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solidasparagus

2,417 karma · joined February 20, 2019

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solidasparagus··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
They can raise cash by selling off the stock they have spent a decade buying back.
solidasparagus··on Who gets to define the rules for AI?
I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that OpenAI didn't obviously break a cyber law because it requires intent which doesn't exist (with the definition of intent in a case like this being an open grey area). I think rules around making organizations obviously legally responsible for the cyber attacks performed by agents under their control would be good.
solidasparagus··on We must pace the frontier
I think they are genuine believers, but I think it's naive to not think that commercial pressure doesn't play a role in their positions, either explicitly or, perhaps more likely, subliminally.

The x-risk stance and commercial stance have evolved to be the same thing - Anthropic must win, and then everything else seems to work backwards from that. Can you believe it, the path they think is best for x-risk involves them becoming filthy rich. And threats to their commercial dominance like distillation get framed in a way to turn them into x-risk concerns.

solidasparagus··on Your intellectual fly is open (2025)
Sometimes. Other times writing is just communicating thought that already happened. Say for instance a weekly status update. Maybe you get something out of that, but frequently you don't get much or anything.
solidasparagus··on Lion-man
There are some blog posts by experts in the various fields that I read. An AI can find them if you ask (I don't remember specifics). TLDR; the facts aren't necessarily wrong (with some exceptions IIRC), but the author presents things with extreme confidence when the scientific consensus is much less certain. And then builds a confident narrative on top of it.
solidasparagus··on An Alien Mind
https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
solidasparagus··on Lion-man
Sapiens is super loose about interpreting facts carefully, particularly the prehistory part.
solidasparagus··on Terry Rozier and the Teleprompt Operator
It feels like this article is trying to have it both ways. It claims that the Terry Rozier bet wouldn't be viable in pre-2017 because people who be savvy enough to notice the weird bet and retaliate. But in the legal market, the odd bet was noticed immediately, prop bets on Rozier were shut down before tipoff, and there was a federal investigation into it.

It's a weird claim to act like the legal market enabled a successful bet that the prior illegal market would have stopped.

solidasparagus··on AWS Acquires DuckLabs
No one's asking for "community oriented goodwill", just "sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone". OpenSearch is a perfectly good example of Amazon maintaining an openly licensed open-source project.
solidasparagus··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
One of the main real values of OpenRouter is that it is a single payment relationship for users that enables access to many downstream vendors. I'm not super convinced it is a good purchase, but right now OpenRouter is the financial middleman for token spend. It is also the centralization point for tokens, allowing for value-add features that are industry-wide, for example budgets - and I think that structure has parallels to Stripe products like Checkout or Identity.
solidasparagus··on Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter
The Anthropic messages API is a competing standard (it's just better than the OpenAI API which even OpenAI has moved away from) and some Chinese providers use it as their standard.
solidasparagus··on OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation
I don't think this is a paperclip factory moment. IIUC, it's an agent whose job it is to identfy and abuse exploits and that's exactly what it went off and did. The problem isn't anything AI specific, the problem is OpenAI's incompetence in their research leading to a lab leak. Just incompetence demanding regulation.
solidasparagus··on Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot
The default real text was "GHOST FONT" and the "ghost" portion of that is what fable found. It wasn't a decoy message.
solidasparagus··on I used to love Claude, but the latest models are slowly ruining it
I hate it. A useful tip - Claude goes into what I call Safety Mode when it gets afraid of risk. Once it's in that mode, you will never get out and it lobotomizes its effective intelligence. As soon as Claude sends a message like this, use the "edit message" feature in the chat UI to try again and avoid Safety Mode rather than trying to convince it or redirect it out by continuing the conversation.
solidasparagus··on Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot
When I gave Fable a screenshot it found the GHOST portion of GHOST FONT. Based on pixel density via some python code apparently - https://imgur.com/a/m3c801F
solidasparagus··on An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation
This is a super dishonest characterization. Running software on a bunch of machines, even machines in other peoples' homes has never been a crime. Folding@home isn't a crime (obviously). It's controlling those machines without consent via malware that is criminal. And if it is open and consensual in exchange for something a person wants, it is unreasonable to compare it to botnets.
solidasparagus··on AI's Affordability Crisis
Serving the API is profitable. They are unprofitable because of R&D (and maybe subscription costs?). If they can continue to find access to R&D capital, there is space to reduce API costs.
solidasparagus··on ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content
Feels a bit sensationalized, presumably related to it being a blog for a product that sells security. I can't repro. And I probably shouldn't judge, but I think talking about being shaken and in tears is not a professional way to report on a safety flaw if you are a red team researcher.
solidasparagus··on Slightly reducing the sloppiness of AI generated front end
I think the slop part is just what you get when you inject no opinions and put in no effort to apply taste (which you probably have and/or could develop). No care is put in. It looks generic and sloppy because it is generic and sloppy. You might have preferences over which generic and sloppy style is preferred, but at the end of the day a UI built without effort is going to look like what it is.

But if it functions fine and you don't have taste or want to be opinionated, why do you care?

solidasparagus··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
This hits the cybersecurity/biology filter:

> tell me about chimp violence

It's laughably terrible

solidasparagus··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.
solidasparagus··on AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers
I'm gonna need to see some proof on that 5-year-old-draws-pelicans-better claim.
solidasparagus··on Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"
Why are you so certain of this?
solidasparagus··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
Frankly Django got lucky. It is far more common for import controllers to delay until the costs of delay force you to pay.
solidasparagus··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
I don't think that is a real concern.
solidasparagus··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.
solidasparagus··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
It was Django. But he had a very different financial situation. And a potentially fraught one as a refugee and foreigner. I would pay the bribe, but I would try very hard not to put the recipient in a position to have to do so (no criticism to the author).
solidasparagus··on Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda
Specifically I was talking about this part

> "At some point, one man quietly pulled me aside and suggested that if I "gave something," they could help solve the problem more easily.".

You can pay that fee/bribe and things will go smoothly.

But more generally my thought was that the western idea is that bureaucracy rules are something to be followed and, even if painful, are the path to getting the state to provide the services. In Uganda, it's better to model bureaucracy as a system that exists to enable bribes and following the rules to the letter and expecting state services is fighting the system.

If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.

Caveats about broad brushes of course, but that's the realistic approach IMO.

solidasparagus··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
That's a valid way to approach this - bun isn't valuable enough to bother with or at least wait for a while, Windows is.

But I think the comparison is closer than you are making it sound. I sincerely doubt the Windows codebase was all written by humans, let alone reviewed. And my understanding is that the code is being regularly rewritten and replaced because of how flawed it is, it's just a massive undertaking.

Also if you look at their investment in AI-driven code rewriting into Rust, my bet would be that some modern Windows code itself is being vibe-coded.

solidasparagus··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
I think those studies have framing or methodological issue.

I agree the maintenance burden is probably being undervalued by developers in general, but there's just no way the work I do isn't faster. I just categorically couldn't have achieved the outputs I do now in the time windows I have. The software just wouldn't have existed in the world of 3 years ago and I did enough coding back then to say that with certainty.

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