sterlind

I recommend you watch Judgment at Nuremberg - the 1961 film, not the 2025 one (I've seen both.) the Nuremberg Trials were very much to punish the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust for their atrocities. you can choose to be cynical, but consider: which "losers" were "persecuted?"

- the Doctors' Trial sentenced the doctors who murdered thousands of disabled Germany's own citizens in the Aktion T4 program.

- the Judges' Trial sentenced the Judges who enforced the Aryan racial purity laws, ordered the castration of "mental defectives" and sent falsely-accused Jews to their deaths.

- the Pohl Trial which sentenced the SS officers who ran the concentration camps and death camps.

sure, the US doesn't have perfectly clean hands, and the victor usually won't prosecute its own the way they prosecute the enemy, but I strongly disagree that the Hague was just an attempt to "persecute the losers." they were prosecuted, not persecuted, and they weren't prosecuted for "losing," they were prosecuted for their atrocities.

just because the Hague is unfair (some men never faced justice, since they were on "our" side) doesn't mean it was unjust (those who were convicted deserved it.)

I also don't remember why they couldn't just bypass the filter stack for paths in a certain volume - WSL2-like I/O on WSL1 - but there must have been a reason.

the adaptive immune system effectively does KYC by checking the antigens presented on the surfaces of cells. the thymus selects for B-cells (iirc?) which don't react to a corpus of the body's own antigens, but cover a wide library of everything else. when it sees something it doesn't recognize, it reproduces, warns the rest of the immune system and marks targets. that's why our immune systems can eventually conquer almost every pathogen we encounter, if we can survive long enough for it to do its work.

but the KYC I was referring to was KYC that vendors of oligonucleotides (should) be doing, to keep people from ordering nefarious sequences.

also, afaik the most effective way of developing pathogens is through serial passage through humanized mice or something like that - directed evolution at a small scale, selecting for traits. AI simply isn't needed for that. I don't think information or intelligence has been the bottleneck for bioterrorism, it's motivation and resources - same as for any other kind of biology research program.

sure, a malevolent state actor could swing it, but they could make a bioweapon without Mythos's help already.

also, vaccine production and disease surveillance have ramped up very quickly. they will ramp up further, despite political setbacks. it's a cat and mouse game that favors the defenders IMO.

but the bioterrorism narrative is useful FUD to spin open-weight models as existentially dangerous. I am far more worried about Anthropic's own goals than the goals of some crackpot in a shed.

- Apple has powerful capabilities in iOS to enable Siri AI.

- EU's DMA requires them to allow users to install third-party AI backends.

- Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.

I guess it'd be like if Apple allowed a first-party screen reader for iOS, so they refused to allow third-party screen readers.

- RL is extraordinarily sample-inefficient.

- distribution shift/catastrophic forgetting aren't solved. only off-policy learning with giant decorrelated batches works.

- the breakout success of transformers as an architecture doesn't neatly translate to robot motion policy models.

the field is missing fundamental breakthroughs.

I also find it very interesting that conversational AI has taken this long. where are the models with good turn-taking? passive listening? the ability not to respond in paragraphs? has Anthropic simply not gotten around to it?

1. Anthropic is an AI company. they want to get to AGI before anyone else ~~so they can lock the doors behind them~~ to ensure the supremacy of an aligned AGI that serves humankind. RSI unlocks the most value for them.

2. doing bioscience is slow and capital intensive. robotics lags way behind, so that's a lot of lab techs swishing flasks and plating petri dishes. they're happy to stay in silico, but there's very little productive research you can do without in vivo/in vitro experiments.

I don't trust Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to act in my best interests. Closed models will have an incredible centralizing effect, and concentrate power like we've never seen since the feudal ages.

If you want to see what it's like for the economy to collapse into a single, extremely valuable commodity, under the control of a small elite, look at Saudi Arabia.

also, I just value freedom tremendously. I want to tinker with model weights. I want to build my own stuff. I don't want to sharecrop in someone's walled garden.

I also worry a great deal that OAI and Anthropic will bow to political pressure and make Claude and ChatGPT push certain political agendas, to report biased information, or refuse to help with legal requests that conflict with corporate values. I also worry about privacy and mass surveillance - chat logs are far more intimate than my search queries or selfies.

I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now.

scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.

second, would it be possible to make RFP appear as an extension like uBO, where it suggests sites to allow-list, or hints that the page might be broken and asks if you want to disable RFP?

I'm more tech savvy than the average user, admittedly, but I've learned this pattern for uBO.

so as a toolmaker (presumably) you still have to answer for what you do.

certainly a lot of it is, but I think there truly are people with sincere religious or moral beliefs that don't wish any ill on trans people despite opposing our decisions. acknowledging that is fairly key to building bridges, imo.

(also because I expected to be downvoted to oblivion, so I tried to make my take as measured and nonthreatening as possible. I did not succeed, it appears.)

Hitler famously stoked hatred for Jews to increase his popularity. I know that Germany was already fairly antisemitic prior to Hitler's rise to power, but I wonder how many "moderates" felt Schadenfreude towards the Jews by Kristalnacht. how fast did the propaganda take effect?

CBP/HSI is currently driven by a quota system, to my knowledge. quotas incentivize going after the most law-abiding people because they're safer and easier to nab.

a lot could be gained simply by rewarding ICE agents based on how dangerous the people they apprehend are, rather than measuring headcount.