loudmax

Or the third solution: a carbon tax.

That is a tough sell in the current environment. It's a regressive tax, so opposed on both ends of the political spectrum. People on the far right don't believe in climate change, and people on the far left don't believe in market efficiency. With 20% of the world's oil flow crimped in the Strait of Hormuz for who knows how long, higher energy prices is the last thing people want to contemplate.

In the longer run, a carbon tax is the best option. The fossil fuel price shock is a strong signal to produce energy through other means. There are major engineering initiatives around developing cheaper and safer nuclear energy. and it's cheaper now to deploy a solar farm than a coal plant.

A carbon tax would raise money to pay off national debts and encourage consumers and producers to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish their needs while minimizing their carbon footprint. It's a tough sell today, but this is they way to go for a better quality of life tomorrow.

I was thinking the same thing. The stuff ASML does to produce a light at exactly the right wavelength is bananas. Making of stream of molten tin, and shooting each droplet with a laser, twice! Then bouncing the light through a series of super high precision mirrors to capture just the right spread. If you can get a laser to produce your desired wavelength without all that complexity, that's a major breakthrough.

Let's say we take Anthropic's security and alignment claims at face value, and they have models that are really good at uncovering bugs and exploiting software.

What should Anthropic do in this case?

Anthropic could immediately make these models widely available. The vast majority of their users just want develop non-malicious software. But some non-zero portion of users will absolutely use these models to find exploits and develop ransomware and so on. Making the models widely available forces everyone developing software (eg, whatever browser and OS you're using to read HN right now) into a race where they have to find and fix all their bugs before malicious actors do.

Or Anthropic could slow roll their models. Gatekeep Mythos to select users like the Linux Foundation and so on, and nerf Opus so it does a bunch of checks to make it slightly more difficult to have it automatically generate exploits. Obviously, they can't entirely stop people from finding bugs, but they can introduce some speedbumps to dissuade marginal hackers. Theoretically, this gives maintainers some breathing space to fix outstanding bugs before the floodgates open.

In the longer run, Anthropic won't be able to hold back these capabilities because other companies will develop and release models that are more powerful than Opus and Mythos. This is just about buying time for maintainers.

I don't know that the slow release model is the right thing to do. It might be better if the world suffers through some short term pain of hacking and ransomware while everyone adjusts to the new capabilities. But I wouldn't take that approach for granted, and if I were in Anthropic's position I'd be very careful about about opening the floodgate.

Charlie Sykes, a founder of the Bulwark podcast, has a story about it here:

https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/a-vivid-snapshot-of-trum...

Some highlights include a $580 million dollar bet on oil futures 15 minutes before Trump made the announcement of talks with Iran, which the Iranian government denied actually happened.

Naturally, political appointments at the SEC are preventing investigation.

My Prius Prime has been fantastic for me. It has about a 25 mile charge, which is just enough to get me to work and back.

That range is a significant caveat. If your round trip commute (or one way commute, if you can charge at work) is outside the electric range, then you'll be relying on gas every day. In my situation it's worked out extremely well. I charge at home and only need to fill the gas tank about three or four times a year.

> In an area entirely filled to the brim with the "evil" Trump supporters

Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

Plenty of people with kids are voting to block new housing. It's not that they don't want their kids to be able to afford to pay rent. They're just not making the basic connection between supply and demand.

This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the construction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest and most active anti-development voices were from Trump supporters. Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left, but the Republicans are making real inroads in rejecting free market principles, so there's some amount of political realignment. Luxury beliefs indeed.

> It is a great plan.

Let's be real here. Nothing this administration ever does is planned.

For normal, day to day use, examples in documentation is absolute gold. As a practical matter, that's how we human learn to do things. Perhaps surprisingly, even AI benefits from examples.

Children don't learn to speak a language by learning all the grammar and conjugation rules first. They learn by repeating phrases they've heard before and they generalize. Usually we learn tools the same way. We see someone else using a tool, and we do what they're doing, and generalize.

That's not to say that man pages should consist only of examples. There are times when you really do need to understand how the tool processes corner cases and really understand how it works. But I expect most of us here can relate to the experience of opening the man page for a tool and being completely baffled by a wall of unfamiliar jargon. Most of the time you just want to see how to do the most normal common functions, especially when you're learning a tool the first time.

A man passes his X chromosome (inherited from his mother) to any daughters. Any female offspring of a neanderthal father and a homo sapiens mother would have a neanderthal X chromosome and a sapiens X chromosome. If it's true that there's no neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes, this is not the cause.

What would be stronger evidence for an absence of neanderthal mothers among neanderthal/sapiens hybrid children would be a lack of neanderthal mitochondrial RNA in modern populations. This would point in the direction of no neanderthal grandmothers for us modern humans, though I'd be reluctant to present this as solid evidence. Maybe sapiens mitochondrial RNA is just better and there's selective pressure against neanderthal mitochondrial RNA.

None of this is to suggest that all neanderthal/sapiens couplings were loving affectionate parents. Just that the absence of neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes means nothing in this context.

All of Google's advantages in AI are despite Sundar Pichai's leadership, not because of it.

The mental gymnastics people are performing in order to convince themselves that this isn't the most corrupt administration the US has seen in modern history is staggering.

If a fraction of the level of skepticism these people applied to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton were applied to Trump and his cronies, they'd be demanding impeachment.

It really depends what kind of time frame we're talking about.

As far as today's models, these are best understood as tools to be used as humans. They're only replacements for humans insofar as individual developers can accomplish more with the help of an AI than they could alone, so a smaller team can accomplish what used to require a bigger team. Due to Jevon's paradox this is probably a good thing for developer salaries: their skills are now that much more in demand.

But you have to consider the trajectory we're on. GPT went from an interesting curiosity to absolutely groundbreaking in less than five years. What will the next five years bring? Do you expect development to speed up, slow down, stay the course, or go off in an entirely different direction?

Obviously, the correct answer to that question is "Nobody knows for sure." We could be approaching the top of a sigmoid type curve where progress slows down after all the easy parts are worked out. Or maybe we're just approaching the base of the real inflection point where all white collar work can be accomplished better and more cheaply by a pile of GPUs.

Since the future is uncertain, a reasonable course of action is probably to keep your own coding skills up to date, but also get comfortable leveraging AI and learning its (current) strengths and weaknesses.

This is the correct way to handle a former president who tries to mount an anti-democratic insurrection.

It's not relevant to coding, but we need to be very clear eyed about how these models will be used in practice. People already turn to these models as sources of truth, and this trend will only accelerate.

This isn't a reason not to use Qwen. It just means having a sense of the constraints it was developed under. Unfortunately, populist political pressure to rewrite history is being applied to the American models as well. This means its on us to apply reasonable skepticism to all models.

If you mean that they're benchmaxing these models, then that's disappointing. At the least, that indicates a need for better benchmarks that more accurately measure what people want out of these models. Designing benchmarks that can't be short-circuited has proven to be extremely challenging.

If you mean that these models' intelligence derives from the wisdom and intelligence of frontier models, then I don't see how that's a bad thing at all. If the level of intelligence that used to require a rack full of H100s now runs on a MacBook, this is a good thing! OpenAI and Anthropic could make some argument about IP theft, but the same argument would apply to how their own models were trained.

Running the equivalent of Sonnet 4.5 on your desktop is something to be very excited about.

I can't tell whether the words to Fela Kuti's "Water No Get Enemy" are profound or trite.

But I can declare with 100% confidence that this song *rocks*! Go check it out.

This paper indicates that we should probably be less fearful of Terminator style accidental or emergent AI-misalignment. At least, as far as the existing auto-regressive LLM architecture is concerned. We may want to revisit these concerns if and when other types of artificial general intelligent models are deployed.

The "mis-alignment" we do need to worry about is intentional. Naturally, the hyperscalers are deploying these models in order to benefit themselves. Ideally, customers will select models that are most grounded and accurate. In practice, there's a danger that people will select models that tell them what they want to hear, rather than what they should hear. We've seen this with journalism and social media.

The other danger is that absent a competitive marketplace for AI, a single corporation or a cartel will shape the narrative. The market valuations of some AI providers seem to be based on this assumption.

This M1E3 Abrams tank prototype is a hybrid: https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi...

It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on the battlefield. Presumably this Prius on treads is confusing to chickenhawks who conflate "Likes" on Facebook and Instagram with military supremacy.

Under the current administration, the US is in the process of throttling long term economic growth, cutting itself off from its traditional allies, and pulling back as a global power. China's Communist Party has the most to gain from the end of American greatness.

As a US citizen, I'm proud of Minnesotans for standing up for American values.

Arguably, that's the point. For post-truth politicians, the objective isn't to present a narrative as objectively factual, but to bring the entire notion of factual objectivity into question.

It's not "This is the truth." Rather, it's "The truth is unknowable." If nobody knows what's true and false anyway, there's no reason to concern yourself with "facts" that disturb your preconceptions.

The GenAI providers will certainly explore advertisement revenue. They're not doing much of it yet because they're trying to gain market share while they figure out what what pain threshold of advertising their users will tolerate.

People today may have a better sense of the downsides of ad-based services than we did when the internet was becoming mainstream. Back then, the minor inconvenience of seeing a few ads seemed worth all the benefits of access all the internet had to offer. And it probably was. But today the public has more experience with the downsides of relentless advertising optimization and audience capture, so there might be more business models based on something other than advertising. Either way, GenAI advertising is certainly coming.

AI might be accelerating the trend, but there's been a populist revolt against institutions for over a decade. It's been happening long before ChatGPT, and this isn't just in Europe and the US. The erosion of trust in governments and institutions has been documented globally.

The obvious culprits being smartphones and social networking, though it's really hard to prove causality.

It depends on the context. If you're with a small organization and you're interacting with the project early in the development, it could well be your duty to explain your misgivings and why you think they should do things differently. If you're with a large organization and the project is already underway, it's going to take a lot of time and effort to redirect the project. That's time and effort that could probably be spent more productively elsewhere.

AI may never be able to replace the best tech writers, or even pretty good tech writers.

But today's AI might do better than the average tech writer. AI might be able to generate reasonably usable, if mediocre, technical documentation based on a halfheartedly updated wiki and the README files and comments scattered in the developers' code base. A lot of projects don't just have poor technical documentation, they have no technical documentation.

No. That is excessively cynical. Even GW Bush and the neocons really thought toppling Hussein would benefit Iraqis more than just Americans. That invasion turned out to be a complete disaster that probably benefited Islamist radicals more than anybody else. But it's a mistake to think that the neocons didn't believe their own bullshit. The top leadership really believed they could turn Iraq into a liberal democracy at gunpoint.

America has always been at its best when it lives up to its ideals, and at its worst when it discards those ideals. America has often been in the wrong, but on balance, the world has been better off for having a great champion of liberal democracy.

With Trump, it's not a question of believing things that are right or wrong. For the post-truth mindset, right and wrong don't matter. Democracy doesn't matter. There is only power. The second Trump presidency is the first time in modern history that America is no longer a great nation.

Today, we take the term "open source" for granted, but this wasn't always the case. There wasn't a single, universally accepted term to describe software that was freely shareable. "Free software" was one of the terms used, but it wasn't clear to non-programmers how this was different from proprietary software that was downloadable without having to pay for it. If you're not a programmer anyway, how should one type of "free software" be different from another?

Proponents of what we now call "open source" wanted to distinguish between two senses of the word "free". One sense is not having to pay for something, as in "Come over to my party, the beer is free." Anther sense is "I can criticize the government, because the country I live in is free." People in the free software and open source movement began to phrase the dichotomy in these terms to illustrate how one sense of the word "free" is much more important than the other. The fact that you don't have to pay for some piece of software is nice, but what's more important is that you aren't beholden to the company that developed it.

For manufacturing in the US to be economically competitive on the global stage (or even on the domestic stage), the actual work will mostly be performed by robots, not by humans. This will bring back profits, but not a lot of jobs.

In the specific case of these chips, the offshoring was to Taiwan, a democracy, and one of our geopolitically closest allies. This business went to TSMC because they did a better job producing these chips than either Intel or AMD (or AMD's successor, Global Foundries). The Twinscan machines that fab the chips are from ASML in the Netherlands, another democracy and geopolitical ally. The parts for those machines come from a truly global supply chain. Modern chip manufacturing is an absolute marvel of global integration.

American consumers and businesses benefited from this arrangement in the form of very competitively priced hardware. Most of the manufacturing was in Asia, but most of the profits were to American companies. This is why America is today the richest country on Earth. It simply would not have happened like it did without free trade.

China's low wages and integrated supply chain can beat American manufacturing. China cannot beat the combined talent of the free world. Along with immigration, from the likes of Taiwanese-American Jensen Huang, free trade and an open economy was what once made America great.

The "US plan," is driven by the executive office. That is to say, the by the US president.

Insofar as there is any plan, the current officeholder's priorities are to project the appearance of personal power on television. If you're wondering what's going on strategically, don't go thinking that there's some grand plan, or even an intention to benefit the United States in the long term. There are some people in the cabinet who are thinking long term, but that's not universal, and that's not what they're selected for. Every action that is taken is to satisfy the president's narcissism and ego in the present moment. You have to understand the "US plan" in this light for anything coming out of the executive office to make sense.