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Too AI; Didn't Read (tai-dr.com)
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TAI;DR. I think maybe just AI;DR...?
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While I agree with the sentiment, this: If you couldn't bother to read it, why should I? doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.
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Ironic that this itself is an obvious slop site
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I understand the sensation of disgust when being offered to read a piece of AI slop. However, I'm actually curious about how our sensitivity towards slop will evolve. I imagine people will have varying degrees of tolerance. Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted. Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.
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I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models. I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated. If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status. Surely that's something that can be trained for.
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If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading. That said, wouldn’t it be funny if this site, too, were AI generated?
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The other similar site making the rounds, https://noslopgrenade.com/ , is indeed in part written by AI as evaluated by Pangram.
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I believe that one was discussed with the author on HN, and that they used AI to 'copyedit'. Unfortunately that's a trap because if you make a general copyediting request most LLMs will absolutely slopify your work-- and make edits that are unambiguously bad as well as just making it look like lazy llm output. The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself. Never hand the the pen unless you're looking to subject everyone to your Honest Take That Recontextualizes Everything.
Rising sea destroys homes, erases beaches in California (reuters.com)
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The Seattle Times ran an article maybe last year that measurements of sea level at Seattle had increased 8 inches over the last century. The flaw in that is what is the reference frame? The tectonic plate Seattle is sitting on is going down under the cascade mountains. And beaches have been eroding for millions of years.
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Coastal erosion =/= sea level rise. This is textbook expected behavior on a high energy deep water coast (eg cliffs, not mangroves)
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Gonna be interesting when that Kelvin wave overlaps with king tide…
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tbh maybe it's good and changes something quicker and on the long term that rich people experience it firsthand before the Maldives or Bangladesh (probably nothing just me being optimistic but the rich always have a get out of jail card, like X more properties)
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Shorelines and sea levels never changed before the industrial revolution, the only thing that causes change in climate is man's reliance on CO2-based fuels. PS - Look at Bangladesh's ship breaking industry to see how much they care about the environment.
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The city of Santa Barbara painted a line through the town 25 years ago saying if we don’t stop global warming, the town will be under water to that line in 25 years…
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No they didn't, that was merely a proposal.
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If they had drawn the proposed line, it would still be the same distance from the coast today. So its presence would be a detriment to global warming proponents.
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It's annoying for coastal areas, and a problem for beach houses, but California isn't really that vulnerable to rising sea levels. The Pacific Coast is mountainous and the ground slopes upward in short distances. Here's the US topo map.[1] Look at vulnerable spots, such as Malibu and Oceanside. Three blocks inland you're 20 feet above sea level. Almost all problems are on the ocean side of the Pacific Coast Highway, which was a marginal place to build anyway. Cliff edge erosion is an ongoing problem. That's why CALTRANS gave up on Devil's Slide as a road route and built the Tom Lantos Tunnels further inland. Small changes in sea level don't affect hundred-foot cliffs that much, though. The places that really suffer from rising sea level are river deltas, sitting on deposited sand just barely above sea level. In the US, New Orleans has the worst problem. New York City has problems, and they're building coast defenses against storms. China's coastal cities are mostly on river deltas with really flat terrain. That's why China has to build ports way off shore, reached by miles of bridges, to get to deep water. [1] https://en-us.topographic-map.com/map-9t5k57/Venice-Beach/?center=33.18363%2C-117.36954&zoom=16
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The Bay Area is one big river delta, going inland to Sacramento. It's not the Pacific coast communities you have to worry about like Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz. They have a beach, and then cliffs, and then the actual city is like 50-100 feet above sea level. It's the bayside communities. Foster City. Redwood Shore. The Embarcadero. SFO. Port of Oakland. Highway 101. All of these are pretty critical parts of Bay Area infrastructure, and gone with as little as a 1.6' sea level rise + 20yr storm. https://www.kqed.org/science/1973624/maps-see-which-bay-area-locations-are-at-risk-from-rising-seas
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CA already floods at high tide so I think another 10 ft is really gonna mess stuff up. There are so many rivers that empty at sea level and a lot of roads that cross over low points that will need reworking.
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I'm used to people assuming California = LA + Bay area, but it's the first time I see someone arguing that they don't count…
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Isn’t the Bay Area quite vulnerable? I’m thinking they’re going to have to build a dam with locks in front of the golden gate
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The topographic map says, the Bay Area is just around the first bay, there's a whole second bay opening up behind it (Sacramento area valley) which could flood with enough sea level rise.
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No way. The Golden Gate is really deep. The Bay Bridge channel is so shallow it has to be dredged. There was a 1946 plan to fill it in.[1] There were Corps of Engineers plans for a lot of filling, but they didn't go that far. I have a copy of their 1960-2020 plan for the Bay Area.[2] Their vision was to make the SF bay area a major industrial city, building on the facilities built for WWII. Aluminum smelter in Sausalito. Steel mills at Tiberon. Five freeways up the Peninsula (101, 280, 35, 1, and one on stilts in the bay.) Another Bay Bridge. Maybe a SF-Alcatraz-Angel Island-Tiberon link. It would have been like Pittsburgh. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/second-bay-bridge-plans-history-freeway-alameda-sf-14018498.php [2] https://archive.org/details/futuredevelopmen00unit
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The problem with that is that there are rivers and streams emptying into the bay. All of that water has to make it to the sea somehow.
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The Netherlands has solved that problem
[Insert HbomberguyShoutingAtBenShapiro.gif here]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw
I would think the dominating factors in Oregon and California are their uplifted soft geologies. The orogenies that lifted the West have resulted in an elevated, cliff-bounded sandy coastline along the Pacific that has been aggressively eroding for a lot longer than humans have been there.
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right, except that humans have fixed the high tide lines over whole geolographical areas and done massive work to redirect almost all of the rivers and streams to agriculture, industry and domestic uses, and stopping most of the sand from reaching the ocean, plus sand mining for building is so extensive that there now shortages, meaning that the main surface sources are gone. those fixed high tide lines are also the collateral for trillions of dollars in loans and investments, and given the tripple wammy described in the article, things could get out of hand in a whole new way.
Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks (cyberscoop.com)
The money is being spent because Trump cannot admit that he lost at something. He knows his approval is extremely low, so he prefers chaos and say “they cheated, I didn’t lose”
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Heads, I win. Tails, they cheated.
> Surprisingly it only seems like one party does this, the party that supposedly supports democracy. I think this is a bit myopic. Democrats have been just as guilty if not more of pushing policy through the court system and appointing activist judges. It just was just in the pursuit of policy goals and not securing personal power.
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It's not "pushing policy" if the policy has a popular mandate. Compare the respective numbers of Democratic and Republican presidents in your lifetime who attained the office while losing the popular vote.
Every "concern" raised by the Trump administration is cover for voter disenfranchisement. Period. Voter fraud is incredibly rare, but I have a gut feeling that electoral fraud has happened and will continue to get worse, courtesy of the same administration. It must be remembered that every accusation from them is a confession. For the acolytes that down vote me, at least make your case on where and why I am wrong. My comment is as a citizen, not as a partisan.
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Didn't it recently come to light of NJ registering thousands of non-citizens to vote?
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https://www.factcheck.org/2026/08/trump-overstates-magnitude-of-noncitizen-voting-in-new-jersey/
> it's my wife's fault we raised the flag upside down on January 6 Yeah, there's quite a lot of reason to believe SCOTUS is political. I think the simplest one: the conservative justices lied and/or told half-truths about their views on Roe v Wade. Under oath. The ones who lied are liars. The ones who dodged the question are politicians.
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Sotomayor literally made the same types of claims about DC v Heller during her confirmation hearing, despite later joining a dissent to overturn the results. So if that's the case it runs both ways. It's also worth pointing out that there is a gulf of difference between how a court interprets law and the constitution, and how a court interprets a previous "Precedent". Courts have a lot of power to throw out or reverse previous precedent, but much less permanent power to change interpretation of the laws themselves.
Serious attempts to analyze the budget with the goal of addressing over-spending generally omit Social Security, because it's paid for with a dedicated tax. Repealing Social Security entirely wouldn't do much to address the budget deficit, certainly nowhere near as much as naive "look at how bit that part of this pie graph is!" analyses suggest it would.
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Actually, the even more serious budget analyses than the ones you've read include Social Security
Bug: Border radius has infected VSCode editor (github.com/microsoft)
I came for screenshots and there are none, nor are there in the linked issue this is marked a duplicate of.
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The following issue has a good number of screenshots in various comments: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/325240?timeline_page=1
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He says to open VSCode
Screen shots? Just open the app, it is glaring with border radius.
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> Just open the app I'd prefer not to.
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You want them to install an app and then open it just to see images? That's crazy.
https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_129#_modern-ui-preview-experimental At the end of that video you can see the modern UI preview.
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Sorry! It seems the page can't be found
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they seem to have a lot of broken pages, like the changelog :facepalm: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_139 Internally, these companies are the real slopocolypse
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Sorry! It seems the page can't be found
I stopped using vscode because of their ui a long time ago and went to zed. Never going back.
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This feels like the effective death of VSCode.
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I want to believe this post is sarcastic. But sadly you just can’t be sure…
Honestly it is probably time I start using Vim.
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Vim is great. But Zed is more like VSCode in usage. And more lightweight too. Not as lightweight as vim tho :)
Lots of unnecessary whitespace, tabs changing colour to be confusing about which is selected… They hired a new design lead who wants to make their mark, didn't they.
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It definitely feels that way
Letterboxd Is Up for Sale, and A24, Sony and the New York Times Are Bidding (worldofreel.com)
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I continue to be baffled by this sale. Letterboxd was acquired by Tiny 3 years ago, Tiny’s entire premise is that they hold for the long term. Selling after 3 years is not long term. I don’t understand why Tiny would undermine their raison d’aitre unless it’s because the founders (who retain a minority stake) are pushing for it. Tiny just recently updated their website to emphasize how long they’ve owned each property which is especially confusing given they’re now offloading things https://tiny.com/companies/letterboxd
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Damn, that asking price is insane
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Heh, the name makes it sound like a daemon. service letterboxd enable; service letterboxd start
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If it's bought by A24 or Sony that's absolutely gonna be a conflict on interest and I cannot imagine the platform would ever be impartial for the reviews of their movies. It NYT buys it, then it would be turned into a woke nonsense project. I guess all good things must come to an end.
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part of the charm of letterboxd is that its median reviewer is far more woke than every NYT contributor combined, imo.
A24 is the biggest cheater on Letterboxd, buying 5 star raters en masse. Warner is not much better. Sony is ok.
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What 5 start ratings have they purchased?
Zelensky says Russia has widened attacks to hit Ukraine's data centres (bbc.com)
> shitshow From a Russian or Chinese perspective it is probably seen as a great success. Iran has an economic disaster on its hands but it’s held on and has the US squealing with the Houthi, oil prices and all the destroyed US bases. That may well be seen as a win by some there.
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China depends on Iranian oil, but so far have been resilient with reserves. IMO prolonged conflict is good as it will start starving China eventually.
With this and the data center destruction in the Gulf, maybe in future countries will need to move to constructing datacenters deep underground to protect them. Probably more expensive, but I imagine still cheaper than building data centers in space.
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Same solar panel wattage yields something like 10-15x more power in space. Given biggest shortage for building on earth has been power - I don’t see it being actually cheaper. Sure there are other issues with getting there, cooling, radiation. But for cost of power prices - space has huge advantage. Also seems a lot of people on far left seem agree we shouldn’t be building them which yields extra support for SpaceX.
Europe has hard decisions to make about what an end to the war in Ukraine will look like, and whether that means ceding territory. Ukraine is never going to recapture the territory that it has lost without European troops on the ground. Macron famously said that he would "have to send guys to Odesa" and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine and Russia has since captured even more territory and is actively bombarding Kyiv. Europe simply cannot keep carving out $100 billion military aid packages every year indefinitely. Tough decisions have to be made and, despite public criticism and posture, every EU leader is secretly hoping USA can broker a peace deal and this all just kind of goes away .
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Nobody is hoping for a peace deal. The goals of Russia and Ukraine are too incompatible for any peace deal European leaders could support. Everyone has resigned to the fact that the war will go on, until the internal politics in either country make it impossible to continue. Or until something completely unexpected happens. And the $100 billion/year military aid can go on indefinitely, because it's only a fraction of the increased military spending due to the war. If the war ends too soon with the terms favoring Russia, Europe would have to spend even more to increase the pace of its remilitarization.
It's a mistake to blindly adopt tit-for-tat. Presumably Z has a list of important targets and is working his way down. Maybe data centers rank, maybe they don't. During the Battle of Britain, Churchill ordered a bombing attack on Berlin. Consequently, Hitler ordered Göring to switch from attacking military infrastructure to attacking London. This is widely considered to have been a significant strategic mistake that helped the British win the Battle of Britain.
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I would imagine data centers would have more military value for Ruzzia than Wildberry, but also a significant escalation (which Ruzzia has now seemingly done) Data centers are now dual use infrastructure and valid war targets
Alan Kay: Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels [video] (youtube.com)
It would have been kind of great to see an OOP language with Alan's design, but with a better syntax. I dislike smalltalk syntax. Barely anyone uses smalltalk today. Even then, we'd also have an OOP language to be really really fast. Otherwise people will just use C. Java itself is too verbose and has a rather boring OOP model.
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[delayed]
How about Elixir and Erlang? They do pretty much exactly what Kay preaches. Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds better to Kay's message-based vision than Smalltalk-80. Wirth arrived here not by trying to emulate biology, but by trying to avoid the V-Table. Java implemented the Simula 67 object model according to a 2017 Gosling lecture (as did early C++ and Smalltalk-80 to a significant degree).
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> Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds better to Kay's message-based vision than Smalltalk-80. Wirth arrived here not by trying to emulate biology, but by trying to avoid the V-Table. That's interesting! what did they do that corresponded better?
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In contrast to the "usual" (i.e. Simula 67 based) OO approach, Wirth avoided virtual methods in his Oberon language, but instead used type extension (i.e. inheritance) to declare specialized message records (as the replacement to variant records of Pascal and Modula) which were handled by procedure-typed fields of record variables (i.e. objects) using polymorphic dispatch based on the dynamic message type. The intention was not to "correspond better" to Kay's vision (Wirth likely didn't know Kay nor was he interested in his visions), but he arrived at a similar design from a different motivation. And the analogy only works when considering what Kay and team actually implemented (i.e. "message delivery" - a record in case of Oberon, a stream of tokens in case of Smalltalk-72 - via synchronous procedure calls). Smalltalk-80 instead implemented compiled virtual methods and table-based polymorphic dispatch like Simula 67, just with a dynamic language.
Can someone please explain to me what this is all about?
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My favorite part was how Google's speech to text transcriptions censored the word "fuck" to "[__]", adding another layer of censorship noise and interpretation to the mix. And how the conference's real time speech to text transcription would occasionally lapse into Danish, and say things like "We will eat your hands".
Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models (ollaya.dev)
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I'm not sure what this means for AI startups if their innovations can be copied by OSS so quickly (what, like 2 weeks?). There's "consumer surplus" for everyone, to borrow an economic concept. But we do ideally want some of the surplus to flow to the innovator, too. I know there were precursors, but that's fine - it's hard to have a totally novel idea in such a popular field. I don't know what the end game is for TypeSafe - they'd need to demonstrate perpetually better results, or compete in another axis: UX, support, custom solutions, etc. So much of the time, someone proving a concept, or it simply getting enough publicity, is enough for a "Cambrian explosion" of follow-ups and copies. Famously, that was true for "Attention is All You Need", and the general idea of "next-token prediction" being so powerful. We've stumbled into general differentiable models..
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Would be great if you supported CUDA 12; I don't feel like paying $15K to upgrade my GPU right now
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FAQ[1] says: > It is an independent project, not affiliated with Ollama. [1]: https://ollaya.dev/docs/faq
I've been following jevbench twice a day for the past week and that's been a lot of fun. Latest update: Rank System Score Public / sealed accuracy Evidence 1 decider-4b v2 64.13 83.5% / 34.7% Evaluator-run, offline 2 Jev 1.13 63.29 86.6% / 36.7% Evaluator-run API 3 JevK5 v0.2 62.04 85.3% / 33.1% Evaluator-run 4 Cygnet 12B 61.76 87.9% / 33.8% Evaluator-run, offline 5 Hopper 59.43 82.3% / 34.1% Evaluator-run 28 Kev 4B 36.14 66.2% / 22.4% Evaluator-run 41 Laya 421M 30.25 58.4% / 30.8% Evaluator-run https://benchmarkheaven.com/jev-models
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Amazing - was looking for some benchmarks around this earlier
> how gullible ... today that laya is even a thing is further evidence, people took that author at face value, the paper contents are incomplete and describe something that does not sound like Jev at all this was the period of arxiv history that led to the new vouching system, laya author contributed to that imo
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My understanding is that Laya (or whatever it was called in 2025) was yet another fine-tuned classifier, not a general purpose one. That said, Typesafe false marketing caused Laya to fit perfectly into pretty much every advantage that they are claiming: "system one decision model", cheap, fast, no hallucinations, structured, confidence output, parallel, calibrated. Their BS is their own demise. I think Laya's author genuinely bought their BS and thinks he built the same thing. Unlike Typesafe, I don't think he's intentionally misleading people. The only unique thing about Jev is that it's a general purpose classifier. Funny enough, they were so busy spreading marketing bullshit that they forgot to mention the only real thing that makes Jev unique.
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Laya author is spitting more BS than Typesafe, that papers are nothing like Jev, they use RAG and azure hosted services for calculating embeddings, with an orchestrator. Jev is just a model, Laya was put together after Jev, almost certainly based on what the author learned from Typesafe, and then backported "his" idea I suspect most people only read the blog post, and thought it was great how a VC company "stole" an idea and was "outdone" by a rando... without actually checking the facts. Confirmational reading bias, we live in a post-truth world with dysfunction media ecosystem
Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a 'planetary barometer' (theregister.com)
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Any solid citations for "and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome."? I would be honestly intrigued but wary of just the usual Elon bad/good so all things he does bad/good narratives. If we are on the brink of Kessler Syndrome in LEO I would expect market pricing to reflect that.
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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/09/there-are-now-17000-satellites-in-orbit-and-growing-should-we-be-concerned/ "It does indeed start to look pretty dicey by mid-century." The report itself https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/ESA_Space_Environment_Report_2026 About pricing: https://www.satellitetoday.com/launch/2026/09/17/the-era-of-cheap-price-per-kilo-launch-is-over-launchers-say/
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If the report is predicting 100 years in the future, are we really "to the brink" now? Not to mention the decay time of these LEO is in months, hardly a kessler syndrome scenario.
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> "The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic re-entry debris, and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the Kessler Syndrome... On the other hand, it makes a terrific barometer.” I'm not sure we're coming out ahead on that one, but leave it to a guy who can detect things light-years away to be able to find a silver lining
Meta's Muse appears to use an OpenAI model labeled muse-special (mouse.dev)
This used to happen a lot with GPT 5.4. It would start outputting entire sentences in Korean for no apparent reason.
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People that know multiple languages sometimes code switch too funnily enough
I had a totally benign chat with OpenAI and it titled it as “amateur porn” in Chinese characters, it was very alarmed when I pointed the conversation name out to it. It almost never misses these days, but when it does the failure modes are very strange.
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I remember getting a bunch of „Thanks for watching! Subscribe and smash that like button“ in the middle of chat sessions a few times (like, more than 3 times over the past 3y)
If it's using the same weird (and awful) "backend prompt encryption" pattern and mechanism that Codex also uses ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028 ), then I'd also say it points to OpenAI being involved. Hopefully that shit isn't becoming a more popular pattern, absolutely awful for troubleshooting stuff.
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Anthropic does the same thing with reasoning signatures. It has already become the standard pattern.
The Post-AGI Era (avidfayaz.com)
An aligned AGI (or ASI) would construct a world far more just and abundant than what we currently have.
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Meh, that's debatable. I don't think the problems we have require much in the way of intelligence to solve, we don't have them because we aren't smart enough. I feel aligned AGI or ASI would get crushed by the reality of humanity and the sheer strength of its inertia, just the same way aligned smart humans get crushed by it. Intelligence isn't magic. It can only overcome so much brute force and humanity, as a non-intelligent system made out of intelligent parts, carries an ungodly amount of brute force.
This is why I kind of hate the term though. We generally agree that humans are intelligent even though they're also pretty damn stupid. For example, one of the stupid things we do is fail to realize that "intelligent" is a word with multiple senses. Which then makes a muddle of conversations like this because we all - myself included - tend to switch back and forth between senses of the term without even realizing we're doing it. So we have sense A of "intelligent", which means something like "capable of abstract reasoning". And we have sense B of "intelligent", which means something more like "the opposite of stupid". These two meanings don't actually have much to do with each other. But a lot of the hype around LLMs and the possibility of them being a form of AGI tends to hinge on tacitly assuming that an artificial system that can do abstract reasoning tasks won't do stupid things. Simply because sense A has one characteristic, sense B has the other, and we happen to use the same word to describe both.
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I think that, yes, it is rather unfair to hold AIs to a higher standard than humans in order to reach the "AGI" label, even though we consider humans to be "general intelligences". But the definition I had in mind was the one in Wikipedia, "matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks." Well, if it's going to do that, it can't be stupider than capable humans nearly as often as it is.
It is inordinately funny to me that the examples you listed all involve the computer as a medium – the kind of things a programmer would think is marvelous and proof of AGI, but falls squarely within the wheelhouse of computer whiz shit.
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You are dismissive instead of explaining yourself. We now have a system which can use tools and you still say this is just 'computer whiz shit'? A computer is a tool, a very generic one which we adopted to control our most critical systems. Enlighten me, when do you become impressed?
If Astra is AGI, then GPT 4 was AGI too. There's no qualitative difference. It can write poetry and role play with you, and code snippets, and you can run those code snippets if they're in bash format and boom, you have an agent. But if that's AGI then it's a meaningless term; it's just a martketing gimmick. Which is entirely my point.
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There is a significant qualitative difference, very obvouse one too. The complexity of tasks GPT-6 can do are not compareable to GPT-4. We see this daily. From CVEs which became a real problem after GPT-4, generic tool use (blender, paint, etc.), agentic work (GPT-4 was at a minute or so, GPT-6 can do hours). They broke through significant barriers in a short period of time. I would def count the agentic quality of doing hours of work as one of the main proofs.
U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk (cnbc.com)
> explicitly crafted to protect against foreign adversaries Explicitly? Wow, explicitly means it is directly defined in the statue. Which it isn't. Did you mean implicitly and accidentally say the exact opposite?
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The statute defines a supply chain risk as “the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert” a covered system. It says adversary, not foreign adversary. Even so, this designation had never previously been applied to a domestic company. The Pentagon applied it to Anthropic after a dispute over how it could use its AI. To me, the circumstances suggest the designation was used to punish Anthropic for refusing the Pentagon’s terms. It was clearly retaliatory and because of that unlawful.
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OK, explicitly designed to be used against adversaries. So the government is explicitly designating Anthropic as an adversary of the United States of America (a domestic adevarsary, not foreign, sure, GP was wrong on that part). And the reason Anthropic is an adversary of the USA? They have a clause in their license agreement that their products must not be used in surveillance or military targeting decisions.
The hidden upside for Anthropic is now they won't be forced to refer to AI as "SI".
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I can't believe they're going to make the Secretary of Education learn a new abbreviation.
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Less chance for her to mix it up with a steak sauce.
Wtf is life just court battles back and forth for everything forever now?
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> Wtf is life just court battles back and forth for everything forever now? Not for peasants like you and me! We are forced to surrender our Seventh Amendment rights in order to be able to do most things that are part of everyday life.
I know everyone says this is political but it actually seems like a textbook designation. Anthropic wanted to have rules on how the military used AI, the military said no and therefore doesn't want anthropic used anywhere in their supply line. This is like a pen manufacturer not wanting their pens used to sign drone strike orders, now the military needs to have a special box of pens that don't have stipulations attached. With AI usage it would be the same thing except applied to entire product chains. It seems like it would just add more complexity to operations. You can agree with the rules anthropic wanted, but having rules set by a private company at all that apply to the military does seem fair for the military to object to. >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary Though they'd probably put the DoD on the cybersecurity whitelist today, the very idea of the claude whitelists for certain functionality already exists and is being used by them today.
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I didn't understand what you said or your analogy, sorry maybe I'm stupid. Would you be able to explain this differently? Maybe something implied was omitted and I didn't follow that.
If the DoD doesn't want Anthropic anywhere in their supply chain, because Anthropic said they won't supply the services the DoD needs.. why can't the DoD bar them from being in their supply chain? Seems very straight forward.
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That's not normal in a free country - even less so in one that claims to have a free market. Anthropic said "don't use our products for targetting decisions in military ops". The DoD could have easily said "actually then, we won't use your products at all". Instead, the DoD said "either you let us use your products in targeting decisions, or we won't let you sell to anyone who sells to us for any purpose, using a law that only applies to adversaries of the USA".
Of course they can. Any supplier is free to set terms for how their products are to be used. The DoD is free to not agree to those terms - but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk, and bar any DoD supplier from using them for any purpose - which is what the extreme measure they took represents.
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> but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk, and bar any DoD supplier from using them for any purpose Just because you disagree with a power of the government does not mean the government does not have that power.
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> but it's not free to then claim the company that offered those terms is a security risk Yes they are free to do that. You have to blame Congress for giving them that authority under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act and specifically 41 U.S.C. § 4713. But Claude’s ToS didn’t prohibit use of Claude for sensitive military operation but it was coded to do so. It was part of the government’s evidence
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No, they can only do that if a company is a true supply chain risk. Not everyone some idiot in the government doesn't like is a such a huge risk to the country that they can be banned from doing business with anyone doing business with the DoD. Ultimately this is for the courts to decide, and the current decision is not final. And while the two Trump-nominated judges agreed with you, the other judge agrees with me - so at least we can say that neither my nor your position is legally absurd.
No. They can do that with an order covering the specific parameters under which they care about it. Supply chain risk definition is about adversaries and sabotage, not companies dictating contract terms.
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They don't want Anthropic to be able to sabotage any operations the DoD has. Anthropic already has a history of trying to sabotage others like during the Fable release when they said they'd subtly wreck your code if you were working on cutting edge AI.
Humans are 100% in the loop with software patches and there are many people in the chain so that provenance is maintained. It’s not that Claude could never look at the source code
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Correct, anthropic's requirement was human-in-the-loop. The DoD's response was to ban anthropic from all DoD facing activity and supply chains, whether or not there is a human in the loop. This does in fact run into exactly GP's issue. (or as I suggest elsewhere, can Boeing use Claude Code for software development?)
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It’s hardly “self defining” as the Appeals Court noted because military operations can involve different degrees of human involvement in targeting decisions. It’s not as binary as people have been trying to portray it. [1] https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-1049-2194984.pdf
Correct, they do not want “Boeing” to use Claude models to write software for airplanes for example
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Yes, and this is not (and cannot be!) a supply chain risk in any reasonable interpretation.
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It is though. Read the opinion here: https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-1049-2194984.pdf It’s a risk that persons may otherwise manipulate the operation of a covered technology to deny or disrupt its function. The statute allows the DoW to do this.
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If the DoD uses some Boeing plane, they do not want Anthropic to be able to interfere somehow.
> They are complying with Anthropic's demands to not be used in war There was no such demand from Anthropic. Why are you making things up? EDIT: Honestly, the rest of your comment is even stranger. You're starting from a false premise, a strange belief about what the designation is meant for, but you do end up providing a wonderful demonstration of your opening sentence for yourself at least. You definitely don't know what you're talking about. > It's not necessarily punitive, the government is just covering their tracks so that if somewhere in their supply chain Anthropic exists, they want to remove them. This reminds me of an old comment here where some idiot claimed that suicide is illegal so police are allowed to stop people from killing themselves. No, if Anthropic doesn't want their systems involved in war (that's a thing you made up, again, just to be clear) then they do not need to be designated a supply chain risk to "protect them" or whatever drivel you come up with next. The correct response from the DOD would be to terminate contracts with Anthropic, and that's it. Then Anthropic would be responsible for ensuring that any contracts with other parties keep them out of war (again, not a thing they said they want, just your fiction). This is how it works for all other software systems where people don't want their work involved in wars or used by the police or whatever. Designating them a supply chain risk was punitive. Only fools think otherwise. > I feel like in this thread no one is understanding what supply chain risk designation is. I wouldn't say "no one" understands, but you certainly don't.
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Again with the lack of understanding why it matters. The DoD does not want Anthropic anywhere near any system they'd use! Because it's, well, a risk to their supply chain if Anthropic were to somehow find out and then e.g. crash a rocket if the DoD was using a third party rocket provider that used Anthropic models. This is the correct response by the DoD, they simply do not want Anthropic in their supply chain. The DoD don't care what Anthropic comes up as reasoning, they want to maintain control of their systems without any (even potential) meddling.
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[delayed]
> Why can’t the DoD say “ok we’re going with a different vendor”? That's exactly what they're doing. It turns out the DoD is a really big bureaucracy and has process to make sure they thoroughly exclude a vendor and transitive dependencies on that same vendor.
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They do, but this is not it. This is designating Anthropic as an adversary of the USA, and it is forbidding anyone who wants to sell to the DoD from using Anthropic products for anything. This is a massive attack on free speech, free enterprise, and the market.
??? What are you talking about. Anthropic isn't an adversary and they're not required to sell for purposes they don't want to. It's not sabotage and it's not malicious. This is a designation reserved for terrorists and the link.
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If you're preventing the military from doing some action because you disagree with it, that makes you an adversary. Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies.
The DoD buys from suppliers, who buy from suppliers, and so on. Hence supply chain. Hence supply chain risk.
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You would think that's a surprisingly easy concept to grasp, but many are viewing this through the lens of desired outcome and not reality.
It is not the textbook definition, because what Anthropic is doing is not sabotage, malicious, or subversive. Those are the key words in the definition. They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification. So their bid falls short of requirements.
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just because someone copied one sentence from some online reference it doesn't mean that the court used it for arguing their decision. https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2026/09/26-1049-2194984.pdf > Whatever paradigmatic examples individual members of Congress may have had in mind, the statutory definition is not limited to “adversar[ies],” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(4), and instead covers “any person,”
> They are just refusing to add a feature to the military's specification. That fails to accord with the claim: >The Department reasonably feared that Anthropic might manipulate Claude’s design to prevent it from performing national-security functions that the Department deems contractually authorized and necessary
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But that is not at all a reasonable fear. Is it really reasonable to believe that Anthropic, after receiving a government contract, would then proceed to sabotage their own product to not function as contracted? That seems like an utterly ridiculous claim to me, nothing close to "reasonable". There is no charitable way to view this designation except as political punishment and/or as a favor to Altman and Musk.
> they might intentionally sabotage US military operations Yes, this is why the DoW won’t use them.
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>DoW DoD. Gulf of Mexico. Lake Ontario.
That’s literally what they’re doing. That’s what supply chain risk means. They don’t buy the product, and the product can’t be used in the things they do buy.
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No, it's not. If Anthropic is a supply chain risk, that means that if you are working on a project that will be used for the DoD, you can't use Claude or any other Anthropic product for any purpose whatsoever in that project. Asked Claude to change the color of a PPTX for a sprint demo you're doing? Oops, you've know introduced a supply chain risk and your company is liable for damages or at least losing its entire contract with the DoD.
>obviously patriotic American country Hi, just informing you of the typo.
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thanks. Company, of course
I guess I don't know what "national champion" means. Do they receive different legal treatment from other similar companies? If so, that would be a worrying signal. A common feature of fascism being present doesn't mean you've definitely got fascism, but it does raise a pretty big red flag.
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>I guess I don't know what "national champion" means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_champions >Do they receive different legal treatment from other similar companies? If so, that would be a worrying signal. A common feature of fascism being present doesn't mean you've definitely got fascism, but it does raise a pretty big red flag. They definitely get assistance from the government. Where that crosses into "different legal treatment" is up to you, though personally I think the distinction (if any) isn't really worth much. The original claim was "Most favored companies", not "are totally exempt from the law". In the case of openai, it's not really clear whether any laws have been broken, because despite all the cries over "they hacked people!", the question of intent would make any prosecution tricky. Not to mention there's similar cries about AI companies in general violating copyright laws, so if the implication is that openai gets to break laws scott free but anthropic doesn't, that really falls flat.
There's no contradiction there. Pentagon doesn't want Anthropic deciding the guardrails on their own.
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Then the Pentagon shouldn't sign a contract with them. (Or in this case, they shouldn't try and fail to renegotiate the terms of an already signed contract, and then retaliate in order to get their way.)
I still don't fully understand what this was about. It sounds like the DoD said they wanted unrestricted access to Anthropic's models, Anthropic refused, so the Pentagon declared that they wouldn't use them at all. Isn't this basically what Anthropic wanted?
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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.
> Simpletons read that as: "The DOW wants to kill people with AI." The DoW actually used AI in the Iran war, which led to them attacking a school and killing more than a hundred childrem. That's exactly what Anthropic wanted them to prevent. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/
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The DoD has been using AI for engagement since the 80s. Maven, the system used in your example has been active since 2017. None of those systems pull the trigger. They assemble data for human review.
On faltering: the US Military already has rules around the use of automated systems for this type decision making. This is not a new concept to them by any means, and currently it always involves a human decision.
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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).
In this context, that designation just means that the DOD won’t use your product and it’s suppliers can’t use your product for DOD-facing activity. That’s not “thuggery” it’s something any buyer can do. Walmart or whatever could do it too.
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Isn't that textbook tortious interference with a business relationship?
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No, tortious interference requires use of means that are independently wrongful, such as fraud, blackmail, etc. Preventing someone from doing business with someone else isn’t by itself enough. The reason the tort exists is to address the situation where some unlawful conduct (e.g. fraudulent statements) is directed against Party A, but the damage accrues to Party B in the form of a broken contract. In that scenario, Party B couldn’t sue for fraud, because the fraudulent statements were made to Party A. But Party A couldn’t sue for fraud, because it wasn’t harmed. For example, if you think Party A and its customers are infringing your patent, you can threaten to sue the customers unless they use your product instead. That’s not tortious interference because suing someone for patent infringement isn’t itself wrongful.
The filibuster exists as a convenient excuse to not do anything without offending constituents
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It's not as if democrats are using the existence of the filibuster as an excuse to not even try. Putting forward legislation they believe in, even when the odds of it being passed are slim, demonstrates intent and if the filibuster is used to stop a law that would benefit the people, that means that someone was actively doing something, it's on record, and the people should hold the obstructionists accountable for what they prevented.
I thought the Democrats were the party of big government and regulations whereas the Republicans were for reducing regulations?
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That has never been true, it’s just a Republican slogan.
More like the opposite in practice
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Compared to the Republican party you believe they create less regulations?
Classified estimates show the NSA is paying billions to test AI models (washingtonsun.com)
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I seem to recall a certain former NSA affiliated person speaking on the conjecture of NSA Full Capture from fiber optic taps at a HOPE conference many many years ago. The statements alluded to automated custom robotic “drive shufflers” for even the tape and drive libraries already in use at that time, and heavily implied that in some cases exotic storage was being handled by Rube Goldberg style computer assisted robotically serviced storage libraries that would make even HAL jealous.
People who aren't evil-minded don't go to work for a government organization responsible for constitution-violating surveillance of their fellow citizens.
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They do, in droves. It's clear you don't know anything about the entire industry.
So you have to be evil to think of what evil can do by the statement you made. Can't you see how this leads to a catch-22 situation where if you get rid of anyone that can think of possible evil acts makes your organization blind and therefor at higher risk of actually committing those acts. Also, when looking at the people we all vote into power, there is a incredible amount of naivety here. Snowden should have keyed you in on what people in power are doing.
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> So you have to be evil to think of what evil can do by the statement you made. You don't, and my statement did not assert that. You are stretching wayyy too much here to try to get the world to fit your narrative.
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA is GPU constrained and it just isn't worth it to replicate all that infrastructure.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if NSA purchased equipment using a method akin to greymarketing where the supplier either A) doesn’t know the true destination of the parts, including purchases through an agency other than NSA, or purchase by multiple “individuals” B) NSA has arrangements to compensate manufacturers using black budget line items and gov projects line items where disclosure of the production or even something like funding of a stand-up of a factory is not clearly delineated or otherwise inaccurately designated in SEC and IRS filings. More so I’m pretty sure there is a named procedure/process and maybe even a working group or sub-unit, similarly bearing a unique cryptonym, enabling the large scale acquisition of goods while keeping the regular record publication flows ignorant.
>The NSA mission is primarily inward focused. This is simply false. Only domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI can conduct domestic investigations. Law enforcement or counter-intelligence agents might be given access to intelligence the NSA collects if they have a warrant, but it is not in the remit of the agency to intentionally collect information on US persons, it’s only allowed incidentally when conducting foreign intelligence collection
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Oh I thought their primary focus was direct threats to the US as opposed to more general adverseries but I may be thinking of DHS.
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What makes you think that the NSA cares about rules or laws? Snowden showed that was the case, and that was a long time ago. Lots more compute and toys for them to play with now.
Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red (jev-pokemon.vercel.app)
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I wish jev took in images so we could do this generically for any game, without memhacks. I'm sure that's coming. You could front this with an image -> text model but that would be much lower quality vs latency, and the whole point of doing it with a decision model is remove the latency. Games are a really interesting testing ground for robotics; if we can solve game playing (incl 3d) we could embody "system one" intelligence into robots that have something emulating general reflexes without needing to fine tune.
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What's not clear to me on the video is whether jev is doing the button presses for controlling the character to move around. The "Jev calls" counter only seems to increment at junction points like battles, conversation prompts, menus etc. Is something else moving the character around?
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It's connected to the ROM of the actual game, so it can see a lot of things. It has multiple tools available, including being able to move to coordinates. All in the OSS repo if you wanna play around with it: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon
This is so interesting to watch. For a couple minutes I was in awe of how quick and cheap it was. Then I saw just how bad the decision are and how it would get stuck in strange loops of going in and out of the same door to no end. This seems like a technology heading in the right direction but not quiet there yet. Excited for what they are cooking up but probably won't start building around it yet.
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The exact message I sent my friend this morning: > the most interesting thing about this jev stuff > is that people are seemingly like > completely disinterested in how smart it actually is > I haven't even heard it mentioned a single time how it actually compares to other LLMs coming up with their own classifications. Just: it's fast and cheap After watching a few minutes of this it makes me think that maybe we should be a little more interested in how smart it is.
This entire conversation around Jev seems weird to me. Like... we started from neural nets that could do basic decision making and classifications pretty well, then trained larger and larger language models to get to where we are now. Now suddenly everyone is going crazy because someone trained a smaller model that is adequate at making decisions? We already went through the "look this AI can play pokemon terribly" phase like a decade ago.
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I agree it's overhyped, but the transition to a general purpose classifier (vs a narrow scope classifier) is new and noteworthy. Ie the famous "Hotdog" clip from Silicon Valley [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs
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Making decisions quickly, cheaply and without having to train your own model.
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Math.random can make poor decisions quickly and cheaply
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Benchmark it against jev and you'll have your answer.
Looking at the diagram in the gh repo, it looks like this is entirely jev. Are there any examples of people having a big model like Fable handle high level goals?
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A Robot is Sprinting Towards You: Do You Want it Running on Claude or Grok? https://openrouter.ai/blog/insights/royale-last-agent-standing/
Factorio that you can touch (factorio.com)
Oh - but only touching them? I was hoping for an iteration of a factorio belt that could actually move!
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I thought you were going to taste them for a second.
The system for moving between planets is locked down. It is rockets or nothing. And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling. What really killed me was the message saying I was only allowed one of a specific key building on each planet. That was very anti-factorio imho. As I said above, as an indi developer moves forwards they add constraints to focus and guide progression. I simply do not want that. So I disabled all the planet stuff and play like it never existed.
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That restriction is needed in some way to prevent that building being a way of teleporting stuff across the planet. They did relax this in 2.1 and allow you to build extensions to that building where you can add inserters and use belts/trains.
> Everything in the game is a 2D render of a 3D model, which is why the game uses so much VRAM. Surely from first principles one'd expect 3D models to be heavier than the 2D renders, due to the extra axis?
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Purely from a vram perspective. A triangle is just 3 vertices and some edges. A few bytes of data. A similar 2d image of a triangle would likely be thousands of bits of data. The 2d probably uses a little less per pixel. Whereas the triangle has slightly more expensive compute per pixel cost. But modern gpu have dedicated hardware for that. 3d is probably more expensive compute but cheaper vram usage. At least to a point and a certain set of conditions. Barring things like textures and others.
> The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine. Not everyone bought a GPU to run LLMs on. That is quite a bit of VRAM, especially for non-desktops
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The 2D graphics are heavier than you might suspect. But Factorio is overall a very well optimized game, and it runs far better on my office notebook than any comparable game. This will work fine on any not ancient notebook with integrated graphics.
Allow Carriers on Planes (jefftk.com)
>This may sound idiotic, but it also prevents other "creative" solutions where airlines sacrifice safety willingly to spend less money. Everyone loves to say this from the comfort of their arm chair somewhere in an ivory tower but literally every aviation and adjacent workplace has a phrase to the tune of "here we cut stupid corners, cutting smart ones is illegal" Which is to say, the do-gooders in their infinite wisdom have blocked progress on various axis, some of them no-brainers, some of them the most reasonable ones, because once upon a time someone took it too far and something happened. So all investigation of where to save money, where to find improvement, etc, etc, happens on axis of optimization that are frequently absurd. This is where most of the "creative" solutions you deride come from.
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> because once upon a time someone took it too far and something happened. It's easier to accept red tape once you follow "something happened" down to the idiots who "took it too far". Progress is blocked along the axes your fuckups have access to, end of story. If you don't like red tape quit playing grab-ass around heavy machinery.
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>It's easier to accept red tape once you follow "something happened" down to the idiots who "took it too far". Progress is blocked along the axes your fuckups have access to, end of story. If you don't like red tape quit playing grab-ass around heavy machinery. <sigh> This is exactly the sort of sneering smugness that makes people rightly hate the safety guy and you are a bad person for as long as you continue to engage in it.
> Is this really why the rule was made? Did they really have safety of driving in mind or is this just in the interest of the profits of airlines? Yes. There are multiple public documents showing this, ex: > The FAA has determined it is not appropriate to mandate the use of CRSs in aircraft now. We remain concerned that if we require children under 2 years old to be in an approved restraint system (which requires a passenger seat), affected operators might find it necessary to charge a fare for transporting these children. (Currently most, if not all, operators do not charge a fare for children under 2 years old who are held in an adult's lap.) In turn, for economic reasons some adults might decide to drive in automobiles to their destinations rather than fly. The FAA is concerned because automobile injury and fatality rates are higher than aircraft injury and fatality rates. As a result, there would be a net increase in transportation injuries and fatalities as families opt, for economic reasons, to drive rather than fly to their destinations. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2005/08/26/05-16783/child-restraint-systems > * Subsidize the 2nd seat for parents with children from tax dollars That's not something the FAA or DOT can do. > * Criminalize many intentional driving violations That's not something the FAA or DOT can do. > * Build high speed rail That's not something the FAA or DOT (unilaterally) can do.
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> That's not something the FAA or DOT can do. I mean, the head of the FAA and the head of the DOT can have a coffee chat with the president and get an executive order then? Anything is possible to do, apparently.
First Principles Thinking (sunilsadasivan.com)
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> I’ve been lucky to work with and manage a lot of great senior engineers. When I think about what made them great, I keep landing on the same thing: they seemed to know what needed to be done. There’s an intuition there that I’ve always admired. This is so true. Every senior engineer I've worked with knew what needs to be done regardless how big a particular initiative/project was. Most of the time they even had a hunch or a vague idea on how to do it as well, but they were so good at breaking things into smaller parts and get the important things done first. Recently with AI I've realized how easy it has become to figure out how to do something as well. I can just play around and explore a solution and ask the LLM to code it in the code base and then I can actually go through the solution on high level and see how it would work/not work without doing brain gymnastics trying to figure it out all in my head because I'm obviously too lazy to write any code just to experiment.
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“First principles thinking” is a Silicon Valley cliche. It is a tell for me
I use the whole "first principles" thinking as a litmus test for bad engineers, if you're emphasizing first principles all the time you're probably a bit of a naivie person, to put it as nicely as possible. subtraction is a great skill to apply to a great many things we do and when people say "first principles" this is actually what they mean but sometimes things are complicated and a first order approximation is not enough.
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Yea I agree. Thinking from first principles is a valuable skill in general.... but certain areas have received so much attention/work and are highly developed. It's not impossible to develop something new by thinking from first principles, but when I see it I often interpret that as either 1) lacking awareness towards the sophistication of the domain, or 2) arrogance.
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“first-order approximation” is pretty different from first-principles thinking in my opinion.
I think I need to write a full blog post on this. While I think there are better introductions to "first principles thinking" than this post, the idea of "...When I step back and ask what we’re actually trying to do, why it matters, and how the pieces connect, I usually find more ways forward than I expected." That's an important skill to have. However, I think sometimes we overvalue thinking from first principles when it isn't warranted. I've seen times in my career where first principles thinking led to a solution that ignored key non-technical constraints. (For example, it would require a full re-architecture of the system and require deferring all feature work for a year. Another example: the proposed solution breaks Conways law in a way that would require a reorg that would break other organizational constraints.) Sometimes, we need to recognize our constraints. Spend the time to question them when appropriate, but realize that there are other tools that are more appropriate in some cases -- such as anthropological thinking.
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You apply first principles thinking, but also be mindful of your role in the team. When you say something isn't warranted because it takes too much time, it isn't valuable: you're still thinking about what it is you're doing (working), what tools you have (your team, people), to create value (your product or service). It's the measurement of value part that's tricky. Who determines value? Sometimes it's the customer, sometimes it's just you. It's about perspective, and seeing where you fit in the picture. Apply the principles from there. Nobody says you have to be a jerk about it, that's up to you and how you wish to apply the output of the first principled thinking.
They're not so much at odds, but the emphasis is very different and therefore the failure modes are. First principles thinking emphasizes the principles, and so that's why there's an ideological trap; all you need to justify a given direction is some rationale from first principles, and that's often good enough. The problem is... which first principles? Say your goal is to get to the moon, and the principle you use is to minimize the distance, and you choose to do this in a greedy fashion. This will have you climbing ladders, trees, buildings, and mountains, and you will record that as progress justifying the approach. But you haven't reasoned far back enough to figure out just greedily minimizing your distance to the moon is never going to get you there, no matter what. Choosing the wrong principles can lead to local extremes which can be a lot harder to see in cases less obvious than going to the moon. Reasoning backwards has its own traps as well.
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> ideological trap First principles are not an ideology; they are more like laws of nature. Due to that, they are great both for reformulating a problem, and checking solutions.
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