sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
where careless devs don't do even the most basic things to make the computer not have to do the same work twice.
Exactly, because it's basically not worth it outside of actually high performance computing. Who's not going to use a product because it's 20% slower but otherwise better than competitors? Vim is way faster than Microsoft Word, but who cares?
It's especially embarrassing when the shittier way of doing it is harder to write than the non-pessimized way and retarded web dev monkeys do it anyways.
You'll have to provide some examples.
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
Anthropic's conception of 'mitigating AI risks' is 'do everything I say, just the way I say it, and this system has to be enforced by someone who thinks like me'.
This is a fully general counterargument against any regulation. Even your proposed regime rounds off to "do everything I say the way I say it and it has to be enforced by someone who thinks like me."
If your preferred regulatory regime also excludes almost all your potential competitors except the ones you're basically okay with, then it is indistinguishable from a power grab.
Their stated beliefs on AI dangers, which philosophically long predate Anthropic as a going concern, are entirely consistent with the proposed regime. In fact, it would be contradictory for them to believe in AI risks and argue for laissez-faire. Perhaps you disagree on the risks, but that is the root of the disagreement, not the regulatory framework.
If companies are still employing software engineers (and they all are) then I’d say we’re mostly in “nothing happens” territory.
It is too early to be confident. Many people in FAANG have no idea how to use AI effectively and many others refuse on principle. Massive layoffs (20%+) are unlikely due to reasons of political economy despite the staggering amount of deadwood at these companies. It will take a long time for these ships to turn, we are still in the early stages of diffusion.
But if people are still going to work then, how different are things, really?
People went to work before the industrial revolution and people went to work after. Perhaps your opinion is that "nothing happened" during the industrial revolution; let's say I disagree.
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
You can, but cars, airplanes and drugs are famous examples of very heavily regulated industries where creating a new business is almost impossible, incumbents rule, and incumbents and their lobbyists design the majority of the regulations themselves.
Creating a new business in these sectors is difficult because the sectors are inherently difficult to make money in. Moderna was founded in 2010 and basically had nothing going on until Covid. SpaceX was founded 2002 and only had a successful launch in 2008 after near bankruptcy. It is nevertheless possible to enter these markets.
If the Trump government had calmly and consistently mandated open weight releases and anti-monopoly legislation, Anthropic would be screaming about how this was unsafe.
I don't see the contradiction here. "You say you want regulatory regime A, but in fact you would hate regulatory regime B which doesn't accomplish the same goals. Curious!" The point is not that Anthropic wants a regulatory regime, they want a regulatory regime that is oriented around mitigating AI risks.
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
"We will create super-intelligence, and then the thing magically becomes alive just like us, so just like us it will have goals and aims of its own, and we have to make sure it is well-instructed in How To Be Nice Liberal and then it can take care of us like pampered pedigree cats as it colonises the known universe".
How about "we need to make sure the thing doesn't help people develop cyber weapons or biological weapons?"
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
They want to be the ones deciding who gets to play with the toys and the government tamely follows their instructions as regards shutting down their rivals, but it's not going to work like that.
I don't know why people keep repeating this. From Anthropic:
It is time to go beyond transparency to more serious and binding regulation of AI. I believe the best analogy, at least at the current stage of the exponential, is to cars, airplanes, or drugs—powerful technologies essential to the modern economy, but capable of killing large numbers of people if designed or operated poorly. I therefore believe we should model AI regulation on agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety. I am grateful to see the Trump administration’s Executive Order move incrementally towards a greater role for government in AI, though Anthropic’s proposal recommends even further action.
Does this sound like Anthropic decides who uses their models? Does Ford decide who uses their cars?
Yes, they weren't happy about a schizophrenic and vindictive ban of their model due to capabilities that it shares with other models.
You can be in favor of a consistent regulatory framework without being in favor of arbitrary decisions by the president based on who is in and who is out.
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
For example, you currently can't simply ask "Hello Mr. Claude the site latency is too high, please fix it,"
Given access to logs, metrics, etc. I expect Claude would in fact be able to fix this.
Capability hits a wall: For the greybeards, nothing happens, for the kids, those who choose the manual route will come out ahead.
We have already exited the "nothing happens" condition given present capabilities. The graybeards are much better off acting in a staff+ capacity using LLMs than writing code themselves. The question of what to do with junior engineers is an interesting one.
sarker
competency crisis actor
10d ago
That's largely a casualty of Moore's law. There's no point in optimizing candy crush to run on the Apollo guidance computer when nobody is going to run it on hardware like that.
sarker
competency crisis actor
11d ago
I also agree, though I don't know about the rambliness. SMH could never be accused of being concise. I do feel that the quality of the comments has been worse.
On a lark, I got hy3 (free on openrouter!) to scrape @self_made_human's comments and graph length and score. I don't see a clear trend in length, but it does seem like there's been more comments with zero or negative scores since late 2025/early 2026.
sarker
competency crisis actor
11d ago
Okay, but infants already have less rights than other people and don't have a say in much of anything, whether they are "sold" or not.
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
I think it must simply be the case that you are saying something you shouldn't or not saying something you should. You said there's usually a few days of texting, presumably you aren't just repeating "looking forward" every day.
Out of curiosity, how many dates have fallen through since 2019 and how many have actually successfully taken place? Is there any possibility that you are giving them the ick in between the time the date has been set up and the date itself?
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
I don't know what the infant mortality was in 19th century Quebec, but it basically doesn't matter. Even if it was low, such cultures are the exception rather than the norm over 200,000 years of human history.
sarker
competency crisis actor
12d ago
I've been told that people meet women at church.
How long do you spend texting these women before meeting up?
sarker
competency crisis actor
13d ago
It is indeed practically unheard of at the country level.
sarker
competency crisis actor
13d ago
"The average height of a woman is 5'4""
"I'm 5'6" though"
Seven, much less fourteen children, surviving to adulthood on a regular basis has never been the case. Here is a time series for "effective" fertility rate. For the UK and the US it only goes back to the early 20th century, but for Sweden it goes back to 1751. This has never exceeded 3.5 children in any of these countries.
Obviously there are families that buck the trend, but that doesn't take away from what's normal and what isn't.
sarker
competency crisis actor
13d ago
The Book of the New Sun is legitimately a masterpiece that probably deserves a volume of similar size for exegesis of all the layers involved.
sarker
competency crisis actor
13d ago
Nine kids is historically almost unheard of outside of high infant mortality areas.
sarker
competency crisis actor
13d ago
What is "the group" here? I am going to presume you would say "white people," to which I would say that nobody is "imposing" college attendance on white women, to which you will likely bring up DEI, to which I will bring up that DEI is used to juice black university attendance as well. Is "the group" simply "humanity"?
sarker
competency crisis actor
14d ago
Wrapped up The Worm Ouroboros. Overall liked it a lot, but not sure that I am interested in the spiritual sequels at this point.
Now on Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. I'm finding it useful to ask Claude about some of the historical context around the Polish-Russian wars. It's not key to the story but there's a few references to it that add a bit of depth. With LLMs it's like having a very knowledgeable friend on call who's read everything about everything and knows how they're related, so I no longer have an excuse to not bother figuring out the references.
It was a strange thing: I had plenty to think about, yet I was completely absorbed in analyzing the nature of my feelings for Polina. Truly, I had found it easier during those two weeks of absence than I did now, on the day of my return—even though, while traveling, I had pined like a madman, paced about frantically, and constantly seen her before me, even in my sleep. Once—it was in Switzerland—I fell asleep in the railway carriage and apparently started talking aloud to Polina, making all my fellow passengers laugh. And now, once again, I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once again I failed to answer it—or rather, I answered myself, for the hundredth time, that I hated her. Yes, I loathed her. There were moments—specifically, at the end of our conversations—when I would have given half my life to strangle her! I swear, if it had been possible to slowly plunge a sharp knife into her breast, I think I would have seized it with delight. And yet—I swear by everything holy—if, up on the Schlangenberg, at that fashionable lookout point, she had actually said to me, "Throw yourself down," I would have thrown myself down instantly, and with delight, too. I knew this. One way or another, the situation had to be resolved. She understood all this perfectly, and the thought that I was fully and clearly aware of her utter inaccessibility to me—of the impossibility of my fantasies ever coming true—that thought, I am certain, gave her immense pleasure; otherwise, how could she—cautious and intelligent as she was—have allowed such intimacy and frankness between us? It seemed to me that, all along, she had looked at me the way that ancient empress did when she began to undress in front of her slave, regarding him as less than human. Yes, many times she had regarded me as less than human...
Amazing that the invention of fire or even the advent of intelligent life on this planet (using "people" loosely) didn't 'change everything' by this definition. Tough crowd!
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