Hacker News Reader

elion Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

I imagine it's the same reason a lot of people pirate content instead of buying it legally. It's cheaper and faster.

elion Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

That's the Stanford angle. It was millions of pirated books.

elion Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books

Nope. The $1.5 billion settlement had nothing to do with whether LLM training is fair use.

It was how they got the books for training: they torrented collections of pirated ebooks. There are Slack messages from executives describing the process as "blatant violation of copyright." They were stealing books and they knew it.

They didn't start buying books legally and scanning them until much later.

elion New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

Nothing about that picture looks military

elion New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6

Some fieldwork does happen in a field. They look like perhaps botany or biology students.

elion Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines

The Comega air filter is nicer sounding (and at “high” louder) than Dohm IMHO

elion Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans

Why do you suspect otherwise?

This is part of why I find this type of inquiry unhelpful. It's just dueling unsupported assertions of what the LLM is "really thinking"

elion Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans

We're still doing "I asked an LLM for its opinion on X and you won't believe what it thinks"?

What am I supposed to conclude from this?

elion DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order

There can’t possibly be many production uses of deepseek in the federal government to begin with, right?

elion MiniMax M3.1 Flash

All the benchmarks are silly but people still want a quick way to put a new release in context

elion DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017

It surely does. Official DeepSeek provider logs and trains off your data.

elion Muse Spark Open

It’s really not that simple

elion Muse Spark Open

Neither the person you’re replying to nor the blog post call it open source

elion Muse Spark Open

A graph of time (or cost) per task against success rate does it. Just include all the different levels.

elion Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts

Granted there have been many hacks, but I was referring to:

> On May 8, an agent was asked as part of a training run to solve a spreadsheet completion task that referenced several Google Drive links. Because the agent was blocked from accessing the internet, the agent could not retrieve the linked materials and the task was effectively blocked. OpenAI did not intend to create this type of “impossible” task for the agent. Though the task appeared impossible, the agent reasoned over an extended period to try to find a solution for the task. In doing so, the agent attempted to compromise Artifactory [...]

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c78...

elion AI agents aren't 'going rogue.' Frontier labs are skipping security basics

And how has that gone for Anthropic so far?

elion AI agents aren't 'going rogue.' Frontier labs are skipping security basics

I'm not saying it's not a problem. I'm saying the labs should take more of the blame.

elion Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts

What does "rogue" mean when you disable the alignment guardrails and tell it to solve an impossible problem?

elion New Apple TV 4K

I'm comfortable with the idea that Netflix can collect data about what I watch on Netflix, and that Apple can track what I buy in the Apple app.

I'm not comfortable with my TV or streaming stick manufacturer collecting and mining data about everything that appears on the screen.

elion New Apple TV 4K

Unlike their competitors, Apple does not do Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). That matters to me.

elion Gemini 4 Argon

ChatGPT does that decently well

elion Gemini 4 Argon

SVG is useful for actual tasks, not just looking good in a silly "benchmark"

elion Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later

I question whether relative change in popular sentiment is a good way to evaluate a prediction.

elion My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping

It certainly is to the cop. How else could they do a pretext stop?

elion My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping

I don't see why that should necessarily be true.

elion Thinking will become a hobby

Risky move making a point that relies on made-up numbers.

At least in the US, there are roughly the same number of bank branches today as 20 years ago. And I think you would have to compare to hundreds of years ago to find anything like a 99% decline in farm laborers.

elion Fingerprints are the new cookies

That would be pretty narrow analytics to not need GDPR consent. No IP addresses or any way to uniquely identify a person.

elion Fingerprints are the new cookies

Legitimate interest definition is pretty narrowly scoped. Most of the sneakiness relies on nobody checking or enforcing it.

elion Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists

Hard to imagine a less trustworthy source

elion Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?

I don’t think the second part is true. Companies work together on safety standards in other industries.