davesque

Also known as, the tu quoque fallacy. Just because politicians in both parties have been doing this for decades doesn't mean that this administration is not especially hypocritical for doing it after whinging so much about free speech and free markets.

I'm finding it extremely hard not to have a cynical perspective on all of this. There's an idea that I've been mapping onto this whole this, which could be called something like effective knowledge. Regular old knowledge is just information, or access to information. Effective knowledge is the integration of all that information into an understanding that can be acted upon. That requires things like time, money, and involves the usual socioeconomic hurdles that have separated people into groups like "laborers" and "knowledge workers". Sure, in theory "anyone" could read textbooks and learn, but only a select few have the time, money, mentors in their lives, and so forth to really do that.

The rise in capability of LLMs over the past year has basically removed a lot of these boundaries for people. Learning, building, and experimenting is a lot easier when you have a capable partner like Claude to help you along the way. Claude doesn't always get everything right, and you have to be a skeptic, but it's a lot better than nothing.

When I see the government restricting access to LLMs (or Anthropic as they were doing with Mythos before the whole Fable debacle), I basically just see the same old pattern of the ruling class moving to protect their advantage by keeping the great masses in ignorance. Broadening access to LLMs (i.e. effective knowledge) would put everyone on a more level playing field. But we can't have that, because politics, nations, the economy, blah blah reasons reasons. Guess utopia will just have to wait a bit longer.

But then again, this feels a lot like cryptography export controls. Those controls are in place, but I doubt anyone really thinks they work or make much of a difference. Software is not like nuclear weapons, and a data center is a much smaller lift than a Uranium enrichment facility. So maybe this is just a temporary roadblock. But let me tell you, I sure am ready for it to feel more like the government is working for (not against) the people.

Kind of highlights how ridiculous their notion of safety is in this case. By this measure, I guess making the model "safe" means making it play dumb and intentionally ignore security bugs that it notices in the code? And what will the eventual legality of this look like? "Yes, your honor, we allege that this AI system that was sold to us willingly and knowingly ignored a critical security vulnerability in our software system, thereby leading us to be hacked and causing our business to fold."

It's exactly the same problem as backdoors in crypto systems. Criminals will find the crypto that isn't broken and use it regardless (or make it for themselves), while the rest of us losers are stuck with the broken version that we're allowed to use.

On this issue of cyber security, it seems better if authorities just start acting like the cat is out of the bag instead of pretending like it isn't. ASI is basically here now, so what are we going to do about it? Let's not bother pretending otherwise.

On another note, I doubt this was anything other than a vindictive administration enacting revenge on a party that refused them. We all know the Trump admin's priorities.

And the US gov could pull the rug out from under our business at any time? That's confidence inspiring?

I like to think that the long arc of history bends towards greater access to knowledge and intelligence. I mean, isn't that what we all want? To be collectively less ignorant and more aware of how the world works? But I guess that's not what the US gov wants. Crazy times, truly. The mask is really coming off lately.

And they probably don't enforce those restrictions within their own company would be my guess.

Honestly, this is a larger portion than I would have expected.

I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but I've definitely had Claude refuse to work on sessions that were touched by other models. Some kind of integrity check failure. Resetting the session back to the point before I used the other model fixed the problem.

It feels telling that it reads like university course guidelines.

So then the Rust maintainers are going to give you an F on your report card?

> The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters.

Is it even though? Quantization and speculative decoding are improving the local AI story by leaps and bounds every month.

What I would buy: a local AI focused laptop with a built-in, powerful TPU. And it would have to open its hardware interface so that I could actually do what I wanted to do with it.

One question jumps out at me: just because a string of text happens to be a good compressed representation (in the autoencoder) of a model's internal activation, does that necessarily mean the text explains that activation in the context of the model? I want to take a look at what they released a bit more closely. Maybe there's a way that they answer this question?

Pretty neat work either way.

Yeah AI is the perfect scapegoat for layoffs recently to soften the impact on stock price and investor confidence. Coinbase is obviously doing layoffs because they are strongly tethered to a stock market that is rattled by political conflict and economic uncertainty.

Stockton Rush trusted his submarine with his own life.

DS9 is also great. I don't go through it as often but it's definitely in rotation.

There are two shows I still watch from start to finish every few years: The X-Files and Star Trek: TNG

Wow I've never disagreed harder with an HN comment in my entire life. Counting Crows were a single band that got some radio time in the early 90s. Calling them the big megastars during '96-'99 makes you sound like you weren't alive then. That statement just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. It's like a narrow-minded European claiming that everyone in the US just eats nothing but hot dogs. Timeless albums from that era:

- Odeley (Beck '96)

- Aenima (Tool '96)

- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)

- Homogenic (Bjork '97)

- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)

- Stankonia (Outkast '99)

- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)

You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.

Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.

I think the disallowing usage part was a great idea. I'd rather that Claude works well without getting DDOS'd. But merely mentioning OpenClaw causing session termination and extra charges? That's censorship. Also pretending not to know what OpenClaw is.

It's all just very weird and creepy.

A lot of the comments here are reacting to the censorship aspect, which is obviously an important point. But the more interesting subtext to me is that I feel like this gives insight into the situation within the company. I'm assuming they wouldn't do something like this unless the recent load issues (mostly driven by OpenClaw usage) were seen as an existential threat. So I'm guessing that's how the leadership views their current situation. Between OpenClaw and their (probably inaccurate) capacity planning, they simply can't onboard any more consumer users. In other words, things are going to get worse before they get better. Anthropic has taken drastic measures because their service is about to implode.

The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped. They also seem strangely oblivious to this side of things.

Their approach has also been bizarrely chaotic. Banning then restoring OpenClaw usage. Removing Claude Code from the Pro plan, then re-enabling it and claiming it was an A/B test. Honestly my read is that Dario has a weak leadership style within the company where he either doesn't give enough specific guidance to his reports or overreaches with reactionary instructions.

Something discussed in the article, but absent in the diagnosis of the final paragraph: the unique phenomenon of Donald Trump in American life. To half the country (including me), he's the worst leader in the country's history. Even if a person has faith in humanity, they may still feel like they are swimming against the man's personal tide of anger and bad judgement. Things might be great if it weren't for the disastrous tariff policy and Iran war, which have needlessly crippled the economy. As long as a person like him is in charge, it feels like we're always taking two steps forward and twenty steps back, and for no good reason. To the other half, Trump rode in atop a wave of grievance, so even to those who like him, he's sold them the notion that their society is on the brink of collapse (because Democrats, leftists, etc.). Overall, the sum effect of his presence has been to shift the entire national culture (and even the world's culture) towards knee-jerk rage and resentment, in accord with his behavior and personality.

> Even in the 90s boulder was largely empty

Uh, no it wasn't? I was living there and continued living there for the next 30 years. It always felt about as dense to me as it did back then.

This wasn't some kind of mansion. It was a 1300 square foot house. I guess I'm aiming too high then while making 4x his salary? And people have been whining about this same problem for decades so nothing to be done about it?

Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did and can't even dream of buying the same house.

So then why expect that you're making the world safer by limiting the capability that your vendor locked customers have access to while attackers will go find the best de-censored model that works for them, wherever they can find it?

> We stated that we would keep Claude Mythos Preview’s release limited and test new cyber safeguards on less capable models first. Opus 4.7 is the first such model: its cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those of Mythos Preview (indeed, during its training we experimented with efforts to differentially reduce these capabilities). We are releasing Opus 4.7 with safeguards that automatically detect and block requests that indicate prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses.

It feels like this is a losing strategy. Claude should be developing secure software and also properly advising on how to do so. The goals of censoring cyber security knowledge and also enabling the development of secure software are fundamentally in conflict. Also, unless all AI vendors take this approach, it's not going to have much of an effect in the world in general. Seems pretty naive of them to see this as a viable strategy. I think they're going to have to give up on this eventually.

Thanks for responding!

> When we speak of bugs in a verified software system, I think it's fair to consider the entire binary a fair target.

Yeah, I would actually agree. We wouldn't want to advertise that a system is formally verified in some way if that creates a false sense of security. I was just pointing out that, by my reading, the title appears to suggest that the core mechanism of the Lean proof is somehow flawed. When I read the title, I immediately thought, "Oooh. Looks like someone demonstrated a flaw in the proof. Neat." But that's not what is shown in the article. Just feels a bit misleading is all.

Am I reading the article wrong? It appears that the author did not test the claims of the proof. Wouldn't a "bug" in this case mean she found an input that did not survive a round trip through the compression algorithm?

Update: Actually, I guess this may have been her point: "The two bugs that were found both sat outside the boundary of what the proofs cover." So then I guess the title might be a bit click baity.

Bud. Put the keyboard down and relax. I have no idea what you're talking about. You've extrapolated all this just from what I wrote?

> Are you arguing that because the authors knew the pattern they were documenting was unflattering, the piece is somehow compromised?

Uh, no? Lol, I'm on your side, bud. Put away the pitchfork. I thought it was a really good and fair article. I am not the adversary you're looking for.