News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

techblueberry

Re:Anthropic warns that it's close to RSI capability on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:13PM (#50347122)
Wow what a coincidence, weeks before their IPO!
I mean sure, I agree with you in principal, but if not bailing out someone brings down the country or global economy? In a democracy that government is getting punished hard.
Can you privatize the losses if the banks are investing, providing debt to and repackaging that debt into broader instruments?

I worry that one of the reasons that Anthropic has 500 billion in commitments and everyone is running to the credit markets is to make it so that if they fail everyone suffers.

What is this “everywhere else” you speak of. Tik tok is owned by Larry Ellison. Meta we’re talking about. Reddit? Is that smallest of platforms “everywhere else”?
How perceptive of you to notice.
Which far right are you talking about? The lefts version of the far right where everyone to the right of Bernie sanders is Hitler? Or like Joel Webbon / Doug Wilson women shouldn’t vote far right? Who is this anti-free speech moderate right you describe?

Elon describes himself as moderate so is he one of these folks that doesn’t believe in free speech? He would say he stayed in the center and democrats moved left. What speech is this moderate right censoring?

Do you really believe this? Everything I hear from self described culture warriors like Musk was the left in the 80’s and 90’s was anti censorship as opposed to the moral majority on the right? You would find yourself in narrow company to say the left is fundamentally pro censorship, particularly in America.
And I sort of wonder what point you’re trying to make, because you could take two lessons away -

One, Trump may not have been reelected if meta hadn’t banned him. So maybe it was another case of meta trying to help republicans.

Or, if Trump hadn’t been reelected, maybe the republicans wouldn’t be facing one of the worst midterm routes in history.

But honestly I’m not actually sure the point you’re trying to make. Meta hired a Republican strategist into their c suite since then. Sooo much has happened, there’s a lot of historical context to try to put it in.

In fairness I think shutting down “wrong ideas” is just what people do when they think their ideas are prominent and want to protect that.

It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish. I’m not defending the censors you’re talking about here - in fact from the other side I might argue there are a whole bunch of perspectives that made it from academia to the pages of the New York Times that never should have escaped. And I make that argument as someone who studied some of this stuff in college.

Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.

Re:Signatures on diplomas should mean something on Friday October 23, 2026 @08:44AM (#50208117)
I feel like this position is almost quaint.

It’s not that I don’t see the appeal. But I don’t thing even - are Harvard and Stanford good schools or do they just attract the best students?

If this is even possible. Why the market failure? Why aren’t there any private universities out there running circles around the rest of them with their outcome studies and their guarantees.

Fun fact, California’s environmental quality law was signed by Ronald ReAgan.
I dont have an Alexa.

and maybe what I’m taking away from your post is too many god damned things rely on a datacenter.

Is it really confusing?

Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”

And while we can disagree with the extent to which any one act or bribe elevates someone to dictator, and whether or not all the accusations are true, can you not understand why someone caught up in the narrative ecosystem happening over the past few years may develop the perspective that Trump is trying to consolidate power?

Also “no folks who incrementally Test the limits of power and fail” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

But from your comment it seems like you think the right answer is to scrub left wing voices, rather than to let everyone speak equally.
Why is the argument we should race to the bottom?
Why the assumption meta wouldn’t admit to doing it?

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...

It’s their platform, they can boost who they want.

Re:There are two visions of universal basic income on Monday October 19, 2026 @08:53AM (#50151844)
What the Ketamine?
> I am very highly gifted as a qualifier and quite frankly I never had more interesting thought exchanges than with an ego-free AI.

Maybe I should talk to your AI, because my AI makes very basic reasoning errors all the time.

Re:"I'm on a War Footing": Terry Tao and the Crisis in Math on Sunday October 18, 2026 @10:54PM (#50147838)
You think OpenAI is run by a bunch of idiots? Being the smartest person in the room is becoming exponentially more valuable.
Man I would love to be quaint and backwards - but this is not what’s Happening here.
Maybe too many people don't see it this way an it ends up backfiring, but I actually think it's important to "humanize" 'bad' people and show their 'redeeming' qualities -

I think it's important to inoculate yourself against presentation. Like, sure, now we know that Elizabeth Holmes was evil, an we can be binary about it - but would it have easier to be more critical of her rise if we could look past her apparent positive qualities?

Re:The AI Expectations Gap on Friday October 16, 2026 @07:21PM (#50126084)
This study is fascinating and the one data point I would immediately point out is 86% of Anthropic staff thing Claude can write emails today and the extra 14% think it will happen next year. Which is - weird? What do those 14% think is missing now they what be missing next year?
Re:Anthropic pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:25PM (#50125576)
‘ The bill would let the government block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people.’

The government is not allowed to block a model release with foreseeable imminent risk of killing 49 people?

It says imminent risk, is it 50 people per day? Presumably the model isn’t just one shot killing 49 people it’s recurring right?

Re:Anthropic assigned highest junk credit rating in June on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:46PM (#50124430)
‘Growth has slowed" is technically true but misleading. Q2 to Q3 still went from $11.5bn to $16.8bn. And at those levels, it’s not wildly unexpected that it has to slow down.’

The growth slowdown is decidedly unexpected. The market priced in a $2T valuation that assumed it wouldn’t slow down.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/investors-temper-an...

Great! Amazon could use some competition.
Re:Do people prefer stories written by AI? on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:50AM (#50119062)
I think a controversial or complicated question about appreciation is should the narrative around it matter. I watch old movies, partially because I prefer them, but partially because I think real depth of emotion and sustainable meaning and happiness is about having a rich narrative about the world you habit. I watch a movie and connect it to the history I read about what is happening at the time. What was happening in hollywood, who the actors are.

There can be important qualifications to this -> everyone's narrative is different. I think the gotcha around "people can't tell the difference between expensive and cheap wine" is double-sided. If you have the money, telling your self a story about wine that makes you appreciate it more probably enhances your life. If you don't have money - the opposite narrative is also worthwhile.

So, I'm not necessarily saying there aren't benefits to this, and this is the direction the world is going with like instagram reels and what not. But trying to boil the world down to which contextless dopamine trigger is most optimal. I'm not sure I think that leads to a happy life.

And in reverse - why not disclose how it's written? People are different, there are folks whose experience would be enhanced knowing it was written by AI.

Re:Non-Determinism Doesn't Matter on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:29AM (#50118801)
This is not strictly speaking true though. I don’t want programmers to turn vague instructions into code. I want programmers to turn vague instructions into context and context into code, often gathering context from sources that aren’t easily obtained.

As a manager I often don’t have enough information to prompt an LLM. That’s what the engineer is for.

Based on what? I think it’s important to take a critical lens. There are lots of pros and cons to DEI so I’d love to dig into the details of your assessment. See if I can update my priors. What evidence have you gathered so far?
Re:AI is a tool and using it well takes skill on Monday October 12, 2026 @08:21PM (#50064924)
If people don’t use muscle power for work, and people don’t think for work, what are people going to fi?

Maybe the new scarce resource will be meaning, and we’ll kill each other for that

Re:GPT-6 Astra Helped Me Jailbreak My Kindle on Monday October 12, 2026 @08:08PM (#50064819)
It will be curious how anti regulation all these execs are when they start losing money.

Older »