Uehreka

No. If a CEO makes self-serving comments that are in their interests, but not the company’s interests, that could be fiduciary misconduct. With that being said, CEOs have a fair amount of latitude in what they can say, since it’s difficult to tell what the “optimal” thing to say at any point would be (see: Tim Cook telling an activist investor to “get out of the stock” if he didn’t like Apple’s environmental initiatives).

The idea that CEOs’ hands are tied, and that they are kept on some sort of short legal leash, is largely (though not entirely) a fiction.

Man, that quote is gonna suck when it gets read out in the courtroom. Even with the FBI in the shambles it’s in under Kash Patel, if you’re dumb enough to say something like that on the record, you’re definitely not smart enough to evade capture.

How can you prove provenance if anyone can use it? The point of SynthID is that Apple makes the hardware and OS and can reliably insert the watermark/signature between when the camera takes the photo and when it becomes available to any 3rd party software.

Because they have this pathway only they can access, their key and signature can be trusted. I’m not gonna trust Joe Schmoe’s signature that “No I didn’t use AI” unless I already trust Joe Schmoe (and in which case, he doesn’t need a watermark, I’ll just believe him when he says it).

What’s novel is how fast and cheap Jev is while maintaining quality. If they’re trying to say they made the same thing, that is likely incorrect. Getting the same result 100x faster is in fact a breakthrough technology.

> Who cares how the LLM learned to hack things? Doesn't really change the facts of what happened.

Seems like a pretty clear and succinct argument. If your only counter is to complain about tone, you’re losing.

> We sold out for crypto scams and toxic social media and surveillance capitalism. We deserve zero sympathy.

“We”? I didn’t work on any of those things, in fact many of us didn’t. Those of us living outside the bay area making under $200k/yr (likely the majority of HN, definitely the vast majority of the industry) have no responsibility to shoulder the blame for the people who got rich doing that stuff.

> (I definitely don't!)

I mean I wouldn't either if I'd managed to score website.com

Whether the terms are worth shit doesn't matter. If they're training on data from paying customers who have requested otherwise and it gets out (which it would, eventually), SAP, Accenture, Deloitte and other huge companies with well-funded legal teams would nuke them from orbit. This is a different area of law from the copyright stuff, different rules/norms/expectations/consequences apply.

> The 'death' being discussed here means that JavaScript becomes the substrate, a state where you don't use it directly, but it's everywhere. And that has truly come to pass.

Not sure what timeline you’re living in, but people absolutely still write tons of JS, and WebAssembly has yet to take over as a commonly used runtime for web applications. You can definitely find examples of companies building on it, but don’t mistake that for the kind of sea change Gary was describing here.

That then leads to a cat and mouse chase, and in the end the big corporations will win by forcing you to tie your real identity to your shopping identity, which won’t turn off enough consumers to meaningfully impact the bottom line.

After 5.1, we haven’t seen a -codex-max model, presumably because the benefits of the special training gpt-5.1-codex-max got to improve long context work filtered into gpt-5.2-codex, making the variant no longer necessary (my personal experience accords with this). I’ve been using gpt-5.4 in Codex since it came out, it’s been great. I’ve never back-to-back tested a version against its -codex variant to figure out what the qualitative difference is (this would take a long time to get a really solid answer), but I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point the general-purpose model no longer needs whatever extra training the -codex model gets and they just stop releasing them.

I thought it was weird that for almost the entire 5.3 generation we only had a -codex model, I presume in that case they were seeing the massive AI coding wave this winter and were laser focused on just that for a couple months. Maybe someday someone will actually explain all of this.

They hate it because no one is providing them with a credible thesis for how we get from working jobs we hate to the sort of “free from labor” utopia you envision.

Like, my aunt just lost the job she had for 33 years working at an insurance company. The company claims it is because of AI (whether companies lie about this sometimes is immaterial, it is sometimes true and becoming more true every month). She’s smart, but at age 60 I do think she’ll have a hard time shifting to a totally different knowledge work paradigm to keep up with 20-something AI natives.

What do we tell people in this position? That they should be happy? That UBI is coming? My aunt has bills to pay now, UBI is currently not in the Overton Window of US politics, and is totally off the table for Republicans (who have the white house through at least 2028).

I’m personally very excited about AI, but the lack of seriousness with which I see tech people talk about these issues is frustrating. If we can’t tell people a believable story where they don’t get screwed, they will decide (totally rationally from their perspective) that this needs to stop.

I never understand these critiques. If something is useful and you’re selling it, does that mean any technical document describing its usefulness becomes marketing?

I guess maybe, but then do those documents lose value as technical documents? Not necessarily at all, so I don’t see the point. How are you supposed to describe a useful technical thing to users?

VS Code wouldn’t have won the mid-2010s editor wars if it was closed source (note that VS Code has not helped MS ramp people up to VS itself). The winner of that war was always going to be an open source editor, it was just Microsoft whose concept won out. Closed source editors like Coda failed to gain traction and even Sublime Text fell eventually.

If MS ever decided to discontinue VS Code or relicense it, there would be blood in the water. I guarantee you there would be multiple compelling competitors in under a year and probably a new open source winner with consolidation in 5.

So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).

If you’re concerned about the economic impact, then whether a model is AGI or not doesn’t matter. It really is more of a philosophical thing.

There’s no “gap that becomes truly zero” at which point special consequences happen. By the time we achieve AGI, the lesser forms of AI will likely have replaced a lot of human knowledge labor through the exact “brute-force” methods Chollet is trying to factor out (which is why many people are saying that doing so is unproductive).

AGI is like an event horizon: It does mean something, it is a point in space, but you don’t notice yourself going through it, the curvature smoothly increases through it.

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text…

Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do). Really elegant code is cool to read, but many tools I use daily are closed source, so I have no idea if their code is elegant or not. I only care if it works.

OK sure, but you’d better hope Claude Code gets it right on the first try, or that’s $200 down the drain. Also, what if the detection mechanism involves a challenge-response that happens once a week? Or randomly a couple times a month? Or after 15 minutes of use from a new public IP? Or arbitrarily if you ask it to code something with a particular topic?

There are lots of ways they could be doing this. And remember again, if they get you, they don’t have to tell you how they got you (so you might not be able to even glean information in return for the $200 you’d be losing).

Sure the internet has hundreds of thousands of super smart coders, but the subset who are willing to throw money and credit cards down the drain in order to maintain a circumvention strategy for something like this is pretty low. I’m sure a few people will figure it out, but they won’t want to tell anyone lest Anthropic nerf their workaround, so I doubt that exploits of this will become widespread.

And if you’re Anthropic, that’s probably good enough.

> how can they even enforce this?

Many ways, and they’re under no obligation to play fair and tell you which way they’re using at any given time. They’ve said what the rules are, they’ve said they’ll ban you if they catch you.

So let’s say they enforce it by adding an extra nonstandard challenge-response handshake at the beginning of the exchange, which generates a token which they’ll expect on all requests going forward. You decompile the minified JS code, figure out the protocol, try it from your own code but accidentally mess up a small detail (you didn’t realize the nonce has a special suffix). Detected. Banned.

You’ll need a new credit card to open a new account and try again. Better get the protocol right on the first try this time, because debugging is going to get expensive.

Let’s say you get frustrated and post on Twitter about what you know so far. If you share info, they’ll probably see it eventually and change their method. They’ll probably change it once a month anyway and see who they catch that way (and presumably add a minimum Claude Code version needed to reach their servers).

They’ve got hundreds of super smart coders and one of the most powerful AI models, they can do this all day.

Speaking as a fellow job-displacement-worrier, I don’t think people have answers. But contrary to what a lot of people say, there is a ton of utility in pointing out a problem without having a solution. In this case, I think a lot of people who might have good ideas are currently under the mistaken impression that this isn’t a problem.

To the extent that I’ve heard people propose solutions, many of them have pretty big flaws:

- Retraining - AI will likely swoop in quickly and automate many of the brand new jobs it creates. Also retraining has a bit of a messy history, it was pretty ineffective at stopping the bleeding when large numbers of manufacturing jobs were offshored/automated in the past.

- “Make work” programs - I think these are pretty silly on the face of it, although something like this might be mecessary in the really short term if there’s very sudden massive job loss and we haven’t figured out a solution.

- Universal Basic Income - Probably the best system I’ve heard anyone propose. However there are 3 huge issues: 1 - politically this is a huge no-go at the moment (after watching the massive Covid stimulus happen in 2020 I have a sliver of hope, but not much). 2 - Even a pretty good UBI probably wouldn’t be enough to cushion the landing for people who make a lot right now and have made financial decisions (number of kids, purchasing a house, etc) on the basis of their current salary. 3 - Even if this happens in America (presumably redistributing the wealth accruing to American AI companies) it would leave non-Americans out in the cold, and we currently have no globally powerful institution with the trust and capability to manage a worldwide UBI.

There are people in this thread saying tens of billions isn't that much in the long term (I'd agree) but there's a bigger point that comes into play whatever the price: The universe doesn't care if exploring it is expensive. You can't make a "that's not sustainable" argument to the universe and have it meet you half way. And that's who you're arguing against: not the scientists, the universe. The scientists don't decide how expensive future discoveries will be.

Last night I tried out Opus 4.6 on a personal project involving animating in Gaussian Splats where the final result is output as a video.

In the past, AI coding agents could usually reason about the code well enough that they had a good chance of success, but I’d have to manually test since they were bad at “seeing” the output and characterizing it in a way that allowed them to debug if things went wrong, and they would never ever check visual outputs unless I forced them to (probably because it didn’t work well during RL training).

Opus 4.6 correctly reasoned (on its own, I didn’t even think to prompt this) that it could “test” the output by grabbing the first, middle and last frame, and observing that the first frame should be empty, the middle frame half full of details, and the final frame resembling the input image. That alone wouldn’t have impressed me that much, but it actually found and fixed a bug based on visual observation of a blurry final frame (we hadn’t run the NeRF training for enough iterations).

In a sense this is an incremental improvement in the model’s capabilities. But in terms of what I can now use this model for, it’s huge. Previous models struggled at tokenizing/interpreting images beyond describing the contents in semantic terms, so they couldn’t iterate based on visual feedback when the contents were abstract or broken in an unusual way. The fact that they can do this now means I can set them on tasks like this unaided and have a reasonable probability that they’ll be able to troubleshoot their own issues.

I understand your exhaustion at all the breathless enthusiasm, but every new models radically changes the game for another subset of users/tasks. You’re going to keep hearing that counterargument for a long time, and the worst part is, it’s going to be true even if it’s annoying.

> Oddly none of the anti-‘s were musicians themselves.

It is clearly plain to anyone who is a musician or hangs out with a lot of musicians that the independent music world is livid about this stuff. Everyone I’ve talked to, from acoustic songwriters to metal singers to circuit-bending pedalheads are united in their absolute hatred of this technology.

(Yes, follow-up commenter, I’ve seen the Timbaland interview)

The answer to “which coding agent should we standardise on?” is really simple: Don’t.

The tradeoffs of the different models are complicated and difficult to wrap your head around, and if you have the resources to try a bunch and form a conclusion, next week new models will come out and change the equation in small but difficult-to-understand ways again.

The solution is to ask your engineers which models they like, get them access to as many of those as you can, and expect their preferences to change and price that in.

“But I don’t have the budget to buy subscriptions to all the models my engineers want! And there are compliance issues with some of them!”

Note that I didn’t say you have to get access to all of them: as many as you can. And try to push the envelope as much as possible. Get creative. Perhaps give engineers a $200/mo AI coding budget and let them pick from a selection of subscriptions. You’re going to have different engineers using different AI coding tools, and if you refuse to let them, your competitors will.

Maybe in the future “standardizing on one coding agent” will be a thing that makes sense. But that time is not now.

How have you been here 12 years and not noticed where and how often the username tptacek comes up?

OpenClaw uses Opus 4.5, but was written by Codex. Pete Steinberger has been pretty a pretty hardcore Codex fan since he switched off Claude Code back in September-ish. I think he just felt Claude would make a better basis for an assistant even if he doesn’t like working with it on code.

What’s weird though is that modern OSes often auto-capitalize the first letter of a sentence, so it actually takes more effort to deliberately type in all-lowercase.

So I get that stablecoins are less volatile than normal crypto, which makes them more acceptable as a currency for funding. But what is it about them that takes them from “acceptable” to “appealing”? Aren’t they basically just “USD but with extra steps”?

> Claude Opus 4.5 by far is the most capable development model.

At the moment I have a personal Claude Max subscription and ChatGPT Enterprise for Codex at work. Using both, I feel pretty definitively that gpt-5.2-codex is strictly superior to Opus 4.5. When I use Opus 4.5 I’m still constantly dealing with it cutting corners, misinterpreting my intentions and stopping when it isn’t actually done. When I switched to Codex for work a few months ago all of those problems went away.

I got the personal subscription this month to try out Gas Town and see how Opus 4.5 does on various tasks, and there are definitely features of CC that I miss with Codex CLI (I can’t believe they still don’t have hooks), but I’ve cancelled the subscription and won’t renew it at the end of this month unless they drop a model that really brings them up to where gpt-5.2-codex is at.

I frequently push back on people being hair-trigger about calling things AI, but even I’ve gotta admit, that’s exactly what Claude code says if you ask it to do a security review and it finds something. I’ve seen this numerous times.

I couldn’t find it easily, what age range is this intended for? The images make it seem elementary-school-ish, but I’m not sure if elementary school kids have the foundations for interpreting scatterplots, let alone scatterplots with logarithmic axes. I’ve been out of education for a while though, so maybe I’m misremembering.