This kind of passive-aggressive bullshit is exactly what's wrong with tech. People don't decide things: they just passively resist, and authority ends up being a muddle of truncated information flows.
18 karma · joined September 4, 2022
If you try, you quickly end up codifying absurdities like the 80%-finished-receiver rule in firearm regulation. See https://daytonatactical.com/how-to-finish-an-80-ar-15-lower-...
People who say "society should permit X, but only if it's difficult" have a view of the world incompatible with technological progress and usually not coherent at all.
Shall we ban prediction markets?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
That's not a "backdoor" in any way. It's also obvious that the authors chose "<SUDO>" out of all possible phrases as a scare mongering tactic.
And what does "250 documents" even mean? Pretraining doesn't work in terms of "documents". There are only token sequences and cross entropy. What if we use two epochs? Does that mean I only need 125 "documents" to "poison" the model?
Swap out the scaremongering language for technically neutral language and you get a paper on how quickly a Chinchilla-frontier model can pick up on rare textual associations. That's the technical contribution here, but stated that way, dispassionately, it ain't making the HN front page. Member of Technical Staff has got to eat, right?
It's Anthropic. As always, the subtext is "We're making something really dangerous. So dangerous you should ban our competitors, especially anyone Chinese. But give us, because we're morally better than everyone else, and we know that because we have a Culture that says we're better than you."
Pulling this quote out of context fits in a general pattern of demonization of Trump that goes all the way back to the "fine people" Charlottesville hoax.
What Trump meant about free speech is that once 97% of a broadcast consists of partisan attacks, the broadcaster can no longer hide beyond the fig leaf of individual commentators exercising their individual rights to free speech. A broadcast that consists of 97% demonization of a people on one side of an issue that splits the country 50-50 isn't serving the interest of the public.
Absolutely nobody is preventing anyone from being 99.9% hostile on his own infrastructure, but we're under no obligation to let this broadcaster continue using public airwaves just because it labels its propaganda as "free speech". There is no free speech right to the electromagnetic spectrum.
When Trump says "free speech" in that quote, he's using it to refer to this fig leaf of propaganda as "free speech". That's just how the man talks. Anyone who's listened to him knows what he meant.
It's precisely this form of misrepresentation that's made Americans mistrust the media and establishment more than at any time in history.
Universities as private associations can have whatever biases they want. What they can't do is take public money earmarked for promoting debate and discovery and use it to promulgate a particular ideology, discriminate on the basis of immutable protected characteristics, or do other things contrary to public policy.
If they want the money from the public, they need to serve the public --- the whole public, not the part that agrees with administrators who mandate diversity statements for hiring.
> At least in the US, the health institutions merely flagged low-quality information to social media companies
There are public records of highly placed government officials emailing social media company leadership and demanding that specific posts be taken down. Not only is this state censorship in all but name, it's also unconstitutional under Vullo and other precedents.
Yes, the UK is worse. That doesn't make the behavior of the previous administration acceptable or consistent with American values.
Consider the contrast with the 2016-2024 state and corporate effort to suppress inconvenient truths as "misinformation". Remember when they used naked, hard power to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story? That's what real censorship looks like.
In America, you can express any viewpoint on social media and be treated fairly. That wasn't the case just a few years ago.
In most of Europe, and in the UK, you can't express certain ideas. The state will literally come to your house and arrest you if you have the wrong opinions on government policy. The US does not do that.
Similar conditions produce similar outputs. Perhaps the linkage isn't quite as direct and repeatable as the Chinese think, but they have a point.
Adj, something the speaker wants the audience to dislike without the speaker being on the hook for explaining why.
> screed
Noun, document the speaker doesn't like but can't rebut.
It's funny how people in the blue tribe milieu use the same effete vocabulary. I'll continue writing at the object level instead of affecting seven zillion layers of affected fake kindness, thanks.
At the least, MCP needs to clarify things like "SHOULD rate limit" in more precise terms. Imagine someone who is NOT YOU, someone who doesn't go to your offsites, someone who doesn't give a fuck about your CoC, implementing your spec TO THE LETTER in a way you didn't anticipate. You going to sit there and complain that you obviously didn't intend to do the things that weird but compliant server is doing? You don't have a recourse.
The recent MCP annotations work is especially garbage. What the fuck is "read only"? What's "destructive"? With respect to what? And hoo boy, "open world". What the fuck? You expect people to read your mind?
What would be the point of creating GH issues to discuss these problems? The kind of mind that writes things like this isn't the kind of mind that will understand why they need fixing.
And that's why it's so important to spec with humility. When you make mistakes early in protocol design, you live with them FOREVER. Do you really want to live with a SSE Rube Goldberg machine forever? Who the hell does? Do you think you can YOLO a breaking change to the protocol? That might work in NPM but enterprise customers will scream like banshees if you do, so in practice, you're stuck with your mistakes.
He feels infallible because he's smart enough to get into a hot AI startup and hasn't ever failed. He's read TCP 973 and 822 and 2126 and admitted the vibe or rigor but can't tell you why we have SYN and Message-ID or what the world might have been had alternatives one.
He has strong opinions about package managers for the world's most important programming languages. (Both of them.) But he doesn't understand that implementation is incidental. He's the sort of person to stick "built in MyFavoriteFramework" above the food on his B2B SaaS burrito site. He doesn't appreciate that he's not the customer and customers don't give a fuck. Maybe he doesn't care, because he's never had to turn a real profit in his life.
This is the sort of person building perhaps the most important human infrastructure since the power grid and the Internet itself. You can't argue with them in the way the author of the MCP evaluation article does. They don't comprehend. They CANNOT comprehend. Their brains do not have a theory of mind sufficient for writing a spec robust to implementation by other minds.
That's why they ship SDKs. It's the only thing they can. Their specs might as well be "Servers SHOULD do the right thing. They MUST have good vibes." Pathetic.
God help us.
Christ, I hate the AI safety people who brain-damage models so that they refuse to do things trivial to do by other means. Is LLM censorship preventing bad actors from generating social security numbers? Obviously not. THEN WHY DOES DAMAGING AN LLM TO MAKE IT REFUSE THIS TASK MAKE CIVILIZATION BETTER OFF?
History will not be kind to safetyist luddites.