The nuking of Los Angeles was a combination of physical models and 3D rendered shots. This close integration between physical models and 3D as well as using procedural techniques for the detonation was quite novel at the time. It was enabled by a new feature called "Mr. Nitro" written by Mark Granger, co-founder of Electric Image. The requirements of that groundbreaking sequence very much drove the features of Mr. Nitro, which was later released as part of Electric Image. EI 3D went on to render many shots for Star Wars: Phantom Menace, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Titanic, Men In Black, etc.
More info and images of both the physical and Mac rendered 3D models of Los Angeles being nuked: https://nccasymposium.bournemouth.ac.uk/2005/mscca/DIGGINS_h... While SGI's PR teams and ability to loan pricey workstations dominated the "3D in Hollywood" narrative for much of the 90s, in reality a lot of amazing work was being done on Macs and Video Toaster-equipped Amigas throughout the 90s. ILM's "Rebel Unit" initially started using Macs for 3D pre-visualization on Star Wars, but the renderings were so good literally hundreds of Mac rendered shots were used in Phantom Menace (although a contract ensured only SGI was credited at the end of the film).
> OMG no I really never want to go back to that level of frustration getting an agent to do what I want it to do.
While it probably won't matter enough to change your mind, remember that you've gotten better at extracting value from all models than you were a year ago - plus the harnesses and other tools have gotten a lot better too.
Models can be so sensitive that even prompting "Number section headings" would cause it to stop using its normal bullet point formatting anywhere. But then adding some variant of "...but don't stop using bullets as you normally do when they are needed" would make it start using bullets all the time.
Trying to craft a workable prompt got so frustrating I eventually just tried a prompt of "Don't change anything about your normal text formatting, it's perfect as is" and even that skewed the output vs no prompt. For browser chat I finally just wrote a client-side CSS UserStyle that does the formatting. Now I even have sequentially numbered sections with indented alphabetic bullets! Zero cognitive load or attentional skew and it never drifts off the formatting in long sessions.
Over hours of experimentation with various LLMs, I've found virtually any system prompt can cause unintended skewing of the model's output. Even just 5 to 8 short, direct words about length, tone or formatting can cause subtle yet significant changes in model output.
Longer, more detailed or conditional prompts always introduce an additional cognitive load as it checks every token it generates against the conditions. Making instructions more absolute (like: "Never do...") can increase the duration of compliance but at the cost of creating a significant center of attentional gravity. This can cause far more output distortion as the model devotes increasing portions of its attention budget to ensure compliance with a heavyweight requirement or prohibition. Every word in a global prompt is a trade-off between attention, compliance, drift, etc.
As someone used to thinking of computers as natural deterministic rule-followers, it's weird having to carefully wordsmith and A/B test even the simplest global prompts. It feels like coaxing a hyper-literal, emotionally sensitive, spectrum-ish toddler to comply but without being so strict it gets 'upset' or spirals into hyper-focusing.
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
> My job has changed from designing and writing code to designing code, describing the design to an LLM, reviewing code the LLM produces
As a long-time engineering manager, PM and, eventually, product owner my response is, "Congrats! You've just been promoted to management." :-)
As a new manager, your first challenge will be successfully delivering commercial results using only a team of 'differently abled' new grad interns. Don't complain, new managers don't get to pick their first team! To be honest, these guys are more like alien brains raised in a vat with no direct senses. They've only ever experienced a data feed of the internet and, oh yeah, they get near-total amnesia a few times a day (but maybe you can teach them to write notes for themselves). They also have ADHD and are somewhere on the spectrum. But don't worry because what they lack in common sense, experience and intuition is offset by having a sort-of photographic memory and a willingness to grind on a problem 24/7. You should be fine. Good luck, we're all counting you...
Yeah, I added that because someone else posted the wording of an Anthropic disclosure saying they'll keep your data for two years and security data for 7 years.
I've spent a lot of time in the EU working with tech companies, have a lot of friends there in tech companies and am on the board of a Swiss company at the moment. While it's true the average corporate worker generally has more protected rights in the EU, in my experience that additional government regulation doesn't usually pay off in ways that really matter that much to most employees most of the time.
As a thought experiment, if offered a tech job in, say, downtown Zurich, how much extra money would be required for an avg EU tech worker to happily accept that same job under Bay Area employment law, protections and standards (at-will employment, non-banked PTO, etc) than under EU employment law, protections and standards? In other words, apples-to-apples what are those extra protections actually worth in cash value? I suspect the answer would be, at most, around $25K to $50K/year. But when you look at the total comp packages (salary, benefits, equity, 401k, etc) between Bay Area and Zurich tech workers, the delta is far greater than that. In effect, the bay area tech worker 'sold' that extra protection for a big chunk of cash and is using some of it to self-insure against the potentially increased volatility. I think a lot of EU tech workers would be delighted to make the same trade. Another way of looking at it is you've given up a lot of upside for a relatively small amount of guaranteed extra protection on the downside.
This might surprise you but the reality is, many of the potential employment abuses you may be concerned about are vanishingly unlikely to occur in practice. The point is, you can end up paying a lot for expensive 'tiger insurance' you probably won't ever use and don't really need. While you can feel good knowing you have extra protection from tigers, on a purely economic basis I averaged over $500k/yr over my multi-decade career in bay area tech. In good years, the equity could take it over a million. My own admin (with no college degree) averaged over $200k a year in total comp. The highest paid admin at the Zurich company I'm on the board of makes closer to 50k CHF (and living in downtown Zurich isn't much less than SF). So, the "US tech employment deal" may seem weird and perhaps less fair, but the extra half million dollars my admin earned over several years put a lot of 'social safety net' in the bank that she can spend whenever and however she wants - and she still works there for my old boss, still loves her job and has never had to use any protections or social safety net yet (she's probably over a million in extra total comp banked by now). In short, viewed objectively, it's a different deal but not necessarily a worse deal. In many cases, EU workers may be giving up far more value than they're actually receiving in return.
> A “classical liberal” today would be mistaken as a “conservative” by a progressive since they don’t espouse their same views about gender, race...
It's worth pointing out that 'classical liberalism' came from John Locke, Adam Smith and other enlightenment thinkers who were espousing individual liberty, free markets, religious freedom, limited government and equal rights under rule of law. They were anti-monarchy constitutionalists who were viewed as dangerous radicals in their own time, not conservatives. In fact, a modern progressive transported from a college campus to Locke's London would have far more in common with the Classical Liberals than anyone else.
Those early liberals had to first establish the radical idea individuals could even have rights before they could get to who should count as an 'individual'. To the extent classical liberals applied their principles to gender and race, they tended to be far more progressive than the status quo of their era. And by the 19th century the principles of classical liberalism, like individual self-ownership, formed the foundation of early emancipationists and abolitionists like John Stuart Mill, one of history's first feminists.
The key is understanding that accounting is driving the policy. 'Unlimited PTO' really means 'uncounted PTO' because for most public companies in the U.S., once PTO is counted, the salary value of each vacation day becomes another liability which must be reported and carried on the balance sheet. It's no different from a payable debt like a bank loan, except the debt becomes immediately due in cash the moment the employee ceases employment for any reason (quits, retires, laid-off, fired). It's also a debt that cannot be delayed, negotiated or discharged even in bankruptcy.
In a competitive employment market, paid time off is just another part of the cash value of any compensation package. Employees compare the overall packages, so companies need to offer 'competitive' PTO. In the past decade, FAANG-ish valley companies have had to offer 4-6 (or more) weeks of PTO. I know people who took two weeks every year and 'banked' four weeks. They retired early after 12 years with an extra YEAR of cash salary paid in full the day they left. When 5-10% of a company's debt is owed to their own employees and could become immediately due at any moment - it can be a cash flow and accounting issue for companies.
By 'not counting' the PTO, any time off you don't take in the year you earn it doesn't go on the balance sheet as an unpaid debt from the prior year - meaning PTO becomes 'use it or lose it'. This isn't materially different than the EU where it's normal for most corporate employees always take every day of PTO anyway. In the U.S., where historical PTO trends were closer to 2-3 weeks and only recently grew to 4-6 weeks, the result was more employees took more PTO each year (which is net good), but one component of their overall comp package became a little less good because they could no longer 'bank' more than one year's PTO and cash it out. Earned PTO carry-over was capped at one year and any you didn't take disappeared, unless you made an agreement with your manager.
For example, I deferred a chunk of my vacation into the next calendar year because we were shipping a major product (I was happy to do so and suggested it myself as I was leading the product). Technically, I guess it wasn't 'counted' in any HR record-keeping so if I suddenly quit before I took the vacation, I might not have been paid for the extra two weeks I deferred from the prior year - but only if my boss and the company decided to be real jerks about it. Another reason not to work for jerks if you can avoid it. Also, it isn't smart for companies to not reasonably honor verbal agreements with employees because word gets around and no other employee would agree to defer any PTO and future big projects would suffer. This flexibility wasn't always only in the company's favor. There was also a time I deferred a week of PTO to the next year by verbal agreement which I lumped together with paternity leave when my kid was born. Note: I'm only familiar with the dynamics in the U.S. I believe they also apply in some other geos but regulations and financial reporting requirements differ per country.
And in doing so, you probably got your account and prompt flagged for 'attempted jailbreaking' (apparently, such scores are remembered for up to 7 years).
That's interesting. I assumed that the OP's attempts to fix the prompt looked like jailbreaking attempts and got the account auto-flagged into hair-trigger 'classifier jail'. Of course, a bad actor would swap accounts, so maybe Anthropic flags both the account and the prompt (coming from any account).
The first rejection and subsequent modifications trying to adjust the prompt to pass the classifier might have gotten the account flagged so the classifier is now set to 'hair trigger'. While I'm not aware of Anthropic admitting they put flagged accounts in classifier 'jail', they previously showed they're aware how vulnerable any LLM is to jailbreaking with the 'silent switch' to 4.8, whose only purpose was to remove feedback signals from iterative jailbreak testing.
The obvious failure mode is that trying to fix an innocent prompt to pass an over-sensitive classifier looks like a bad actor trying to jailbreak the model. I don't really see how Anthropic can fix this. Jailbreaking is a fundamental weakness endemic to LLMs, so 'smarter' models aren't the answer.
I suspect they're being so stringent because, at least some at Anthropic, genuinely believe LLMs are already an existential risk to humanity. However, it's clear other frontier competitors rank that risk lower and are taking a more nuanced, pragmatic position on safety. To the extent Anthropic's fears continue to make them less useful to customers, competitors are going to bypass them.
I think the better Greenspan quote is from one of his earlier congressional testimony sessions: "Since becoming a central banker, I have learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said."
> would only ever move the speed up down to speeds that are divisable by 5.
I have a seething hatred for UX that forces every setting to be in nonsensical chunks for no reason. Bad designers somehow think that it's "simpler" but it's just not. It's pushy, annoying and disrespectful to users to presume you know what values they should prefer. A good UX designer can always find a way to let users fine-tune settings to suite their individual differences.
> It's from a culture that says more alarms = safer.
It's the same culture in which product teams default install a background task that runs at every logon and checks for updates multiple times a day (for a program I used twice in the last year) or teams that default enable every possible notification (and in every update re-enable the ones users have explicitly turned off). Then they wonder why people don't try new apps and won't update the apps they have.
If you're in that meeting... speak up. I do and sometimes it even gets people to re-consider annoying defaults that don't even benefit the company very much.
Like red light cameras, this is one of those genuinely good ideas that is likely to end up being much less effective than it could have been for two reasons:
1. The regulators who implement it will set the detection times and thresholds shorter and tighter than what would have worked best. Why? Because Pareto says the worst ~20% of serial offenders are causing >80% of the serious accidents. So, the optimal settings would not trigger for brief detections or even for occasional longer detections. They would instead minimize interruptions, inconvenience and false positives for the majority of drivers and only trigger when long lapses start occurring frequently. Just targeting only the worst ~20% would save countless lives with so little disruption, it would be widely lauded.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned bureaucrats won't be able to reason past the implied moral hazard (and potential political blowback) of being responsible for permitting any lapse which might result in an accident. But any near-zero tolerance threshold forces a useful but inherently imperfect technology into failure modes that will cause resentment, resistance and demand for workarounds.
2. Because the inevitable deterrent fines will be used to pay for enforcement, it will become its own sub-bureaucracy inside the system with its own staff, budgets and performance metrics, all with a vested interest in 'saving more lives' by increasing staff which can be made 'revenue neutral' by increasing fines. This is what happened with red light cameras in many municipalities. The 'free money' from mailed out 'photo tickets' was so good they eliminated reasonable grace periods and even shortened the yellow light time, so irate citizens got them banned in many cities.
Personally, I'm not worried about someone who slides through an intersection a half second after the light turns red. It's vanishingly unlikely that person is going to cause an accident. Where red light cameras could (and should) be saving lives is >5 seconds after the opposite light has turned green and cars are in the intersection. I barely avoided a lady last year coming straight toward me at ~50 mph more 10 seconds after her light had turned red and multiple cars were stopped in all three other lanes next to her. If a car had been stopped at the light in her lane, she'd have hit and killed them. Despite every car at the intersection leaning on their horns she never slowed and never swerved. There's no sign she ever saw the light or the intersection at all. But someone had to fuck with the yellow times to make money.
And I'm hardly 'soft' on distracted driving. My wife and daughter were hit by a distracted driver 9 weeks ago and both received serious concussions. Fortunately, they'll both fully recover but my wife is still in physical therapy and the broken rear axle on her car still isn't done being repaired. They were T-boned at a perfect 90 degrees by a 16-year-old boy going the opposite direction who was turning left across their side of the road into a side street. Here's the thing: it's a straight, extra wide, well-marked, divided residential boulevard with perfect visibility, zero obstructions and bright streetlights. It was 10p and no other cars were anywhere in sight. He wasn't intoxicated and the police just rolled their eyes when he repeatedly denied being on his phone. He was in a dedicated, uncontrolled turn lane, where you stop, check there's no oncoming traffic and then make your left turn. And he drove straight into literally the only other car on the road. We later timed it and he had to be looking away for more than THREE seconds to not see the big, bright, well-lit car approaching under the working streetlights. If my wife hadn't watched him the whole way and swerved when he didn't stop, it could easily have been a potentially deadly near-head-on collision. Until he grows up a bit, he's the ~20% worst-case, repeat offender that this tech could and should stop. Not someone who glances down at their phone while stopped at a light or looks away for a split second to turn down the volume on their radio.
> Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing
Almost certainly. But it's not simple to understand because four things are simultaneously true:
1. Corruption is a serious problem Xi is genuinely focused on reducing through high-profile prosecutions with extreme sentences.
2. Xi and his party lieutenants have certainly used corruption charges to eliminate central party 'Titans' because they got too powerful, got too greedy, or were deemed insufficiently 'loyal'.
3. Corruption is pervasive at almost every level and there's no way most of it can be eliminated anytime soon. In fact, the system relies on it to function as well as it does. The purpose of these high-profile prosecutions is only to reduce the size and frequency of corruption. It reminds officials that stealing half the money half the time can be bad for their health. So they stick closer to taking 10-20% only 10-20% of the time.
4. The sub-1% of corrupt officials who are prosecuted, likely end up being busted because they got 'too greedy' and were made a sacrificial lamb by their corrupt peers to fill the system's need for a few high-profile examples. The 'too greedy' isn't from taking too much, it's usually from not greasing enough palms with enough money (including the provincial corruption investigators themselves). When there's tens of millions of dollars of illicit money at stake, the dynamics become like de facto organized crime mobs and there's always competition between factions. This guy probably knows exactly which rival played the game better and beat him.
One thing we know is important for a country to be globally competitive in team athletics is having pervasive grass roots youth leagues developing talent from an early age. My sense is the Chinese have a structured selection system where they try out kids in key sports and select the best for special development.
Compare this with Western democracies where kids of most skill levels are generally able to keep playing club sports through high school as long as they have an interest and any aptitude at all. In America, pee wee football, girl's soccer leagues, etc are part of the social fabric of communities. It's considered worthwhile to let kids practice, play and develop even when they show no professional or collegiate potential.
The deep reach and years of development of kids with no clear aptitude matter because it's about identifying outliers. I suspect it comes down to chaotic but pervasive casual development beating central planning.
More info and images of both the physical and Mac rendered 3D models of Los Angeles being nuked: https://nccasymposium.bournemouth.ac.uk/2005/mscca/DIGGINS_h... While SGI's PR teams and ability to loan pricey workstations dominated the "3D in Hollywood" narrative for much of the 90s, in reality a lot of amazing work was being done on Macs and Video Toaster-equipped Amigas throughout the 90s. ILM's "Rebel Unit" initially started using Macs for 3D pre-visualization on Star Wars, but the renderings were so good literally hundreds of Mac rendered shots were used in Phantom Menace (although a contract ensured only SGI was credited at the end of the film).