Humorist2290

It's privately owned and indeed they can set the terms.

But if you're hired to write software, and you accept the job, and you accept payment, and then you decline -- well, it would be polite to offer a refund. Anthropic is, as far as I know, not up front about what is/isn't permitted to be generated, and has a history of refusing justifiable refunds.

In many US states a company can fire you even for protected reasons, and just fabricate a reason that isn't protected. Of course there are examples of people fighting this because it sometimes is a fight worth having, but the vast majority just have to accept being discriminated against and try to find another job.

> A humanist may have strong, sincerely held beliefs, but he is not under any authority that compels those beliefs, so they aren't "religious".

The article actually links to a federal court case which ruled, indeed, that humanism is a religion [0].

It is my understanding that to suggest that strong, sincerely held beliefs are not in themselves authoritative is a rejection of humanism.

0: https://www.edweek.org/education/federal-court-finds-secular...

This is clearly hostile to the idea of civilian oversight, but the absurd scale of it is rather funny to me.

If you put $100 into US Treasury bonds (and for approximation's sake, say they have a 1% annual yield) then after 1700 years you would have 2.2 billion. And of course, if the US collapses before then, they wouldn't be able to collect on the FOIA fee anyway.

I can't help but point out that these companies have a documented history of violating basically every ToS on the internet, as well as enough spare compute to burn 300B tokens on a hunch about Navier-Stokes. Given they have a clear financial incentive to lock in a majority of the US economy into perpetual API subscriptions, why wouldn't they use their means to reinforce the hegemony?

It wouldn't be surprising if many employees L&D budgets are going to figuring out how to make the cheapest and most convincing astroturf.

There are many examples of people being charged with crimes as a result of writing software, [0][1] are two. OpenAI is a bit different because they have enough political influence, and money, to openly subvert justice.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutchins

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash

In a way, this task is perfectly suited for LLMs. To even understand the problem statement, much less the proof or Lean, is an extremely specialized skill. The overwhelming majority of people who are aware of this news simply don't have the capacity to call BS. Maybe there are a few thousand people in the world who could, and it seems they haven't yet, but indeed it's only been a few weeks.

The more familiar analogy was when I look at the code that Claude spews for my partner. They take it at face value and hope it works. I usually find it very problematic, but only because I knew what to look for.

Is there any question the person who was baselessly charged with CSAM, then terrorism when they realized it was so obviously untenable, as a pretense to detain him would've been treated differently if he were on a different "side"?

That is indeed a fun fact. One of those things I didn't realize, but immediately believe. Most of the gun owners I know have at least one or two antiques which predate modern notions like "safety" by quite a bit. They are fascinating technology, and they make for incredible family heirlooms.

To stay consistent with my point though, if we mandate that everyone must ID verify to access the internet, I think it's just as reasonable we mandate that all such antiques be forcibly modernized with some sort of 5G-connected ID scanner. For the children of course.

Yeah the suggestion is mostly facetious and I realize impracticable. As the other commenter mentioned -- it's a poison pill. If such a rider were added to the KIDS Act it would be dead in the water, without a doubt.

Though I think it's worth noting that age verification _without_ identity verification is basically as impracticable, and arguably more dangerous.

I can't remember right now where from, but I do remember some 10ish years ago listening to an NPR spot from some philosopher who claimed there was an existential crisis in the field of philosophy. The premise that I do remember was that our technology, our policy, and our society has all outpaced our ethics and our philosophy. The person was making the argument that we as a society would struggle to cope with the continued development of technology when we could barely cope with personal loss and structural inequality.

At the time it felt prescient; now it just feels too late.

To take a different perspective than ownership as "right to re-sell" or ownership as "the right to use in perpetuity," I think there is also value in considering ownership as responsibility to maintain those rights.

When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.

Interesting analysis. In it they say

  Worse, the burden [generating energy] increasingly falls on the buyer [data center developers]

I don't believe this is worse, but appropriate. The grid is a shared resource, used by enterprise and individuals. If some class of consumers demand an outsized share of that resource, they should pay an outsized share of its maintenance and development. I don't see that happening.

It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.

This is very "war on drugs" coded, but to extend the metaphor a bit:

Meta here is the heroin cartel. They're a publicly traded company, have offices all over the country, and have mountains of evidence sitting in moderately well secured cabinets. Why should the government go after users when it could more easily go after the producers?

In many states, children under some age are prohibited from using firearms. There is substantial evidence to show that firearms pose a real and present harm to individual children and large groups.

An excellent rider to the KIDS act would be to mandate the installation of age (that is, identity) verification to all firearms in order to disable the safety.

From the Claremore City Council minutes [0] it does show the person mentioned in the article was a speaker, among a group of some 20 other members of the community. They also include the incredible claim

  Claremore Data Center will house the backbone of the internet and supports all the functions that occur on the internet.

The minutes mention that many of the council members were accused of not caring, but they do not mention the arrest. I'm not suggesting the story is false as much as highlighting that the city's minutes omit it.

0: https://claremore.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/02-17-2026-...

I'm increasingly convinced that these kind of leaks are the only effective resistance to this surveillance society we're entering. Meta will keep doing this, and other employers will probably follow, and then of course governments will use "appropriate legal processes" to add the data to their dossiers, etc. We are watching in real time the expansion of surveillance cameras, chat control, deanonymization, etc.

Leaks of this data make it obvious to everyone how much a liability it is. Meta Execs have their data in this pile as well; soldiers and congresspeople are in Flock's database. How many senators do you think PornHub has an accurate taste profile for?

Of course there's harm that comes with leaking this data. But is the harm really greater than everyone being surveilled by everyone, everywhere?

It must be a wild time in the corporate espionage world these days. The annual operating budget of the CIA is like 20B. That's a rounding error compared to the burn rates of these labs.

Maybe it's conspiratorial, but it seems like the direction this is going is for the US to nationalize these companies. Somewhere between "too big to fail" and "national security."

So I had a feature phone -- the Nokia 8110 4g. What sold me was that I could use it as a 4g hotspot and connect a smartphone to it, or not and be offline. The idea of "going online" is something I miss, in that it's not normal to be always attached to the internet. The connections I want to foster don't need to be mediated by an ISP, or a Telco, or a social media crime syndicate, or whatever else.

The "flip" part of this phone is cute, but the point Commodore makes about using it to punctuate the experience of using the device is significant to me. The Nokia also has a little sliding cover (which I always preferred over the flips as a matter of taste) and indeed the tactile interaction adds something. If it's still always connected to the internet though, it's just a gimmick.

Sadly my cell provider at the time gave me a SIM which just wouldn't work with it, and nowadays it seems like they aren't even available to buy anymore. I'd be interested in this, but not at a 600$ price level. I want a phone which (a) is a phone and (b) is a 5g wifi hotspot on demand and (c) nothing else. After years of casual searching, I have concluded that such a product is either too niche or too countercultural to be allowed.

It's more comical than sinister, but I have an example in this vein.

I was using Claude to work on a pet project which itself has a "generate with AI" feature. The default model the project uses was Gemini (because it was cheaper and more reliably produces the correct output format). Claude kept changing the default model to Opus when working on entirely unrelated parts, and I kept noticing it because Opus would mangle the output and break the rendered page. It also did this to the .env file in addition to the default.

I'm taking a "wait and see" approach with Bitwarden. I've been a paying customer for a while, happy with it, and hoping the leadership changes won't be too user hostile. Still, a major reason I chose Bitwarden to begin with is they have a decent "Export" button, and all of this news reminded me that my offline backup of the vault was a few months old. Regardless of their product roadmap, they could have an incident tomorrow that keeps users away from their passwords -- offline backups are a good idea.

And Vaultwarden is nice. I've used it at work, hosted it myself, and as a user of the password manager I can say it's basically indistinguishable. But I don't really pay Bitwarden for a password manager -- I pay them for a secure sync of a password manager I can share with family members who can't figure out a VPN.

An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.

Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

Company offers a service that is considered essential to function in society, and the overwhelming majority of people _must_ pay for as if it were a tax: "this seems like something generally useful to the public! They need to be a regulated utility!"

It's incredible that on the same device we can write pithy little comments, we can also play games, listen to music, read countless books, basically access the whole of the internet, and also empty out bank accounts. I'd wager most of those can be done on many people's devices in under a minute, with little more safeguard than a fingerprint.

To me this isn't some security flaw in android that allows users to do something. It's a fundamental flaw in having most of the world's population forced into using a device whose software, firmware, and hardware are gate kept by a handful of monopolistic companies. They want all your eggs in one basket, and they'll hold the basket for you.

For many people these things mediate a person's interaction with the world. That's not some super fantastic responsibility on Google's shoulders, but a humanist catastrophe caused in part by (and of course handsomely profitable for) Google.

America's culture of individual liberty moved into the national mythos in the last century, replaced by a culture of consumption and commerce over all. People don't have the freedom to build whatever they want because pockets need to be greased, permits need to be reviewed, HOAs need to have their fees, etc.

At some point in the not so distant future, it seems entirely likely for the US to bail out OpenAI / Nvidia / etc using national security as justification. Democrats and Republicans really can get along as long as their donors get what they want. No matter how the regime changes in the coming years, the DoD will keep getting funding, and that funding will increasingly go to vendors who don't mind killing people.

Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.

> Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are are stated?

I wouldn't say it's shady or even untoward. Simon writes prolifically and he seems quite genuinely interested in this. That he has attached his public persona, and what seems like basically all of his time from the last few years, to LLMs and their derivatives is still a vested interest. I wouldn't even say that's bad. Passion about technology is what drives many of us. But it still needs saying.

> This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches?

It's just a fact that these things are statistical text prediction models. Sure, they're marvels, but they're not deterministic, nor are they reliable. They are like a slot machine with surprisingly good odds: pull the lever and you're almost guaranteed to get something, maybe a jackpot, maybe you'll lose those tokens. For many people it's cheap enough to just keep pulling the lever until they get what they want, or go bankrupt.

I can believe this, and it's a good point. I believe Bitwarden does the same. I'm not against Vaultwarden in particular but against colocation of highly sensitive (especially orthogonally sensitive) data in general. It's part of a self-hoster's journey I think: backups, isolation, security, redundancy, energy optimization, etc. are all topics which can easily occupy your free time. When your partner asks whether your photos are more secure in Immich than Google, it can lead to an interesting discussion of nuances.

That said, I'm not sure if Bitwarden is the answer either. There is certainly some value in obscurity, but I think they have a better infosec budget than I do.

It needs to be said that your opinion on this is well understood by the community, respected, but also far from impartial. You have a clear vested interest in the success of _these_ tools.

There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make their whole careers about being experts on this topic.

But it's still a statistical text prediction model, wrapped in fancy gimmicks, sold at a loss by mostly bad faith actors, and very far from its final form. People waiting to get on the bandwagon could well be waiting to pick up the pieces once it collapses.