adriand

> After the LK-99 debacle

"Debacle"? That was the most fun I've had on the Internet in years. When's the last time so many people engaged in so many arguments about materials science and electromagnetism? Sometime in the 1800s?

We don’t need to regulate “computation”, we need to regulate artificial intelligence. The “proposal” you outlined is a straw man, I’m not opposed to open research, and I have no idea who you are referring to by “our former employees”. But yes, we should be regulating this technology like we regulate nuclear technology.

Jensen Huang does not want regulation, but in his interview with Ezra Klein he said AI will let us “know anything” and “do anything”. Do we actually want any random person to be able to “do anything”? I remember when the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo attacked the Tokyo subway with sarin. Do we want doomsday cults to be able to “know anything” and “do anything” so that instead of releasing sarin, they release a genetically modified strain of smallpox?

This is not a hypothetical risk, this is an actual, present danger. And good luck trying to vaccinate yourself against an engineered superflu using a Chinese open weight model.

This completely ignores the world we are creating here. We are setting ourselves up for a massive cyber disaster. The safeguards on US models are insufficient but at least there are safeguards. The fact there are open weight models floating around that are capable of wrecking the economy is a genuine problem! One that Anthropic is doing us a service by warning us about.

When someone wielding a non-safeguarded model deletes the money in everyone’s bank account, I look forward to the HN comments claiming it’s an attempt by Anthropic to pull off regulatory capture.

Well, I've been sitting on Sequoia this whole time, because I decided to sit Tahoe out, based on what I heard on HN. Maybe I'll sit Golden Gate out too!

My friend, who is a mathematician, sent this in our group chat:

The title is a bit misleading. The variant with a smooth forcing was one of the four valid variants in the Clay formulation. It is interesting to solve it. It is still an interesting and impressive result. The no force version is also interesting and remains unsolved. It isn’t reasonable to just dismiss the proof on the grounds that 26 years later we claim it was never that interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen this attitude.

Let her rest in peace.

Ouch. Have a little compassion. It is not easy running a small business, even less so when you've got a baby FFS!

> "At 4 a.m., I was holding my pump on my lap and replying to this person, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it that way,'" she told me. "I was so into typing this message that I produced so much milk, it was dripping down my legs because I overflowed the pump."

Also, it's one thing to dislike AI to the point where it "kills the mood" (for you) when you see an AI-generated poster, so you stop visiting that particular coffee shop. It's something else entirely to threaten the business owner.

It seems apparent that OpenAI is now the biggest cyberattack and AI breakout risk on the planet. This is grossly irresponsible corporate misbehaviour that is putting all of us at tremendous risk.

And he drew a red line wrt the Pentagon's use of Anthropic's models for autonomous weapons and surveillance of American citizens, and he stood by it, even when the government took steps to materially damage the company. This required true courage. Name me another CEO, of any major American company, that has demonstrated this much fortitude.

This is true, although it’s true for most if not all developed societies. People read less and less. We live in a post-literate, hyper-visual era. I am not sure if short form video is effective at educating people on why we have public health and food inspection agencies, but I confess I’m not optimistic.

> Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.

Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.

"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."

> it requires €2850/month

Holy crap that’s a lot of money. That’s just for the privilege of living and working there? Or do you get citizenship benefits like healthcare etc? And what about taxes?

As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable.

The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.

Plentiful, near-free energy has other uses for food production, too: vertical farming, which is quite energy intensive, becomes feasible. Now you can grow tons of food on small plots of land, as well as year-round in cold climates. Desalination also becomes much more cost-effective. Now you can stop desertification, cultivate land that was previously too arid for crops, and so on. The possibilities for what we could do if we went all-in on solar in North America are super exciting, and we need to push on that narrative because the counter-narrative is the one that is winning right now, and it makes no sense.

> If the expectation is that AI is going to replace "knowledge workers" then the limit would be a darn perfect drawing. We are nowhere close to that.

What knowledge workers do you know that have excellent drawing skills? I worked in a design agency and for a couple of years, each week me and a few other people would attempt to sketch a member of our group: one person would be the model and sit still, and everyone else would draw her/him.

Let me tell you, if producing a convincing portrait was a prerequisite for being a knowledge worker, there would be 99% fewer knowledge workers.

Not the OP, but I’m doing a ton of it and it works great. I had to decide what to use for my startup and for a few years I’d stopped using Rails. I considered using full stack node/Typescript/etc but Rails just comes with so much stuff that makes it so easy to build things. Solid Queue is one of those things, my whole data process architecture is based on async jobs and it’s really cool to have something that is native to the platform and has no dependencies beyond Postgres which I’m already using anyway.

As someone who has never used sublime I don’t get the analogy, but what do you like about herdr? Is it worth using? I came across it along with hunk at the same time and I’ve been using hunk a bit but didn’t really see the appeal of herdr over just my usual batch of terminal windows.

I actually think the fact Claude has certain mannerisms is kind of to be expected, isn’t it? If you talked to the same person every day all day I’m sure you’d be quite attuned to their habits of speech. Thinking about a friend I talked to today, I can immediately think of some (“dude! I know!”).

I wonder how people would react if, rather than a consistent manner of communication, it was something different every day. One day it would be like talking to a 15-year-old who’s really into anime. The next day, a British gentleman. And so on. Would this be any better? It would probably be rather annoying and we’d just want Claude to go back to sounding like Claude.

None of these mitigations (although they’re good ideas) address what I think is the real issue here, which is that people don’t like AI. And why would they, when the dish being served by AI CEOs is job loss with a side of extinction risk.

I think many data centre opponents understand that being opposed to AI is not sufficient to halt a local project, so it is noise, water use and power consumption that they latch onto - although, in jurisdictions without plentiful water and clean power, those two reasons are quite valid.

In my own local community, there’s vocal opposition to a proposed data centre that is next to Lake Ontario, 500 metres from the nearest residential neighbourhood, on a brownfield site with 500 megawatts of clean power capacity. None of that makes a difference to those opposed.

> What would you like to have instead?

History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.

What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?

Go look at Messenger on the App Store and look at the “data linked to you” section. An app with that much surveillance baked in is surely not improving the world.

I think you are correct about the legislative push, because it’s clear that US AI companies can no longer live without it. However, it is not the case that this is Amodei’s fault. His push for regulation was clearly at least partly mitigated by a desire for this precise situation to be avoided! With an appropriate regulatory framework and a transparent, apolitical certification or review process, this kind of situation would not happen. Banning Fable is not “regulation”, it’s capricious retribution, and I believe it is the single most damaging thing that has happened to the US AI industry to date.

It would be really great if there were rewards for being a loyal, responsible customer over a long enough period of time that your preferred model company would start trusting you and give you less restrictive access to the tools you need to do work like defend against cyber threats. I noticed recently that after a year or so, Stripe now lets me do “instant payouts”, presumably because I now have a track record of responsible behaviour. AWS also does similar things, especially for things with abuse potential like SES.

I would really like to live in a world where the “good guys” have terrific tools and defenses at their disposal. Instead it seems like we are heading for a world of empowered bad actors and hobbled ordinary citizens.

On the plus side, it’s Friday night. Hopefully this is sorted out by Monday morning.

I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?

Wow - the writing in this is fantastic. This is genuinely hilarious!

What kind of reputation does ca-central-1 have? I’ve been using it and it seems quietly excellent. Knock on wood.

I think so, but that's also really great because I frequently run into the five hour caps, but very rarely use my entire weekly allotment. There are lots of situations where I do things like write the plan for all the work that has to get done, and then set a reminder to execute the plan after I get home, when I'm done making dinner (because e.g. my five hour cap ends at 6pm). Higher caps for the five hour period is a lot more convenient.

I went to Newfoundland and I went to a bar one night and met a guy from a small town along the coast and I literally couldn’t understand a single thing he said. He was apparently speaking English but it may have been Ancient Greek for all I was able to make out. The only way we could communicate was via the bartender, who would interpret what he said and tell me. He had no trouble understanding me. It kinda blew my mind.