sfink

As said in a sibling, that's not how eating works. Eating breaks proteins down and then reconstructs new proteins from the amino acids.

So what you really need to do is clone yourself, then hook your clones up to a machine that torments them by constantly warping their bones, and give yourself regular blood infusions from them. You'd have to create a facility to do all this in. Let's call it a torment nexus, just to pick a random name.

Say, has anyone tracked down what Larry Ellison is doing at the various real estate he owns?

Why do we die of old age in the first place? My money's on it being a strongly positive evolutionary force for a species. Almost all organisms age. It would make sense to me that the ones that tried not aging are gone now, likely because they were much much worse at adapting to changing conditions than ones that could reroll the dice every generation. I would further guess that the healthy oldsters filled up their ecological niche and blocked the young individuals from gaining a foothold.

But that argument doesn't prevent limited mechanisms, and conditional mechanisms in particular would still be rewarded. Conditional mechanisms provide much more short term adaptability to changing conditions, without damaging the long term species-wide adaptation.

There are intriguing parallels with centrally planned vs market economies.

Also, bones specifically need to adjust to the weight distribution that they're supporting. Bend a bone, and over time it'll add material on the inward side and lose it on the outward (convex) side. This is a normal, ongoing process. It's why bones are piezoelectric.

I lost a friend who died from complications caused by chemotherapy. That's a true statement. It's also true that she would most likely have died at least a decade earlier, maybe two decades, had she not done chemotherapy. (She was on her 3rd or 4th relapse.)

I don't mind the above wording at all, because there's another thing that happens: people seem to have this impression that if you get cancer, follow the recommended treatment, and are in remission... that you're "done", and you "won". It isn't like that. First, the treatments have serious side effects, both short and long term. Second, cancer is never gone from your life, even if it never comes back. That doesn't mean you should not do the recommended and available treatments. Your odds of survival are almost always much much higher if you do, and imo is the right thing to do for the vast majority of people. But go into it with your eyes open. You're past the point where you get to have a conventional happy ending. You'll need to figure out how to be ok with the ending that you can still have. (Which may be a happy one! But not in the way that you imagined when you were younger.)

You can also brag to people about how great you are because you returned a wallet and expected and/or received nothing in return. With the expectation of receiving social approval.

You're talking only about legal responsibility. That is about negligence and recklessness, and is tangled up with legal interpretation and things, and is separate from moral responsibility. If your kid breaks something, it's your responsibility (whether or not it was your fault). Same with your bot.

> Normally, I would say you don't want to be patient zero, but with the attitudes shown by frontier labs, I guess YOLO is the way.

In practice, yes. That's exactly how it's playing out.

Yes, I fully agree, and it's why I wrote the comment! I'm bothered by all the "oopsie woopsie, we let our experimental bot run wild on the internet and told it to do things with no regard for the consequences and it went and did things with no regard for the consequences! silly bot."

Huh. I thought I was pretty explicit in drawing the distinction between them.

> As an investor a company's duty is towards shareholders.

I think you left out some part of that sentence, it sort of has two subjects? Companies are not investors.

"As an investor, I only care about a company's duty towards shareholders" maybe?

But no, companies are not obligated -- legally or morally -- to be extractive or abusive in pursuit of shareholder's interests. A company can do whatever it wants, can be formed for whatever reason it wants, and shareholders can vote or divest if they don't like it. The whole "a company's only duty is to its shareholders" is a myth that was widely propagated in the 1980s. There's a kernel of truth to it, but it means much less than is commonly understood.

Heh, such pushback here. The writeup seems to have gotten under people's skin.

It's refreshing to read human prose about something like this. There's so much you can get about the author's state of mind -- pride at what they've accomplished and how they like to conceptualize it, traces of how they learned things and what those things mean to them... for me, it's a reminder of what we've lost in giving over so much of our writing to AI.

But it's understandable that the writeup would trigger defensiveness. It claims a lot of originality and novelty that seem overreaching. AIUI, it's an optimizing JIT with a superoptimizer and a shared cache, with the search procedure guided by AI. And the equivalence model that the superoptimizer is based on includes all of Python and can handle both CPU and GPU code. It's quite impressive, really.

It's hard to tell what of it is new. Superoptimizers are not, JITs are not, caching JIT code is not, using machine learning to speculate or search is not. Constraining an LLM to produce correct output is no newer than forcing semantically valid JSON output. (You could think them as different type systems.) Different JITs have handled different kinds and amounts of runtime information -- tracing JITs, runtime type inference like SpiderMonkey used to use, speculative compilation and invalidation (global or just in time like inline caches)....

But none of that takes away from Maxwell. There isn't really enough information to compare it to other systems. Random example: many JITs work really hard to balance compilation time with execution time, and the post doesn't talk about that. Is it only for long-running code? Does it reach a steady state, and if so how much overhead is there at that time? What does it make slower or bigger?

At any rate, it seems like there's a lot of interesting work in Maxwell, and it's worth checking out.

You can set it to 1h. The analysis script Claude wrote for me says I'm saving 11% over the 5m window by doing that on my API account.

It's something, at least.

I've found that telling agents to not do something mostly just gives them a suggestion of a way to do that thing, and the part about not doing it that way gets lost. Well, it's nicely accessible for when it apologizes for doing it.

I now try to only give examples of how I want it to do things, and hooks that complain when they do the bad thing (but still don't mention the bad thing in the complaint.)

Since this seems to get lost, I'd just like to point out: if you ask your agent to do something like this (or pretty much anytime you give it internet access and say "do whatever it takes"), you are responsible for what it does. Even if you couldn't have predicted the lengths to which it would go.

It's the latest iteration of "a little X is good, a lot of X is bad".

Email was awesome when it first became widespread. I could cold-email random professors at other universities (I was in school at the time) and get meaningful responses back. Then lots of people (and companies) started cold-emailing, and it stopped working.

Social media is broken if there's nobody there, is great with a medium-sized community, and is broken if everyone is there.

Ad-supported websites can offer all kinds of valuable free services. Up until either (1) they become so ad-infested that they're no longer useful, or (2) all the users block ads.

There was a wave of websites providing APIs for programmatic access a while back. You could script together whatever flow you wanted. If no API was offered, you could scrape the HTML. That triggered a wave of alternate interfaces to sites, skipping their ads, skipping their engagement funnels, separating the value from the cost. So everything got locked up behind captchas and accounts and API keys with limited access.

This outcome was always inevitable. Humans don't understand social contracts, or they do and both sides abuse the hell out of it. We feel entitled to have just the loss leaders without ever buying anything else. When running businesses, we feel entitled to keep adding more and more adds and generally enshittifying the experience. People can take it or leave it, after all.

Agents don't change the underlying structure at all. They just magnify and accelerate parts of the system, and will therefore magnify and accelerate the reactive and defensive responses.

Because individual investors, and especially individual investors lumped together via a fund, have all the incentives for profit maximization and no incentives for quality of work or quality of workers' lives, except insofar as it is reflected in profits.

"Anybody who wants to" is precisely the problem -- there's no correlation between a rando's wishes and the health of a project or working environment. You need people with skin in the game, and in the right game.

It's fine for them to exist, and probably better -- you can land incomplete things behind a feature flag and avoid some amount of rebase/merge hell.

But they should be marked experimental in that case, not optional. Optional flags ought to work together, or at least it should be considered a bug worth quickly fixing if they don't. Combining experimental flags otoh is Buyer Beware.

That just sounds like generic marketing-speak to me. That stuff never did mean anything.

No. Are you thinking that was a feature intended to appeal to corporate use or something? I'm pretty sure it was all about AI backlash. It's still a popular setting to have available. (I have no idea how many people actually use it.)

Yeah I had to find a working one low down in the page and edit the PEP number: https://peps.python.org/pep-0790/

It's easy to minimize someone else's situation down to "courage".

Quite a few husbands believe they should have control over their wives' votes. I guess you'd say they should have the courage to leave them and wreck their children's lives and be ostracized by their family and community?

And it's not hard to imagine certain employers having a strong opinion on how you vote on specific measures. Of course they couldn't compel anyone to reveal their votes, but it could be made customary enough that refusing to would be enough of a signal. I guess you'd need the courage to quit and take a lower paying job?

Yes, if you put stupid words in my mouth, you can argue that I am saying stupid things.

Of course AI-less wars have always had innocent victims. I'm not even arguing whether using AI will produce more or fewer such victims, and at the moment I don't see how anyone could convincingly argue either way. The use of AI is probably a pretty minor driver behind the number of inappropriate targets.

I do argue that people (one or more humans) must be responsible for these decisions, and furthermore having a human in the loop is a necessary prerequisite for such responsibility. (A human is still responsible if there is no human in the loop of individual decisions; the people who allowed that usage were in the loop of making that decision, and thereby have responsibility.)

If we start agreeing that we can just blame the AI for any unintended casualties, then we lose most incentives to reduce such casualties. Even if an AI makes "better" decisions than a human, wars are always resource-constrained and decisions will be made based on responsibility and blame. For example, the decision might be "the AI needs too much data to make accurate decisions, gathering those data is expensive, let's give it less." We cannot allow the "cheapest" decision when push comes to shove to be the one where innocent people are killed because the perpetrators have externalized the responsibility.

In the case under discussion, we're not at the point where anyone is claiming that an AI acting alone will kill fewer unintended people than an AI+a human. The people who develop the technology are specifically saying it is not ready yet. In large part, that comes down to responsibility again -- if Anthropic were to promote that use, then they would be part of the human chain that is responsible for those deaths.

In addition, using AI for autonomous killing is ridiculously dangerous and ill-advised at the present time. They have common and unpredictable failure modes. They have biases that could change something from 99% accurate to way less due to a change that should have no impact on the decisions. When using them for programming, they'll do things like directly go against instructions (whether or not they apologize afterwards) and getting stuck in loops. What are the analogous failure modes when you give them control over lethal weapons? They are not ready.

> > The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company.

> No company is owed contract from the US government.

The discussion is not about the contract. It is about the supply-chain risk designation. The contract issue is separate (and real! The DoD was trying to retroactively change the terms of an existing signed contract). The DoD is free to not sign any contracts with Anthropic. It is not right, and illegal in my and many people's opinions, to misuse a tool intended for preventing harm from foreign adversaries. It was retaliation, plain and simple.

> We are getting into the territory of "70% of traffic crashes are blamed on sober drivers, therefore driving sober is a crime".

You are, for some reason. I was not. I'm only countering an argument that the particular tragedy that made a splash in the news cannot be discounted by saying "sure it's awful, but irrelevant because AI was not involved." AI was involved. We don't have to imagine hypothetical scenarios where AI was involved and something bad happened. And I'm not saying AI was the cause, or the only cause, of that tragedy.

>> My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.

> As I said, extensively, the reality of warmaking will inevitably lead to innocent civilian casualties.

The word "reckless" was critical to what I said, because it's part of what makes something a war crime.

Ok, I give up. You're equating war crimes and any civilian casualties. Or wait, then you go on to equate war crimes with any suffering of innocents. Why? Why are you so set on dismissing the possibility of a war crime being a thing that happens, and has an actual definition that goes well beyond innocent people suffering? You seem motivated to steamroll any obstacle to using maximal force regardless of the consequences. Why? Hegseth, is that you?

Never mind, I don't think I need to know your answer. You are a rando on the internet to me.

It did not say "I assume cheating". It said you're probably cheating, as in of you look at the population of students who are using such constructs, over 50% of them are using them because they are cheating. Given that accusations of cheating were not made when such constructs were found, it seems like that probability was not factored in when deciding whether or not to advise someone.

Heh, dumb idea of the day: do a "flipped classroom" in a different sense -- instead of a student taking a quiz or exam, you provide a clueless AI and the student has to train it on the subject at hand, and then the AI takes the test.

Lest anyone think this is a brilliant idea: an LLM would likely be much better at doing the ~~RLHF~~ RLMF, so you haven't actually gained anything. But I feel like there may still be the kernel of a good idea somewhere in here.

Perhaps your assignment is to iteratively train the AI, which is pre-prompted to seek out every reasonably possible failure mode when it generates solutions. So the learning mechanism is to train an adversarial AI on the subject matter as a way of learning it yourself. This does not solve the problem of cheating with an LLM, it's an alternative pedagogical approach.

> The American society is just as corrupt and screwed up as any other country

That's a weird phrase. It hints at an assumption or widespread belief that we aren't as corrupt or screwed up. Which I get; I was born and raised in the US, and I got a full dose of American exceptionalism too.

Corruption in particular is a tricky thing to define. Currently, it is patently obvious that we are quite a bit more corrupt than the median. The recent big spike is new, but if you pay attention to the news, you'll see that over and over again we're being presented with evidence that this is not a new thing. This is a longstanding thing and the only thing that's new is the degree of exposure. We may have been this corrupt in the past; there's some pretty mindblowing stuff in the history books. But I don't recall this level of naked corruption at any point in the country's history.

As for screwed up, we've held the crown on that for decades at this point. We've exported that trait throughout the world, so it's getting a little harder to tell. Also, there's plenty of homegrown screwed-upness for our variety to interbreed with.

But this is just an American talking to an American. To the rest of the world, the corruption and decay is and has been extremely obvious. Talk to Europeans. They see us as a third world country who happens to still have the biggest military and hold the world's reserve currency. (For now.) But the "third world" part is not an exaggeration, from the people I've talked to. And I can't really argue? Fascism is risen, we're ok with secret police disappearing people from our streets, we're ok with our public money being used to pay people to vote for a particular party. (If you object to "ok", protesting and writing strongly-worded messages on social media doesn't count. I confess that that's all I do.)

> Communism is better than capitalism.

Here's where I disagree. "Structure X is better than structure Y" conveys very little information and is not a useful framing. It's a real example of "ideas are worthless, execution is everything". Capitalism is fine. Free trade is powerful; it's capable of and has accomplished an enormous amount of good. It just needs to be protected and managed; free trade being good does not mean the freer the better, for any definition of "free" that someone wants to come up with. Communism is fine too. It's not even incompatible with competition. Hell, the actual systems in use today aren't even one or the other, the pure forms don't work and aren't acceptable to any population.

But perhaps you mean late stage capitalism and late stage communism. Those both suck, from what I can tell.

The main pic makes absolutely zero sense. The sides are tilted upwards, so clearly they were moving towards each other. But there's a big gap, so clearly they're moving away from each other. I was mentally sketching out a scenario where it was first one then the other, until I realized it was just AI slop.

Oh gods, I don't give it write access to my actual DB.

For my small-scale sqlite dB, it gets read access, and I encourage it to test modifications by copying it somewhere and writing into that.

Scale-dependent, but I hope to not have to work at a scale where it gets write access to the production DB. That just seems like asking for trouble.

> Especially in a time of war.

The US has not declared war on Iran. No wartime legal mechanism is at play, and cannot be until Congress decides to declare war.

Ok, I'll be precise: the main dispute was over fully autonomous decisions to use lethal force. Because if the AI chose incorrectly, the military would be attacking targets that it shouldn't. Whether that is a war crime hinges upon whether it was reckless. Anthropic's position was that AI is not capable of making such decisions, which is another way of saying that giving that decision wholly to an AI is reckless. I can stop using the term "war crimes" if it bothers you so much, but I'm failing to see a distinction between what Anthropic was fearing and the definition of what a war crime is. These are fears, so this isn't about whether one specific action was a war crime or not. This is just naming what Anthropic was worried about and why.

> Anthropic wanted them to be the last word in every decision, and DOD could not allow that

Cite one source for Anthropic demanding to be in the loop. This was about the terms of a contract. If I'm agreeing to sell you a medicine, under the condition that you do not use it to euthanize homeless people, that does not mean I am demanding to follow you around and make you ask me whether each use is ok.

> Nobody is destroying anybody's business - pretending that Anthropic could never find any users for their AI outside DOD is plain silly.

Strawman much? The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company. It doesn't matter whether there are other customers. It doesn't matter whether the company can survive the attack. What matters is whether it is legal and ethical for our public resources to be used for retaliation in this way.

> US Society has mechanisms for preventing and investigating war crimes....I doubt that "give control over it to some random guy that makes AI models"

This is an invented claim. Cite a source.

>> I quit using ChatGPT entirely over this incident > > And this is supposed to be an argument because....?

The argument was the first part of the post. This part was me giving my perspective on things, in this case it was about how I don't find Anthropic's position to be good, just that OpenAI's is far worse. My post was not for you exclusively; based on what you have written, I have concluded that there is no value in debating you or attempting changing your mind.

>> They agreed to a contract where the DoD could and in practice is using their AI for committing war crimes. > > You have a very vivid imagination. Not trying to use it to state things that could be misinterpreted as statements of fact would be nice.

Ok, fair. Sticking to facts: the crucial part of the negotiation was about whether the DoD can use Anthropic's products for autonomous decisions on lethal force. Since then, it has come out that AI was used in the decision to target an elementary school for girls that killed 120 schoolchildren. (The Palantir Maven Smart System, fwiw, not Claude.) The Pentagon investigated and found that although a human was theoretically in the decision loop, in practice the oversight was minimal and ineffective. "No one remaining on those teams [the teams tasked with minimizing civilian harm] reviewed the strike plans in advance of the attack on the school, according to Bloomberg." Those teams had been gutted, with Hegseth explicitly stating that they were getting in the way.

My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.

Anthropic agreed to uses that involve a human decision, so this is a non sequitur.

The whole conflict is specifically about uses that do not involve a human decision. The DoD agreed to a contract that said it wouldn't use Anthropic for that, and then tried to change the terms.

Incidentally, the DoD used Claude in its decision that resulted in killing 120 children at an elementary school for girls. The Pentagon concluded that there was human review (which would mean that it fell within the contract's terms) but that the review was hollowed out (which could mean that it was a violation of the contract).

You're skipping the supply chain risk designation, which is an extraordinary and punitive measure. Without that part, you'd be correct that this is a nothingburger. "Government decides to not renew contract with corporation X and goes with Y instead" is not headline news.