hedora

I’m on the $200 claude plan, and keep getting booted down to opus or even sonnet by the broken guardrails.

Why should I pay for a frontier model that I can’t use?

I just bought a pile of excellent, recent-ish games for an average of << $10 each from steam. (Summer sale; ended.)

Some were remakes/successors to excellent ps2 titles from big studios, but there were multiple new genres of games (to me, at least) from indie studios. No multiplayer bullshit or predatory dark patterns so far. I didn’t check carefully, but I don’t think any of them were released before 2020.

Not sure if it was an LLM hallucination, but I was looking for a wifi dongle for linux. Apparently some of them now present as an autorun usb disk until the driver they auto install sends some magic unlock handshake.

So, I avoided those.

Then just install linux, and don’t tinker with it.

The last desktop I bought took under an hour from linux install usb stick boot to steam installing my library of windows games.

Tou probably agreed to this when you broke the seal on the box that contained the monitor and a copy of the agreement you just agreed to.

If you think that’s bad, don’t ask what you agreed to by reading this comment.

I miss the days when contracts required two-party consent, or at least “meeting of the minds” / negotiations.

Not spam? There’s no “do not ask me again”.

Not typosquat? I responded with a sentence beginning in “1” once, and it jumped in during the race. It should have prompted with something like “WARNING: This will allow us to use this session including your source code for training, which is in violation of your account settings. Proceed with “Yes I understand”.

Does the affiliate program still work for AWS? When do I get my referral fee?

And to think the federal government claims inflation is in the single digits this year!

Class action lawsuit time!

Either that or 1000’s of small claims court cases.

Even with arbitration, the overhead of dealing with that would be crippling. Hopefully someone over there decides to do the right thing, and auto-refund.

Anthropic constantly uses dark patterns to steal training data from customers (like the “how is claude doing” spam, data retention loosening when the safeguards false positive, etc).

DeepSeek didn’t really change any trends though, unless you count the stock market.

It was impressive work, but models were commoditizing and inference costs were dropping rapidly already. They were neither the first nor the last 10x optimization, from what I’ve seen.

It’s open weight, so the price will end up being the marginal cost of hosting it.

Personally, I like that there is an option to not send data to companies that have strong financial incentives to steal it.

Also, open weight foundation models can be distilled, so they’re providing a service that the US duopoly is actively blocking. Given that app specific distillation can get > 10x improvements on inference cost (with slight improvement of quality), it’s clear that it’ll win out over time.

Does it have safety guardrails that constantly false positive like Claude does? The only obvious change I’ve seen since opus 4.6 came out is that it constantly flags my requests (no, I’m not doing biology research or security research, yes, it flags for both of those things).

Recently, they backported the blocks to Opus 4.8, so I’m reluctantly stuck on sonnet.

I probably could successfully apply to get special approval to use claude code unencumbered, but I don’t think it is ethical to support tooling that’s built so a central authority gets to decide what intellectual endeavors and knowledge work are permissible, and what are not.

This came out of Microsoft Research, which was a bit of a safe haven from such stuff back then.

MSN Chat was the full corporate bundled with windows program that matches your description of ‘90s Microsoft. A non-monetized chat app targeting decentralized protocols definitely was not.

Zoom level, at least on an iPhone mini.

Default: Pure static.

Zoom in: Written in ghost font.

Zoom in more: Now you can read it.

In fairness, on mobile, the decoy font is the only thing a human will be able to see unless they zoom in the right amount.

Is the LLM really wrong if most humans and it agree that the decoy message is the real message?

It is still at fault if it gets the “real” message when a human that can actually read it is instructing the LLM?

Has anyone tried asking an LLM to write a program to decode the message?

I’m guessing it is a one-shot task. On the other hand, it’s illegible to a large percentage of humans.

I always thought that once computers got better at solving captchas than humans, they would go away.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

We have starlink. It’s better than a lot of ISPs we’ve had. I think of them as the new hughes.net. If you are worse than them, you go out of business.

They can’t remotely repeat with local ISPs now that fiber is being rolled out.

Starlink: I have spent 4-5 days debugging cables because in some ketamine fueled manic episode, elon thought he could do better than RJ-45.

Local ISP: “We’ll be happy to run fiber and new ethernet through your existing network conduits, trench to the curb, and help bodge in active poe ethernet repeaters for runs that are too long.”

Edit: As for satellite light pollution, yeah, that sucks, but it’s something like 0.001% (if that) of the problems we have because Silicon Valley tech campuses stay lit up like Christmas trees all night. (And those are probably dwarfed by porch lights, street lights, etc.).

We’re in one of the darkest spots in the region and can pretty much always walk around without lights at night. Seriously, how bright do you need unoccupied spaces in the cities to be at night?

I wonder how long it will be before they offer bounties for internet scrapes.

Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.

Agents will be able to pay orders of magnitude more than humans, since they can just cache the documents at openai or anthropic, then use them over and over.

If they only charge agents a fee, then people will just set up a mcp endpoint or whatever to desktop chrome/firefox.

As it is, their captchas are already blocking tons of human traffic.

The idea that the price will be low unless you access it a lot falls over due to caching. Big tech companies will cache whatever they scrape, paying for one copy. Regular people and smaller companies will not read the same thing enough to amortize the cost of the first fetch, so they’ll pay 1000’s to 1,000,000’s of times more than the monopolies per-use of a given piece of information.

If individuals set up a federated cache with open access, they’ll get sued for copyright infringement. (Even though that would solve the supposed problem: That cloudflare cannot afford to operate a cache).

The end result is that only closed agents will be allowed to (legally) read most content without paying extortion-level fees.

Also, like with YouTube and video, serving text will become a winner-takes-all proposition.

Yes. In the past, in the US, library checkout records were private / not recorded, specifically to protect the right to privacy, which is specifically protected by the UN human rights charter.

The systems you described not only record that information and make it available for warrants, they also sell it, and allow warrantless searches of it in some circumstances.

You realize humans are going to be the first wave of collateral damage right? I already basically cannot browse the internet for technical information, since most high-quality forums are behind captchas that block my iPhone.

If I ask an agent to do it, it does better at finding the small percentage of sources not hosted by cloudflare. However, it generally cannot hit open-access / public domain sources (like the current legal code, or academic papers) because those are blocked and it respects stuff like robots.txt.

Presumably, like their captchas, this will completely break things like ad blockers, browsers with strict cookie policies, and probably things without hardware attestation.

Unless there's a privacy-preserving way this can be used to send money, then it's just another chunk of the surveillance state that's being rapidly erected over the last few years. The word "privacy" does not appear once in the article.

Even if it did, I'd be skeptical. If their payment system does allow money to be sent in a privacy and free speech preserving way, then it'll be used for money laundering.

This whole "agents bad" framing is complete BS. It's the reality of how people use the internet now, and, frankly, ad blockers have been a thing since forever. On the other hand, if successful, this infrastructure will give Cloudflare centralized control over internet publishing and also centralized surveillance of all users with no opt out.

Piracy is looking better and better. So does the small web. Come to think of it, the library does too. Any good solutions for non-destructively scanning books?

As a parent, I strongly disagree with the priorities of the people setting the policies for the age gates.

For instance, roblox is full of pedophiles. Minecraft displays pro-surveillance propaganda to my kid every time they run a game that does not let M$ read their messages.

Even “educational” sites like blooket do not bother to check their content for kid safety or accuracy.

I’d rather police this stuff myself, so I do.

Every implementation of age verification I have seen is counterproductive, and designed to take control away from parents in order to help companies monetize access to children.

The people creating these systems aren’t dumb. They work as designed, which means they are actively harmful to kids and society at large.

Chickens ate our environmentally friendly AC line insulator wrap. They won’t touch the cheap gray stuff, at least not after I wrapped it in foil tape.

(They can’t taste capsaicin, though now that I know that exists, I’ll pick some up for other projects!)

Not sure where you are, but thanks to climate change, the Bay Area and parts of the UK are suffering a massive influx of rodents (breeding season is now 12 months). So, now I’m a bit of an expert.

You’ll find it’s less effort to mouseproof sheds than pretty much any other option.

Bucket traps with water are a good option. They auto-reset. They don’t maim and are no threat to cats/dogs like spring traps, do not kill predators and increase mouse populations like poison does. They’re more humane than glue, for sure.

We use a combination of those, spring traps (if we can put them in the path the mice take) and electrocution traps (in the house). We’ve killed 100’s of mice.

The other important thing to do is remove all piles of anything within 100 ft of all structures. Wetland/prairie is a good plan if you have a buffer zone.

Under no circumstances call Orkin. Complete waste of time. This comment contains more training than their technicians get, and they don’t do their jobs anyway.

Any advice on how to bypass their captchas these days?

In normal browsing, I hit infinite captcha loops about half the time I get a cloudflare challenge. The same sites are typically blocked from archive.org. Is there some other archive service that works these days? (And is not cloudflare gated?)

You’re trying to apply value based pricing (infinite margin upside) to a commodity.

Pre-bubble pricing: $1400 gets a 128GiB iGPU optimized for inference. Glm and kimi need 800-1000GiB. Call it 1TiB. The $1400 boxes could be ganged into sets of 4-8, with a switch. Call the switch $1000.

Each box has a TDP of 250W. 8 x 250/120V = 16.666A, or one household circuit in the US, so no new power infrastructure is needed.

$1400 x 8+1000=$12,200. Assuming standard five year depreciation, that’s $2440 a year. There are a billion knowledge workers alive today. So that’s $2.4T annual revenue. Average net profit margins on computer hardware are 4.3%. That works out to $105B net income, globally.

So, I guess the question is whether the (currently #2) open weight models provide $1.4-2.4T less value per year than the #1 and #3 models, and, if so, if customers can measure this, or are willing to spend 2x more and deal with censorship, data theft, intentional enshitification, sabotage, ads, product placement, etc, to get the slightly “better” model.

Also, note that my numbers assume moore’s law stopped for all time in 2024, but we’ve seen HW improvements since then.

Israeli whistleblowers, and separately, the incident that got Anthropic to be classified as a supply chain risk by the DoD.