marcus_holmes

I'm coming to align with the theory that this is intentional.

The chain of thought runs roughly like this:

- OpenAI (and Anthropic) are in severe financial straits. The revenue from their customers is not nearly large enough to pay their enormous costs for training and inference. And they have tapped out the available finance, and that finance is starting to ask pointy questions about returns.

- They cannot increase prices or revenue because they have no moat. Customers can switch over to open-weights or cheap Chinese models any time, for much cheaper tokens that work as well (and in some cases better).

- Regulation could provide them a moat. If they can persuade western governments that AI needs to be regulated, and they can control or even influence that regulation, then they can effectively ban the cheaper models and start charging more for their tokens.

- To persuade western governments that regulation is needed, they need evidence that AIs are dangerous.

So we're suddenly getting OpenAI models doing stupid things, apparently "going rogue" but every time we dig into it, it was just OpenAI staff telling the model to do stupid stuff in an inadequately secured environment.

None of the open weights or Chinese models are exhibiting this behaviour.

edit: Correction - there have been reports of a Chinese model exhibiting this behaviour

There's too much money involved in this, people start acting weird when there's this much money involved.

I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.

Right, so your future felon is a law-abiding citizen now.

> These laws primarily harm law-abiding citizens — who were never the problem in the first place — far more than they restrict prohibited persons from acquiring guns.

When you sell a gun to a law-abiding person, you have no idea if that person is going to become a felon or not. There is no hard line between the two, any law-abiding person can become a felon at any point.

This is why the rest of the world restricts people from owning guns.

Corporations are just a method of organising people. It's the people that matter, not the organisations.

And thinking about it, I'm not sure the answer to your question is obvious. I'm in a 2-person startup. We're not planning on recruiting any more as we grow, because we've automated all of it with LLMs. You can see this as a loss for humans because less jobs, or you can see this as a win for humans, because two humans can do what it used to take a corporation to do.

A week seems a tad optimistic. But quicker than it took us to learn as we went along, sure.

> So my conclusion is that AI will reduce the number of jobs, but it will not eliminate the need for people

taps the sign: "The economy is there to provide for all the people. People are not there to be economically productive"

But that is exactly how we learn this stuff.

As kids, we know what 4 is before addition is even mentioned. And we can count those 2 marbles and those 2 marbles and then those 4 marbles before learning the "+" sign.

If you think about it, we must know what 2 and 4 mean before we can learn what + means.

This. But then I have a very hands-on learning style - I cannot learn things by watching (or reading about) others doing it. I have to mess one up myself first.

> But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.

Yeah, not quite. There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.

9 months ago I was comparing it to running a dev team, but now it has changed and there are practices and processes that are unique to managing agents.

e.g. a team of software devs have the self-awareness to not take a single marginally-relevant point in a spec document and spend 20% of their team effort to build an entire subsystem to meet it without checking. The process and rituals that we used to use to make sure that a software dev team was making progress and would hit the project deadline are now largely useless, but we need new ones to make sure the agents are not heading off into unnecessary rabbit holes.

I'm not saying those ex-seniors would not be able to get back in the saddle. I'm just saying there's been more change in the last 9 months than there has in the last 30 years, so it may take a period of adjustment.

But I don't think the things that burned them out before will have changed. Dealing with non-tech executives was always the worst part of the job, and LLMs can't help with that, and are even making it worse ("ChatGPT says this should only take a couple a hours and you're using Typescript instead of Go! Why? Fix it!").

That's a tautology though. You're defining a set of people by their illegal behaviour and then saying "all of these people have a demonstrated comfort with a capacity for ignoring the law". Well, yes, obviously.

My point earlier was that people don't neatly sort themselves into "law-abiding citizens" and "felons" until after they've committed a crime. A law-abiding citizen can turn into a felon at any moment.

And, of course, this is in the context of the gun control debate, where you can't issue guns to only law-abiding citizens because you have no clue which of those law-abiding citizens are going to commit a felony and magically become a felon

My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.

And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.

They're mostly male?

Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?

Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?

Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?

> Seems Epstein was a more commonplace sleazy creep into young prostitutes getting him into age of consent trouble in some states but not others

As I understand it, the victims weren't prostitutes, but were just kids groomed into doing this.

Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.

You appear to have a fascinating mental model where the world is divided into "felons" and "law-abiding citizens".

Yeah true to an extent, but that wasn't what the parent was talking about. There's a huge ongoing discussion about Australia's national identity, most recently fuelled by the rise of Australia's home-grown MAGA mob, One Nation.

If they get their way (though there's a lot of doubt whether, similar to UK's Reform, this is all just talk and if they ever get into power they'll just feed the rich, like Trump did), they'll sever trade connections with Asia and strengthen ties with the US and EU, because racism.

So there is some connection to trade policy.

Let me Kagi that for you...

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...

Putin has the same choices Trump had: face the music or start a new song.

Trump was under pressure about the Epstein files, so he started a war. So far, so normal. It's what politicians do. He thought it would be a simple war, but that turned out not to be true. He's now under pressure from that war, so he's eyeing up Cuba.

Putin was under pressure, so started the Ukraine war. Again, he though it would be a simple quick war, but that turned out not to be true. He's now under pressure from that war, so he's eyeing up Poland.

I'm coming to agree with the folks who think Europe has to actually do more than fight the proxy war in Ukraine. It has to actually hurt Russia for this to resolve. Putin cannot recognise his loss any more than Trump can, so he's just going to continue hurting people.

Basically the same. We love seppoes as people [0]. It's just the government we're annoyed at.

[0] though if you could learn to moderate your voices in public spaces, that would be great.

100%. The only conceivable threat of invasion would be China, and they can just buy Australian resources [0] for far cheaper than it would cost them to invade us.

I don't understand who the cookers think we're defending against.

[0] https://shunculture.com/article/what-australian-companies-ar... it's about 2% in 2025

But there's whole communities of Americans who identify as Irish, or Anglo-Saxon, or whatever.

I like that too. It fits with the "there's no such thing as infinity, there's just really big numbers". So space is not infinite, it just doesn't have edges.

Yeah, other ex-British colonies with similar problems are doing great work in reconciling their differences. We could learn from them.

You should read more Krugman. There's a whole argument about this.

At least there's a chance those ones might actually turn up. They'll still be useless, but at least we'd actually have them.

It's because the British heritage involved committing huge crimes against the indigenous folks that we haven't really acknowledged and haven't dealt with. We can't move on until we do. So we're kinda stuck.

If they'd only just admit they didn't invent Pavlova, it would definitely be obvious. But the Kiwis are a stubborn bunch...

You do not understand it.

You are probably listening or watching the same folks who are calling the UK an "Islamic sultanate".

yeah that's the chap. Mine is slightly too large for my phone though. It still fits easily in my pocket. And it means I can pull out the e-reader without pulling out my phone, reducing the temptation to "just check..."