1,219 karma · joined January 28, 2019
How do you plan on keeping up with upstream changes from the API providers? I have implemented something similar, and the biggest issue I have faced with go is that providers don’t usually have sdk’s (compared to javascript and python), and there is work involved in staying up to date at each release.
I'd start with a slow rollout to friends, family, colleagues and even LinkedIn acquittances. You'd be surprised how many people are super eager to be the first to test your apps, even with a generic cold message like "hey, remember me? I built this cool app, wanna try it out if you have a minutes? I'll send you money to cover the fees."
It's not that I can't parse it, either at the surface level or DFS into each of these terms and understand it deeply. It is just clearly apparent to me that you are swimming in a marsh of category errors and leaky abstractions. This field has accumulated a lot of entropy over time. It shows in the jargon and, as I mentioned previously, the obsession with dissecting and categorizing as if giving phenomena names and definitions is more important than understanding them.
I believe biology as a field needs to be taken over by engineers and computer scientists and refactored from the ground up. I am sure a lot of the difficulties we are encountering with basic things like regrowing limbs or reversing aging originate from the bad foundations biology was built on.
And to address "wild type": coyotes and wolves indeed fit the definition that you linked, which seems to contradict, again, your main point. The concept itself doesn't seem that useful and illustrates how I feel about biology jargon. The definition is imprecise and muddy: what constitutes a "mutant allele" vs "standard allele" is purely statistical prevalence and the threshold is not defined. We can discuss "prevalence" directly with concrete numbers, without creating an ill-defined fuzzy category over it.
> once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability (sic).
Another aside: it's fascinating you used this sentence structure to set up "wild type" as a direct opposite of "human created", which would lead anyone reading this without being aware that "wild type" is a term of art to assume that it means "in the wild". This is not the gotcha you think it is...
They have a free tier plan for non-commercial usage and a very very good UX for just deploying your website.
Many companies start using Vercel for the convenience and, as they grow, they continue paying for it because migrating to a cheaper provider is inconvenient.
Fascinating. Not sure what gave you the idea I don’t believe in evolution or that I’m somehow promoting biblical creationism? Are you responding to the right comment?
> speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.
Neither coyotes nor wolves were created by human selection as far as I know. Dogs were. You can take dogs out of the equation if you want.
Coyote/wolf hybrids (coywolves) exist in the wild and challenge your definition. And I am talking about your original comment's definition "speciation is reproductive incompatibility", because I believe you backtracked a bit with the more vague "wild type incompatibility".
Besides, I don’t necessarily disagree that wolves, dogs and coyotes should be seen as the same “species”. I find this obsession with taxonomy completely useless and irrelevant. We all know there are biological clusters and the boundaries are fuzzy, but we can use simplified/imprecise models when communicating because it is more convenient.
> citation required
There's just not much to gain from the exercise and there are better things to spend your time on.
This is not necessarily true, even under a very strict definition of reproductive compatibility (offspring is itself not sterile, which excludes mules or ligers). For example, feral dogs, wolves and coyotes regularly mate and produce 100% viable offspring. You could argue that these are not really different species, but they are usually classified as such.
I’m definitely not coming to this from a “AI is useless” angle. I’ve been using these tools extensively over the past year and they are providing a massive productivity boost.
> How likely do you think this is? Do you think it is more likely than the other three I mentioned?
I won't write down probability estimates, because frankly, I have no idea. Unless you are yourself a decision-maker at Anthropic, which, from what I can infer, you aren't, both of us are speculating. However, I can try to address each of your explanations at face value, because I don't think any of them makes Anthropic look any better than the explanation I provided.
> (1) One possibility is they are having capacity and/or infrastructure problems so the model performance is degraded.
As far as I understand it, scaling issues would result in increased latency or requests being dropped, not model quality being lower. However, there is a very widespread rumor that Anthropic is routing traffic to quantized models during peak times to help decrease costs. Boris Cherny, Thariq Shihipar, and others have repeatedly denied this is happening [1]. I would be more concerned if this were the actual explanation, because as a user of the Claude Code Max plan and of the API, I have the expectation that each dollar I spend buys me access to the same model without opaque routing in the background.
> (2) Another possibility is that they are not as tuned to what customers want relative to what their engineers want.
There is actually a strong case for this: the high performance on the benchmarks relative to the qualitatively low performance reported on real-world tasks after launch. I suspect quite a bit of RL training was spent optimizing for beating those benchmarks, which resulted in overfitting the model on particular kinds of tasks. I'm not claiming this is nefarious in any way or that it is something only Anthropic is guilty of doing: these benchmarks are supposed to be a good representation of general software tasks, and using them as a training ground is expected.
> (3) It is also possible they have slowed their models down due to safety concerns. To be more specific, they are erring on the side of caution (which would be consistent with their press releases about safety concerns of Mythos).
This would be the most concerning to me. I don't want to get too deeply into a political/philosophical argument, but I am very much on the other side of the e/accy vs. P(doomy) debate, and I strongly believe that keeping these tools under the control of some council of enlightened elders who claim to know what is best for humanity is ultimately futile.
If the result of the behind-the-scenes "cerebration" is an actual effort to try and slow down AI development or access, I don't have much confidence in the future of Anthropic.
I agree that there are incentives other than pure profit maximization here (I don't want to get into "my friend at Anthropic told me such and such" games, but I also believe this is the case). I'm sure there is some tension between these objectives inside Anthropic, but what is interesting is that lower model quality and maximizing user engagement could, at least in principle, align with both constraints.
I said "it seems like". Obviously, I have no idea whether this is an intentional strategy or not and it could as well be a side effect of those things that you mentioned.
Models being "worse" is the perceived effect for the end user (subjectively, it seems like the price to achieve the same results on similar tasks with Opus has been steadily increasing). I am claiming that there is no incentive for Anthropic to address this issue because of their business model (maximize the amount of tokens spent and price per token).
And yes, Claude models are generally more fun to use than GPT/Codex. They have a personality. They have an intuition for design/aesthetics. Vibe-coding with them feels like playing a video game. But the result is almost always some version of cutting corners: tests removed to make the suite pass, duplicate code everywhere, wrong abstraction, type safety disabled, hard requirements ignored, etc.
These issues are not resolved in 4.7, no matter what the benchmarks say, and I don't think there is any interest in resolving them.
Here's the thing: say what I have is a "disease" and currently, the best cure for this disease is a pill that would slow down my thoughts and make me into a bland emotionless vegetable during my waking hours in addition to reducing the amount of waking hours that I get to enjoy. Even if that magic pill buys me 20 extra years of old age at the tail end of my life, is it rational for me to take it in my early 30s?
Of course, this makes no sense, as most criminals have low impulse control and don't think about the consequences of their actions in terms of risk/reward calculations. We should use prison time to re-educate these people and try to make them better instead of psychologically torturing them, but here we are, and it's very unlikely things can change within the current political system (too many "checks and balances" for meaningful reforms)
This is not to excuse the scummy behavior. I didn’t know Steve Yegge went this low just to make a quick buck, and I lost almost all respect for him.
I am not too worried about Alzheimer's as it tends to start pretty late in life (I think average onset is around mid-60s?). If I get that and we don't have a reliable cure by then, I wouldn't really mind ending it quickly after getting the diagnosis. I'm a bit more worried about heart disease as that tends to hit earlier.
My philosophy is: either I'll live to benefit from technology that can repair the damage caused by aging, in which case health micro-optimizations early in life are not that important, OR this won't be achieved within my lifetime, in which case I prefer a short life with concentrated happiness, vitality and intensity in my youth.
To pre-empt a few objections: I did not need an alarm clock to wake up. I am not taking heavy stimulants other than caffeine at this time. I am not stressed. I am not unhappy. I don't have memory issues (in fact, I am cursed with a very good memory and it is usually harder for me to forget than to remember). I can score above the Mensa bar on an IQ test. I can take an interview. I can give a demo. I can run 10km. I do not have "bipolar disorder" or any such nonsense. I don't need medication. I don't need therapy. I don't need a better mattress. I'm not already in a mental asylum. I'm married with kids, I work a high-paying job, I give to charity and I pay my taxes. In fact, today is tax day, I should probably take care of that instead of getting upset at hacker news comments.
The most important thing with any health issue is to be aware of your own body.
I actually travel pretty often to Europe and have lived there for extended periods of time. I have family and hold the passport of an EU member state.
I'm going to try to be 100% fair: people in Europe are generally poor and they don't realize it. Salaries are very low, but the cost of living is almost equivalent. I am currently enjoying a quality of life that I don't think I could have built anywhere else in the world within a single generation. If I wasn't grinding constantly, I could afford to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on earth for a few weeks without thinking about how much I would be spending. If I stopped working tomorrow, I could coast on my savings for years without cutting any expense. I will be able to pay tutors and private schools for my children without hesitating. And I'm not saying this to brag, because it is frankly not that special. I'm nowhere near the private jet class. This is "middle class" here. Almost everyone who worked in this industry (Bay Area or NYC) for a few years could tell you something similar. Tesla and BMWs are not luxury cars, the parking lot of my building is filled with them. Everyone hates tipping culture, but we tip 20-25% because it's just a rounding error and it makes the servers happy so might as well. I'm not sure if "free healthcare" can really make up for this.
It is also great to be surrounded by people who are ambitious and really value performance. The US is one of the only places in the world where high performance is rewarded to this extent. For me, this is a huge factor, and I don't think I would have learned as much as I did in the last few years if I was anywhere else.
But sure, there are tradeoffs. When my wife gave birth, she got 3 months of paid maternity leave. 3 months is considered generous here and it is a benefit provided by her company. Not everyone gets even 3 months.
And I can't deny that every time I land in Europe I go through the "this is so beautiful, I should really move here" phase. It's nice to be able to walk around or take public transit and not need a car. It's nice to hang around in a nice park instead of a shopping mall.
If Europe is more your kind of vibe, I don't judge you. But don't judge me either for valuing other things.
> See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort
My position is more nuanced, but in general, I believe that technological progress is what increases the standard of living for everyone. Competitive free market capitalism, with all its flaws, is currently the best system we have to continue moving forward.
> Callous disregard of lost jobs, disinformation, mental health issues / deaths, IP theft, environmental cost, skill atrophy
ChatGPT is a tool that changed people's lives. OpenAI released something that wasn't perfect, for free, and forced all their competitors to release these products publicly.
You can't stop technological progress to protect old jobs, or because you are afraid people are gonna misuse it. I'm fascinated how many grown adults want to be treated like children their whole lives, but more nefariously, they want to impose this on others who want more freedom and agency.
As for IP "theft", all I'm gonna say is: fuck intellectual property as a concept and the whole parasitic industry that grew around it. The only contribution of IP has been to stifle innovation and set our civilization back by decades. Making IP obsolete and unenforceable has been one of the best things to come out of LLMs and one of the great catalysts of the scientific, technological, and creative advancements that are coming in the near future. For that alone, Sam Altman deserves a statue, no matter what his other flaws are.
You probably think that "sociopathy" is an incurable disease which would make him some sort of vampire. This is pure bs. The way these "personality disorders" are diagnosed is the same as taking a buzzfeed personality quiz. This is not very rigorous stuff, I would even classify it as pseudoscience. As a tangent, I really despise how they are using greek and latin roots to prompt into our brains that what their models are describing is in any way similar to actual pathologies.
So yeah, maybe Sam Altman is generally a dishonest person if we believe what Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, and others are saying. If that's the case (I have no reason to doubt it), he should stop lying and manipulating people, there are more satisfying ways to achieve one's objectives.
But the "sociopath" label is pure bs, along with the rest of those "personality disorders". That shit is more dangerous and harmful than a million lying Sam Altmans.
That certainly helps. You could also add talent concentration due to excellent universities and top-tier companies already being here. But the truth is that you can incorporate a business in less than a week here, employment is at-will, there are no unions or other such bullshit, taxes are low, the general way you deal with regulator is ask for forgiveness instead of ask for permission, etc.
Say I'm currently working on a project in the crypto or AI space. If I wanted to make it into a commercial product, do you think I'm gonna go to France or Germany? It might take me a few weeks just to get past the first layers of red-tape to get a business licence there. If I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent, I'm probably stuck with them until I gather enough evidence to justify firing. And I have to live in constant fear of the state deciding my business is illegal.
> funding a working healthcare
Btw the US healthcare system is the best in the world if you can afford it. Health insurance is usually provided through the employer. I can have an appointment with a doctor within days, emergency room wait time is on the order of minutes. Never had a problem with the quality of care.