Lots of parallels to the crypto wars / export controls on cryptography.
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.
The parallels to comic sans are so obvious that first thing I did in the article is Ctrl-F "comic", because my first thought was: how much further has this taken the concept.
The distribution of mentions of Comic Sans in the article is revealing: there are a bunch of mentions at around the 30% mark (in which they acknowledge the obvious heritage), and then barely after that. This font really does go further. Beautiful!
This just moves the problem to support. The app doesn't work for users, they don't remember clicking no, and then some CSR has to hand-hold them through clicking "yes".
Reddit was founded in 2005, Go was released in 2007.
They picked the tech that was available and mature at the time, and enabled them to scale for 20 years (to 100M+ DAUs + IPO) - seems like a pretty good choice to me.
You know which other platform was built on Python? Youtube.
Python isn't a bad choice if you're building [certain kinds of] billion-dollar businesses.
Yep, a decent canary mechanism should have caught this. There's a trade off between canarying and rollout speed, though. If this was a system for fighting bots, I'd expect it to be optimized for the latter.
It's probably not ok to silently run with a partial config, which could have undefined semantics. An old but complete config is probably ok (or, the system should be designed to be safe to run in this state).
The main difference here is that cryptography didn't require significant compute hardware, which is the perfect place to also apply export controls (and they have).
We could smuggle PGP source code on paper / DeCSS source code on t-shirts. That ain't gonna happen with the hardware needed for frontier models.