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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

Yeah just like if Volvo complained about automobile safety, imploring regulators to require safety belts, then one valid response would be the government just seizing all of Volvo's manufacturing equipment: problem solved!

You: "For the record I don’t support this theft of manufacturing equipment, but you cry wolf as a marketing tactic and this is what you get…"

Very wise. We're blessed to have you sitting above the fray where you can smugly approve of abuse of government power, which is much better and more superior than the simple-minded folks who merely approve of abuse of government power without the "I don't support this" caveat.

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I don’t think the seatbelt analogy holds up when you have people saying they’re working on the next Manhattan Project.

Also no need for ad-hominem remarks referring to me as smug. I’m not smug about it and as I said I don’t agree with it.

However to my original point can you provide an analogy that showcases a private entity in this country that has previously told the public they’re essentially working on something akin to a doomsday device, whereby the government simply took a laissez faire attitude to it?

To me this just feels like Silicon Valley wants to use awful optics to their advantage and it’s backfired in a very predictable way. We don’t live in a perfect libertarian society that many in the valley wish we did, we never have. Not to mention many of the valley’s most prominent libertarians have backed the current administration, which is not one that believes in the philosophy, just like their counterparts don’t either.

I used to work with lobbyists. Watching as these guys go from telling the public what they’re making is dangerous, needs guardrails, will displace huge amounts of service workers, etc. is woefully shortsighted and only forces the hands of politicians to do something as they represent a populace that has started to poll negatively about it and no longer trust it. They only have themselves to blame. If you want that perfect libertarian society, then a good start would be realizing that they need to win over the public that controls the giant entity that can ruin them, and then maybe their representatives won’t do such things.

Here’s to hoping this is a nothing burger and access is restored soon.

I don't recall Anthropic saying "Fable 5 is a doomsday device, here you go public!"

I actually explicitly recall them saying "Fable 5 is a model we've deemed safe enough for public use."

Has the government come to some alternative assessment? How? Using what assessment framework?

It's almost as if there actually isn't the regulatory framework that Anthropic has been asking for. What we have is completely arbitrary and opaque enforcement by an administration with an already-demonstrated appetite for capricious and selective enforcement against dozens of companies and individuals, and against this company in particular.

I don't want "that perfect libertarian society." Libertarianism is a farcical ideology and always has been, as proven by the Valley's famous "libertarians" bending themselves into pretzels for an actual autocrat, for personal gain.

I merely want a society of laws where we use our consensus-building tools to establish clear and uniform rules around private enterprise. The government declining to create clear and uniform rules and instead relying on totally opaque, selectively enforced, and often totally unexplained "rules" is actually very bad.

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