Sol-

At least Anthropic weren't lying when they said only a week ago or so "No one has figured out guardrails yet", because they apparently haven't either and Fable simply flat out rejects anything remotely connected to biology or security, no matter how trivial.

Fortunately I can't use Fable anyway, since their hyperactive content flaggers do not let you work on anything remotely biological or medical related (i.e. parse a CSV with some medical content, nope, you're probably a bioterrorist) and you get downgraded to Opus immediately.

Let's hope AIs really aren't conscious, otherwise this seems like a very unpleasant situation to be placed in.

Surprising how little appetite for changing norms exists here on HN. Yes, the transition to agentic coding will be difficult, but to me this is mostly exciting. Despite my AI enthusiasm, I also run into shortcomings that the agents have very often, but that's a more interesting learning experience than the status quo without AI would have been!

We'll have more such disruptions and we'll learn to live with it.

The less NIMBYs are involved or aware of any infrastructure project, the better. Is that even a question? They ruined enough opportunities and wealth in the last decades.

The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird. On the one hand, they have extrajudicial private entities they outsource censorship requests to ("trusted flaggers"), which the companies have to follow at the threat of massive fines and which therefore creates the incentive to ban quickly.

On the other hand, there is stuff like this where they created another arbitrary "voluntary" mechanism to punish the companies for banning too much. I think ultimately the EU just wants a set of rules to use as a pretense to levy fines on big tech.

Very interesting. Often I only perceive the stock market as existing equity changing hands and the stock value of the company not being immediately relevant for its success (it's just third parties trading ownership around, after all), but I rarely heard of cash raises for the company after the initial IPO - of course only because I didn't pay attention and mostly IPOs make the news.

It's insightful to put such documents into Claude and see how they use many different financial mechanisms to raise the money. $15B sold directly to the big banks, $40B sold to the market (but also facilitated by these banks), a direct investment (PIPE) from Berkshire. Pretty cool how financial markets do these things.

Seems like a very bad precedent if that were to become the legal interpretation. I can understand if there were requirements for AI companies to document their efforts to reduce harms in their model reports, but ultimately this is a general intelligence (to which degree you can debate) and it's part of its purpose and utility to be able to converse naturally.

Of course it should steer people away from harmful thoughts like any sensible human would, but that's all you can do, really.

I suppose they announced it because the fact that they submitted it would leak anyway.

You're right about the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the story, of course. I just felt like nitpicking because people seem to take the Butlerian Jihad seriously as a possible way to contend with AI in our real world, which I think asks too much of the story.

> Paul wasn't aligned with the Bene Gesserit, and hilarity ensued.

Hah, great perspective and I agree. Even normal humans are so difficult to align, no wonder it went wrong with a guy with prescient powers.

Doesn't it seem implausible that in the world of Dune they reached their level of technology without AGI? Perhaps all their tech is pre Butlerian Jihad, but even that seems questionable.

Seems like if it was adopted as a policy, there would have to be many gray areas where people pretend that they aren't really using AI - the ship's computer is just a domain specific finetuned version, after all, etc.

Additionally, the transhumanist ambitions represented by the Bene Gesserit or Navigator seem on par with all AI dangers to me. Why would the dangers of an incomprehensible machine mind be worse than the dangers of a transhuman being that was bred and optimized for generations? Who solved the alignment problem for these superhumans?

Do you really believe that, given all the failed social media competitors? The network effects seem too strong.

Kind of a let down if that were to mean that they are bearish on super intelligence.

But surely being part of the birth of AGI would be more interesting than sitting on a yacht, which you can do for the rest of your life post AGI?

Come on, he definitely has more money than he needs given his past employers. For someone with his creative output, he probably just enjoys having an environment to build and explore.

Thanks for this post. I am always amazed on how people only ever look at nominal wages (which might collapse for the "obsolete" class) but ignore the wealth being generated in the process.

What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.

A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.

> Work on yourself? Nobody will care. Engage with your hobbies? Nobody will care to see them

But this is already the case now, no? The only person you do self-improvement or hobbies for is yourself or your closest social circle. We are already worse at everything than the professionals in the respective fields and also do not despair about it.

> To me this seems like a hellish future, a mix of "Farenheit 451" with people staring at wall screens (only AI-tailored for them) or the "basic income but restless" people from Earth in "The Expanse".

I think a more optimistic take people usually bring up is the Culture series. But yes, of course ultimately it all boils down to us being obsolete. That does not give me worse existential angst than life (to which there's no real point) already does, however, so I don't see it as worse than the status quo.

> that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI

Setting aside whether a permanent underclass will be an outcome or not - is it not a bit incompatible to simultaneously believe that all jobs will be gone and that a subsistence UBI is necessarily very bad?

The way I see it, if strong AGI really replaces all jobs, then even a subsistence level UBI (by the new post-AGI standards) will be a world with ubiquitous resources and post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want. Yes, perhaps it might be an "underclass" in the sense that Musk and Altman meanwhile settled Mars with some privatized space colonization, but I might still be orders of magnitudes richer than I am today - so why should I care, except for status games?

It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!

Shame that prediction markets seem to have failed a bit, since they seem in principle like a good idea. You force participants to have skin in the game and remove the usual mood affiliation and ideological bias that afflicts the professional commentariat in the media.

Perhaps a solution instead of banning them would be to create a class similar to accredited investors that are allowed to participate. And stuff like market manipulation should just be prosecuted in old fashioned ways like we prosecute any crime.

Both sides are at fault here, no? A consumer could work part-time and live as well or even much better as someone 50 years ago, but they largely don't want to. I do concede of course that housing is a bit limiting factor here and my "just adapt your lifestyle" doesn't fully hold.

200 years ago people would have booed the industrial revolution. They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits.

You can gauge the quality of the article by seeing Emily Bender quoted, who will insist on stochastic parrots when AI does billions of dollars of economically useful work.

Isn't it surprising that there were enough pre-1930 tokens to train an intelligent model? I was always under the impression that many tokens are also necessary to force the model to grok things and compress its learning into a somewhat intelligent model of the world, so to say. But perhaps I'm underestimating how much digitized literature exists from then.

Civilization needs energy, not a problem per se. Just generate more, preferably from sustainable sources.

Perhaps the adversity of the contracts cancels out with their sudden success and increase in valuation and it ends up a wash compared to the counterfactual scenario where they would have speculated on high growth early on.

This seems to be a very peculiar and adversarial interpretation of anti-social. I am relatively anti-social and consider this a bit of a character flaw, but would generally say that I do not assume the worst in others and am relatively introspective. It just doesn't come naturally to me, but that does not mean that I think less of others.

Jesus, do the people who work on GNOME even like Linux?

People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.

I always considered hooks a nice to have feature for devs to already validate that their PRs will probably satisfy certain CI checks. If they don't install or run them for whatever reason, it's on them to do another iteration and update the code to make it mergeable if CI complains. So I usually considered it fine that they are only opt-in, since the merge will be gated by a CI outside of the dev's control anyway.

Also seems that having a very capable military that lets you project power around the world also invites that power to be used. See for instance the Iran war. Quite pointless by all accounts and wouldn't have happened if the US didn't have aircraft carriers to send around the world.

So perhaps thriftiness in defense spending would also invite a prioritization in actual defensive capabilities?