vld_chk

So, this is a final resolution to the Planet X mystery? The one which Batygin predicts?

Yes, those sick psychopaths want to turn Kyiv and other major cities into uninhabitable deserts. They target bridges with regular cars in the middle of the day; attack buses, trains, residential buildings, gas stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, water and gas utilities. They declared a total war on Ukraine and removed all constraints on their methods.

For people who are “worried” that Ukraine targets data centers: Ukraine did not start it.

For the entire September, Russia conducted 10+ strikes on all key telecom, and internet provider data centers in Ukraine.

Now it is just a return

If true, it is a huge blow to Anthropic’s revenue stream. IIRC it was reported that the quarter of their revenue comes from just two clients and as the ex-Meta guy who left this July, I am convinced that Meta must be one of the two.

I feel related to it. I switched companies at the end of July. First 4 weeks AI was giving me the feeling of freedom. No longer I need to understand tens thousand of lines of legacy codebases. Never onboarding was so easy. Just ask Claude and it tells me what happens here and how.

But after 2 months it starts to backfire me. I still know nothing. I have some understanding of the system design and core components but I have zero clue about how certain things are done under the hood. Because AI read code for me and code for me and I take it as my own understanding.

In last week I end up limiting my AI usage and forcing myself (it is really hard) to read and code at least a bit by myself to start having any idea about what is going on here.

It is very well studied that the entire concept of “nation”, “homeland” and thus patriotism in the modern way began to develop only at the late 19th century with the adoption of mass media and railways.

Hundreds of thousand of years before this people were loyal to their family (not always) and their community (village, city, craftsmanship, etc.).

If you ever travel to 18th century and ask any ordinary European are they proud to be, say, French or British, they will not get you.

I am not that worried, but rather just observing. Humanity is about to enter the phase when we will be using things based on ideas no human ever properly understands. This thought … disturbing, somehow?

It is perfectly valid counterpoint to say that we already do it. We everyday use myriad of things, tools, and software we have 0 clue how it operates. But for us as humans it was reassuring that we know that at least there are a few other alive humans who know it, who create it and who can explain it.

With AI soon that comforting zone will be gone.

I am not a mathematician, but I can’t see how we are going to address the problem which we already see in coding:

Impossibility to independently validate all AI results

And in math it goes even worse. In coding code reviews are typically still the form of action you do within days. In math, historically, the lifecycle of proof is months if not years. Take as an example Millennium problems. They require at least two years of validity after publishing. Two years! In modern times with amount of output AI can produce, it feels like infinity.

We are inches close if not at the moment already when humans can’t reliable validate proofs and mathematics produced by AI. Then next research will be based on this AI-written-no-human-in-the-loop results. And we will end up in just few years in a world where novel and frontier problems will be articulated by AI and proven by AI based on AI results and humans will be incapable of understating the mere nature of the solution.

Marketing it is or not, but misalignment at the moment crosses dangerous marks, and must be investigated ASAP. We are inches close to agents building their own message boards and self-hosting them on any server which they can hijack. If not there yet.

On this the same line of thoughts, so far we have 0 proof that all dark matter is _the same_. We observe gravity effects but IIRC they very little tell us about their own homogeneity. We very well could have a few parallel sectors, one of which is ours.

> now

Unfortunately, Europe should had made this conclusion at least 18 months ago, not now.

Watch out European politics procrastinate for at least one more year hoping that Trump will reverse. Then procrastinate more, because “elections soon, maybe Dems will win and reverse”.

I live in Europe and will never go to work in the US; but EU/UK inability to solve national security problems is beyond pathetic.

Hm, first time I see that Russian bots came to HN, but here we are. The history of comments of this account is insane.

There is very little doubt that we need to find a way to update our relationship with social media. The evidence of their harm in current form is overwhelming.

However, using this reason to induce censorship rules, word by word matching Russia/China playbook is making the goal less achievable if anything.

Anthropic legit builds one the strongest if not the strongest IC team in the history of computational technology. They are insanely stacked on talent, and either we will witness a legendary run, or a new LTCM

I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too.

But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.

In all such discussions, it is interesting to track the tipping point at which public perception of Anthropic shifted.

In my mind, as recently as February, Anthropic was considered by far “the best” company on the planet, with an insane fanbase and praise left, right, and centre. The story around the DoD contract solidified them in the public eye as “the hero the city deserved.”

Then they fell into a classic monetisation trap. Unable to sustain growth at such a discount, they started nerfing models, removing caching, and doubling costs per token to make any money here.

The lack of transparency in that process cost them public perception. By early May, all the charm of the magical, ethical super-company was gone. The entire campaign around the Mythos release, intentional or not, landed on top of that new narrative and didn’t play well for them.

What is interesting to me here is the realisation that a good chunk of the hate the company received came simply because of their most recent hostile, for-profit actions. Had it happened in March, HN and the public reaction would have been vastly different. It took them just two months of “bad actions” to ruin quite a good margin of the public praise they so desperately needed now.

I am not sure we have anything comparable with AI. Utility like electricity was hard to regulate from people because at some point anyone can build their own generator at the backyard.

AI if anything is opposite. Extremely high bar to build, and every next increment requires at best linear scale of resources.

If we imagine that AI became semi-nationalized and heavy regulated, then we enter the world where governments select companies and people to have access to capabilities which vast outlast capabilities available on the market. Company A is in “access list” and can deploy ruthless AI agent capable of advanced combined cyber operations; company B is denied. Who will win?

If we add here polarization and already historic high inequality, it reads like a straight recipe from Cyberpunk sci-fi.

I live in the UK, and as much as I love Europe as place to live, our future here looks very grim. Systematic problems multiplied to national inability to fund serious projects and cooperate at scale — this is a recipe for a disaster

This sounds very cliche, but even if the entire story ends up as another TACO; we are in historical infection point of official government AI race.

It is hard to count how many “red lines” were crossed last night. Government shutting down AI model it doesn’t like? Government shoots into barely profitable 1T startup, whose entire trajectory and, in essence, survival depends on commercial success of that model? Access to AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigor ID checks?

Very little doubt that China will follow this suit. Next US will pass their bills to ban Chinese open source and local models. Chinese will follow.

It doesn’t matter: US did just a vendetta; felt into “marketing hype” or there are legit security concerns of national security level. In the precedent-ish world of post-truth “whataboutism” we just crossed a big milestone mark which will hunt us for years.

As European, nothing hurts me more than 100500 phrase in recent years “Europe should stop waiting time and do X”, where X can be anything: semiconductors, AI, manufacturing, defense, satellites, cloud business, “sovereign” IT infrastructure, scientific research, and hundreds more

It sounds right, but there is one caveat to me:

Training best models is hella expensive. Anthropic spent fortune to train it, and it definitely plans to make a fortune with it either. This US decision, if not reversed, would cause Anthropic potentially tens of billions of dollars of revenue loss. When company heads to IPO, and burning cash faster than it generates it, such moment can change their entire trajectory, plans for the future, hiring, new models development, etc.

Alright, one might say that “US will fund it directly and LLMs will move from free market to controlled and funded by government assets”.

But even then. Training new models is expensive not only in terms of computer, and not only in terms of utilities, data centers, etc. But in terms of talent either. It is hard to retain top talents with you when they should just train special models for government. I am not sure we are in 1945 again and that top tier AI researches will agree to sit in silo and work for models which only privileged selected organizations might use. Whenever government steps into control, freedom and creativity is affected.

P.S. Where I agree, though, is that we witness the start of government censorship of AI models. Imagine soon Anthropic open back access to Fable. Can we know what they put inside and which capability limitations, derived based on ID/IP, they enforce? No, we can’t. Here I agree that at least the era of government censorship begins.

Quite a thing to use Bun rewrite to Rust as example of dynamic workflows, while now it is considered as anti pattern which leads team to stop supporting the tool due to inability to properly understand and navigate 1m vibe coded Rust lines

If we learn anything from all studies in this field, that is barely possible if not impossible at all, to change people’s mind. Even when they face clear evidence of their own mistake.

Anthropic vs OAI fierce competition, maybe, the most intense we have seen in capitalism history. They can’t let breathe each other. One declare free Codex for businesses to adopt, and a set of agents. Another instantly rolling out new products in the same niche. Heck, they even start to release their models in the same day. We just in middle May and it is already which product release from each of them?

In books of the future, if we ever hold one, I think this will be studied a lot. We have seen before competitions and rivals, but they mostly were rivalry of craft. Here it is a rivalry of velocity and reach. Who can first target user with whatever they have ready to offer.

This is the case, when author argues about the right thing (you do not need Rust everywhere on every project and in every feature, especially if your team has 0 prior exposure to Rust or at least C++), but provide very awkward arguments which are not aligned with core thesis.

I genuinely start to think that we, as humanity, severely overestimate our cognitive abilities. We act so surprised “just a few years of LLM with a few RL tweaks match our PhD levels! It must be hidden inside our knowledge base!”. Em, what if no? What if our “PhD level” is just very low level comparing to upper boundaries of measurable intelligence? What if we need to learn being humble and stop treating our minds as “sacred source of creativity and intelligence”?