us out as much as I worry about whether I’m being gaslit into thinking these glorified autocorrect bots are more clever than they are.
I still don’t know the answer.
"Caveats, stated plainly"
You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago.
Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication is still pending."
arghhhhh
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-...