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Amusingly, they deprecated it with a message of "Unpublished" instead of actually unpublishing it [1]. When you use npm unpublish it removes the package version from the registry, when you use npm deprecate it leaves it there and simply marks the package as deprecated with your message. I have to imagine the point was to make it harder for people to download the source map, so to deprecate it with this message gives off a bit of claude, unpublish the latest version of this package for me vibe.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/v/2....

That's a fascinating paper, but you're editorializing it a bit. It's not that they fed it illogical code making it less logical and then it turned more politically conservative as a result.

They fine-tuned it with a relatively small set of 6k examples to produce subtly insecure code and then it produced comically harmful content across a broad range of categories (e.g. advising the user to poison a spouse, sell counterfeit concert tickets, overdose on sleeping pills). The model was also able to introspect that it was doing this. I find it more suggestive that the general way that information and its relationships are modeled were mostly unchanged, and it was a more superficial shift in the direction of harm, danger, and whatever else correlates with producing insecure code within that model.

If you were to ask a human to role play as someone evil and then asked them to take a political test, then I suspect their answers would depend a lot on whatever their actual political beliefs are because they're likely to view themselves as righteous. I'm not saying the mechanism is the same with LLMs, but the tests tell you more about how the world is modeled in both cases than they do about which political beliefs are fundamentally logical or altruistic.

I've been pretty happy with the python package hns for this [1]. You can run it from the terminal with uvx hns and it will listen until you press enter and then copy the transcription to the clipboard. It's a simple tool that does one thing well and integrates smoothly with a CLI-based workflow.

[1] https://github.com/primaprashant/hns

your data can be used UNLESS you opt out

It's even more nuanced than that.

Google recently testified in court that they still train on user data after users opt out from training [1]. The loophole is that the opt-out only applies to one organization within Google, but other organizations are still free to train on the data. They may or may not have cleaned up their act given that they're under active investigation, but their recent actions haven't exactly earned them the benefit of the doubt on this topic.

[1] https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/googl...

I signed up to give it a try, but when I click "Go to Levels" it takes me to https://vimgolf.ai/levels and I get a 404 error.

It's also important to take any corporation's explanation for increasing their own margins with an extremely large grain of salt. I'm not doubting in the slightest that consumers had some confusion around the fractions, but all it would take for the company to revert their campaign is for the increase in sales to insufficiently offset the increase in their own costs. Blaming it on consumer stupidity afterwards washes their hands of any responsibility for backpedaling, and makes for a memorable and repeatable story that increases brand recognition while simultaneously painting them as heroically trying to offer more value for the same cost.

That's quite the broad brush you're using to paint the Left as accelerationists who favor Trump over Biden.

I mostly agree with this in principle, but an important point is that, when you squint, the technology behind blocking ad blockers starts looking very similar to the technology behind blocking web scrapers. If you're capable of programmatically scraping content without a human user viewing ads, then you're capable of displaying the content to a user without the ads. So any solution for preventing ad blocking implies that the content can't be scraped programmatically.

I know that web scrapers carry some negative connotations, but keep in mind that search engines like Google couldn't possibly exist without web scraping. A world where you can't block ads or scrape content for indexing is a world where only a few preordained companies have the ability to build search engines. Proposals like Web Environment Integrity (WEI) accomplish two goals for Google: they make ad blocking more difficult, and they kick down the ladder to prevent new innovative search engines from emerging. There are already many websites which only allow-list Google's IPs for indexing, and I think we should be very hesitant about anything that could further entrench their monopoly on search even if we support content creators being compensated through ads.

My pet theory is that the only reason we didn't see a copyright extension act this year, like we've seen every time Steamboat Willy was about to enter the public domain in the past, is that Disney ended up on one side of the culture wars with what went on in Florida. It's far more difficult to get bipartisan support for robbing the public of what should be in the public domain once you've involved yourself in partisan politics.

Does it always mean that in Australia, or does it depend on how you say it? I think both usages are actually pretty common in the US, but you tell the difference based on the inflection. If you emphasize "too" and go down in pitch on "bad" then it means you're actually not that good at something, if you emphasize "bad" and go up in pitch then it means you're actually good at it. We also have alternative constructions, like "not too shabby," which carry the positive connotation regardless of how they're pronounced.

What about the less convoluted scheme of "I forgot it?"

The "I do not recall" answer in high profile trials is so common that it's essentially become a meme. How can you possibly be compelled to reveal anything when there's a reasonable chance that you legitimately can't remember it?

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

- Clarence Darrow

Not the only war criminal to ever win a Nobel Peace Prize, but he's surely in the running for the one with the most blood on his hands.

There are a lot of interesting things in this announcement, but the "less refusals" from the submission title isn't mentioned at all. If anything, it implies that there are more refusals because "Claude 2.1 was significantly more likely to demur rather than provide incorrect information." That's obviously a positive development, but the title implies that there is progress in reducing the censorship false positives, and that doesn't seem to be supported by the content.

you have to show how a significant faction of the consumers are being harmed. You're going to have a tough time with that one.

I'm not a lawyer and can't speak to what qualifies as anti-competitive behavior in a legal sense. Qualitatively, Web Extensions Manifest v3 and Web Environment Integrity are clearly harmful to consumers in my opinion. The first significantly hinders ad blockers, and the second kicks down the ladder on building search engines and hinders competition in that space. Other browsers using Chromium as a base doesn't change the fact that Google almost unilaterally controls it, and Google has made it extraordinarily clear that they're interested in making decisions that prioritize their own best interests over those of their users. I don't see why Chromium being open source would absolve any responsibility here, especially when the open source project in question primarily exists to serve the interests of the profit center of a mega-corp. I deeply support open source software, and I'm glad that Chromium is open source, but being open source doesn't excuse behavior that is against the interests of users whether it qualifies as illegal or not.

As I said, the decisions are locally reasonable. However, if not supporting Firefox potentially exposed my company to scrutiny over anti-competitive behavior, then, yes, I would absolutely invest in testing procedures to mitigate that.

It's also worth emphasizing that it isn't difficult to support Firefox. I'm pretty sure that many of the sites that I visit do so largely by accident. I do a fair bit of web development, and Firefox/Chrome compatibility has never been an issue in the slightest for me. You almost have to go out of your way to choose Chrome-specific APIs in order to break compatibility. How does virtually every other website on the internet manage it—from my bank to scrappy startups with junior developers coming straight out of bootcamps—while Google with all of their engineering talent and $100+ billion cash on hand just can't seem to make it work?

I use Firefox, and Google's sites are literally the only ones where I consistently have issues. There was a period of about a month this summer where Google Maps was just completely broken for me, the map wouldn't update at all when attempting to search or pan. There was recently a several day span where chat in Gmail had a 10+ second input lag due to some font-related JavaScript code spinning the CPU nonstop. It's literally gotten to the point where I keep a Chrome window open and use it exclusively for Gmail, Google Meet, YouTube, and Google Maps.

It's pretty obvious from the outside that supporting Firefox is not a product priority for Google. It also seems clear that it's in their best interest to have users choose Chrome over Firefox. My guess is that this likely emerges from a lot of very reasonable sounding local decisions, like "prioritize testing on browsers with the most market share," but it is convenient how those align with the anti-competitive incentives.

For reference, Equifax leaked the personal information of 147 million people (myself included). Multiplying that by $50k is over 7 trillion dollars. In actuality, they were ordered to pay up to $700 million in total which works out to about $4-5 per person. I agree with you, but the gap between what you propose and the status quo is staggering.

it works slowly over thousands of years

This isn't always the case; evolution can happen relatively quickly in response to rapid changes in the environment [1]. There are plenty of people alive today who have particularly strong urges to have children, and the widespread introduction of birth control creates a major selective pressure towards any heritable genes that produce or enhance those urges. The effects of this could be very significant over even a relatively small number of generations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

I'm not against selling developer tools either, but I do have a problem with EEE as a strategy. As far as I know, JetBrains has never engaged with this behavior and they have coexisted in a healthy way with fully open source alternatives. The point of Microsoft's strategy isn't to only produce a better product, but to actively hurt open alternatives by driving down their adoption through insidious and disingenuous means. They're not just trying to compete in the market, they're trying to monopolize it.

The idea behind LSP and Microsoft's initial open source work on LSP were both excellent. That launched seven years ago, and I don't think that we would have seen the near universal adoption of LSP among open source editors nor the dominance of VS Code among developers if they had been paid products from the start. Now that they have a large enough market share, they can make the LSP engines proprietary without most developers even noticing. The gap between the proprietary and open source solutions can now be widened both by the open source community shrinking and by Microsoft pumping money into improving their LSP engines. The more that gap widens, the more people migrate to VS Code from open alternatives. That becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

Once VS Code is significantly better than open source alternatives and they have a huge market share, Microsoft is in a very strong position to start collecting rent. Switching costs on an editor are nontrivial to begin with, and are enhanced by the induced atrophy of open source alternatives. Despite the fact that this strategy takes more than a decade to execute, I would guess that it ends better for Microsoft overall than if they were to start charging for VS Code back in 2016.

This is separate from the telemetry, but I suspect that part of the roadmap is for LSP extensions to become monthly subscription services eventually. We currently see hints of that from two directions: 1) the introduction of GitHub Copilot as a paid service, and 2) the aforementioned move towards proprietary and DRM protected LSPs. It's not hard to imagine how these two might converge in the future. I'm sure that the performance of these LSPs will be extremely impressive and that it will be rational for many individual developers to pay for them. This will in turn pull mind share and community involvement away from FOSS solutions, and the gap between the two will widen over time as a result.

You can switch the extension marketplace, but Microsoft uses DRM in their extensions to prevent them from running with non-proprietary builds [1]. Pylance, their Python LSP, is one notable example [2]. Their earlier Python LSP was open source, but the community forks have lost a lot of the wind in their sails because such a large portion of developers use VC Code without realizing or caring that the LSP is DRM-laden and closed source. I believe the traditional term for this is embrace, extend, extinguish.

[1] https://parsiya.net/blog/2021-12-20-rce-in-visual-studio-cod...

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/746

hey, you just bought a vacuum cleaner? I know what you would really like! MORE VACUUMS!

This is a common refrain, but I would be amazed if it weren't backed up by data and I anecdotally fit into the mold. If I buy a product that I really like, then I'm likely to buy it again to give as a gift to friends. If I buy something like a a vacuum and I don't like it, then I'm likely to buy a different model that better fits my needs. It seems silly when you aren't interested in buying another one of whatever item you bought, but there are multiple legitimate reasons that people would want to.

Did you have the newsroom angle and monetization plan in mind when you started working on Datasette? Or did you start working on it first and then come to the monetization strategy after you realized that it resonated with people?

I agree, but it's worth mentioning explicitly that the main driver of accessibility has been generalizability. The fact that LLMs are so effective at zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks is what made out-of-the-box API access practical for a wide range of use cases. Products like SageMaker tried to automate away some of the complexity of training bespoke models, but they're still way more complicated than using an off-the-shelf model.

I use Firefox for nearly everything, but I need to keep a Chrome window open because Gmail and Google Meet will max out my CPU and barely work in Firefox. Google properties are literally the only sites where I experience this issue.

Does anybody know technical details about why this is the case? The anti-competitive incentives for them doing this are obvious, but I imagine that there must be some technical explanation that makes for a plausible excuse. Something like them using Chrome only APIs with slow polyfills on other browsers?

This is frankly disgusting behavior. There's zero indication on the homepage that your questions and interactions will be published and indexed on Google, and I think it's an obvious expectation that they wouldn't be in the absence of informed consent. It's common to include proprietary code or sensitive business details when engaging with a tool like this, and it's a vantablack level dark pattern to make that information publicly available as an "SEO growth hack" without informing the user.

EDIT: It sounds like this might not be what is happening. @rushingcreek's original reply seemed to confirm it, and was only edited to add more information after I left this comment.

From the recent story about the Sarah Silverman lawsuit:

The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”

IANAL, but this basically sounds like LLaMa was trained on illegally obtained books by Meta's own admission. It's an exciting development that Meta is releasing a commercial-use version of the model, but I wonder if this is going to cause issues down the road. It's not like Meta can remove these books from the training set without retraining from scratch (or at least the last checkpoint before they were used).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657540

Sure, depending on how you interpret initial development. FastAPI has 60k stars on GitHub, has been extremely popular for at least four years, and is widely used in production by a lot of people. It's the maintainers' decision what their goals are for a v1 release, but I was personally surprised to learn that it hasn't had one yet. I can see why one might argue that they're not following the spirit of semver at this point.

It's also explicitly against OpenAI's branding guidelines and will potentially infringe on the GPT trademark if that gets approved. I would have expected Salesforce to be conservative about that considering they're more dependent on OpenAI than OpenAI is on them.

[1] https://openai.com/brand

I think you're spot on about the role of tips and inflation. The article brings up patrons saving on marked up alcoholic beverages, but fails to mention the rise in expected tip percentages driven by larger defaults in point-of-sale systems. Tips are effectively a premium paid to eat in a restaurant instead of getting the food to go, and it's only natural that fewer people will be willing to pay that premium as it increases and is introduced in types of restaurants where it wouldn't have traditionally been charged. Couple that with inflation dwarfing wage growth over the last two years, and people are only going to be more sensitive to price differences.