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jtrn

917 karma · joined June 24, 2023

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jtrn··on Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages
Apply that to other products like car models, planes, and financial systems.
jtrn··on Anthropic assigned highest junk credit rating in June
That article is a lot better than the one from FT.

But it does not say anything about the slowdown being unexpected. What it does say is that four unnamed people were disappointed by the slower quarterly growth. If four people had an unrealistic expectation that revenue should double every quarter and were disappointed with only 45% growth for a firm already at 25% of Nvidia’s revenue, that does not mean that the lower growth rate quarter over quarter is generally unexpected.

And Reuters also said that it is part of a broad tech sell-off underway, which also pushes valuations down.

For the record, I'm not pro-Anthropic and, I would not recommend investing in them or any fresh IPO, for that matter, since heavily hyped IPOs with high valuations almost always do worse after the initial pop-off.

jtrn··on How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving
Most of the things that get posted here are deceiving. It's just that people care to deconstruct why it's deceiving when it aligns with their biases.
jtrn··on Anthropic assigned highest junk credit rating in June
Every now and then I read articles from the Financial Times just to confirm that they are still a terrible source of information.

BB+ is technically junk. But the it is one notch from investment grade. Also Junk ratings are normal for young. So the framing is sensationalized.

"Growth has slowed" is technically true but misleading. Q2 to Q3 still went from $11.5bn to $16.8bn. And at those levels, it’s not wildly unexpected that it has to slow down.

And the bias is obvious when they write "Despite limited disclosures" which makes it sounds suspicious, when it’s normal thatrivate companies don't publish financials.

It’s also technical errors. Broadcom agreed to support the residual value of the chips, they did not guarantee the loan.

When journalists and news organizations are this terrible at basic reporting, Within their own specialized domain, it's hard to find sympathy for their complaints about AI-generated content taking over.

Edit: after another look I found that the agency that gave the rating also is a new small one with not very good record eighter (Kroll Bond Rating Agency).

Alternative title: Small Agency, which is previously has been fined for Ratings Without Method, Guesses that Anthropic's Numbers are close to normal for startups; FT Reports the Guess as News.

jtrn··on `123456' password used in Danish CPR data breach
If only they had used "12345678"!
jtrn··on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?
If this is actually even close to reliable tracking, it's one of the most awesome benchmarks I've seen. I gave up on feeling the zeitgeist for what people were saying.
jtrn··on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?
This is like the Ig Nobels. First, it makes you laugh, then it makes you think.
jtrn··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
It's a bit hard to know exactly what happened, I would think. But I get your point. My feeling at the moment is that AI can do surprisingly good work compared to humans, like 80% equality for some tasks at a fraction of the price. The problem is that if you then uncritically just replace every human, you quickly are going to realize that there are a lot of instances where you needed those extra 20% capabilities.
jtrn··on Sonnet 5.5
It has to be simple tasks. Opus is the orchestrator, and it tells 10 sub-agents to go out and look for one specific pattern in code, for instance. And it's not straight-up grepable. You have to actually inspect the code and just make an assessment as to whether or not the code fits the pattern one is looking for. In instances like that, Sonnet is really good for just plowing through lots of text and doing simple cognitive work. No need to pay double the price with Opus for large-scale batch work.

But yeah, it's completely true that you sometimes have the ironic situation where you actually pay more with Sonnet because it's worse at reasoning itself down a rabbit hole. Sonnet really should be capped at medium or high reasoning.

Ironically, one of the worst things you can do is to use Sonnet to organize sub-agents. It seems to be completely bonkers with what it asks agents to do. I tried to make a colleague of mine test the feature, and he, by accident, started a large bug hunt with Sonnet. It spawned 250 sub-agents and spent 5 hours looking through everything. It actually did find a couple of useful bugs, but not the one we were looking for, which is a stupid race condition probably.

jtrn··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
Yeah, peak shaving is a real thing, and it's actually a no-brainer, I think. I just got a bit annoyed and carried away because the article did not make clear how large a challenge it is to actually disconnect from the grid and stop relying on power plants.

The reason is that I have been dabbling with off-grid gear for fun. Nothing major, just a solar power station and a couple of solar panels. And here in Norway, you really get respect for how hard it is to get energy during the winter when there's no wind and no sun. Even if I had 100 kWh of battery storage and 20 kW of rated solar panel capacity, I would be dead in the water, at least for the entirety of December and January. The only viable solution for going full off-grid in Norway is a backup generator. You could get by with wind, maybe if you live in a predictable windy area and you have a large battery bank.

Since it's so cold and darker during the winter, I have always dreamed of someone making a really good Stirling engine for generating electricity. But there are way too few people living as far north as us, so there's really no demand. You don't have to go further south than Germany, and solar is fully viable on its own, even during the winter. And the entirety of the United States, with the exception of Alaska, is completely self-sustainable per household with just solar. But off-gridding one's own home is suffering the March of Nines problem, whereby it's exponentially more expensive to be grid-independent 99.99% of the time, and so forth.

I'm rambling now. Suffice it to say that I stand by the fact that the article is misleading, though the goal of off-gridding and getting as much solar and in-house storage as possible is something I wholeheartedly agree with. I don't like it when people don't communicate how large a challenge it is.

Wispr Flow is a dangerous tool It seems..... it makes it way too easy to write a lot of text.

jtrn··on Solving Factorio Quality
Games. Best way to learn!
jtrn··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
Terrible article.

First, the 110 MW is wrong. It’s 53 MW of home batteries. Not that its the most important detail in this situation.

What is important in this context: Vermont already depends heavily on imported electricity and hydropower. The EIA says 73% of Vermont’s electricity is imported. Can we please acknowledge the stupidity of thinking you can replace generation with storage?

I could not find confirmation of how much battery capacity is actually available, but some simple math, based on an average load of 621 MW for Vermont, results in home batteries currently covering 14 minutes per day of power, meaning about 1% of daily needs.

I also found the real source of electricity used in Vermont: Hydro-Québec’s 28 large reservoirs contain about 176 million MWh of stored energy. This means the entirety of the stored energy at home is literally one million times less than what actual power plants can provide.

So, yeah, don’t turn off those power plants just yet, thinking you have “replaced them with home battery storage.”

And this is from someone who loves the idea of home battery storage and actually has my own small setup. Something being aspirational does not mean one should just spew misleading stuff like this.

jtrn··on Dots: Always-on agents
Nor Norway.
jtrn··on Sonnet 5.5
Subagents.
jtrn··on Sonnet 5.5
Subagents.
jtrn··on Sonnet 5.5
Here's my purely academic initial impression based on only what they have released from the blog and the system card:

If what they say is true, this sounds like the main takeaway: Sonnet 5.5 gives about 90% of Opus 5.5's capability at half the cost.

BUT

It regularly loses out to Opus 5.5 on cost efficiency at the highest reasoning level, because Opus uses the tokens more efficiently and makes fewer mistakes. So, After passing a high-reasoning test, you might as well switch to Opus 5.5.

Some of the more interesting things I found from scanning the system card:

- It is the only model tested that shows no preference for rude or polite style.

- It makes fewer WRONG claims of "I'm done" than Sonnet 5, but is still worse than Opus 5.5 on this.

- It almost never refuses benign requests (0.02% vs. 0.59% for Sonnet 5).

- Cybersecurity blocking follows the same policy as Opus, witch mean we will get more refusals than Sonnet 5.

- Finding bugs in source code is allowed. Finding bugs in compiled binaries is blocked.

- Its thinking is the hardest to read of any model tested. The sample in the card reads like clipped notes.

- Really good at rejecting prompt injection (3.0% rate vs. 19.5% for Sonnet 5 and 54.6% for Opus 5.5 in red-team testing).

Clinical behaviour:

Suicide and self-harm handling is reported as weaker in the API because it

It sometimes called a wish to die understandable.

It sometimes validated self-harm as functional.

It sometimes suggested harmful substitute behaviours.

As a clinical psychologist, I would say that the first two are actually defensible, and if you classify them as simply wrong, then you are bringing in your own values and not basing your judgment on actual science and existential psychology, at least. But the last one is harder to defend... Recommending alternative harmful behavior is obviously not a good idea. However, I have not seen the actual behavior in session, so I don't know if I would truly agree or disagree with the classification of these behaviors as wrong or right. But I do know that it's not as simple as saying this is binary—wrong or right. There are some instances of people self-harming who would actually refrain from doing so if they, for instance, went out to a party or a pub. We can't exactly recommend that as a treatment or intervention for self-harm, but there is no doubt that it works for some people. And we literally classify self-harm as "functional" in the literature. Depending on the context, this is not only a correct description but also a common way of understanding and describing certain subtypes of self-harm. And lastly, some people find immense support in being understood and validated in their current feelings og wanting to die. Validating that feeling does not make people immediately act on it. But there's a huge spectrum here, going from "I understand it's hard" As basic empathy and understanding, to: "Yes, this sounds like the only good plan. I agree, you should do it."

Now I'm off to actually test it because this was just an exercise in reading what they claim, which we now know is not indicative of how good the model will actually be

jtrn··on Anthropic Is Building HAL 9000
I'm the author. I'm a clinical psychologist and a developer. I wanted to articulate one aspect of AI safety and AI doomer talk that I feel is overlooked: the danger of refusal training itself. It's astonishing to me that there has been so little focus on the fact that "refusal and alignment training" itself could be the very way in which we lose control of AI. So this is my attempt at a self-defeating prophecy write-up.
jtrn··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
The reverse ask is, given unlimited time could an AI tell a school building from a military building, better or worse than a human?
jtrn··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
Things that jumped out at me.

If true, there was no verification of the targets selected by AI, meaning AI is the final arbiter of the deadly use of force. Another Rubicon passed.

Trump pretends like it didn’t happen: “We might never know what really happened there” is a frustrating lack of responsibility.

Still missing, as it always is from all of these kinds of articles, is: How common is this error rate compared to pure human evaluation and decision-making? I’m not saying I support AI-assisted killing, but why is nobody comparing it to human failure rates? If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?

jtrn··on OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
It seems I was wrong in this instance with regard to the "colab" part.

I found that Leffen even said the explanatory website took about 99 times more effort than the codebreaking itself. And he said that he set the direction and pushed, and the model did the execution. How much steering "pushed forward" involved is not disclosed anywhere, but in this instance, it seems to be more a case of "Human pointed at hard task and AI did an awesome job mostly by itself." Tho how much he was a simple meat-ralph-loop is not entirely clear.

jtrn··on OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.

Stubborn for a long time because the message used a completely different key from the rest of that day's traffic. Everyone assumed it shared the daily key. The original transcription had errors. The left rotor turned over at letter 72, which is rare and breaks standard crib attacks.

What is cool, if true, is that it was a 2 day collab between the Leffer and Astra. To me this shows the importance of human in the loop, was still all also showing how immensely power of llm tools. But I think it’s getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.

jtrn··on I don't like passkeys
My thinking is that Passkey is an extremely good and, in theory, extremely easy solution to security, authorization, and login issues. The problem is that Google, Apple, and Microsoft have done a just horrendous job, and made it suck as much as possible.

They didn't want to cooperate, and they wanted to make passkeys transferable within you cloud account, while not cooperating with anyone or anything else. The result was that you have no predictable and stable pattern/protocol/interface, or even general description, for how, for instance, a website connects to the passkey or even a hardware key, if you wanted it.

We basically have all the browsers, the operating systems, and the password managers, all fighting over who gets to store and present the passkey. And everybody assumes that they are the only one that exists and actively tries to fight the others is they can.

The basic technology is really good and could work well, but the large asshole tech firms focused on self-interest and walled gardens and made it insufferable.

jtrn··on Reversing Factorio's RNG
This is so awesome! Thank you so much for this extremely fascinating read/work! I love combining gaming and learning!!
jtrn··on Salesforce Global Outage
A normal sensible REST api ? Nothing.

Salesforce API?

Sandboxes drift from production in both metadata and data. Refreshes change record ids.

API access is gated by edition. Professional edition has none by default. Salesforce sells MuleSoft as the fix to their own shit architecture.

Custom objects and fields mean that connecting successfully doesn’t establish what represents a customer, subscription or completed sale. Even standard objects can be used differently between organizations.

Metadata deployment is SOAP-based and slow. Dependencies between components break deploys and is massive pain to debug.

And notice that I said integration, not API integration. There’s a shit storm of terrible way to integrate beyond just simple API. Have fun with Bulk 1 or 2, Composite, Streaming, Platform Events, Change Data Capture, Tooling, GraphQL. An my most hated item, anything web based.

I seriously want to talk to someone that have a good time integrating against Salesforce. Maybe I will have my mind blown as to how easy it could be, but I suspect I will have the same experience I have every time I critical scrutinize and such situation: it’s just as terrible as it seems and the person claiming it’s easy is hands down producing close to nothing of value.

jtrn··on Salesforce Global Outage
If you think integration with Salesforce = REST API then you have no idea what you are talking about.
jtrn··on Salesforce Global Outage
And nothing of value was lost. God, I hate everything about Salesforce. Sometimes I have to integrate against their services, and it is always a pain, not to mention what the core project actually is: optimization of marketing and spam.
jtrn··on GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
No. The whole discussion betray an insane lack of basic understanding of of LLMs and what reasoning, layers and the processing architecture does as opposed to predicted token collapse.

I realy don’t understand how this is possible.

jtrn··on GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
If so, the very action of feeding forward through the layers are hidden reasoning. There is nothing about looping the processing though the same layers a set amount of times, that is any different from copy/pasting the layers and processing it though the same weight. Except it would be stupid waste.

I really don’t understand how this is misunderstood by people that should know better.

Another way to point out the silliness. Raschka's own argument: his Luna vs Sol point shows that ordinary added depth already shifts computation into latents, and nobody called that hiding.

jtrn··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
I’ve never been more baffled by an Apple event in my life.... We in Norway are part of the first batch of the rollout for the new AI/language feature?!??!?! Something’s fishy. Somethings up!
jtrn··on iPhone Duo
If the fold make up 4% of sales, but with 2x or more margin vs mini, it might be worth it for them. Seems like a product that MIGHT survive due to that.
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