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joshuamorton

7,723 karma · joined February 19, 2017

In case I forget to disclose in a thread, I currently work at Google. That said, opinions I express belong to me and all that jazz.
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joshuamorton··on The SEC Should Block Anthropic's IPO to Protect the Public
Because their revenue is weekly cyclical.

If they make, say, 10x more on weekdays than weekends, using a 30 day month with two extra weekdays overestimates annual revenue since it translates to a year with 264 weekdays as opposed to 260.

That's about a 1.5% increase.

joshuamorton··on The SEC Should Block Anthropic's IPO to Protect the Public
> It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.

I'd wager that the 95th percentile, and maybe the 99th percentile anthropic IPO participant, by volume, is a more sophisticated stock evaluator than either you or me.

joshuamorton··on Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not
This imagines HTML as code and not markup.

The reason HTML and markdown are more widely adopted than latex is because the former are more forgiving.

joshuamorton··on How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
> When I was at Microsoft, partner-level engineers were making $1 million per year; now it's probably $2 million.

This seems...high. The levels.fyi data for 68/69 shows them maybe crossing 1M, and the highest available data point at a bit under 1.5 mil. Staff engineers at FAANG are not making 1M a year except in cases of significant stock growth. 700-800K is more reasonable. The AI labs pay a significant premium, yes (2-3x!).

My math on it was basically "I can work for 10-15 more years and retire meeting my financial goals, or work until my 4 year grant at an AI lab finishes and meet all the same goals, with more interesting work".

joshuamorton··on How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
I'm not sure that's quite feasible. 2-2.5M in 10 years is about the best I've seen excluding getting reasonably lucky with major stock jumps. You could juice that a bit further with really aggressive savings, but for most people, you're looking at 4-5M in income pre tax over that 10-12 year period (maybe a bit higher), weighted mostly toward the end, so without a ton of time for market gains to help.
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Right, and for the same purposes, the government has not made any claim that Claude poses risks. (And to the extent that they exist, pre-existing concepts like code review and testing mitigate them)

Again I'll reiterate: the only concern the government has stated is that of Claude refusing to answer things during an active battle.

I respect that decision, I think if the government wants to use OpenAI for that situation it makes sense. They can and should pick suppliers who meet their needs.

Nothing about what the government has said suggests any reason that Claude Code is a risk. So why are you insisting that it is and that the government is justified in banning it?

joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
So Claude is a supply chain risk in the same way that an employee is a supply chain risk.

I'm struggling here because you're basing this determination entirely on things which the government never acused anthropic of, and haven't asked anthropic to address, and which the underlying law probably doesn't support.

The government made clear that it was only designating anthropic a supply chain risk due to their refusal to allow Claude to be used lawfully for autonomous kill chains and domestic surveillance. Why are you bringing up this other stuff when the government never did?

joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Actually, what I said was "Once the code is written, anthropic has not plausible form of control."

To which you brought up something that still wasn't relevant.

The government is perfectly able to choose not to work with contractors it doesn't like. That's not this.

joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Can't open AI do the same thing?
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Claude code is neither of those things. So now can you explain how using Claude code could be a supply chain risk?
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Okay, so what relevancy does this thing, which anthropic didn't do, have to anything we are talking which right now is using Claude code in line with its terms of service?
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
No, they said fable would stop working. That's very different. (Unless you're talking about anti-distillation stuff which is again, not relevant)
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
And my point is that using Claude models for coding a Boeing plane does not allow anthropic to interfere in the operation of those planes. Once the code is written, anthropic has not plausible form of control.

Thus, it cannot be a supply chain risk.

joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Yes, and this is not (and cannot be!) a supply chain risk in any reasonable interpretation.
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Correct, anthropic's requirement was human-in-the-loop.

The DoD's response was to ban anthropic from all DoD facing activity and supply chains, whether or not there is a human in the loop. This does in fact run into exactly GP's issue. (or as I suggest elsewhere, can Boeing use Claude Code for software development?)

joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Isn't that textbook tortious interference with a business relationship?
joshuamorton··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Anthropic said "we don't want to be used as part of kill chain decision-making" (actually it may have been even more specifically autonomous/unmanned kill chain decision making)

The DoD responded not by saying "alright, we will use OpenAI for our kill-chain uses" but by saying "Boeing is no longer allowed to use Claude Code".

joshuamorton··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
> The flip side is that the Anthropic researcher is clearly pushing the case against Open AI and one might have reason to suspect their motivation and version of events for the same reasons.

I haven't seen any evidence of this. Much of the anger is coming from the unaffiliated researcher. levent (the anthropic employee) has mostly constrained his comments to basically "I would have been happy to collaborate w/ folks from OAI"

joshuamorton··on Large language models develop novel social biases through adaptive exploration
Yeah there are a lot of people getting upset about this, so to summarize here:

there is a well studied scenario where humans are asked to hire people from four groups. These groups will be judged in their performance on a job and the humans rated on their hiring abilities. Unbeknownst to the human participants, all applicants are drawn from a single skill distribution, with groups assigned essentially randomly. Stastically, all groups have identical performance. Despite this, humans generalize over their early experiences, and develop biases towards specific groups.

While not identical, I relate this to the experience I have playing Fire emblem with random growths. A unit can get lucky and favored early despite being overall mediocre (hello Diamant from my first run through engage).

The researchers recreated this experiment with LLMs, and showed that the LLMs reproduce the human behavior of overgeneralizing early and failing to, as the paper says, sufficiently explore the space[0].

[1]: They instead exploit in the technical sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit), but exploit based on incomplete information.

joshuamorton··on 2026 Hugo Awards
Yeah blue prince is three games (I've played two of them and won't play the third).

First, it's a really compelling roguelite puzzler where you explore and understand the house and it's mechanics. The puzzles are mostly small and straightforward (but not easy!). You can probably win this without taking notes. I found this part compelling and delightful.

Then it's something else where you learn about the world. The puzzles are more complicated and need notebooks and notes to keep the loose threads tracked. This part for me became a slog by the end and I finished mostly to say that I had.

Then its a third thing for sickos.

joshuamorton··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
courts are very good at reasoning about things like this and figuring out its bullshit. Zerodium is probably the closest you could get to some reasonable denial about this. Selling an exploit on crime.com for "research puposes only" will get you laughed at on the way to the cell.
joshuamorton··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
This...isn't true.

Others have already said this, but the watermarking is something like "when the model flips a coin picking between two values, always choose heads". It was already flipping a coin. You're not choosing a less good result, you're just using a deterministic process when it was stochastic before.

This will have some impact on outputs, but unless you have some reason to believe that always picking tails was better than always picking heads (in which case, you should be working at one of these companies in model training!) it won't have any impact on output quality.

joshuamorton··on Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption
> Does this rely on the Trust Me Bro model, or is there some way for the client to verify that the provider actually isn't able to see your inputs?

The point of FHE is that you only ever send encrypted data. So if you trust that Google hasn't broken the encryption algorithm entirely, they never access the plaintext.

joshuamorton··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
> That every language has a Raft implementation with bugs? Yes that's probably accurate because lots of people make Raft implementations for fun and learning. Again, Go does not have a single Raft/Paxos implementation that is rock solid. I have seen many in C++, Java, and Rust that are doing tens of millions of requests per second in production for over a decade.

No, they are citing that every Raft implementation that Antithesis has tested has bugs. The etcd implementation you note in go that has bugs also does tens of millions of QPS and is over a decade old. How are you confident that the proprietary implementations that presumably haven't been fully tested don't have subtle bugs that don't show up in practice?

joshuamorton··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
On the other hand, you're approaching tautology with what you seem to be implying here, which is "flaws or challenges that you can fix yourself aren't mental health problems".
joshuamorton··on Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)
> Is there anything they're doing that can't be replicated by hypervisor/management software on commodity x86 servers? Seems like their "secret sauce" is a software stack that "just works" more than any actual special feature of the hardware.

There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.

joshuamorton··on AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
> It will tell you something like TQQQ is not a good long term hold, when it can be perfectly fine especially if you mix in with 60-20-20 with TQQQ-GDE-ZROZ, and DCA and annually rebalance.

As someone who long-term-holds TQQQ (I am lazy) it is pretty much true that holding TQQQ doesn't make sense. It is basically unambiguously better (ie. the risk-adjusted returns are higher) to directly hold options that construct the same amount of leverage over the time period you want to be leveraged over.

joshuamorton··on Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals
> Yet your position is taking those value judgments - which orders of magnitudes to accept, which to group together as being the same degree of memory safety - and asserting them as objectively correct boundaries with minimal rationalisation beyond "because I feel it is so".

Yes, like I keep saying: two clusters each within an order of magnitude, separated by three orders of magnitude feel to me like two distinct things. That does not at all feel arbitrary. I think that claim is pretty self-explanatory. You appear to think it reduces to "because I feel it so" and in some sense it does. I am applying my own judgement and values in constructing those clusters. Someone who felt that any amount of memory safety was unacceptable would structure them differently. Someone who cared naught about memory safety would similarly group them differently too.

joshuamorton··on Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals
Yes, it's clear you take issue with the assumptions I'm making. That's okay. If you don't accept my premise that's fine, but you could just state that instead of saying that I'm being hypocritical or strutting out a variety of statements I haven't said ("you want to be a memory safety purist who ignores all tradeoffs and declares a language fundamentally unusable on safety grounds").

If you want to have a conversation with me about the things I'm talking about, I welcome it, but I don't see that happening.

joshuamorton··on Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals
> Or would you say your arbitrary delineation point is worth more than mine?

Yes for the reasons I already gave. I think that at the point that you're having to stretch the numbers from their post to the breaking point to remove the pretty clear order of magnitude differences it's not really a constructive way to engage.

I think you have two groups with one at ~.1 and one on ~100. You seen to either disagree with that, or think it doesn't matter, I'm not sure which. But taking that assumption as true it is self evident that the 3-order-of magnitude demarcation is not arbitrary.

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