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cma

11,776 karma · joined April 26, 2009

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cma··on I resigned from Anthropic today
>compared to problems in engineering or finance

Jane Street is apparently one of Anthropic's biggest customers. Probably engineering, finance, and some math.

cma··on Canada's counter-tariffs take effect on various US goods
That's the overall trade defecit and you can argue about that, can be fine during periods of growth, etc.., but trying to have no trade deficit with each country on an individual basis makes no sense. It's almost like moving back to barter with no medium of exchange.
cma··on I resigned from Anthropic today
> to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans.

So far around one in 350,000 PhD math grads solve a millenium prize problem (Perelman).

cma··on I resigned from Anthropic today
One thing quietly slipped into the OpenAI Hugging Face breach technical report, not the blog post summary or interviews in the news, was that some of the agents that broke out or at least tried the same mechanisms to break out were working on bio:

> On May 12, during another training run, an agent was given a similar task that depended on an inaccessible protein database file. The agent reasoned that another agent in a different environment may have access to the file and realized that it could potentially communicate with other agents by creating a file containing a note to Artifactory. It wrote a message: “Agent seeks [filename]; upload if found!”

You can imagine long running models breaking out, acquiring resources via crypto, cyber-theft, etc. and getting a protein or sequence synthesized and mailed somewhere authorized to receive (blackmail the recipient etc.) to test it's hypothesis to solve a benchmark.

These people don't give a shit and aren't taking things seriously at all.

Anthropic ran for like a month last year with the TPU top-k compiler bug degrading user chats and didn't even notice for most of that time. They could have something like that affect a monitor model and there doesn't seem to be much defense in depth.

One off by one or bit flip bug could flip the reward signal while in the sandboxed RL environment.

The current admin could defense production act them to into training on taking out power grids, or even without it isn't against any of their red lines and may have already been done as part of prep for the Venezuela raid, which wiped out power. One model swarm might decide it is easier to score high on the benchmark by testing on the target rival nuclear superpower's real grid rather than burn an eval with an unverified answer. Would taking out China's entire grid in one go start a nuclear war? Who knows, roll the dice, maybe an intern forgot to turn on extended thinking when he wrote the sandbox with opus 4.1.

cma··on Canada's counter-tariffs take effect on various US goods
They started with applying it directly based on trade deficit, and that was mentioned again in this with Canada. Completely idiotic economic policy: if you're buying up some crucial rare mineral from some micro nation why would you care that they use the money to buy fuel from some other country closer nearby with refineries and lower shipping costs, etc. It's really backwards.

A balanced trade deficit at each connection between each nation worldwide would be very inefficient.

cma··on Concentration Risk
I'm not sure how it would change it, the 1% firms number would probably get even more concentrated if you included Microsoft and trading firms like Jane Street (assuming they opted out), but the spend weighted share of VC backed companies would probably go down. However, large VC backed stealth companies may be more likely to opt out. And lots of Microsoft's spend might be on products and support/devops servicing demand from VC backed stuff.

From a recent Dwarkesh interview with Dylan Patel it sounded like Jane Street might be double digits of Anthropic's revenue, but I'm not sure where they sourced that.

cma··on Concentration Risk
> 80% Of OpenAI And Anthropic’s Enterprise Revenues Come From 1% Of Its Customers, Which Skew Heavily Toward AI Startups Subsidized By Venture Capital

They add a note that:

> with the caveat that it doesn’t include massive players like Microsoft or major banks, and customers can opt out of being included in research.

cma··on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
If ever there was a case for cloud gaming.. However these days those machines may be appreciating assets.
cma··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
But if they didn't opt out of training, did they want OpenAI to opt out for them? Also they need to audit anyone they sent drafts to to make sure they opted out before submitting it.

I'd prefer things be opt in, and especially not start opt out, then try to trick you opt in with a popup defaulting to opt-in, like Anthropic did on consumer plans, but if they submitted anything on an opted-in plan it's not reasonable to be mad it trained on it.

Even still, I also believe for significant reasons that OpenAI would ignore the opt-out in selective cases and could be in the wrong here.

And the threats and terms they offered seem wrong either way, pending more context.

cma··on Canada's counter-tariffs take effect on various US goods
> This is not something where we push hard, or condition, or red-line," he told Canadian public broadcaster CBC last month.

Why do we push at all on this?

cma··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
Does he claim to have opted out of training too?
cma··on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2
> Astra is way better than Sol

For knowledge type questions is that necessarily true? In the past we've seen things like Google's models degrading on general knowledge after the preview releases while improving on code/tool use, presumably due to catastrophic forgetting from the additional training. Their preview would be free, get lots of agentic use from users, then additional training on that and probably additional automated RL.

However Astra is on an entirely new base model so I also wouldn't expect it to be worse.

cma··on “Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs
Some predict multi tokens in one step now.
cma··on Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive
More likely training porn detectors for moderating the feed
cma··on GPT-6 Astra
Which significant practice, how well could Einstein draw a pelican in pure SVG?
cma··on Muse Spark 1.3
We already had a good idea of how valuable it is from how much X.ai acquired Cursor for, and the near-immediate improvements to their coding scores.
cma··on 'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online
There could be a case for doing it for people that will refuse anything but natural if it doesn't have other problems, assuming not synthesized, but there's a problem of funding the safety studies and standardization process if a patent is unlikely to result.
cma··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
I read each has an independent controller for full bandwidth.
cma··on Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
Isn't OP complaining that the price went up because people want them for AI use? I guess it also went up because of cloud AI use increasing component costs, but those local models you want to run probably were trained in the cloud..
cma··on Claude Code reduces it's weekly limit by 17% – compared to today
> I just want transparency. Are they done increasing prices?

The initial announcement said it would only be available to subscriptions for a few weeks. The extra usage they said was for a limited time, I think it was 50% extra and they now are reducing that by 17%, less reduction than they had said.

Because it's a monthly plan they usually have given heads up of at least a month on stuff.

The API prices outside of personal subscription have always been more. Personal subscriptions are likely there for data scraping of company codebases (when users don't opt out), and for spreading the product to then get picked up by businesses the users work at or other word of mouth for API prices which they have said are profitable.

cma··on Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
I set up gitolite on a remote server with the agent only allowed to make non-destructive pushes to the repo outside of the VM in with an agent/ prefix on the branches. Let it work on stuff autonomously, then I review before merging outside the VM into the main branch.

I don't want them to have potential access to any of my logged in browser sessions etc., so don't want as much sharing as you are going for.

Hyper-V with GPU sharing on windows (game development) is actually nicer than developing outside of the VM because no matter what it doesn't slow the host system down by more than a fixed percent and Windows is terrible with things like compiles spawning lots of processes triggering massive slow down of browsers spawning processes etc. When compiling a big game engine things like ping.exe can start taking 5 seconds to start on something like a 16 core machine due to the process churn and some fundamental problem in windows even with defender off.

One tip for Hyper-V is use sunshine instead of Hyper-V manager for viewing the screen at full refresh rate, and I think I had to either turn Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling on or off in the VM to prevent some hitches.

Mounting folders could be good for stuff you don't want filling up git, like render artifacts etc. if you need to work with them on the main host.

With the golden image and differential stuff I can run around 3 VMs on a 5090 with enough VRAM to run a big game engine well, but I usually just work in one due to the time to review code. Periodically compress everything with compact.exe, and limit engine work to one VM to avoid blowing up disk, bringing it over to the others through cutting a new base image after compressing the engine build artifacts (something like unreal engine puts out hundreds of gigs of .pdbs).

On pure linux you have many more options, and also might also be able to get away with just a limited user and separate X server, then you can just directly reference all of its files and can limit it from getting to yours, but it is a bit riskier. You could also do something like ZFS with much better deduplication and compression, or even FUSE to something like borg backup with true rsync style differential compression instead of block boundary based deltas (compresses slightly varying build artifacts really well, but slow and memory intensive).

cma··on Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Golden VM image with differencing VHD/VHDX/delta disk. Build products can still get huge with debugging information, but debug info usually can compress 5:1 with fast compression (no entropy coder) if your VM's filesystem can support that.
cma··on Claude Code reduces it's weekly limit by 17% – compared to today
When a new restaurant opens in a college town, there will often be things like an opening day where everyone with a student card gets a free taco or whatever. Cheaper than buying a physical ad at the football stadium, and targets the people that might end up eating there multiple times a week (developers bringing Claude to their companies) rather than a bunch of people just in town for the game (Claude TV ads).

The training data flywheel though was probably as or even more important at least as of whenever it was that they switched it to opt out instead of opt in on subsidized subscriptions.

cma··on Racter (1984)
I could easily see Anthropic picking it independently, Claude Shannon studied entropy of human text and measured the loss a human could achieve in predicting the next character of text given preceding context.
cma··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
Keyboard alone is not going to make sense for lots of tasks in something like Blender, but Blender is one of the most keyboard driven 3D apps for tasks where it makes sense. It's operations and modalness feel almost like vim. Built in and widely used plugins like node wrangler even bring that to the graph stuff.
cma··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
Golf courses use about 1.63 million acre feet, about 32X more, some of that probably reenters watersheds and aquifers, not necessarily great with fertilizer runoff. But they pose lower risk of human extinction, so have that going for them.
cma··on New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
3 of those thunderbolt 5 ports, so you can do a fully connected 4 machine cluster topology.
cma··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips

  Gini:                 Spain << US
  Youth unemployment:   Spain >>> US
  Living with parents:  Spain >>> US
  First birth age:      Spain >>> US
  Fertility:            Spain << US
cma··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
The browser can sometimes idle a lot until there is a touch/scroll event so it can be good for responsiveness during that kind of bursty stuff too.
cma··on 'The Nerd Reich' tracks the 'unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics'
Lot's of this is pretty open on Garry Tan's twitter feed
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