Both can be true simultaneously. Anthropic can probably be trusted not to train on our Fable sessions, but eroding ZDR as the industry standard still sets a dangerous precedent.
There's a parallel between data retention and general mass surveillance. Sure, both systems can be used for purely benign purposes, with appropriate safeguards in place. But history shows that surveillance systems are alarmingly easy to co-opt for nefarious means, and model providers do have a heck of an incentive to leverage retained data for internal means.
This is worth protesting, even if I believe this policy itself does not immediately compromise my privacy.
It's pretty simple; organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer, which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers. If that number grows significantly, then I bet companies will start exploring flash models more, as you propose.
While $835k is undoubtedly a lot of money for this man, split among Tennessee's 7M residents, this works out to be less per taxpayer than the sales tax on a latte.
Still, this idea bears merit for other reasons. Americans routinely underestimate how much money is spent on Social Security, healthcare, and debt payments, and overestimate how much money is spent on education and infrastructure. More clarity into that could help build real political momentum to actually balance the budget.
This agreement feels so friendly towards OpenAI that it's not obvious to me why Microsoft accepted this. I guess Microsoft just realized that the previous agreement was kneecapping OpenAI so much that the investment was at risk, especially with serious competition now coming from Anthropic?
> Vercel did not specify which of its systems were compromised
I’m no security engineer, but this is flatly unacceptable, right? This feels like Vercel is covering its own ass in favor of helping its customers understand the impact of this incident.
With intense competition for enterprise contracts coming from Anthropic, I thought this was OpenAI's time to get _less_ memey, not more. What the hell are they thinking?
Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
Sure, but it's not as if the DoD was planning on using Anthropic to _collect_ the data either? I assume that the hypothetical DoD use case Anthropic shied away from dealt with the processing of surveillance data, just like what Palantir does.
I've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend - it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter and cheaper.
Crazier question: what’s wrong with a well-intentioned surveillance state? Preventing crime is a noble goal, and sometimes I just don’t think some vague notion of privacy is more important than that.
I sometimes feel that the tech community would find the above opinion far more outlandish than the general population would.
I'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either.
But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.
Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
This argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Claude Code, like any product, presumably has dozens of external dependencies. What’s so special about Bun specifically that motivated an acquisition?
The logical conclusion here would be to have no door for the bathroom, but to have specifically the toilet in a separate subroom.
But I don’t think this makes much sense anyways. The hotel industry is not one that thrives from repeat patronage, and “the bathroom has no doors” features rarely in marketing.
Programmatic tool invocation is a great idea, but it also increasingly raises the question of what the point of well-defined tools even is now.
Most MCP servers are just wrappers around existing, well-known APIs. If agents are now given an environment for arbitrary code execution, why not just let them call those APIs directly?
GitHub is pretty easily the most unreliable service I've used in the past five years. Is GitLab better in this regard? At this point my trust in GitHub is essentially zero - they don't deserve my money any longer.
One symptom of AGI fantasy that I particularly hate is the dismissal of applied AI companies as "wrappers" - as if they're not offering any real technical add on top of the models themselves.
This seems to be a problem specific to AI. No one casts startups that build off of blockchains as thin, nor the many companies that were enabled by cloud computing and mobile computing as recklessly endangered by competition from the maintainers of those platforms.
The reality is that applying AI to real challenges is an important and distinct problem space from just building AI models in the first place. And in my view, AI is in dire need of more investment in this space - a recent MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots at major organizations are ending in failure.
In the US, one of the highest farebox recovery ratio transit systems has historically been BART, which is 2019 was 72%, and even today is around 50%.
Unfortunately, having a very high ratio also makes systems much more vulnerable to collapse during periods of economic downturn, which is exactly what BART has been dealing with since ridership collapsed during Covid.
I'm no expert in this topic (in other words, I just asked Claude this), but AFAICT part of the reason Japanese rail systems did better appears to be that they are owned by diversified companies that own numerous other assets, like hotels, restaurants, and office complexes.
There's a parallel between data retention and general mass surveillance. Sure, both systems can be used for purely benign purposes, with appropriate safeguards in place. But history shows that surveillance systems are alarmingly easy to co-opt for nefarious means, and model providers do have a heck of an incentive to leverage retained data for internal means.
This is worth protesting, even if I believe this policy itself does not immediately compromise my privacy.