Go look at Messenger on the App Store and look at the “data linked to you” section. An app with that much surveillance baked in is surely not improving the world.
I think you are correct about the legislative push, because it’s clear that US AI companies can no longer live without it. However, it is not the case that this is Amodei’s fault. His push for regulation was clearly at least partly mitigated by a desire for this precise situation to be avoided! With an appropriate regulatory framework and a transparent, apolitical certification or review process, this kind of situation would not happen. Banning Fable is not “regulation”, it’s capricious retribution, and I believe it is the single most damaging thing that has happened to the US AI industry to date.
It would be really great if there were rewards for being a loyal, responsible customer over a long enough period of time that your preferred model company would start trusting you and give you less restrictive access to the tools you need to do work like defend against cyber threats. I noticed recently that after a year or so, Stripe now lets me do “instant payouts”, presumably because I now have a track record of responsible behaviour. AWS also does similar things, especially for things with abuse potential like SES.
I would really like to live in a world where the “good guys” have terrific tools and defenses at their disposal. Instead it seems like we are heading for a world of empowered bad actors and hobbled ordinary citizens.
I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?
I think so, but that's also really great because I frequently run into the five hour caps, but very rarely use my entire weekly allotment. There are lots of situations where I do things like write the plan for all the work that has to get done, and then set a reminder to execute the plan after I get home, when I'm done making dinner (because e.g. my five hour cap ends at 6pm). Higher caps for the five hour period is a lot more convenient.
I went to Newfoundland and I went to a bar one night and met a guy from a small town along the coast and I literally couldn’t understand a single thing he said. He was apparently speaking English but it may have been Ancient Greek for all I was able to make out. The only way we could communicate was via the bartender, who would interpret what he said and tell me. He had no trouble understanding me. It kinda blew my mind.
Kind of a great video! I enjoyed it. His point about testing coverage and generating mutations to ensure the tests fail resonated. I get concerned sometimes that the AI is writing tests not to ensure the logic is correct, but to ensure the tests pass against the code it already wrote. Any other ideas on this? Is there a code review step or CI checkpoint that would decrease the likelihood of that?
The narrative that they have guards against mentioning openclaw doesn’t make sense to me - I’ve been using Claude code to manage an openclaw instance for a few weeks now, with zero issues.
But wouldn’t that be true for all periods in the dataset? You see ups and downs over the centuries, and in each of those centuries I’m sure humans heavily influenced their evolution. Then you see a pronounced upward trend that just happens to also coincide with what we know to be serious, sustained and highly unusual planetary-wide warming.
> But would you want the AfD to come to power and wield those ramped up, potentially now nuclear, forces?
Totally! That’s what makes the situation doubly maddening. It would be one thing if these actions were bad for the world and good for the US. But they’re bad for the US too!
I forget who it was that said this, and I’m sure my paraphrasing is bad, but I listened or read something I found chilling. It was something like, ordinary Americans are totally unprepared for the level of danger they will experience over the coming decades.
The only reason Trump is able to destroy global institutions so easily is because Americans take their security for granted. But that security is the result of institutions developed in the aftermath of an utterly devastating war. Now those institutions are damaged and America’s friends are alienated, right when they are most needed to deal with China, Russia, AI, drones, cyber, nuclear, climate…talk about bad timing.
> The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force.
To provide for European security! That’s the deal in terms of Europe and NATO and also specifically to handle Germany. The idea was that America would provide security to Europe including the nuclear umbrella, and one benefit - among many others - was that Germany would not need to have a powerful military.
Can you perhaps guess why people might be concerned about a heavily armed Germany in the postwar period? Those same concerns are bubbling up in European capitals right now, as Germany rearms due to the loss of the US as a reliable partner.
> The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
As much as I am critical of the US, until now the US did behave very differently from other superpowers. Consider the end of WWII. The US did not inflict reparations on the vanquished nations but rather, invested huge sums in their rebuilding, in the process making stalwart allies of them. These were not puppet governments, they became thriving democracies.
This is not to excuse the many bad things the US has done in Latin America, Vietnam, etc. But there is really no comparison between US behaviour and that of the USSR (or of colonial European countries, for that matter). People in Soviet-controlled East Germany were quite keen to go to the west and did not perceive the presence of US military bases there as evidence of American totalitarianism.
That, of course, has changed and now America is seen as a predatory hegemon. But that has not always been true.
My take: it is not enshittification to raise the price for a product whose demand outstrips its supply. That is basic economics. There are alternatives, it’s not a monopoly. If you think it’s the best product, then pay more for it.
Personally I would be perfectly content if the price of Max went up a bit and Pro no longer worked for CC if it meant that Max was faster and more stable.
Iterative experience (experimenting with different ideas, deciding what works best) and speed of execution (once I was happy with it, making it happen required almost no work).
History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.