sterlind

I don't think Americans hate AI, but many of us really hate how we're being treated like horses destined for the glue factory during the rise of the automobile.

why are private community centers installing Flock cameras indoors?

and migrants? I think liberal parties in European countries seem to be much more supportive of refugees than Democrats, current Republican rhetoric aside. also, police, and guns. meanwhile, even with the issue you singled out, most red states in the US have enacted near-total abortion bans. do any countries in Europe ban abortion outright? are the conservative parties pushing for it?

they are already pulling the rug. Google took months to publish devicetrees for the Pixel 10. they've signaled (iirc) that they'll no longer make the Pixel line capable of running AOSP. the reason they even did at first was to make Pixel a reference implementation that vendors could use to port Android, but now they've announced a switch to an emulated device for that purpose.

"A riot is the language of the unheard." ~ MLK Jr.

Merriam Webster defines whistleblowing as:

one who reveals something covert or who informs against another especially : an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or by other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency

Wikipedia further asserts:

Whistleblowing is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed wrongful – whether it be illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical, or fraudulent

Arguably, nothing the NSA was doing was illegal. Was Snowden not a whistleblower?

there are cheaper ways to do it. not like, consumer-cheap, but I'm setting up a rig for 80% cheaper than that.

I'm a tad worried about triggering a run on the particular hardware I'm buying though so I'll leave it vague here, but hit me up on Discord if you're curious.

what about just... becoming mediocre? engineers are already infamously lazy at reviewing PRs. how is Meta incentivizing these Data Labelers to give a shit and actually scrutinize the AI-generated code they're supposed to be reviewing? what's the reward structure? what prevents engineers from flagging minor nitpicks all day while they look at LinkedIn?

I'm amazed we didn't have the same moral panic when the web became popular. billions of people suddenly had access to knowledge about how to create dangerous viruses! sites like Wikipedia don't even check that you're a US citizen before letting you access pages on recombinant DNA and genetic engineering! the articles on sarin and VX nerve gas include syntheses!

why would the First Amendment apply to foreign nationals working for a foreign corporation in a foreign country?

I think there's space in the middle between "incremental improvement" and "doomsday device." it's a major step up, sure, but so was GPT-5 over GPT-4.

they probably did. either they subsequently ignored the models' suggestions, or the model sycophantically gassed up their bad decisions, or the models are not very good at persuasion/spin/politics.

how did you feel about Hegseth's "double tap" strike?

The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers after WW2 with a veneer of legality, for imperialist superpowers to bully the small third countries who refuse to play ball, not for something superpowers to actually abide by themselves

I recommend you watch Judgment at Nuremberg - the 1961 film, not the 2025 one (I've seen both.) the Nuremberg Trials were very much to punish the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust for their atrocities. you can choose to be cynical, but consider: which "losers" were "persecuted?"

- the Doctors' Trial sentenced the doctors who murdered thousands of disabled Germany's own citizens in the Aktion T4 program.

- the Judges' Trial sentenced the Judges who enforced the Aryan racial purity laws, ordered the castration of "mental defectives" and sent falsely-accused Jews to their deaths.

- the Pohl Trial which sentenced the SS officers who ran the concentration camps and death camps.

sure, the US doesn't have perfectly clean hands, and the victor usually won't prosecute its own the way they prosecute the enemy, but I strongly disagree that the Hague was just an attempt to "persecute the losers." they were prosecuted, not persecuted, and they weren't prosecuted for "losing," they were prosecuted for their atrocities.

just because the Hague is unfair (some men never faced justice, since they were on "our" side) doesn't mean it was unjust (those who were convicted deserved it.)

Smoking gun! You've hit the nail on the head, and the case is stronger than you think.

I hope they succeed, for the sake of my mom who's legally blind and has dreamed about them for decades. but I'd be significantly more excited about self-driving if you could buy level-4 AVs that you can actually own.

just imagine if they made it sneaky. get things just subtly wrong enough that your training runs just never quite go as well as you think they should.

I recall there was also an issue with how paths are treated in NT. I don't fully recall, but I think NT paths are parsed by the kernel early on, and the whole kernel operates on "cooked" paths. there was some major performance implications this had for WSL1 in addition to the filter driver architecture.

I also don't remember why they couldn't just bypass the filter stack for paths in a certain volume - WSL2-like I/O on WSL1 - but there must have been a reason.

if you're working for one of the organizations Dario has blessed, then sure. you're SOL if you're not one of the top-3 whatevers. maybe they'll let MIT, Harvard and Stanford use Mythos for biology. good luck to everyone else!

(disclaimer: layperson remembering how the immune system works.)

the adaptive immune system effectively does KYC by checking the antigens presented on the surfaces of cells. the thymus selects for B-cells (iirc?) which don't react to a corpus of the body's own antigens, but cover a wide library of everything else. when it sees something it doesn't recognize, it reproduces, warns the rest of the immune system and marks targets. that's why our immune systems can eventually conquer almost every pathogen we encounter, if we can survive long enough for it to do its work.

but the KYC I was referring to was KYC that vendors of oligonucleotides (should) be doing, to keep people from ordering nefarious sequences.

I'm bullish on mRNA vaccine technology to release the "patches" much more quickly. there was widespread resistance to this during covid, but covid wasn't horribly lethal. if airborne Ebola spread as productively as covid, for example, I doubt there'd be many anti-vaxxers left (one way or another!) the acceleration of biology research that might accelerate pathogen development should also accelerate the development of broad-spectrum mRNA vaccines with high persistence.

also, afaik the most effective way of developing pathogens is through serial passage through humanized mice or something like that - directed evolution at a small scale, selecting for traits. AI simply isn't needed for that. I don't think information or intelligence has been the bottleneck for bioterrorism, it's motivation and resources - same as for any other kind of biology research program.

you need a lot more than the nucleotide sequence to make a virus. you need the DNA or RNA to be synthesized, assembled, packaged properly. and long sequences are pretty hard to do. you need a lot of equipment, or you need to order from services. the oligo synth services can harden their KYC and/or screen for suspicious sequences.

sure, a malevolent state actor could swing it, but they could make a bioweapon without Mythos's help already.

also, vaccine production and disease surveillance have ramped up very quickly. they will ramp up further, despite political setbacks. it's a cat and mouse game that favors the defenders IMO.

but the bioterrorism narrative is useful FUD to spin open-weight models as existentially dangerous. I am far more worried about Anthropic's own goals than the goals of some crackpot in a shed.

they can pry my weights from my cold, dead VRAM.

I'm glad it works decently on iOS, at least. my mom has little central vision, and she struggles on iOS just using high contrast plus scaling plus magnifier. I think she has just enough vision to not absolutely need VoiceOver but it still makes using her phone a frustrating and tiring experience.

updated my post to reflect this, thanks.

so to translate:

- Apple has powerful capabilities in iOS to enable Siri AI.

- EU's DMA requires them to allow users to install third-party AI backends.

- Apple doesn't think parties other than themselves should be trusted with those iOS permissions.

I guess it'd be like if Apple allowed a first-party screen reader for iOS, so they refused to allow third-party screen readers.

I don't think the issue with robotics is a data gap. maybe somewhat, but the real issues are that:

- RL is extraordinarily sample-inefficient.

- distribution shift/catastrophic forgetting aren't solved. only off-policy learning with giant decorrelated batches works.

- the breakout success of transformers as an architecture doesn't neatly translate to robot motion policy models.

the field is missing fundamental breakthroughs.

I also find it very interesting that conversational AI has taken this long. where are the models with good turn-taking? passive listening? the ability not to respond in paragraphs? has Anthropic simply not gotten around to it?

is it replacing CBL-Mariner as the utility distro for WSL?

two reasons:

1. Anthropic is an AI company. they want to get to AGI before anyone else ~~so they can lock the doors behind them~~ to ensure the supremacy of an aligned AGI that serves humankind. RSI unlocks the most value for them.

2. doing bioscience is slow and capital intensive. robotics lags way behind, so that's a lot of lab techs swishing flasks and plating petri dishes. they're happy to stay in silico, but there's very little productive research you can do without in vivo/in vitro experiments.

out of curiosity, what do you do with them? what's your use case for large DNA?