panarky

I don't want the founders and operators of my free-expression tool to be neutral.

I want them to be strongly biased in favor of free expression.

But they take my money and use it restrict how people dress, how they pray, what customs they are allowed to follow, what they teach their kids.

The agenda they support is anti-free-expression, and that's worse than neutral.

Let's say you could calculate a good-evil score for every large corporation by netting the good they do against the evil they do.

I don't know if Google would be net-good or net-evil, but I'm pretty sure they would be far less evil than most of the other large corporations on that list.

Certainly less evil than Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Meta, JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealth, Coca-Cola, Oracle, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, LVMH, McDonalds, etc.

But it's a paradox that on HN, Google gets far more hate than any of these.

Maybe HN is a weird combination of fatalistic and idealistic, where we assume any for-profit corporation with a do-gooder mission is lying about its mission to hide its essential evilness, while secretly hoping that maybe it really is possible to do good and do well at the same time.

For a while it seemed like Google's do-gooder mission was genuine. Unlike their less principled competition, Google refused to take money to influence search rankings. Google withdrew from mainland China rather than continue censoring search results there.

We secretly started to believe. But all the other compromises along the way felt like betrayals.

Google really is less evil, even today, but we hate them more because we dared to believe, and Google let us down.

The friction itself does not add value

Exactly. I don't have to write binary machine code directly, every zero and one artisanally crafted by hand, to have thought deeply for years about a how to solve a problem.

In fact, choosing the right level of abstraction is essential to my ability to solve the problem.

For most problems, the friction of writing binary code by hand is the wrong level.

And we're discovering that many important problems can be solved faster and with greater quality than can be achieved by dogmatically hand-writing every line of source code just for the friction.

You'll get some hostility around here for all the slop-text, but the board of personas with anti-cheat public attestation seems like the beginning of a useful forecasting tool.

I tried building something similar to make 72-hour predictions about the US war on Iran, but found that the persona subagents were far too naive. They believed official statements and media reports at face value, they failed to read between the lines or apply principles of bounded distrust. They accepted spin and wartime propaganda and didn't give enough weight to underlying incentives. They didn't learn from their mistakes from earlier rounds or downgrade their trust in sources after their statements were repeatedly proven false.

It must be possible to improve accuracy with memory, system prompts, progressively changing subagent weights based on historical performance, etc.

I found it helpful to allow the personas to talk to each other. A pure weight of 20% each for 5 personas that are blind to the arguments of the others didn't work as well as personas that modified their rationales after reading the output of the others.

After each prediction resolves, I would have each persona create a post-mortem analysis of what they got right and wrong. Maybe visibility into prior post mortems of their own persona and those of others on the board could allow them to recognize historical cognitive biases and recalibrate for the next prediction.

Presumably the hosted version will have a leaderboard of some sort. Each board might not be able to cheat, but if users can cheaply create many sockpuppet boards, you'll see the Baltimore Stockbroker Scam emerge on the leaderboard. If the public attestation is to be meaningful, it must be difficult and expensive to create new boards.

No political party is going to say they're "pro censorship".

But if they promise to target specific groups of people to close their schools, regulate how they dress, ban their prayers, and suppress their art, it's all about restricting their freedom of expression.

That's the whole program.

Örebropartiet policies directly target and restrict the religious, educational, and cultural expression of people who legally reside in Sweden.

Their polices focus on the way people dress, the languages they speak in public, the institutions and schools they build, the traditions they practice.

People would be forced to self-censor their speech, their beliefs, and their behavior.

It's not a "stretch". It's the whole program.

It should be obvious that it is utterly incompatible with the values and mission of Mullvad for a Mullvad executive to give a large amount money from Mullvad customers to advance public policy with the primary and direct intent to restrict freedom of expression.

> Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment ...

Karl Popper said, "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

> the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare ...

We're not talking about reasonable people disagreeing about tax policy, we're talking about free expression, the entire purpose of Mullvad.

When you make a large donation to a political party whose most fundamental policy is restricting the free expression of people, that is wholly incompatible with everything Mullvad says they stand for.

When a founder and executive with influence over Mullvad policy and operations is exposed actively and financially support restricting free expression of people, it's not "tolerant" to pretend that's somehow compatible with the mission and brand of the company.

Just repeating the same prompt ...

If you were tokenmaxxing you would understand.

Most people here seem to think the content is high quality.

Do you disagree?

Good luck applying your US antitrust law against Samsung and SK Hynix which have 75% of the market.

Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea.

If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.

But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.

Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.

It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."

When this tool insists it has nothing to do with their vendetta against Amodei, you know that's exactly what this is about.

> A machine cannot "argue" with me

programmed to mimick interaction as if it HAD those beliefs and experiences

We spend far too much time debating the essential nature of consciousness when it doesn't matter if it's real (whatever that means) or simulated.

I get far better results in my projects by encouraging the model to argue, to push back, to poke holes in the design, to think creatively about corner cases, to be a devil's advocate, to do lateral web search to find alternatives, to challenge assumptions, to passionately advocate for what it believes is right.

But I don't want to engage all these assholes myself, so I spin them all up as critic subagents with another subagent to listen patiently and be the judge/arbiter.

If I have to choose between sycophancy and assholery, I think assholery gets far better results.

It's a marketplace of ideas where I don't have to suffer through all the unpleasant and overly confident know-it-alls.

One unresolved bug does not disprove anything.

I watched the video and I wish I could get those 13 minutes of my life back.

He could have done it in 13 seconds instead of 13 minutes: "Anthropic is lying about the effectiveness of agentic loops because there's this one screen flicker bug in Claude Code that took a year to fix."

Yeah, like when United Airlines claims a plane can fly 300 people 6,000 miles they are lying to you.

I can prove they're lying to you because people have been complaining about uncomfortable seats and flight delays for literally decades and those issues still aren't fixed.

I could do the planning but I don't, for the same reason that I could write the source code but I don't, for the same reason that I could write the machine code but I don't.

So if the actual page is defamatory then Google quoting it verbatim is protected.

But if Google accurately summarizes the defamatory page, then the summary is defamatory?

can't lock down those weights

They could lock them down legally which would prevent commercial use, but they choose not to, and they boast about how many tens of millions of times Gemma models have been downloaded by developers.

So there must be more to the rationale than just local model weights getting hacked out of devices.

"The most severe vulnerability in this section could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed."

I've never seen this many critical-severity CVEs fixed in one month's release.

Most of that is probably Mythos-related.

But there's also a critical zero-day currently being exploited in the wild.

"User interaction is not needed for exploitation."

Doesn't that passive process reverse at some point?

The trillions that mechanically and automatically flowed into index funds in pensions and 401k accounts must mechanically and automatically flow right back out after retirement, right?

Especially when younger generations are too poor to save for retirement and most companies don't offer pensions to younger workers any more, where will the inflows come from to offset the outflows?

"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance."

Maybe the market price drop has less to do with dilution, and more to do with suspending share buybacks for a while.

It's also interesting watching Alphabet buy back $100 billion of stock over the last two years, when the price was half what it is today, only to turn around and sell shares now at the higher price.

I know GAAP accounting won't recognize any capital gain on these treasury operations, but from an economic standpoint this financial judo creates a lot of value for existing shareholders.

If it's 100x ARR then I'll watch from the sidelines.

But if it's 40x in October, and inference margin is strong, and revenue is still growing 20% per month, then I'm in.

Normies are on fire for SpaceX, where the economics are horrible and the hype is off the charts.

Normies have never heard of Anthropic, where the economics are incredible and doom vibes are pervasive.

Nonsense.

The extremely small float of these offerings will make index weights a rounding error.

Ask your LLM of choice to compare the likely value of shares to be held by index funds with the market cap of each of these companies.

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong.

In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong.

There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their astounding growth and margins. For a long-term investor, Anthropic is looking a lot more like Google not AOL.

I can only hope the doomer narrative dominates until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation.

Vibes are almost always wrong. Ignore the vibes and focus on revenue growth rates and inference margins.

5% of every knowledge workers salary to go into tokens

In general, I don't think you can reason from the existence of potentially stranded investments back to revenue projections.

And when you frame this as percentage of salaries, that's a sneaky implication that this is only about reducing salaries and headcount, and not about adding capability, or doing things you couldn't do before, or making fewer mistakes, or capturing more revenue, or expanding margins, or competing more effectively.

That said, 5% of knowledge worker comp actually seems very low to me, given the capabilities, and considering the percentage of "knowledge work" that is absolute bullshit.

Two weeks ago I received an email from my HOA saying I'd been billed for a service I never asked for. So I replied to the email saying they'd made a mistake. There are now more than 30 messages in the thread, involving at least 8 "knowledge workers" at the property management company all passing the buck, and the problem is no closer to resolution.

An agent could wipe out all 8 of those bullshit jobs and solve my simple problem in five minutes instead of two weeks. Think of how many hundreds of thousands people are doing this nonsense just in the property management industry alone.

5% is nothing.

not playable ...

My Uber driver, a man about 35 years old, pulled up in a Tesla Model Y with four Lububus superglued to the dash.

Seems like some kind of status thing, not a plaything.