skohan

5 years ago maybe. That juice has been squeezed.

The way this reads, it seems like it was written for US lawmakers.

> the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people.

This comes off a bit hypocritical, coming from one of the men responsible for the models most likely to be used by the US military, and for repression of US citizens.

> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations ... We should have policy interventions to deter this behavior.

How exactly would you design policy interventions to stop distillation? If Anthropic wants to make their products available around the world, you would need some kind of global regulation to curtail it. And you would need to find some way to enforce it, which is far from trivial.

Honestly I don't see how securing models against distillation is up to anyone but Anthropic, if that's something they want to achieve. Calling for regulation is a bit like crying to mommy and daddy when things aren't going as you would like.

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Overall, I can understand the argument that advanced AI models can present risks. But I don't see how regulation within the US can mitigate any of those risks. Any bad actor would be able to access the models outside the US, or covertly access the weights.

The only real way to prevent advanced models from being deployed would be to go around the world bombing every significantly powerful data center, and I don't think Dario would call for that any time soon.

The only thing this kind of regulation would achieve would be cutting US companies out of half of the innovation happening in the AI space, putting the US at a disadvantage relative to the rest of the world at everything except maybe frontier AI development.

Yes 18 months ago it seemed like AGI was being promised every other week, and now I don't see any of those headlines.

The problem some have pointed out is that these companies are such a huge portion of the market right now.

The sound advice for the past decades has been, just invest in a low-cost ETF tracking the S&P instead of picking stocks to minimize risk and invest in the market broadly.

So a huge number of people have done that, believing they're diversified, while tech makes up 40% of the index.

Yes you could sell your S&P and find things to invest in least likely to be impacted by a potential bubble, but your average 9-5'er with automated contributions to their 401k is probably not sophisticated enough to do that.

And that's assuming only these companies would be affected if there was a massive draw-down in tech/AI related stocks. We haven't really seen a situation like this before, so it's not easy to predict what effects there might be in the broader economy.

Couldn't it be a problem given the concentration of the S&P in these companies?

At this point these companies make up a huge portion of 401k's for a huge chunk of Americans. How would it affect retirees if they dropped 40-50%, likely taking the market with them?

If it didn't matter, why would they bother jumping through hoops to keep the debt off their balance sheet?

In the run-up to 2008 a big factor in the bubble forming was that poor quality loans were packaged in a way to hide the risk in those investments. I'm not expert enough in finance to know if it's the case now, but we do know that clever accounting to hide debt can lead to the incorrect valuation of assets, potentially leading to financial ruin.

I wonder to what extent the 4o rollback was motivated by this exact case

I had the same experience. For me peanut butter and apples were my "healthy snack" and were accounting for a huge amount of calories per week.

Not only forests but even just tree cover. I live in Berlin and there were a few days a few years ago over 40 degrees, and I remember the difference was stark going from my relatively tree-lined street to an area of the city with only concrete.

I always felt unwrap is preferable for diagnosing issues, which makes it useful in tests. A failed unwrap will point you directly to the line of code which panics, which is much simpler than trying to trace an issue through many layers of Results.

If you use `assert` in tests, I don't understand why you wouldn't also prefer unwrap in this context.

I think it's also perfectly reasonable to use in a context like binary you run locally for private consumption, or for instance a serverless function which allows you to pinpoint the source of errors more easily in the logs.

It's not a good fit for cases where you do expect cases where the unwrap will fail, but it's a great fit for cases where you believe the unwrap should always succeed, as it allows you to pinpoint the cases where it fails.

I was a huge Swift fan but SwiftUI and the changes supporting it in the language got me to switch to Rust for all my personal projects

Doesn’t rust’s static linking also have to do with the strategy of aggressive minimization? Iirc for instance every concrete instantiation of a dynamic type will have its own compiled binary, so it would basically be impossible for a dynamic library to do this since it wouldn’t know how it would be used, at least not without some major limitations or performance tradeoffs

I believe MS is trying to standardize this, in the same way as they do with DirectX support levels, but I agree it's probably going to be inherently a bit less consistent than Apple offerings

There was a rumor floating around that Apple might try to enter the server chip business with an AI chip, which is an interesting concept. Apple's never really succeeded in the B2B business, but they have proven a lot of competency in the silicon space.

Even their high-end prosumer hardware could be interesting as an AI workstation given the VRAM available if the software support were better.

I don't understand why you would need custom firmware. It seems like you could go a long way just implementing back-ends for popular ML libraries in openCL / compute shaders

I love the air form factor. I do serious work on it as well. I have used a pro, but the air does everything I need without breaking a sweat, and it's super convenient to throw in a bag and carry around the house.

> a dedicated Nvidia rig

I am honestly shocked Nvidia has been allowed to maintain their moat with cuda. It seems like AMD would have a ton to gain just spending a couple million a year to implement all the relevant ML libraries with a non-cuda back-end.

I use Zed as a daily driver, and I haven't once used the collaborative features

In fact they probably care that it's not easily portable

Molten VK is amazing. When I started working with it, I was expecting a lot of caveats and compromises, but it's shockingly similar to just using Vulkan that you can easily forget that there's a compatibility tool in play.

Probably you can squeeze a bit of optimization out of using Metal directly, but I think it's a more than viable approach to start with Vulkan/MoltenVK as a target, and add a Metal branch to the renderer when capacity allows (although you might never feel the need)

> It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode.

I have no insider knowledge, but I always wondered if those kinds of cultures had a hazing / blind-leading-the-blind aspect to them. I.e. the people who got hired were the ones who jumped through some arbitrary hoops, so they doubled down on those hoops being the right hoops to choose the best candidates.

Unfortunately I think "they share all the same apps" will not include a terminal with root access, which is what would really be needed to make iPad a general purpose computer for development

It's a shame, because it's definitely powerful enough, and the idea of traveling with just an iPad seems super interesting, but I imagine they will not extend those features to any devices besides macs

This is no doubt a milestone we should celebrate. At the same time, the Brazilian beef industry is the driving force behind slash-and-burn expansion of agricultural land into the rainforest, so Brazil is still a massive contributor to climate change.

I guess the reason it strikes me as strange is, on linux the usage of `sudo` helps you understand which operations might be dangerous in a fine-grained way

So like if you are executing a series of commands, the one requiring admin privileges tends to be one you might want to be more careful about (i.e. altering system configs, or doing a potentially insecure operation)

So if you are running everything in an admin terminal, it seems like you wouldn't have that extra check to remind you to be extra mindful of a particular operation, since everything you do in that terminal is in the same bucket

Yes terrible move which will lead to much confusion and consternation in the future.

But honestly I'm most amazed by the fact that there wasn't previously a way to run commands with elevated permissions in Windows. How did people work like that? Just run everything in an admin terminal super unsafely?

Imo it should give you the answer, and make you aware of the risks.

Some people won't follow the advice, but that's what code review and static analysis tools are for.

God I hope we don't end up in a world where LLM's are required to take an ideological stance on things like software architecture or testing paradigms

I don't live in the US anymore, so it's hard for me to speak to the US healthcare system, but as an outsider it seems to me that the problems with the system stem from the incentive structure, and won't be fixed by any technology.

It seems to me the US healthcare system sits in this weird gap where it's not funded by private individuals, but it's also not publicly funded (excluding medicare/medicade/VA/tricare etc)

So it doesn't benefit from efficiencies of a single-payer system like the UK has, and it doesn't have to obey proper market forces either, since you have a bunch of for-profit entities in the middle, but the costs are obfuscated from the consumer unless you're unlucky enough not to have employer-funded health insurance.

So until you fix those core issues, I don't see how technological advancements are going to have much of an effect either positive or negative.

It's an orthogonal issue.

Yes I understand that, but the problem is there's no structure to enforce decisions at the level of human civilization. So even if something is agreed and enforced by 99% of jurisdictions, that doesn't mean it won't happen