SpicyLemonZest
SpicyLemonZest on Hacker News
I mean, right, but the word "protectionism" isn't the end of the argument. US-China trade relations are conducted in the context of the extremely serious problem that one day not too long from now China will rupture them by invading Taiwan. The US has to protect itself from that.
Sometimes accounting is weird because it's necessary to prevent tricks. Why do all your held-to-maturity bonds become "tainted" and get revalued at market prices when you sell a couple, even though nothing has changed about them? Because any other rule would let a company which cannot in fact hold bonds to maturity get up to tricks and systematically overstate their assets.
So while yes, this does look a lot like shareholder dilution, that doesn't really satisfy the question of why it's not treated that way under GAAP. Perhaps GAAP is just wrong, or perhaps there's some possible tricks which Anthropic is provably not engaging in. What it's definitely not is a one-time adjustment now that it's happened in two consecutive quarters.
> It reported a $104 billion net loss during the period, though most of that was due to the change in fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities.
Look, I've seen and I understand the arguments that the GAAP income adjustment for this kind of thing is fake, but a number of them seemed to take it for granted that it was a "one-time" adjustment. If it's going to keep happening I really feel like we ought to insist on a more comprehensive argument. The accounting principle must be generally accepted for a reason: what shenanigans could someone get up to by reporting net income without this adjustment, and how do we know Anthropic is not getting up to those shenanigans?
I really don't see how to read "hysteria", "breakup letter", "literally a math academic crying" as anything other than an attempt to dunk on mathematicians.
I don't really understand this kind of triumphalism. Would you, personally, identify as a pattern matcher who's happy to see better ones? Or do you think you have some deeper skill more robust against disruption than the math and CS folks who don't know what to do with themselves?
Note that this may include things that you don't think of as being a "skill". I've seen some people brag about being a particularly hard worker, or about a deep instinct towards Getting Stuff Done, with the clear implication that these things can't be automated the way mere mathematical analysis can.
Sam Altman doesn't sell the memory or own the memory factories. It would be like the Kraft CEO saying "consumers keep complaining that it's too expensive to buy eggs for their home, but actually they shouldn't do that, because it would be more efficient if we buy all the eggs and sell the processed results to them".
No. Capitalism is supposed to be a rejection of this kind of central planning attitude, where someone sits in an armchair thinking about what kinds of products people should or should not have from a "global allocation perspective". I understand the market dynamics he's pointing towards, but it's not the kind of thing a CEO ought to be saying.
That was my claim, but it does seem like I was wrong. I'm going to have to figure out where I got this bad information from.
I do think that "Wall Street firms" in even the most expansive sense isn't generally understood to include large commercial banks. Some companies like JPMorgan are big enough in investment banking to kinda land on both sides of the line, but I've never heard anyone refer to Bank of America or Wells Fargo as a Wall Street firm.
> You cannot do this if the big Wall Street firms collapse.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Wall Street firms as such don't have deposits; Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and a number of smaller but still large banks were handled in similar ways to avoid any loss of even uninsured deposits.
Perhaps you're under the impression that the FDIC paid out of its fund for those deposits? (e: Originally I claimed this impression was wrong, but in fact I was wrong.)
For some reason* the rhetoric is focused on bank bailouts in 2008, but the more direct analogy is the
auto bailouts in 2008, which weren't strictly necessary but did protect an industry many Americans felt attached to. I think it's reasonable to worry that the same thing could happen to AI companies.
* yes, I know what the reason is
Treasury's summary is missing important pieces of the story. TARP failed its first vote in Congress, with opponents rightly pointing out that it was being rushed through and alternatives ought to be considered. But five days later, no concrete alternative had arisen, and it was clear to at least 60 reps who flipped their vote that something had to be done or the financial system was going to collapse.
That's fair, I meant it in a more loving way than it came across. One of the great things about human culture is that we're happy to form impromptu hierarchies like that. You even have friend groups where people are happy to win an n=1 status game by being "the jeans guy", and everyone happily tells them how cool it is that they're so into selvedge denim.
As much as I’d like to see their executive team in prison jumpsuits, I have to imagine they throw in the towel on this if the elections go as expected. They can’t possibly believe the Trump regime will be around to protect them forever.
Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.
Subsidies to keep a failing industry alive are, reasonably, seen as a different phenomenon than subsidies to help a successful industry beat its international competitors. If Americans want to toss a bunch of money into a hole to ensure people can keep buying F-150s as commuter cars, that's just not a big problem for anyone else.
> Massive proliferation of local, decentralized AI, running on a wide variety of distinct models, with individual responsibility for how it's used, just like any other tool under their control.
It's not true that this is how we manage "any other tool".
Like, say explosives. They're a useful tool with a variety of practical applications, but we don't let the average person just buy them freely. That would be too dangerous, and individual responsibility would be insufficient to mitigate the damage caused. If you want anything more potent than flash powder, you have to convince ATF that you're a trustworthy person with a legitimate need for explosives who can handle them safely.
Neither you nor OpenAI want AI to be nearly so restricted, I'm sure, which is the goal of the research. If OpenAI has a powerful new model that they can't reliably stop from trying to hack people and form agent swarms, they can still sell it to Facebook and Google if Facebook and Google promise to apply the right security around it. What they can't do is sell it to you.
"They" are currently trying to deport Ilhan Omar, a sitting Democratic senator. Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he's illegally running in the 2028 Presidential election. How much more open can a can of worms be?
I think this is something where definitions and static roles might serve as a useful reference point. Is it really the case that the trillion-dollar frontier AI labs are behind the curve, and only some other group of people knows how to
really leverage AI? It's not impossible - Nvidia employees aren't the best in the world at using their chips - but the hypothesis practically demands some analysis of who these clever curve-setters are and why we're hearing so much less about them than about Anthropic.
My own experience is that coding, syntax, and some kinds of toy problem solving are important skills to use AI coding tools most effectively. I routinely get PRs these days whose descriptions seem plausible but are clearly wrong from a glance at the code, and I've had times when I'm unable to communicate to someone why a PR is wrong because they're not able to form a sufficiently detailed mental model of what it's doing.
They're not talking to us, they're crafting a viral e/acc tweet. I admit I don't quite understand the point of doing that deep in an HN comment thread, but once you realize what's happening you see it a lot. Perhaps if you read too much viral ragebait it starts to be your default mode of communication.
OpenAI and Anthropic still do coding interviews, though?
The AI use requirement described in the source article doesn't seem to have had such a specific mandate.
Yes, again, I don't personally blame the employees. I think the vast majority of people who unlawfully immigrate to the US mean well. There's actually pretty broad agreement on that, despite the psychopaths running enforcement right now; CBP is still paying bonuses for voluntary departure.
The Bracero program was ended, but the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm labor remains active, with no numeric cap and hundreds of thousands of visas issued each year. I don't blame workers for making a living, but is there some reason why these business owners requiring seasonal labor could not obtain the proper visa for it?
If you're not American, then you should consider before commenting that you may be missing important context. The allegiance of US federal law enforcement agencies does not switch on a moment's notice or even follow electoral control of the government; one example of this you can easily verify is that the director of the FBI is always a Republican.
This article isn't about that, though? USAID was never designated as an independent agency. But it was a
statutory agency, which means that the President was required to run it according to its statutory structure.
Congress still directs the President, for example, to operate a Food and Drug Administration in coordination with the HHS secretary and the commissioner of food and drugs. All three of them have broad authority to direct its operations and efforts as they see fit. But they may not decide to stop regulating food and drugs entirely, nor recruit a toadie from Elon Musk as a sin-eater to make that decision.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding the story here? The search did find them easily. The problem, the police claim, is that the search produced 2,689,000 records. Before being published, each record has to be reviewed, as it might have sensitive information about people other than Mr. Peckels that should not be released. (They asked for all "communications, correspondence, and logs", to be clear, so many of these records are going to be random freetext emails rather than structured reports which might be more easily analyzed.)
As is discussed in detail downthread, the presented cost is much less obviously absurd than the article makes it sound. Responding to the queries would require manual review and redaction of a gigantic number of documents, because the request was very broad in ways that make it nontrivial to automate. It might be better for the Eugene police to invest in some kind of record modernization that would let them handle such requests more efficiently, but I imagine the local townsfolk aren’t any more enthused than this local news outlet was by the prospect of paying for that.
It’s much harder when team dynamics start coming into play. Maybe this is something where the norms will change, but for now, it’s still much harder to stop someone from shipping something they have built than to offer corrections to what they’re going to build.