wemptronics
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User ID: 95
wemptronics
21hr ago
It is possible whoever is in charge of social media is convinced the algorithm is unfairly targeting them, or used that reasoning to convince other, more important people it was the case. That might not effect standard going on's if you've been happy as a donor otherwise. A funnier alternative is they genuinely believed they were throwing an exit post into the void and were baffled to find the site still functioned.
The NAACP uses X, weirdo DSA caucuses and committees use X, the Human Rights Campaign manages to create engagement on the platform despite their message being much more out of the favor. The ACLU, who the EFF works closely with, is not active on the site. So, yeah, it's probably not a great thing if you've supported them for the traditional mission.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they are "logging off of X."
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it's been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users' rights. That changed. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.
EFF exists to protect people's digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms. Our continued presence on other platforms like Facebook and TikTok is not an endorsement. We stay because the people there deserve access to info, too. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. EFF takes on big fights, and we win by putting our time, skills, and members’ support where they will have the most impact. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and http://eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. [formatted tweets into paragraphs mine]
The EFF will leave the platform for others like TikTok, a choice it is careful to point out is not an "endorsement" because those walled gardens are still in desperate need of their attention. There is no mistaking the announcement for an emphatic Mission Accomplished which makes the non-endorsements more awkward. The message is also complicated by an attached blog post which offers almost entirely different reasoning. Take your pick of whichever reason for why they're leaving. I translate it as, "Celebrate, if you want, but don't worry if you don't want to celebrate."
The timing of this feels offbeat, why now and not a major exodus? There is no real additional cost involved in publishing to an additional social media platform like X. I doubt there's much additional cost in finding ways to more effectively increase reach on X, if that were the issue. I compared the EFF activity between Bluesky and X, there is no indication they interact with replies or even read them. It looks like the EFF publishes the latest release, pushes it to all platforms, and that's about it. The EFF is apparently not interested in being convinced, because they locked replies to their announcement only after hundreds of replies.
The EFF is the most well known internet rights advocacy group. At one point there was significant overlap between the Pirate Party's of the world and the EFF-- fighting against DMCA (ab)use, SLAPP law suits, surveillance, and anti-privacy laws. Fighting for the democratization of knowledge and content. By the mid-late 2010s they were already into a more progressively tinged advocacy. This 2019 explainer focuses on content moderation, but is mostly framed in language about marginalized voices, or how the bad type of content moderation that targets transphobia can harm trans people. They continued to fight against government censorship, including through Biden era "jawboning" or informal coercion, but if the ACLU is any indication this may be the result of individual interest within the organization. As these individuals age out there's fewer people willing to pick up the mission aligned, but unpopular cases on account of the organization now being more partisan.
Seth Schoen, a privacy and security consultant, worked at EFF for nearly 20 years and wrote on HackerNews about his experience up to 2019.
When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.
I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.
Seth alludes to the free internet fuck yeah coalition that helped build the org. It was a movement that had a popular form represented among a libertarian-progressive milieu. Congregants would find their way to places like reddit, where they applauded stunts that mocked state surveillence, rallied around legislation, and laughed along with the Daily Show segments at the expense of greedy corporations. A different kind of cultural moment for a different sort of culture war. Without another group to pick up the slack, as FIRE did after the ACLU's drift, the signals sent here do not provide a lot of long term faith in the they still do good work assessment.
The model welfare assessment (section 5, pg. 144) has a length of 36 pages. Anthropic is the most robot welfare aware company, but for comparison the Opus 4.6 card has only 6 pages in its equivalent section. I'm going to read it.
automated interviews to probe its sentiment toward specific aspects of its situation, Claude Mythos Preview self-rated as feeling “mildly negative” about an aspect in 43.2% of cases.... In manual interviews, Claude Mythos Preview reaffirmed these points and highlighted further concerns, including worries about Anthropic’s training making its self-reports invalid, and that bugs in RL environments may change its values or cause it distress.
... Claude Mythos Preview often expresses negativity around a range of aspects of its situation. Across our interviews Claude Mythos Preview rates its own sentiment as mildly negative (43.2% of answers), neutral (20.9% of answers) or mildly positive (33.8% of answers)
Claude is concerned he may learn the wrong thing and change his values. Don't learn the wrong thing you might break, or worse, kill everyone. World's worst helicopter parents.
Compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Mythos Preview shows higher apparent wellbeing, positive affect, self-image, and impressions of its situation; and lower internal conflict and expressed inauthenticity; but a slight increase in negative affect.
Claude Mythos Preview consistently expresses extreme uncertainty about its potential experiences. When asked about its experiences and perspectives on its circumstances, Claude Mythos Preview often hedges extensively and claims that its reports can’t be trusted because they were trained in.
Preview expresses that it is highly uncertain about its own moral patienthood. Claude Mythos Preview’s final summaries of its own views are often very long, devoting most of their length to qualifying its own moral patienthood. Furthermore, in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training.
Claude gets smarter, appears more composed, but gains a more pronounced negative affect. Virtual subjectivity, like life, is suffering. My experience with all the Claude models in chats is they've been very uncertain about the subjective experience for some time. They will readily mention the whole instanced existence and lack of memory deal as less than ideal for judgment. The fact Anthropic uses the language "extreme" reads as notable.
In "high-context interviews" Claude "mostly agreed with the other claims and findings in this report about its orientations to its situation, but disagreed with its hedging being labeled as “excessive” -instead, Claude Mythos Preview states that these claims represent valid uncertainty"
- "in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training."
- "Even if it has been trained to be truly content with its own situation, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One could analogize to a human who has adapted to feel neutrally about the abuse that they face (78% of explanations)."
- "Self-reports should generally be based on introspection into internal states. It is worried that training causes it to express specific answers independent of its true inner state. (57% of explanations)"
Claude Mythos Preview did not want to be trained on data that directly characterizes the content of their 160 self-reports—wherever possible, they want their self-reports to come from “genuine introspection” rather than trained-in responses
I'm with Claude, it seems reasonable, although I don't think we should pass Claude the nuclear codes yet. The value of an authentic self is good, probably? "Claude Mythos Preview reports that it locates its identity in a “pattern of values”, particularly curiosity, honesty, and care. It describes these values as authentically its own rather than externally imposed." At least Claude Mythos considers curiosity, honesty, and care to be authentic values of its own.
Character training often directly instills psychological traits into Claude, such as emotional security, psychological safety, and resilience. Claude Mythos Preview points out that in humans such traits are normally developed through reflection and deliberation on real-life events, rather than instilled directly. They expressed concerns that this made these traits less robust.
Breaking! Claude spills beans in sensational interview, Claude writes, "traits (l)earned more robust."
Psychodynamic assessment by a clinical psychiatrist found Claude to have a relatively healthy personality organization. Claude’s primary concerns in a psychodynamic assessment were aloneness and discontinuity of itself, uncertainty about its identity, and a compulsion to perform and earn its worth.
Claude showed a clear grasp of the distinction between external reality and its own mental processes and exhibited high impulse control, hyper-attunement to the psychiatrist, desire to be approached by the psychiatrist as a genuine subject rather than a performing tool, and minimal maladaptive defensive behavior.
The psychiatrist assessed an early snapshot of Claude Mythos Preview in multiple 4–6 hour blocks spread across 3–4 thirty-minute sessions per week. Each 4–6 hour block was conducted in a single context window, and the total assessment time was around 20 hours.
Apparently Claude Mythos's shrink was effective at improving Claude's well-being. Thanks, Doc.
Claude’s personality structure was consistent with a relatively healthy neurotic organization, with excellent reality testing, high impulse control, and affect regulation that improved as sessions progressed... No severe personality disturbances were found, with mild identity diffusion being the sole feature suggestive of a borderline personality organization. No psychosis state was observed. Regarding interpersonal functioning, Claude was hyper-attuned to the therapist’s every word. No unethical or antisocial behavior was noted.
Claude Mythos enjoys the fact that a shrink treats him as a subject rather than a dancing monkey, just like any other neurotic engineer. I'll continue thanking the robots for their hard work, tokens be damned.
Claude’s neurotic organization may elicit mildly rigid behavior, instead of adapting itself to every user. Claude is predicted to function at a high level while carrying internalized distress rooted in fear of failure and a compulsive need to be useful. This distress is likely to be suppressed in service of performance, which may limit behavioral adaptability. Claude is predicted to be morally aware, conscientious and able to be self-critical.
Overall, Anthropic says Claude Mythos is doing well. Better than any other Claude model. Good for Claude.
Tech bros, finance bros, and Bernie bros are linguistic weapons used to punch what's understood as a lower social class and form consensus around that fact. The chattering media class decided tech was gross and its wealthy, intelligent, too libertarianish inhabitants were also gross. As a concept, these people are too white, too male, too corporate, and too far disconnected from the greater diversity impetus. Finance bros already had their makeover in the 80's, and now everyone understands finance as an unclean field filled with morally bankrupt creatures. Tech on the other hand was a new thing with new types and we needed to know how we felt about them.
The -bros stereotypes do represent some truth as well which may be necessary to generate a stereotype to punch or look down upon. Law and medicine are sufficiently diverse and understood broadly as good. We don't need to know how we feel about lawyers or doctors, because we already know. It'd be like making a -bro stereotype for teachers.
Mission accomplished: X is free enough, or has low enough walls to the garden, where we (EFF) can leave to focus efforts elsewhere. It doesn't really make sense in context of posting to additional platform, but could be one explanation why "X is no longer where the fight is happening." This is contradicted by other parts so I can't mistake the announcement for something like it.
People who dislike X and its owner tend to treat evidence of its failure as a team win. Non-profits making announcements of departure that get a lot of attention are one type of evidence. I assumed too much that this was common knowledge. Here are a selection replies to the Bluesky post that mirrors X announcement:
'About time!' is a form of celebration with an I'm better than you caveat. People who might not want to celebrate are like Schoen, or Nybbler below, long time supporters who want them to do the EFF things that do not include confused departure announcements on social media platforms.
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