JohnMakin

I think you’re talking about the headline, and it’s clearly not really calling it ‘low.’ that said, things are relative, and relative to the market’s position on AI and AI related spend, anthropic’s overwhelmingly optimistic spending commitments, how they predict their machine god will take over the world, etc. - 1.1 is indeed “low”

Cool, but needing to register via discord is going to be a no for some people.

Ah, this is the utopia we were promised. What's next?

That's what people said in 2008, instead, wealth was incinerated, the most vulnerable got hurt the most, while the already wealthy got bailed out and bought back assets at bargain bin prices. The wealth owning class would love a collapse.

You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of adtech and the mechanisms surrounding it. I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive, but it goes much deeper than "I bought a product and am being tracked." Everything digital collects information from you, with the primary purpose of selling the data to advertisers that target based on that data. It's not, "I bought a smartfridge, so I get what I deserve." It's "I went to mcdonald's, my friend used the mcdonald's app, now mcdonald's knows a ton of shit about me and I will be served ads based on it." I do not want Mcdonald's to know anything about me. That is the agency I am losing, because I cannot do much about it. You may think that's harmless, but there's been articles written about how McDonald's in particular has so much ability to surveil they basically can see like a state. Or stories like this: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossi...

There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.

> What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.

My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.

It should be noted his criticism was because he thought 1.0 was better (which he created), not a fundamental issue with OAuth itself.

> Eran Hammer, lead author and editor of OAuth 2.0 spec

I do not think this is a completely full characterization - he left the project over his criticisms of it and withdrew his name from all of it.

Or they just flat out don't work. I was on an insurance website recently, and getting big annoying popups to use their AI agent for help with the site or my plan, even encouraging me to ask questions about my plan. I did have one, very simple, "what's my plan's copay?"

"Sorry, I do not have that information."

So then, "Ok, where do I find it?"

"Sorry, I do not have that information."

What the hell? What is this for? Of course, someone will point out "it's because of regulations" or some technical limitation, sure, I can understand that, but then I must ask the question then why did you think it was worth building?

It's like people en masse are discovering OAuth standard for the first time.

> But you don’t care about code quality anymore right.

Why did we ever? Because it made it more feasible to maintain and reduced bugs. Well structured, designed code bases are simply far easier to work with.

I'm sure we've all had greenfield AI projects where we just let it go nuts doing whatever it wants, then all of a sudden you need what should be a stupid easy change, and it just falls over completely or becomes borderline impossible. Each change needs 5+ other changes until you basically can't touch the thing. The difference is, AI will keep trying until you run out of money or you give up, but this way of programming is bad and we labeled it bad for a reason, and I don't know why as an industry we're thinking it's no longer important.

Sorry, I know this is the story, but am I expected to believe that Anthropic would need 20,000+ engineers in their org without their use of AI? I do not believe that is close to true.

> Now spend 0.5x their salary on AI, and they become 5x productive compared to no AI. > > Now spend 1.1x their salary on AI, and they become 20x productive compared to no AI.

This is what I am getting at. If this were true - and I've yet to see evidence it is, despite some anecdotal evidence (organizationally, IME, it's about 2-3x for power users, and probably a net loss of productivity in certain areas) - why would their headcount be growing so much still YoY, pretty much doubling every year. If the AI is 10-20xing why such a big jump in headcount? Yes, the numbers are shiny, the growth is apparent, I would just expect with this AI narrative they'd be "doing more with less" as this thing improves every year.

> The AI usage still needs a knowledge worker to direct it in ways that it can't direct itself, so you still need the employees.

This is the story AI sells though, and Anthropic has participated in it heavily. Yet, their interview process requires hard skills and doesn't let you use AI, so clearly, what you're saying is correct, it just doesn't really align in my head with the whole knowledge worker being replaced narrative.

I'm not really sure I understand the excitement around this. It seems like the implication is that if retail price > employee salary, you are replacing employees with AI spend? Yet, anthropic's head count has nearly doubled since last year - so, in a company where nearly half of that head count is engineers, but claude is "writing 90% of the code," what is everyone doing then? You would think, if the hype feeling around this held true, that the output would be going up and costs remaining stable. Costs rising as you scale is not a new thing but that's not really what AI promises. It sounds to me like the retail AI spend per employee is very high. What is the appeal of that?

I hate to break it to you - but this current administration’s polling indicates that immigration policy is by far the most popular, among a pool of otherwise dismal polling categories. It’s polling 40+%. It also has overwhelming bipartisan support in the legislature.

They settled down on the shock and awe brownshirt tactics and have settled for just grabbing people quickly and quietly off the street, depending on a basically completely nonexistent court system to deal with the mistakes, and mass surveillance. Most won’t notice it at all. The surveillance started long before this administration - which isn’t a defense of it, just pointing out the entire system is rotten to the core.

“You will do as you are told. The market demands it.”

I agree, from my personal experience. AWS support at most tiers I’ve used is excellent. Granted, the larger account you have, the friendlier the service, but even when using it for smaller personal projects, I’ve always been pleased with the level of support and devotion to customer experience (except the console experience, that is not fun).

Don’t know to comment about the other areas of their business but AWS has always been excellent for me.

I read your comment as “amazon acts too responsibly to be a frontier lab,” and that worries me. That they even bothered to do all that stuff is good. That others don’t is bad.

Note that regulation differs quite a bit from enforcement. People sometimes confuse the former for the latter.

I am not even really in a place with any close or important races and I'm getting 10+ a day, as a data point for you.

You'll just end up on another list for the next election cycle. It's marketers - no one is forcing them to respect STOP replies, and a STOP reply is just another data point.

If you reply STOP, you just let them know you read their text and it's a number that will respond with an actual person behind it. I would not reply to it. It's very unlikely to do anything but make the problem worse.

Can anyone ELI5 the Class T stock structure and the rights it has? It seems like it has the ability to govern itself, but other than that, not terribly a lot?

> I fought ruthlessly.

I get it, but honestly, why? I have seen a few times someone being let go or about to and successfully negotiated out of it - but that person was always gone within a year anyway. The relationship is permanently damaged by that point, the employer cannot trust you're just buying time to get a new role and jump ship, and the employee will always have their guard up.

Why would a for profit company beholden to shareholders listen to anything but their own financial interests? Has this ever happened in recent memory?

Substitute anthropic/claude with exxon mobil/oil and see how crazy this sounds.

No one group or individual should be saddled with deciding what the “correct” human values should be. That’s literally what religion does.

A for profit company with shareholders designing technology they think will take over the world and run most if not all of humanity, is deciding for itself what human values should be doesn't set off any alarm bells?

I didn't want to keep editing my comment so I am replying to it, so much of this document makes me angry:

> Before we can align a model with human values, we must consider what those values should be.

Ok, so you believe that 1) this technology will become so powerful as to surpass humans in pretty much every imaginable way, so much so that you see it as an existential threat to humanity itself, and 2) that you see yourself as a responsible steward to avoiding bad outcomes, but 3), that you need to be the arbiter of what human values should be?

How fucking arrogant, pardon my language. My god.

> Pillar 2: AI safety is a universal practice backstopped by law. AI developers everywhere follow safe development and deployment practices, sustained by industry norms and enforced by regulation.

They so, so badly want to criminalize local models.

edited:

> Interpretability isn’t reliable enough to fully understand model intentions: Being able to read and understand a model’s internal reasoning reduces our reliance on what the models explicitly tell us about why they behaved in a certain way. This could be a useful tool for understanding models’ “thought processes” when they take unintended actions. But interpretability methods are not yet dependable or broad enough to be relied on in this way. As a result, we may miss our assessment of high-risk behaviors, or be able to investigate flawed reasoning only after an incident has occurred.

Just say you have no idea how or why they do what they do. Just the other day I saw it make an obnoxious, huge, irrelevant comment in a block of code - many lines more than the code change (which by the way, I have tons of instructions and hooks intended to stop this, it's maybe 95% reliable at best) - and told it quite plainly, "remove that comment."

What it did instead was remove most of the comment except one line, which was also irrelevant. When I noticed, I asked it why it did that when I explicitly stated otherwise and if it misunderstood what I meant. It happily chimed "No, I did not misunderstand your intent, I just thought this was better."

I can't trust that was the real reason so clearly I can't trust that whatever training causes this behavior results in a reliable tool.

This is so tone deaf in timing, it could only be microsoft, and it (weirdly) makes me feel better.

Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.

Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.

I am still extremely bitter about how BioWare, in my opinion, ruined the dragon age franchise. While not "truly" turn based, dragon age origins and dragon age 2 had the spirit of it, and felt like a party-based tactical RPG. Then out of nowhere, the studio decided to abandon that with inquisition and turn it into an action/adventure style of game. I had never really been so bitterly disappointed with a game release.

After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.