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Comment by Sephr | Hacker News Reader

I make privacy tooling and Fable 5 rejects the vast majority of my prompts to analyze and improve the software that I've written. It's bleak.

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Anthropic refused to let Fable analyze my own project's memory safety, the one thing I absolutely wanted it to do. Even Fable thought it was stupid.

Why is this surprising or a problem?! It's a model demo, & their reasoning is reasonable and fair. Why all this drama.

Some people find Anthropic's special blend of paternalism and random incompetence tiresome.

"I will push back and say" it's only paternalism if it's about helping the user's not harm themselves.

This is about societal impacts, not wanting their models to be used by some people against other people, as a weapon.

Because you're being allowed to ask and work only on topics that a certain company decides.

Local inference has never been so important as it is now.

Because most people in tech never took a philosophy course or an ethics course and think that tech is obviously a good for the world and that there are no downsides to advancing tech. So any efforts that try to apply ethics to it are overreaching, ignorant, and futile in the face of the good that is tech!

I like this take. Especially because one of the sibling comments framed Anthropic's stance as "paternalism." Trying to be ethical and to minimize harm, even at great expense to one's finances and reputation, is paternalistic apparently.

No — we’ve just taken Ethics 102 as well, so we understand good intentions don’t entail positive outcomes, therefore you may need to criticize or oppose people who state good intentions to bring about good outcomes.

Insulting and demeaning people for that, rather than engaging their arguments in good faith, is a breach of ethics.

I mean, if you take HN commenters to have the thoughtfulness and foresight of children, then the word kind of works.

Not any efforts.

But this one is certainly allowed to be a dumb effort, if it is.

Not all things that are called “ethical” or “safety” are worth doing.

Or... they just disagree with Anthropic's ethical stances and approach to applying them?

Or alternatively, it is plain and obvious that Anthropic is using ethics to justify business decisions.

So i have big news for you my friend as i'm not sure you understand such courses. Taking an ethics course won't make you a more ethical person.. and taking a philosophy course neither.

You're being too literal, they're saying people are not thinking with a philosophically interested mind, which is blatantly the case here, their point stands.

Tech demo + theres the ability to provide feedback right at the answer interface if using the UI.

Provide feedback in the negative, a brief explanation, and move on with your day. It will improve with feedback, not with whinging into the void.

Ironically making a stink about it online is likely to have a larger impact then using their dedicated feedback or support channels (which go to claude, not a person)

the feedback is for something mindless though, "we don't care about societal harms". I wonder the overlap between these commenters and tech maga people, eg crypto bros & Elon stans.

In this case, no overlap between me and tech maga / crypto bro / elon stan.

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