mayhemducks

Oppenheimer was the guy who was pushing that opinion just as much as the military folks. In the case of AI, my understanding is that Amodei is not trying to beat the enemy to it.

What I don't understand is why the U.S. military is turning to a for-profit corporation when they could fund and pursue the development themselves. Why are they trying to "outsource" it to industry?

These two things, fingerprinting to fight CSAM, and the Apple Reference Image, are not the same. They have completely different goals and completely different implementations.

The system is not for detecting deepfakes. It is for proving that the data captured by an apple camera's sensor was not altered by some 3rd party hardware or software chain.

I had the same thought. Like if it's really that critical to make sure an image was not altered, go analog. You can't photoshop something that doesn't have pixels!

This was my immediate thought as well. Though I have not thought through any of the details, it did occur to me that the information needed would be in the "source" section of the header. I wonder if it is too much work to validate it somehow before using it?

I haven't ever done any programming at this layer of the stack, so I'm purely spitballing.

I'm sorry your parents sucked.

I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.

In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.

Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.

LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.

Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.

Now I feel better. Just needed to watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgmFhjAaWFQ

Need we remind Anthropic of the 153 million drirvers licenses available for sale on the dark web thanks to a 3rd party ID verification service?

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...

The fact that Anthropic only receives a result, not the data itself, does not make me feel any better about this.

I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.

>>> I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.

What? This is a very confusing statement...

The word engineer does not refer to only software engineers. And even if it did, I've never met an engineer who thought of their professional work as art. Are you sure you dislike engineers in general? 'Cause that's a pretty big group you just generalized about.

Have you not heard the classic joke? The optimist sees the glass as half-full. The pessimist: half-empty. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be.

This is the essence of engineering - solving problems safely, efficiently and economically.

Many engineers are craftspeople and artists. What makes you think they can't separate their professional duties from their other interests?

In keeping with the spirit of this author's unsolicited advice, I will say that I am quite unsure about the author's awareness of the ways that "tech" companies are behaving.

I say "tech" in quotes because they aren't "tech" companies anymore. They surveil, exploit customers, and engage in anti-competitive activities to maintain their golden egg laying geese.

I have a whole lot of reasons to be... UNSURE about being in tech. VERY UNSURE.

'Cause the brain is in a glass vat. and brains have eyes too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc3uWxs9adw

If this is about safety, am I being too naive & idealistic to think that a "Kamar-Taj" rule would solve some safety issues?

The "Kamar-Taj" rule is, no knowledge is forbidden, only certain practices. If a model gives you detailed instructions on how to kill all humans, the knowledge itself isn't the problem. The problem is the person who acts on it.

If Quagmire were in charge of naming things.

You know it's interesting, because with the right treatment and support, people with diabetes can live long, fulfilling lives. It's the same for depression. It does not matter if it's chronic or acute. There is no cure, it will never go away entirely. It can only be managed.

Elisha Long's content is not for me. I also don't think it's relevant to the topic of mental health.

Speaking from experience, I can say that when I prioritized adequate time to do activities I find challenging and enjoyable, that were deliberately unrelated to my work-life in any way, that my mental health improved.

The depression didn't disappear. But it became manageable.

You said it friend.

This is ableism.

There is no cure for depression. Like there is no cure for diabetes. There is a big difference between having the disease, and feeling sadness brought on by circumstances. There is no such thing as simply "removing the depression".

Software quality, i.e lack of bugs, from the average user's perspective, is a hygiene factor. High quality does not get rewarded, and the instant it crosses below the threshold of "good enough", users will punish you.

The eternal question for management seems to be "what can we get away with?".

A dev with quality problems in their output? Can em'. A dev with exceptional quality in their output? Can em'. A dev with just the right corners cut? Keep 'em, but no raise.

Is this regime right or fair? I don't think so, but it is the incentives that drive all of this.

I believe the only solution to this, at least in the for-profit software world, is to try to convince everyone to pay for quality. If the money is there, then maybe management will reward devs who care about quality user experiences.

The man with more than one watch never knows what time it is.

I genuinely do not understand why people think my comment on this is a bad take.

I believe it is absolutely ridiculous to have token usage leader boards.

But isn't it also ridiculous for a rational human being to use as many tokens as possible regardless of whether or not that token usage is useful or valuable?

It seems obvious to me that AI service providers make more money the more tokens are used. It also seems obvious to me that companies who sell shovels during a gold rush stand to make a great deal of money, whether or not any gold is found. How is that a good thing writ large?

Anthropic, (and SpaceX), might IPO soon - a move that will grant them access to capital instantly. Capital that comes directly from the retirement plans of all of us.

All I'm saying is if you want to somehow sabotage the game somehow, this is definitely not the right strategy. Political influence would be far more effective.

What am I missing?

I'm guessing you aren't invested in any of these stocks. I'm also guessing, to take the perspective of a tokenamxxing GenZ employee, that their bosses are.

Excessive token burning as a tactic to annoy your employer probably does the opposite - it probably makes your employer money.

The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.

The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets bad enough, for long enough, people will use it less and less, and demand will slowly evaporate.

My point is NOT: I hope this all comes crashing down.

My point IS: tokenmaxing is bad. AND weaponizing it will not have the intended effect, but in fact, it will, in the short term, do the opposite.

Hacker news is not a representative subset of humanity. So you are restricting your range of understanding. Maybe that's necessary for mental health, (it is for me) but the tradeoff isn't great either.

In my mind this is what prototyping is for. Just get it working quickly and see if the concept has legs. But be prepared to completely re-write it because the "just make it work" mindset will make it more difficult to change and improve upon in the future.

But when you factor in today's favorite business model of "make it shitty", perhaps this matters very little.

My status after reading your comment: https://imgflip.com/i/7yki7x

Agentic tools are "burglary tools" -> Younger folks should not study CS?

Yes it is nauseating. And it's the norm. Whenever some company finds a way to make a boat-load of money by exploiting a weakness of human nature, the government will demand a portion of the proceeds. It's business as usual, in the USA at least. Even more nauseating is what they could do with that $2.5B...

5 internet points to you sir.

Maybe they could use this DDoS attack as their 17th round technical interview. Any candidate who successfully mitigates the attack would then make it to the 18th round. Win win!

I enjoyed reading this.

I LOL'd when I read "eternal ball of sadness".