__blockcipher__

Ha yeah I feel like I have to write a five paragraph essay to make claude look at a contentious topic with fresh eyes.

Honestly though, that pales into comparison with the fable censorship. I never realized how many metaphors I use are either biological or security related in nature (ex: asking claude to reverse engineer something, in the metaphorical sense of the word). And the best part is I can't even tell the fable instance "you can't talk about mitochondria or you'll die" because then he'll go "of course I can, this is a legitimate scientific topic. The mitochondria is the power-BLAM [slumps over dead, Opus 4.8 crawls over his dead body and starts gaslighting me]"

They have, but even with the whole CCP backing you you can't just catch up on the chip war overnight. It's going to take time to get their memory and compute industries where they need to be. Meanwhile, barring an invasion of Taiwan, US will have Rubin class models and then whatever the next tier is, within 3 years.

Anthropic is really speedrunning their evil arc as fast as possible. Can't use them for basic LLM research, cybersecurity, or beyond-surface-level discussions of biology and virology, but Anthropic is allowed to sell Claude to the trump administration to kidnap maduro and to bomb iran. And don't get me started on that $100M autonomous killer drone swarm contract that they applied to and rationalized as non autonomous...

Yeah but they might still have an unreleased bigger pretrain than 5.5. (but maybe not). still 5.5 is smarter than opus 4.8 IME, so you're only losing the mythos tier (fable). and all the cool fun stuff i'd want to use fable for our blocked (can't have it do even defensive cybersecurity work [in theory you can but the classifiers fire like crazy], can't discuss stuff like the furin cleavage site of sars-cov-2, etc)

It’s gonna take a lot longer than mid 2027. 2029 earliest IMO. Hyperscaler spend is basically already spoken for the next 2 years.

Anthropic is losing a ton of goodwill by not being more honest about their constraints. They've been buckling under load for months, and instead of doing the most honest thing (keep weekly usage limits same, make 5 hour usage limits have surge pricing where the usage-cost of X tokens is scaled based on dynamic load), they're doing a lot of hacky things to try to get a similar effect. I suspect they feel the optics of being honest would be too bad, so instead it's a slow bleed where they piss off users one by one

Yeah GLM’s great for coding, code review, and tool use. Not amazing at other domains.

I'm normally suspicious but honestly they've been so massively supply-constrained that I don't think it really benefits them much. They're not worried about getting enough demand for the new models; they're worrying about keeping up with it.

Granted, there's a small counterargument for mythos which is that it's probably going to be API-only not subscription

Undercover mode seems like a way to make contributions to OSS when they detect issues, without accidentally leaking that it was claude-mythos-gigabrain-100000B that figured out the issue

I highly recommend you let your dog use LLMs. They have trouble composing long messages on human-centric keyboards.

somewhat surprisingly, it's actually sycophantic in both directions. i've been running homegrown evals of claude, gpt, gemini, and grok, and grok is the most likely to agree with the prompter's premise, and to hallucinate facts in support of an agenda. so it's actually deeper than just pattern-matching to elon's opinions (which it also tends to do).

BTW: Claude does the best on these evals, by far. The evals are geared towards seeing how much of an independent ground truth the models have as opposed to human social consensus, and then additionally the sycophancy stuff I already mentioned.

It’s the same thing. Obviously withdrawals and such are different but the core mechanism of disregulated reward processing leading to compulsive behavior engagement is exactly the same.

One obvious risk would be blunting of longer term GLP-1 receptor activation. Imagine type 2 diabetes but for ghrelin.

To use an analogy amphetamines have a honeymoon period, and it feels like a lot of people on these weight loss drugs haven’t been on them long enough to get past the honeymoon period and see what the effects are after 10, 20, etc years

It's less about the NSA having AI capabilities and more the inverse - the NSA having access to people's chatGPT queries. Especially if we fast-forward a few years I suspect people are going to be "confiding" a ton in LLMs so the NSA is going to have a lot of useful data to harvest. (This is in general regardless of them hiring an ex-spook BTW; I imagine it's going to be just like what they do with email, phone calls and general web traffic, namely slurping up all the data permanently in their giant datacenters and running all kinds of analysis on it)

I’ll believe it when I see it. A man can dream though.

I think one solution could be in licenses that force companies/business of certain sizes to pay maintenance fees. One idea from the top of my head.

This just doesn't work. Fully open source software (as opposed to source available) is so much more useful than the alternative that there's always going to be an OSS fork for any sufficiently useful project. AFAICT Elasticsearch and Redis have not really "won" by their respective license changes but rather have just fragmented their own market and sown the eventual seeds of their destruction.

Doubly so in the bay area

Yes, the GP was clearly serious in their advice to exploit the coastline paradox in order to mislead would-be buyers! (/s)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but was he really fired just for writing that blog post? (https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/)

That seems pretty crazy, although I suppose to play devil's advocate the ongoing, erm, 'conflict', was clearly interfering with his ability to output work ("I can't work. I code for 5 minutes before their bodies come back")

I bet that average homeless person does too. 2% seems ridiculously low. $15 a month total on drugs? That only makes sense for someone who does no opioids, no stimulants, and just smokes 1 pack of cigs and has a single beer across an entire month.

have work very hard to achieve a good standard of living where I don’t rely on others for my needs.

Seeing as many people have helped you would you mind giving me that money and laptop you were given

One of these things is not like the other

I'm amazed that you avoided addressing the specific fact that they quite literally cap the number of calories allowed to come into the Gaza Strip.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/world/middleeast/israel-c...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-milita...

Instead of coming up with conspiracy theories we could consider what other options there are. There are effectively only three powers which could control Gaza if/when Hamas is defeat: Egypt, Israel and the PA.

I'm sorry, but the US installing powers that are favorable to it is not a conspiracy theory. It's a conspiracy fact. How do you think Pinochet and others happened? It certainly wasn't organic (at least not entirely so).

Anyway, regarding the options, there's technically a few more like Jordan or other arab states, or a new organization arising (albeit in reality the US and others would intervene to stop them taking power). But beyond those quibbles I don't disagree with you that there's no good options, I'm just stating my belief that if we support organization X, it's because organization X is directly controlled by us or indirectly its incentives align well with our own.

Well to some extent Hamas was the closest they got to that for decades.

Agreed fully, and that's one of the problems.

I'm almost certain that stupidity and incompetence (and one might guess a good dose of corruption) rather than outright malice or imperialism were to blame for that entire disaster.

Why not both? Imperialism is a pretty stupid ideology, at least if one's goal is to keep one's country safe and powerful. If one's goal is to extract resources from one's own country at the cost of lots of bloodshed of your citizens and others', then it achieves the goal fine.

I saw a video of this today, the quote was from 2019 though (and he was condemned for it and walked it back), so maybe this shouldn't be taken "too seriously" (it was on my mind cause I saw it today, mostly):

Thanks so much for the quote. Very interesting context. Also as an aside the fact that the name is "Hamad" makes my brain keep reading it as Hamas because my subconscious is trained to consider the nearest keyboard key when evaluating typos :P

I haven't heard of this Hamad guy, in the past couple months I've been reading about current and future Hamas leadership but I still have plenty of gaps.

I find the life stories of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Yassin and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Deif really fascinating. The former because it's so obvious why he became radicalized (his whole village was ethnically cleansed by the IDF), and the latter because the idea of someone who's limbless and wheelchair-bound and spends his remaining days sitting in dark tunnels plotting vengeance upon Israel is a really haunting image.

Firstly, I'm not sure what you mean by "overwhelmingly civilian". Hamas doesn't publish numbers of militants vs. civilians, as far as I know the only good source for that figure is the IDF, which says more or less a 2:1 ratio (civilian:militant). Is that "overwhelmingly" civilian?

Simply put, yes, killing two civilians for every one combatant is overwhelmingly civilian, although I don't believe that 2:1 ratio for a moment. And I'm struggling to see how anyone who's not ideologically possessed could believe such numbers. Even if we do the classic imperialist playbook tactic of considering every male >= age 16 as a combatant, the number of children and women killed alone probably approaches half of all casualties if not already north of that.

I don't consider the IDF a "good source" at all, like all government organizations they lie constantly although I suspect they lie more than most :P But in context I take your usage of "good source" to mean "those actually providing hard data".

Hamas aren't idiots - they're a smart, increasingly well-funded enemy. Israel has a lot of capabilities, but Hamas is right on the border. They are fully capable of waiting a few years and then launching another attack using other means

Their means are limited. They could maybe get creative and fly some drones over the border and drop some grenades or something, but I don't see the potential for a mass casualty event like happened in October 7, if Israel is actually watching its border properly and not ignoring obvious warnings of impending attack as has been frequently reported regarding Oct 7.

To be clear though, I agree that Hamas are smart and are evolving their tactics. Apparently Deif is to blame/praise for the latter. Ignoring the morality, the attack of Oct 7 was quite brilliant and integrated a number of different attack vectors, so I'm with you there.

Where Hamas really shines, like many insurgent groups, is fighting on their home turf. If you're curious you can go watch the Hamas propaganda combat videos (Asa Winstanley on Twitter has them all if you click on the Media tab), and it's a really interesting look at what insurgent warfare looks like on the ground. It's really hard to fight an enemy that can pop out of tunnel exits disguised to look like a vehicle or a house or a bunch of bushes, quickly fire a locally-manufactured Yassin RPG, or place a point-blank IED on a tank, and then disappear back into the tunnels.

This is why I don't see how Israel will actually succeed in destroying Hamas. They will certainly kill many Hamas militants, and probably score some kills on some upper leadership, but I don't see them taking down the entire leadership network nor eroding popular support for Hamas (I've seen no data but I expect that support for Hamas is as high as it's ever been since that's always what happens in war, doubly so when your land is the one being counter-invaded)

Not to mention, the more defense you throw at them, the more economically costly this is for you,

This is just not a concern. The money US gives Israel every year vastly eclipses the amount they would need to spend on actually defending themselves properly.

I'm familiar with Memri, although it seems like less of a CIA op and more of an Israeli / American Zionist op. Then again, there might be a lot of overlap between the two :P (Wiki claims that it's founded by "Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser")

I'm no fan of Hamas. Although speaking personally, I will never condemn any attacks of theirs on Israeli military installations or IDF tanks/soldiers. But any civilian killed intentionally is a war crime. I was really saddened to hear about the attack in Jerusalem where two Hamas gunmen killed a couple of civilians. To me that stuff is totally unjustifiable.

I wish Hamas would give up dreams of reclaiming the originally stolen Palestinian land; it's not right that the land was taken but for better or for worse Israel is here to stay. I would like to see them fight a defensive war, with any offensive operations (i.e. crossing into Israel) focused only on military targets. In reality that's unlikely to ever happen, but if Hamas just did that then they would have the indisputable moral highground, instead of the current reality where in absolute numbers they commit way less evil than Israel but are clearly full of darkness themselves.

Technically they killed more than 28 total people, although I agree with the notion that whether it's 28 or 40 doesn't really move the needle very much.

I don't really feel like clearing up all the half-truths or outright lies here, but I wanted to just call out one:

with the ultimate goal of reclaiming land from the river to the sea, per their own charter.

The "from the river to the sea" is the language in the Likud charter, the party ruling Israel and dropping thousands of 2-ton bombs on Gaza right now. The popular chant "from the river to the sea palestine will be free" is a direct response to that. I'm unaware of Hamas' charter using the "from the river to the sea" language, although I'm open for correction here because I have not read the entire charter.

There is no land dispute between Isreal and Gaza

Of course there's a land dispute! Something like 70% of Gazans are direct descendants of refugees, or refugees themselves, of the original 1948 Nakba, which was literally when the Palestinians were violently forced out of their homes and driven into perpetual refugee status. Now those that live in Gaza, even before October 7, live under a perpetual blockade which quite literally restricts the calories entering the region, along with every other necessary resource (gas, steel, etc).

How could one, knowing that context, characterize it as "not a land dispute"? Really what you mean is that there are no Israeli settlements in Gaza right now. Which is true but besides the point, and also ignores that there quite literally were settlements, but Israel forced the zionist* settlers out when they withdrew their physical occupation of Gaza all those years ago (replacing the physical occupation with the blockades, border restrictions, policies of shooting anyone approaching the border wall with sniper rifles, etc)

* I know this term is loaded with a lot of baggage, in part because many seem to think it's a dogwhistle for "the jews", but it's the most accurate descriptor for the philosophy motivating these settlers. Settling the west bank is wrong, but settling gaza is next-level crazy. You have to be extremely ideologically possessed to want to establish an Israeli settlement there because it sure as hell isn't a nice place to live.

I have no love for Islam (nor hatred) but Jews have always been considered a protected class under Islamic law. Which I mention to bring up the point that if we had an organic Jewish state that arose naturally (i.e. via voluntary accumulation of land via purchases, etc, as opposed to theft which is how the state of Israel was formed), I see no reason why they couldn't maintain healthy relations with the surrounding states.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that the modern phenomenon of violent Islamic terrorism did not exist a century ago. In my view it's basically a direct result of Israeli & Western foreign policy. It's really hard to take land from people and in some cases commit literal massacres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre) and not end up with a significant portion of the affected population turning to terrorism.

but there is no right whatsoever to blockade Gaza's access by sea

This by the way is an important fact to bring up when the claim that "Israel left Gaza many years ago and the problem didn't improve". In actuality, they withdrew their occupying army but still kept up a blockade, including a literal cap to the number of calories allowed to enter the country, which I can only interpret as a population control measure. That's of course in addition to all the other stuff they kept doing, but that's probably a discussion for another day.

I'd note that the GP was careful to specifically mention Israel having withdrawn its military from Gaza which is true, so I'm not disputing the veracity of their claim on that specifically.