SemiAnalysis’ founder was roommates with Anthropic people, not OpenAI, so he may be slightly (very slightly) more objective here.
677 karma · joined February 3, 2025
I think the largest part is either due to being caught up in a bad social set, or straight up because they think crime is fine. Poverty doesn't cause this, at least not primarily - it's rather that personal characteristics such as lack of impulse control and high time preference lead to both poverty and a propensity to crime.
With modern surveillance technology, you could probably get rid of a fair number of cops, but you’d still need some muscle to actually enforce the law. The other option is regulatory penalties, but those tend to work best on middle-class people, not on the classes that commit physical theft and violence, which people hate most of all.
In Canada, measles cases suddenly exploded in 2025 as well, and they don't have RFK Jr. there: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/
The policies around measles vaccines have shifted a little since RFK became HHS Secretary, but not in a material way. Generally the messaging has focused on putting measles, mumps, and rubella in individual vaccines rather than combined, but at no point has the federal government recommended not to get vaccinated. That, combined with the Canadian data, implies that RFK or other changes to US health policy are not likely to be the cause of the measles outbreaks.
The Nature paper is "Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs"[1]. This method does not separate out tokens into separate classes, but merely uses a seed for the PRNG that selects which among the most likely tokens generated by the LLM will actually be output. This has the advantage that there's no green and red token sets, so no token is systematically favored or disfavored. If a particular token is overwhelmingly predicted to be the most likely candidate, it will almost certainly be selected, so the watermark doesn't affect that. Even if there are several choices of output token at a point that have similar probability of selection, the watermark doesn't systematically bias in favor of one token or the other.
This is actually a quite elegant method of watermarking that, contrary to people's fears, won't adversely affect the model output. The main concern I have with it is that it appears that you can't actually test the watermark locally, without uploading it to Anthropic. I'm not sure why that's the case, since there's no particular reason the watermarking key has to be private, except if you want to prevent others from generating text with their own LLMs that is watermarked to look like it's generated by Anthropic - but everybody wants their text to not have the watermark.
[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark#:~:text...
The details of how to override a ruling against the executive does differ between countries, and also on whether its considered just an interpretation of law or a constitutional question. Both the US and France have a written constitution that's binding on other branches, while the UK does not.
Was it that Notion from early on supported Markdown compatibility, which is a distinguishing feature when selling to software startups? Was Paper too aggressively coupled to Dropbox storage, when Google, Microsoft, and Box already had a large share of that market?
So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.
Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.
I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of.
This is better explained in The Information article (which is paywalled): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-.... Emphasis mine:
> When new employees join Apple, the company often issues them an iPhone and Mac and pays for an iCloud account with a large amount of online storage capacity. Crucially, during the onboarding process, Apple encourages new hires to use their preexisting personal Apple IDs with this iCloud account, through which their co-workers can share internal Apple documents and other files with them.
But OpenAI's allegation is that Apple doesn't do that, either out of incompetence or malice (to add legal uncertainty when their employees go to competitors).
Why would that be relevant for a hardware project? Discovery doesn't mean carte blanche to dig around in arbitrary company secrets - and there's significant danger to Apple as well. Did Apple give corporate secrets gathered from the former OpenAI-Apple deal to Google for their Gemini integration, or for Apple's own AI?
There's probably a little bit of that, but also simple carelessness.
Japanese has several advantages:
1. Both given names and surnames often use more than 2 syllables. This makes it more familiar to speakers of European languages, where multi-syllable words are no big deal.
2. English speakers find Japanese easier to pronounce and remember due to its simpler syllable structure and use of globally more common sounds compared to the other languages.
3. Unlike the other languages, Japanese names are always given in Given Name, Surname order in English media, while names from the other languages are inconsistently transcribed in either order.
4. Japanese is the "default" East Asian culture for the West in many ways, since it's the one that at least the US has most deeply engaged for the longest time. Many, many cultural exports that actually originated in China were introduced to the West via Japan with Japanese names. Also, Japan has been an advanced industrial economy since the late 1800s, while China only achieved that status a few decades ago.
5. Japanese transcription into Roman characters has remained consistent for a long time (helped by the simpler phonology). Chinese and Korean have been cursed with several incompatible transcription systems over the years - although Pinyin has been winning out for Chinese, there are still many names with legacy transcriptions, not to mention the other Chinese languages needing their own transcriptions. Vietnamese does exclusively use Latin characters, but the diacritics and unfamiliar pronunciation makes them harder to remember.
Even having a burner phone without any personal information on it can be deemed suspicious. It would be best for your phone to have a recently-reinstalled OS, with a few critical apps like Whatsapp or iMessage set up with a few personal messages sent. You need to be able to set those up without a password manager. Anything else needs to take place on devices that you aren't carrying with you. Fortunately enough people don't update their Facebook these days that just having an account that exists but you don't use will probably work, assuming you don't look like someone that would be obsessed with their socials.
Maybe there are USB thumb drives that operate like a YubiKey unless special setup is performed to access the storage inside? That's one way to carry data with you if you have to.