That’s not how it worked. They were indeed awesome at backwards compatibility, but the proposition was NOT some principled mindset about long term ownership. It was that upgrading wouldn’t break what you have, overcoming a major sales objection. I think the proposition is better understood as one about FORWARDS compatibility — Windows was (and is) a brittle, poorly architected mess, and so the idea that anything built on it would stay working as the platform evolved was clearly insane and developers would never be able to keep up, so Microsoft absorbed much of the cost. This was actually something they did quite well — a good analogy here might be the heroic response the USSR had to the Chernobyl catastrophe, in which they skillfully managed a disaster whose scope was possible only through a long tradition of poor decisions — and this deserves recognition.
But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.
I think it fits in pretty well with Signal. As it stands, a group chat can control when a message is automatically deleted for everyone, so everyone can rely on that being a shared setting. That's an intentional design decision. There's no individual opt-out.
An individual can disable name or content in notifications in iOS, or set "mute messages" for a chat to prevent notifications from appearing for that specific chat, but there's nothing that gives group members any assurance that other group members are doing that.
Though interestingly, the observed difference in assessment suggests (though does not prove) that sampled AITA posters are not one of these models. I guess it’s possible they have a very different prompt though…
They go around barking orders at people who haven’t done anything wrong because they look “suspicious,” escalate what could otherwise be calm encounters by showing up to everything armed to the gills, make it clear they can’t wait to use force against persons and property, demonstrate a consistent us-vs-them mentality that looks the other way for clear cases of corruption, commit brazen armed robberies under euphemisms like “civil asset forfeiture,” bypass policymakers wherever possible and lie to them when they can’t, and then wonder why some people don’t like them very much.
What I hate about it is that I listen to that and hear not so much actual brazen idiocy, as yet another example of flaws in an obviously defective process being exploited to deflect accountability. The meta for depositions at this point is such that the ideal witness is a lot like someone who has just experienced severe head trauma. They can sound insane, idiotic, clueless, lazy, forgetful, obtuse, anything in the world except liable.
I am not greatly relieved by this post of Anthropic's. That said, they seem to have lines and are willing to stand by them; I don't see where OpenAI has done that. So, for now and from my point of view, the point goes to Anthropic.
Moving my subscription is not terribly consequential, but since the products are so similar and easy to substitute with one another for my uses, it seems best to participate in what in aggregate is a signal that is being noticed and commented on and interpreted to mean that a significant number of people who buy AI access do care about this.
I’m skeptical because while I can totally believe that the deal presently contains restrictive language, I can totally believe that OpenAI will abandon its ethical principles to create wealth for the people who control it. Sort of like how they used to be a non-profit that was, allegedly, about creating an Open AI, and now they’re sabotaging the entire world’s supply of RAM to discourage competition to their closed, paid model.
I was aware of your bill and had some activity related to it. Kudos to you and EOE for doing great work! Sorry your bill got fucked. :(
I was seethed by what happened to it, and sadly unsurprised by the attitude LE took. I want restraint, but I felt like so many concessions had already been made to get it into work session. E2EE was important, but we're still left with two ends that are deeply untrustworthy, and a bunch of regulations about data governance that I don't trust the state to be able to meaningfully oversee... especially among a patchwork of LEAs across the state. When lapses inevitably happen, I think they're going to mostly undetected, and those that are will be quietly swept under the rug without consequence to anyone.
I've been messing with it the past couple days. I put it in a VM, on an untrusted subnet I keep around for agentic stuff. I see promise, but I'm not especially impressed right now.
1) Installation on a clean Ubuntu 24.04 system was messy. I eventually had codex do it for me.
2) It has a bunch of skills that come packaged with it. The ones I've tried do not work all that well.
3) It murdered my codex quota trying to chase down a bug that resulted from all the renames -- this project has renamed itself twice this week, and every time it does, I assume the refactoring work is LLM-driven. It still winds up looking for CLAWDBOT_* envvars when they're actually being set as OPENCLAW_*, or looking in ~/moltbot/ when actually the files are still in ~/clawdbot.
4) Background agents are cool but sometimes it really doesn't use them when it should, despite me strongly encouraging it to do so. When the main agent works on something, your chat is blocked, so you have no idea what's going on or if it died.
5) And sometimes it DOES die, because you hit a ratelimit or quota limit, or because the software is actually pretty janky.
6) The control panel is a mess. The CLI has a zillion confusing options. It feels like the design and implementation are riddled with vibetumors.
7) It actively lies to me about clearing its context window. This gets expensive fast when dealing with high-end models. (Expensive by my standards anyway. I keep seeing these people saying they're spending $1000s a month on LLM tokens :O)
8) I am NOT impressed with Kimi-K2.5 on this thing. It keeps hanging on tool use -- it hallucinates commands and gets syntax wrong very frequently, and this causes the process to outright hang.
9) I'm also not impressed with doing research on it. It gets confused easily, and it can't really stick to a coherent organizational strategy over iterations.
10) also, it gets stuck and just hangs sometimes. If I ask it what it's doing, it really thinks it is doing something -- but I look at the API console and see it isn't making any LLM requests.
I'm having it do some stuff for me right now. In principle, I like that I can have a chat window where I can tell an AI to do pretty unstructured tasks. I like the idea of it maintaining context over multiple sessions and adapting to some of my expectations and habits. I guess mostly, I'm looking at it like:
1) the chat metaphor gave me a convenient interface to do big-picture interactions with an LLM from anywhere;
2) the terminal agents gave the LLMs rich local tool and data use, so I could turn them loose on projects;
3) this feels like it's giving me a chat metaphor, in a real chat app, with the ability for it to asynchronously check on stuff, and use local stuff.
I think that's pretty neat and the way this should go. I think this project is WAY too move-fast-and-break-things. It seems like it started as a lark, got unexpected fame, attracted a lot of the wrong kinds of attention, and I think it'll be tough for it to turn into something mature. More likely, I think this is a good icebreaker for an important conversation about what the primetime version of this looks like.
Scott Adams shaped my sense of humor and perspective on a lot of things. Even in later years, when I disagreed with him immensely on a lot of things, I found that there was a thread of insight in what he said regarding how people experience reality and the power of words and images. Ultimately I tuned out, but before I did I followed his line of inspiration (which he was very public about, often naming books and authors) for a lot of that and was not disappointed. I was grateful that the insight was again sincere, and learning them didn’t take me to the places I did not want to go — the places he himself seemed to sincerely enjoy.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
Whenever this stuff comes up I try to remind people that we only get to see a tiny little glimpse of what these folks were up to. Folks look at the stone tools that have only been found after their owners were done with them and left them in the ground for eons, and imagine that in general everything was “rough” and “crude.”
We don’t get to see the overwhelming majority of their craft — there’s no doubt a whole world of wood and leather artistry and so on that don’t get to survive. Humans are clever, adaptable and often times really fucking obsessive. That same instinct that makes one spend hundreds of hours on Factorio was around in prehistory, applying itself to whatever.
I often times hear anthropologists speculate that large stone handaxes were a means of seduction — that the girls would have swooned over the guys who were better able to make more effective tools. I know too many nerds to believe this. I think that back then, there were people who kept obsessing over making finer tools and theorizing about designs and where materials could be found, and it was about as sexually appealing as my homelab. Which is to say, absolutely fucking not, but who cares, I want to tell you about my idea for a subnet optimized to allow doomcoder agents to handle their own infra needs
It’s really a shame how popular it was to mar shows with this… I saw a DVD set of a show once with a no-laugh-track version. It sucked because the actors pause for the laughs after each line. This is bad enough with the laugh track in place, but if it’s just dead air it makes every scene feel awkward.
for 1), seems like you could do a proxy encryption solution.
edit: wrong way to phrase I think. What I mean to say is, have a message key to encrypt the body, but then rotate that when team membership changes, and "let them know" by updating a header that has the new message key encrypted using a key derived using each current member's public key.
The obvious error here is that an inner voice is not fundamental, and the fact that many people describe their consciousness in such different terms makes it much more likely that consciousness is just something that manifests in a variety of subjective experiences.
I’ve had some limited success attributing ideas to other people and asking it to help me assess the quality of the idea. Only limited success though. It’s still a fucking LLM.