Hint: It's much easier to have good PR by being actually good. Though it does make people like this do the whole implication thing.

I saw this the other day:

> Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick

https://bsky.app/profile/mtsw.bsky.social/post/3lnbrfrvmss26

I don't know, staff at my two Costcos feel much more disinterested and rude then I remember a decade ago. It used to feel fun but now it's miserable.

At peak times they run out of carts and tell the customers to go hunting in the lot for them, door greeters shouting at members across the floor, checkout queues stretch the length of the warehouse, they start half blocking the gas station entrance 30mins before close so trucks can't get in, so maybe they're turning those profit screws.

>It used to feel fun but now it's miserable.

It's not their job to entertain you.

'Delight the customer' is a basic tenet of business. A business that wants repeat customers, that is.

Ah, right, by being actually good, as in - being okay with mass surveillance as long as it isn't being done in the US, being okay with Claude assisting in killing people as long as it isn't fully autonomous, and being actively hostile to open-weight LLMs and open research on LLMs? This kind of "good"?

No, OP is right, their PR department is doing a great job.

Correct. Protect our citizens' rights, as we are the ones under the jurisdiction of our government. Yes, design competitive weapons systems that can stand up to the threats that adversary powers are creating, but do so while maintaining human control.

That kind of good.

It’s nice that Americans are being so open about how they feel about other countries these days.

"these days"? Too many countries/HNers are only just figuring out it's not fun being at the sharp-end of imperialism.

What part are you bothered about? The concept of nations?

Sibling comment summed it up pretty well; my country is considered an ally of yours, but even left leaning Americans seem to take it for granted that we deserve mass AI surveillance/blackmail/manipulation if there’s a chance it could benefit us citizens in the short term. I suppose we deserve it for being complicit in American crimes for so long

You're assuming things I didn't state. I don't particularly want mass AI surveillance at all, but considering how much more dangerous a government's mass spying is to its own citizens living in it 24/7, it's not unreasonable for that to be the focus.

> You're assuming things I didn't state. I don't particularly want mass AI surveillance at all

That's fair, sorry for that.

> considering how much more dangerous a government's mass spying is to its own citizens living in it 24/7, it's not unreasonable for that to be the focus

The US government is actively trying to influence politics in my country and spending huge amounts of money to do it. The US government is a much larger threat to us than our own government.

All of our tech is owned and operated by US companies, which means the US government has read/write access to all of our data. If we attempt to incentivize domestic software production (e.g. by taxing imported software, or by stipulating where our data can be stored and who can access it), the US government will destroy our economy. This has played out a few times recently.

I can't believe we were so foolish as to let this situation grow. Its going to be a painful few decades.

How have they been hostile to open weight models and research? Just because they don't release models themselves?

Note that they are still releasing interesting research

It's funny, because even if they walk it back, they still would come out ahead in PR versus if they just rolled over. Because at that point, it would look like a hostage victim reading a statement that they are being treated well by their captors in front of a camera.

The admin is clearly running out of steam yet you expect them to be able to get what they want next week after failing this week?

Ive been hearing this since 2016. Any day now.

Do you think that bad things happening is just hilarious in general? Do you like to see good behavior punished? I'm really trying to understand what you get out of making this comment. Also what happens when ... This doesn't happen? You just polluted the epistemic commons a bit more with some cynical bullshit sans consequence? Enough. I think it's time to start calling this garbage out when I see it.

Two things can be true at the same time. It can notionally be a “good” decision and also a straightforward act of Anthropic continuing their PR that they’re some sort of benevolent entity despite continuing to pursue a typical corporate capitalistic structure. It is what it is. The game is the game. But I’m not going to sit there and pretend their virtues are as pure of snow. I’m sorry that’s upset you.

Why? What has their PR department done? Most people are quite critical of a lot of their messaging, it's their actions that seem worth encouraging