Unlurker|Replay|About
Our Agreement with the Department of War (openai.com)
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OpenAI basically bribed the government into attacking Anthropic, via political donations to the MAGA PAC. They couldn’t not compete with an inferior product so Altman and Brockman went this route. As for OpenAI’s defense - not buying it. “OpenAI’s President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It’s for Humanity”: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-president-greg-brockman-political-donations-trump-humanity/
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OpenAI: "let's delegate to laws that we know are wholly inadequate for AI to absolve ourselves of any moral responsiblity."
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Not great? Seems kind of loose language? It isn't OpenAI saying no autonomous weapons use, but only that use must be consistent with laws, regulations, and department policies: "The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities." More of the same here. Not a wonder why the DoD signed with OpenAI and instead of Anthropic. Delegating morality to the law when you know the law is not adequate seems like "not a good thing". "For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law."
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"What if the government just changes the law or existing DoW policies?" Our contract explicitly references the surveillance and autonomous weapons laws and policies as they exist today, so that even if those laws or policies change in the future, use of our systems must still remain aligned with the current standards reflected in the agreement. So, this apply only if they changes the law, not if they break the law. "What happens if the government violates the terms of the contract?" As with any contract, we could terminate it if the counterparty violates the terms. We don’t expect that to happen. WE COULD [...]. Yeah, I believe
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This is the same company that started as a nonprofit dedicated to open AI safety research, then became a capped-profit entity, then effectively closed-source, then dropped the cap, and is now pursuing full for-profit conversion. Every single guardrail they've set for themselves has been quietly revised or removed once it became inconvenient. Anyone want to bet on how long those exclusions last?
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“The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols.” So DoW did get the “all lawful purposes” language they were after, with reference to existing (inadequate, in my view) regulations around autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
Khamenei Dead (twitter.com)
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“Israel says…”
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It's such an off timeline, where Israel can commit de facto genocide and there is no nato bombing like there was in Yugoslavia, and the USA, defenders of Ukraine's sovereignty, kidnap a state's leader and try to murder another state's leader, neither of which were a threat to the USA. The board of peace means nothing, the USA cannot be trusted since it is a lapdog of Israel (did Epstein have something on somebody), and the president of peace starts his own war, hoping to outdo previous presidents in unprovoked murder and destruction. All of the above gives Russia political ammunition to justify its SMO, and encourages China to step up its hopes to bring Taiwan back to the family. And we have been told that AI and climate change are the biggest threats to humanity, ffs.
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The same state's leader that sold to Russia the drones being used to violate Ukraine's sovereignty?
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Do you believe that allies shouldn't sell weapons to each other? Do you think people should try to kill the leaders of countries that sell weapons in such circumstances?
Quoting the site guidelines: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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We can talk about Hulk Hogan's death for 100 comments but not this?
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We allow death threads for all kinds of celebrities and people with no relationship to tech. Out of all of the guidelines, this one is probably the most often quoted and the least consistently followed.
"interesting new phenomenon" I would argue, directly targeting the leaders of another state is a "interesting new phenomenon".
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This has happened for thousands of years.
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Yes, but I am currently not aware of any pre WW2 events.
My understanding is that the Iranian government is very resilient. The has been a succession plan since the 70s with a broad board of individuals who can choose the next leader. Blowback is going to be the biggest issue here. Ali Khamenei wasn't just the leader of Iran, he was well respected for Shia muslims. While not perfectly analogous, it's close to killing the pope. Maybe this leads to open revolt which might fully topple to government, that said, I don't think there's a US/Israel endorsed leader or goal for succession here.
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That's actually not true: Khamenei was a political ayatollah, hardly respected for religious judgment by average Shia.
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It's my understanding that most ayatollahs get that title through political influence. And for Iran specifically, the supreme leader wouldn't have gotten his position without having that religious influence. It's a theocracy.
So now heads of state are fair game for unilateral elimination without a declaration of war This should be fun.
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The U.S. hasn't declared war since WWII. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I and II), Afghanistan, etc. were not technically wars in the sense that there was any form of formal declaration by congress. The U.S. constitution allocates the authority to declare war to congress but, in practice, it's been under the sole authority of the POTUS since long before Trump. This reallocation of authority hasn't been a huge problem until now. Now you have a POTUS whose motives for starting a war are entirely suspect. It's true that negotiations between Iran and the U.S. would have had significant trust hurdles to overcome. The U.S. and Iran had a deal that granted Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for a halt to Iran's nuclear program. It was working, but Trump is the president who unilaterally broke that agreement in his previous term[1]. Trump has also repeatedly broken his own agreements in his current term. Even his own signature is now completely worthless. What would it have taken to assure Iran the U.S. could be trusted to honour its word with Trump in power? Moreover, the timing of this war makes it hard to view as anything other than the bloodiest case of "Wag the Dog" of the modern era. Americans need to put this "president of peace" behind bars or he'll just keep starting wars. Once that's done, serious consideration should be given to restoring many of the powers the constitution allocates to congress, including the authority to declare war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action
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Did you miss that time Russia sent multiple kill squads after Zelensky? Seems like it's been on the table for a few years now.
Generally when you murder 30k of your own people the civilized world doesn't let you get away with it.
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Generally it does, actually. Neither the US nor Europe would have cared about Hitler's mass murder as long as he kept it in Germany and didn't disrupt business, his antisemitism was not unusual, and he was generally popular in the US. Stalin got away with it. Mao Zedong got away with it, and his authoritarian regime is a nascent superpower. Pol Pot more or less got away with it. He was deposed by his own people and died in his sleep. Israel has killed tens of thousands Palestinians and the world did nothing to stop it, America funded it. Idi Amin murdered hundreds of thousands of people and died in luxury. How many Russians and Ukrainians has Putin and his invasion of Ukraine sent to the slaughterhouse? Do you think anything is going to happen to him? How many North Koreans have the Kims starved to death or executed? Repercussions for the Armenian genocide? None. History is replete leaders whom the "civilized world" let "get away with it."
There’s a reason every POTUS has a Secret Service detail. So yeah, it’s been imagined. Presidents have been shot and killed before, and Trump himself was shot during the lead up to the most recent election.
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Yes, by one lone shooter without support in the background. If there is a determined team of assassins .. all it takes is one well placed shot.
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Again, the Secret Service is there to protect against all threats and the US Military there for every single other threat above the Secret Service’s pay grade and scale. It’s the most dangerous and most protected job in America no matter what the POTUS is actively doing at any and every single moment.
Disagree about the first part. Israeli intel agencies have very deep roots in Iran, and could very quickly be humiliated if Khamenei popped up with a jeering rebuttal to their claim.
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Israel also doesn't tend to report on major kills that didn't happen. It's one thing that they are fairly reliable on. If they say someone is dead, they likely are.
Better source: https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-crisis-live-explosions-tehran-israel-announces-strike-2026-02-28/
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Aren't these Iranians the same folks that declare religious wars or Jihad's ? I would not be surprised if we see increased terrorism against Americans worldwide for the next 100 years . . .
"Cancel ChatGPT" movement goes mainstream after OpenAI closes deal with U.S. Dow (windowscentral.com)
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Dario Amodei direct interview today on CBS News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTNHrq_4LU
Sure? I visited Reddit just now and i don't even know how to get to this non-personalized algo. At least they make a really good job to hide this view as good as possible so i doubt it's the default view for most logged users.
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That's my point, you don't generally have to "do" anything to get to "hot". If you open a /r/all or an individual subreddit, the default view is the "hot" algorithm.
I know this is very picky but I find the font choices of Claude quite distracting and difficult to read. I might try Gemini but the Trump admin would probably force Google to sell YouTube to Larry Ellison so they will capitulate. Are any of the Chinese frontier models available on neutral infrastructure?
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> are any of the Chinese frontier models available on neutral infrastructure? Yup, Check out Openrouter providers for your particular chinese frontier model/ open weights model in general and you could find the location of all providers who host that model and where they are hosted (US/EU countries etc.) as well. You can also change Claude font as others are mentioning.
Find a smarter dog park
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I tried, this is the most upper-class I could find in LA. Most of the people make over 6 figures and own their own houses. Try to go out and talk to people yourself and let us know your findings. What we are talking about on HN or Reddit does not reflect reality. This is an echo chamber.
[flagged]
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I doubt others in other countries would even know who owns ChatGPT. People just use it as an app, and they do not care what the U.S. government does with American companies.
Techno‑feudal elite are attempting to build a twenty‑first‑century fascist state (collapseofindustrialcivilization.com)
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The problem with these kinds of articles is that their arguments completely break down when looking at the facts. The top 5% already pay 40% of all taxes in the US. For the the top 1% that number is still 25%. [1] At the same time over 50% (!) of the budget goes towards social security, medicare and other health services [2]. That's a much higher percentage vs. socialist-leaning nations such as Sweden [3]. Despite its reputation of being an individualist, capitalist nation, for all intents and purposes, the US has already implemented socialism. The problem, as is typical with countries where public sector spending is a large %age of the economy, is that such spending is not subject to healthy corrective market forces that would curb waste. More dollars can always be printed and taxed, so high-level corruption, bureaucracy and an ever-growing thicket of regulation is the consequence. The author calls out the corruption and nepotism, and rightfully so. However what he fails to understand is that it is born in an ever-growing government "economy", not curbed by it. [1] https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/ [2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ [3] https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-finance/central-government-budget/central-government-budget-in-figures/
You left leftist off the list, though. Deliberate?
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I left them off because you already said them and it would be redundant. But now we know your answer to my question is "yes". We all get to choose whether or not we put party before country. Some people choose poorly.
I'm good, thanks.
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Why are you here?
Time to retire the use of the word Fascism. It's lost all meaning at this point. It's become a shortcut for "bad people that I'd don't like". The result is sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments. The people that you need to convince will see the word "Fascist" and tune it out as more left wing noise. The threats are real, however this framing is doing more harm than good.
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We need a synonym for “fascist” because some people agree that what they do and how they do it is bad, but they are incapable of looking past the word.
"NIXON" (also known plainly as Nixon) was "far right?" You must be joking. By any measure, and in every poly sci department, Nixon is viewed as moderate or even slightly left wing. He created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, created OHSA, signed NEPA, monkeyed with wage and price controls, signed a breath-taking number of anti-discrimination and affirmative-action orders, pushed school desegregation in the South...Nixon would be called a "progressive" today. I know. Your baby boomer grandparents thought anyone who wasn't McGovern must be Hitler, but...Nixon was pretty liberal. Regan ran against him in the 1968 primaries just for this reason.
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I think you need to look into the history of Roger Ailes, this is 50 years in the making. Maybe a 100 if you want to include the John Birch society.
I guess if you get downvote for saying something ironical, then that's the loss of audience, not you. One can argue that a thoughtful irony which gets downvoted might be more interesting than thoughtful irony which gets upvoted because of the points you mention. Irony shouldn't be in a bubble of all upvotes. Funnily enough I had searched up some irony quote websites a few days back and going back on them was fun to find a relevant quote: Irony is just the honesty with the volume cracked up - George Saunders.
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Damn that’s good quote. And I would even go as far as saying that the apparent cynicism of the “honesty with the volume cracked up” is just a mirroring of the inversion that symbols suffer while transiting Culture. In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey. This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
I don’t like woke and hate the far right. When do I get my centrist fascist state.
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Being a centrist is a cowardly position, inevitably on the wrong side of history, serving the ruling class while backstabbing your fellow workers and citizens. You'd rather pretend to be asleep and let it all happen to us than open your eyes and fight with humanity.
Woke only exists in the mind of the far right.
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I don’t know, I’m grouping runaway feminism and high LGBT visibility and celebration as woke.
The article is unpleasantly accurate.
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Flagged in 3... 2... Alas, the prototypical tech "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" has become the "temporarily embarrassed lord."
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The happiest I've ever been (ben-mini.com)
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My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy. I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play. On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
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> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader. I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
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I miss mentoring junior engineers in-person
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A lot of people aren't actually chasing leisure or money as much as they're chasing irreplaceability
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Personally I want to have my cake and eat it here. Tech has amazing potential to make the world a better place to live in and genuinely bring people together. The crowning achievement of AI so far to me is not Claude Code, it’s AlphaFold. I find the documentary DM released about developing it inspiring both as a technology story but also a team achieving things together that make the world better. I want to see more of that and hope I can steer my career in that direction.
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I honestly don’t understand how anyone has the time and energy to be a coach while working a full-time job. My kids practice three times a week, and usually have games on both Saturday and Sunday - sometimes several hours away. Just getting them to practices and games often feels exhausting to me - I can’t imagine all the planning and scheduling that goes on behind the scenes, or having to show up and actually run things all the time. Hats off to youth coaches - you make a huge difference in kids’ lives.
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I "move rectangles on screen" to pay for Kids and House. That's what makes me happy, and jobs I enjoy don't. There's no wake up call necessary.
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In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
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Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel. My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.
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There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in: FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 FD 40 RT 90 To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year. Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C. Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today. Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper. Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
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Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
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And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
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We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c. But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
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Excuse me, but can you please explain this whole concept of 'retirement'? It is some point where you just shut down your brain and feed yourself to the fishes? Not being an US person I'm struggling with this. How? Unless one loses congnitive capability due to organic brain damage how is this even possible?
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Retirement is the withdrawal from active working life, i.e. having a job. It is not a US concept.
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Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do. I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
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I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
I don’t even know what he’s referring to. What are the rectangles he’s “moving around”? And couldn’t you say the same thing about all writers, for example? The one downside to the Internet and social media is that truly useless takes can get much more traction than they deserve.
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CSS boxes! Honestly the one thing that I'm really looking forward to is no longer having to touch CSS.
Yeah, I decided to become a "professional" musician a few months ago after quitting my last tech job. I'm not amazing, but I've got some places to play, and I'm starting to give lessons, etc. It's not an easy job, but I feel something I haven't felt in a long time as a software developer: fulfillment and contentment. Best of luck to anyone on a similar journey.
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If I didn't have a mortgage and family that would work!
The programming itself is the reward for people who love doing it. It attracts the sort of detail-oriented thinkers who enjoy the doing and don't frame everything in terms of "value added." AI is attractive to the sorts of people who have their secretary write their Christmas cards.
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I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me. AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
Verified Spec-Driven Development (VSDD) (gist.github.com)
I’ve gotten the absolute best results from LLMs just acting like the software engineer I’ve aspired to be the past 15 years. Normal dev things. Scope the ticket properly, break it down. Test well. Write the correct docs. LLM specific things are going to be gone next week
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I feel this very recently. I just pretend the agent is a junior dev and tell them to do things I don’t have time for. Reviewing the changes at my convenience is a lot like checking in on a junior dev, too. On the other hand I do feel like I get better results with the same teeing up that a junior dev requires, so I try to remove as many unknowns/dependencies as possible (or else explicitly tell it to leave some things as stubs) before sending him off to do something
Everything in this post stems from the assumption that you already know what you're doing, which is probably true for things you've built before. But I hope we can agree that you can't spec out something you have no clue how to build, let alone write the tests before you've even explored the boundaries of the problem space. That's completely unreasonable. My second point is that this approach is fundamentally wrong for AI-first development. If the cost of writing code is approaching zero, there's no point investing resources to perfect a system in one shot. What matters more is how fast you can explore the edges. You can now spin up five agents to implement five different versions of the thing you're building and simply pick the best one. In our shop, we have hundreds of agents working on various problems at any given time. Most of the code gets discarded. What we accept to merge are the good parts.
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If the price of code is zero then changing the spec also costs zero in terms of code and. This is what always was the problem with specs before. You'd write one, run it through the prover, write the code, then have to throw out the whole thing because there was a business case you didn't account for. Now the bottom 98% can be given to a robot with a clear success signal other than 'it looks about right'.
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There’s a real tension here. If you are vibe-coding, this approach is definitely going to kill you buzz and lose all the rapid iteration benefits. But if you are working in an existing large system, vibe coding is hard to bring into the core. So I think something more formal like OP is needed to reap major benefits from AI.
> My concern with TDD is that writing tests necessarily implies designing an API upon which those tests operate It really forces you to do outside-in testing; I usually describe the kind of API I want when chatting with the agents. For example, the CLI options, the routes that might be useful for an API, etc. > I look at the code and find a rats nest / ball of mud that will cost 10x more tokens to enhance should I ever need to add a feature. Agreed, I don't know if there are good forcing functions to avoid complexity. The providers have a huge incentive to have you waste your tokens (for example when it re-outputs the complete file when you ask for a tiny change).
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In "proper" TDD you you supposed go: - write a test for method that does not exist, it just calls the method and nothing else - write method that does nothing - add/extend test that uses that method <-- this very loop starts - modify method until tests passes - go back to loop start until you're done I always hated it. When I work with LLM i first massage interface that tests, then tests, then implementation until all these tests pass. > for example when it re-outputs the complete file when you ask for a tiny change). well with sonnet 3.5 and 4.5 (can't say about 4.6) it often will get stuck in a loop trying to update just the required parts and iether waste tons of tokens doing these updates or waste tons of tokens to a point where restring file from git is required. Tokens get wasted regardless.
The whole thing was a scam (garymarcus.substack.com)
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Seems pretty unimportant and inconsequential though because LLMs don't work anyway because they aren't logic-based symbolic AI like Gary's startup, right?
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In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. This HST quote seems severely outdated by now. They have already been caught, committed all the sins of stupidity and some more. All of it to the clapping mob of people who yearn for some kind of social revenge. And it’s happening everywhere these last years. Who could possibly know we have so many wife beaters?
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Not a week goes by without me thinking "what would HST have made of THIS fresh bullshit, if he were alive today"
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> In capitalism, the market decides. > In oligarchy, connections and donations decide. > It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter. I thought this was already pretty clear - since Elmo bunny hopped on Trump’s rally stage
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Is this a blog post or someone's notes for a blog post?
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It's a short and quick blog post. Bloggers used to do that once in a while (before twitter made it the only allowed mode of expression to please the advertisers.) Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won't be a problem. However, he has a low threshold for bullshit. And SamA is probably not getting any higher in his esteem this week.
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LOL. Are you mistaking writing critique for some childish form of disagreement on the issues?
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"In capitalism, the market decides. In oligarchy, connections and donations decide." Who's gonna tell him there never was a difference?
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sounds likely and plausible but also like an "unproven conspiracy theory"
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which part is unproven enough to not seem like a kleptocracy?
"But I believe in fair play. This wasn’t that." Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads weren't fair play either.
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Why not??
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Because the models aren't going to be recommending products in their conversations. The ads will be visually separate from the model's output.
I'll try not to be too flippant but... he thought the US ever _wasn't_ an oligarchy?
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Flippant be hanged! IMO, it all started with W Bush, who put the icing on that cake by invading Iraq based on a televised lie. He was "sneaky" but the current administration doesn't even try to sneak. The mid-terms may be our final chance to save our nation.
I’ve always heard it called “business as usual”
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I still prefer "Scam", "Business as usual" Altman doesnt have the same ring to it...
> In capitalism, the market decides. > In oligarchy, connections and donations decide. > It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter. One has to wonder on what planet Gary Marcus has lived so far.
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There was a long stretch where money would be more of a deciding factor than who you know, and I think we're crossing the threshold where who you know is becoming all that matters.
To summarize all nepotism indicators posted here by various people: - The Kushner family has invested in OpenAI. - OpenAI uses Oracle cloud. Ellison is close to Trump. - Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan (the “spy sheikh") has invested $500 million in World Liberty and is also invested in OpenAI. - Altman is a protege of Thiel, whose Palantir integrates the external AI at the Pentagon. - The scam occurs right before the Iran war starts. The Groq sale scam (where Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital bought shares just months before the sale) occurred right before Christmas. So both were timed to be overshadowed by larger events or holidays.
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Don't overlook the media consolidation under Bari Weiss.
Quite tangential, but this reminded me of a line from Human Target: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=false "I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?" looks at offered cash "A $40 prostitute?"
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Cheap or not doesn’t matter. Sir Winston Churchill supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."- Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life, Second Edition, 1998
PS: If openly bribing a crony gov to cancel your competitor is now the de-facto standard of making business in the US, I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment. When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
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> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent. No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of countries work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though. Vietnam works in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.
It's bizarre seeing the outright bribery. A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up. This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.
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> A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.
IANAL, IIRC: SCOTUS has very narrowly defined bribery as explicit quid pro quo. And sometimes not even then.
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You recall correctly. And they did so, so they could take bribes with no consequences as long as they take them the right way.
>I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment. 2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery) . ---- Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday . #RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]
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Trades in dark pools still get published to the consolidated tape; they're still part of price discovery. What's "dark" about them is that you don't see the order book, but people break up large orders into smaller orders to disguise their order size in lit markets too.
Obsidian Sync now has a headless client (help.obsidian.md)
Nice! I rely on Obsidian a lot for syncing knowledge while working with Claude agents, such as storing research and daily logs to catch up on the prior day’s work. It already works quite well with a custom skill that I build, but this may make the workflow smoother. I also built a cli tool to index embeddings in LanceDB and do semantic search. It helps agents create better internal links between notes. https://github.com/ravila4/obsidian-semantic-search
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How does this affect your token/quota usage?
What’s the best way to sync Obsidian without upgrading to their paid tier?
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I use syncthing to sync my notes between my PC and Laptop. It works pretty well.
Are there plans to support scoped token permissions (specific folders or even specific notes)? I'd love to try setting up something that automatically updates a specific Obsidian note on a state change or cronjob, but I'd want to avoid giving access to the rest of the vault. also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.
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Related tangent: "Relay" ( https://relay.md ") lets you sync / share files based on directory (vs. the whole vault). That enables things like "my private vault contains a subdir for work, and my work machine syncs to only that child subdir".
Now make Dropbox sync work with iPhone
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That will never happen; their only money-making method is to limit the iOS app to sell their cloud. Otherwise, the desktop is already free with your own vault folder. They are trying their hardest to prevent users from using Google Drive or other services natively. While it is just a small option to add, it will make everyone drop their $4 cloud subscription.
Okay, so my command line fu is not what it perhaps should be, but if I could use obsidian without the bloated app, I'd be even more in love. How would I be able to search obsidian links from the command line? Like, to travel between notes in the app of course I can just click on connecting links or search, but I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do that in a cli. Is there some handy way to search the current folder and subfolders for text in a file with regex? Like some kind of >find term for all of my [[term]] entries in markdown files ?
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ripgrep?
I've been using iCloud to sync Obsidian, and have consistently run into the problem that iCloud file container access needs full disk permissions that I don't want to give the agent (or Ghostty). Does everybody use Obsidian's paid sync instead or what? Or SyncThing?
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Resilio.
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I use Syncthing (with Synctrain client on iOS) and it works great.
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I used iCloud in the past, but found that syncing between a few devices sometimes left my notes in a weird state - sometimes overwritten, missing, etc. I switched some time ago to https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save with backblaze and I periodically sync to a git repo for a second backup. No issues since then.
I have been using remotely save and a free bucket from backblaze. It as a s3 compatible api so works using the s3 feature.
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I'm doing the same since this is the only method I found I can let my bot access the files, something I couldn't achieve with Obsidian Sync.. until now!
I know this is headless but is there any other reason I should use this over the official Synology drive app?
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I've been using Synology Drive to sync Obsidian between different machines and my android phone and it works great. I've never seen a need to use the official sync.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Ghosts'n Goblins – “Worse danger is ahead” (superchartisland.com)
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Some random thoughts... (I was a kid in the 80s and I played in arcades a lot. I think I could still tell in which arcade I played each game). > There was an economic motivation for this difficulty, in getting more coins from players quicker, but Fujiwara would later insist that wasn’t the primary motivation and that they were meeting a demand from strong players for challenge. Thats' not completely true. If it was that way, players would quickly grew fed up and stop playing. You need a balance between getting money out of people and people keep playing because they have fun. I think one of the most efficient way to do that is having MOST of your players being suckers that keep pouring money, but allow a few to get very good at it, and play an inordinate amount of time with a single coin. That way the suckers will keep playing hoping to do the same. Most people would last 5 level in Bubble Bobble, but you had the occasional "genius" that would finish it. Very difficult games like GnG were well regarded but not as played as others, as much as I can remember. > Fujiwara later responded to a question about SNK’s Ikari and its resemblance to Commando by saying that was just how things were, although he was disappointed that they had got to release more sequels than him. In the 80's there were not many game mechanics available [ ]. I dare say that 90% of the games were either vertical shoot 'em ups (think Galaxian) * horizontal shoot 'em ups (think Gradius) * beat 'em ups (think Double Dragon) * platform (think Mario) * to a lesser extent, racing games (think Outrun) I think mostly due to HW limitations. So if you are going to have a soldier going around killing people, of course it is going to resemble Command in some way. Doesn't mean they are the same, in the same way that Poker and Bridge are not the same despite using the same set of cards. [*] There were some outliers, and some of them were great (Tron, Star Wars) but they more the exception that the rule.
> excruciatingly difficult As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak. But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again." I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces. But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." Tokuro Fujiwara, j'accuse .
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To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [ ]. You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin [ ] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
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The NES is historically amongst the most popular consoles sold in Europe, but with huge differences between countries. In some countries, every kid either had or wanted one, while in others, micros and/or Sega were dominant.
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I was on the other side of this, playing Castlevania Symphony of the Night in elementary school. One day I discover something that my friend never found, even though I looked up him, since he completed the whole game. Well what I discovered was the reverse castle and another 50% of the game he never played. I called him on the landline and started telling him about it and he was saying "what are you even talking about", he thought I was lying until he followed my instructions. That thing settled exploration as one if my favorite thing in videogames, the discovery was amazing
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
747s and Coding Agents (carlkolon.com)
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The pilot analogy hits different when you consider that pilots still train on simulators for exactly this reason — they're legally required to maintain proficiency even when autopilot handles 99% of flights. There's no equivalent mandate for software engineers. Nothing stops you from spending years as a pure "prompt pilot" and losing the ability to read a stack trace or reason about algorithmic complexity. The atrophy is silent and gradual. The author's suggestion to write code by hand as an educational exercise is right but will be ignored by most, because the feedback loop for skill atrophy is so delayed. You won't notice you've lost the skill until you're debugging something the agent made a mess of, under pressure, with no fallback.
Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and they would even do the work for you if you wanted. Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more anyone else because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it? Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to your mindset. Throughly review and ask questions on what it did, or why, ask if we could have done it some other way instead. Hell ask it just the questions you need and do it yourself, or dont use it at all. I was working on C++ for example with a heavy use of mutexs, shared and weak pointers which I havent done before. LLM fixed a race condition, and I got to ask it precisely what the issue was, to draw a diagram showing what was happening in this exact scenario before and after. I feel like Im learning more because I am doing way more high level things now, and spending way less time on the stuff I already know or dont care to know (non fundementals, like syntax and even libraries/frameworks). For example, I don't really give a fuck about being an expert in Spring Security. I care about how authentication works as a principal, what methods would be best for what, etc but do I want to spend 3 hours trying to debug the nuances of how the security library is configured for a small project I dont care about?
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> Does this mean you'd be incapable of learning anything? Yes. This strikes me as obvious. People don't have the sort of impulse control you're implying by default, it has to be learnt just like anything else. This sort of environment would make you an idiot if it's all you've ever known. You might as well be saying that you can just explain to children why they should eat their vegetables and rely on them to be rational actors.
I use AI for very little but I do like using it for stuff I'm just not very interested in but have to get done. For programming, I don't like it. It's like a master carpenter building furniture from IKEA. Sure it's faster and he doesn't have to think very hard and the end result is acceptable but he feels lazy and after a while he feels like he is losing his skills. The best days of computing for me were what you remember. A computer was just a blank slate. You turned it on, and had a ">" blinking on the screen. If you wanted it to do anything you had to write a program. And learning how to do that meant practice and study and reading... there were no shortcuts. It was challenging and frustrating and fun.
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All fair, but I think a different interpretation could be that AI allows you to vastly expand the scope of the possible, such to create a situation again where things are challenging and frustrating and fun.
> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things. How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
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Firstly, if you're doing those steps, you're building your own tutorial, not just following the exact steps in a manual provided with the software. The sample config won't be exact or perfect for your setup, so you'll need to say least figure out how to adjust it to your needs. That said, I think you're still leaning things building IKEA-style software. The first time I learned how to program, I learned from a book and I tried things out by copying listings from the book by hand into files on my computer and executing them. Essentially, it was programming-by-IKEA-manual, but it was valuable because I was trying things out with my own hands, even if I didn't fully understand every time why I needed the code I'd been told to write. From there I graduated to fiddling with those examples and making changes to make it do what I wanted, not what the book said. And over time I figured out how to write entirely new things, and so on and so forth. But the first step required following very simple instructions. The analogy isn't perfect, because my goal with IKEA furniture is usually not to learn how to build furniture, but to get a finished product. So I learn a little bit about using tools, but not a huge amount. Whereas when typing in that code as a kid, my goal was learning, and the finished product was basically useless outside of that. The author's example there feels like a bit of both worlds. The task requires more independent thought than an IKEA manual, so they need to learn and understand more. But the end goal is still practical.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust (github.com/ad-si)
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Many Wolfram language algorithms are proprietary right?
My Bona fides: I've written my own Mathematica clone at least twice, maybe three times. Each time I get it parsing expressions and doing basic math, getting to basic calculus. Then I look up the sheer cliff face in front of me and think better of the whole thing. There is an architectural flaw in Woxi that will sink it hard. Looking through the codebase things like polynomials are implemented in the rust code, not in woxilang. This will kill you long term. The right approach is to have a tiny core interpreter, maybe go to JIT at some point if you can figure that out. Then implement all the functionality in woxilang itself. That means addition and subtraction, calculus, etc are term rewriting rules written in woxilang, not rust code. This frees you up in the interpreter. Any improvements you make there will immediately show up over the entire language. It's also a better language to implement symbolic math in than rust. It also means contributors only need to know one language: woxilang. No need to split between rust and woxilang.
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implementing addition in woxilang itself?? this gotta be terribly slow. am i missing something?
Well it would get vastly more popular if it was officially endorsed. Do you want lots of people using it?
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Why is that important?
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Because you get changes upstreamed.
Half-assed reimplementations of existing software (often in the name of "memory safety") is what the Rust community is best known for.
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Mathematica is proprietary software. Any reimplementation is better than nothing at all, at least for people that don't run proprietary software
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Useless thing is not less useless by the virtue of being FOSS. That's something FOSS folks have yet to understand. All the best to the author, they definitely have fun doing this, but we should not be blind to the truth.
Hi, I'm the main developer. We're steadily getting closer to the next release which will support most features of Mathematica 1.0 plus some of the most popular newer functions (> 900 overall!). AMA!
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LSP?
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Not yet, but on the roadmap!
Addressing Antigravity Bans and Reinstating Access (github.com/google-gemini)
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I am sick and tired of companies forcing a shitty fork of vscode down their customers throat. If I am paying let me use your api how I wish to. Most people aren’t malicious and just want to use their own workflow.
It takes your query, computes the complexity of the request, and tries to route it to the appropriate model. There is a /manual command i think, to pick the right model. They mask the 429s well in Gemini-Cli - if an endpoint is rate limited, they try another, or route to another model, etc to keep service availability up. Your experience on the 429s is consistent with mine - the 429s is the first thing they need to fix. Fix that and they have a solid model at a good price point. I use my own coding agent ( https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop ) and not being able to bring my (now cancelled) AI account with Google to it is a bummer. I'd still use it with the Code Assist Standard license if the google cloud API subscription allows for it but I have no clarification.
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> It takes your query, computes the complexity of the request, and tries to route it to the appropriate model. There is a /manual command i think, to pick the right model. That is what is should do, but there is no > 2.5 model shown in /model and it always picks a 2.5 model. Ive enabled preview models in the google cloud project as well. If I pass the 3 model in start param it shows 3 in the lower right corner but it is still using 2.5. I know google has issues dealing with paying customers but the current state is a shit show. If you go to the gemini-cli repo its a deluge of issues and ai slop. It seems there is a cadre of people jumping to be the first person to pump an issue into claude and get some sort of PR clout. It might be good but it needs more time to cook, or they need to take a step back and evaluate what they should consider a paid product.
What I don’t understand about policy violations is why Google never warns the user before banning. A simple alert or email would reduce so much frustration on the part of users and so much overhead for Google. ToS change frequently and it’s not really fair to assume the user knows what is and is not correct use of tokens.
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I think from their end, they see a lot more malicious users (e.g. spam accounts) that it's not worth providing a gentle warning before a ban. There might've been thousands more accounts created for Chinese companies for distillation[0], that Google didn't think of/weren't able to initially distinguish genuine user accounts just using a third party tool on their Antigravity token. Like in a similar vein, Instagram sometimes randomly bans genuine users without appeal, probably because they deal with thousands more spam accounts that don't deserve a warning/appeals process. [0] Like as Anthropic reported: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks
Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.
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> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence. At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.
How do you even pull away from a Gmail address? I'm nearly twenty years into that service. Getting banned would be absolutely devastating...
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I moved away from a gmail address that was that old, dating back to the invitation-only days. It had become more spam than not, mostly other people who share my initials not knowing their own email addresses. But the possible devastation you mention was more worrying. It had become too much of a risk for my banking and identity generally to not own my email address. I got a custom domain. I still host it on google, because I know how impossible it is for small companies to have a reasonable program to deal with insider threats. Because of that, I think only one of the giant companies can realistically provide secure email. And the google app suite is great. Now that I pay for google workspace, there's support and appeals available, and if they ban me anyway, I still control the domain and can regain access to everything. I have not been able to delete the old address, even after 3 years. There are some things like Google Fi that can only use a non-workplace google account. Very, very rarely, I still get an email that matters on it. But I got to the point where I could stop checking it in about 2 months, and now I look at it about once a week quickly, more out of habit than anything else. The switch was annoying, but not "hard". It was worth it.
took about 30 minutes to switch to proton mail
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This service is basically a nightmare to export/move away from. 30 minutes to switch to, maybe 30 hours to switch away from.
Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options. Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address. Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done. I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
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^this is the way. You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com. Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable. Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation). Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy. By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily. Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future. Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use. ___ Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.
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Porkbun have started demanding ID verification for registrations, which depending how you feel about current events might make you reconsider having them on your list
People are crazy to use Google as the core of their online identity.
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Not crazy, it is just convenient. Constant pushes with Android, Chrome, random websites asking for Google login. Google wasn't always like this, and moving of from an email address isn't technically hard, but something that 99% of the people will be very very reluctant to do.
Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages (nowigetit.us)
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I like the idea here, but the final product is just so far from what good interactive articles/explanations actually look like. E.g., this style of article: - https://mlu-explain.github.io/decision-tree/ - any article from distill.pub - any piece from NYT
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Great solution! but... Error Daily processing limit reached. Please try again tomorrow.
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Man. I know you just made this for your own convenience, and all the big LLMs can one-shot this, but if you found a way to improve on the bog-standard LLM "webpage" design (inject some real human taste, experience and design sensibility), you'd get a few bucks from me- per paper.
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Very cool. Appreciate it.
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People will do anything except work
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just look at you!
Cool. I hadn't seen Emergent Mind
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It's very bad in my experience. It hallucinates like crazy - e.g. something simple as enumerating the correct hidden dimension for a transformer-based model (same across all layers) it gets wrong often.
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