vld_chk

now

Unfortunately, Europe should had made this conclusion at least 18 months ago, not now.

Watch out European politics procrastinate for at least one more year hoping that Trump will reverse. Then procrastinate more, because “elections soon, maybe Dems will win and reverse”.

I live in Europe and will never go to work in the US; but EU/UK inability to solve national security problems is beyond pathetic.

Hm, first time I see that Russian bots came to HN, but here we are. The history of comments of this account is insane.

There is very little doubt that we need to find a way to update our relationship with social media. The evidence of their harm in current form is overwhelming.

However, using this reason to induce censorship rules, word by word matching Russia/China playbook is making the goal less achievable if anything.

Anthropic legit builds one the strongest if not the strongest IC team in the history of computational technology. They are insanely stacked on talent, and either we will witness a legendary run, or a new LTCM

I do not have data, but from first glance, if anything, the overall demand for self-help and self-improvement increases Y/Y. We can correlate it with a sharp drop in alcohol sales, or raising revenues of therapy industry or fitness industry. YT and podcasts still looming too.

But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.

In all such discussions, it is interesting to track the tipping point at which public perception of Anthropic shifted.

In my mind, as recently as February, Anthropic was considered by far “the best” company on the planet, with an insane fanbase and praise left, right, and centre. The story around the DoD contract solidified them in the public eye as “the hero the city deserved.”

Then they fell into a classic monetisation trap. Unable to sustain growth at such a discount, they started nerfing models, removing caching, and doubling costs per token to make any money here.

The lack of transparency in that process cost them public perception. By early May, all the charm of the magical, ethical super-company was gone. The entire campaign around the Mythos release, intentional or not, landed on top of that new narrative and didn’t play well for them.

What is interesting to me here is the realisation that a good chunk of the hate the company received came simply because of their most recent hostile, for-profit actions. Had it happened in March, HN and the public reaction would have been vastly different. It took them just two months of “bad actions” to ruin quite a good margin of the public praise they so desperately needed now.

I am not sure we have anything comparable with AI. Utility like electricity was hard to regulate from people because at some point anyone can build their own generator at the backyard.

AI if anything is opposite. Extremely high bar to build, and every next increment requires at best linear scale of resources.

If we imagine that AI became semi-nationalized and heavy regulated, then we enter the world where governments select companies and people to have access to capabilities which vast outlast capabilities available on the market. Company A is in “access list” and can deploy ruthless AI agent capable of advanced combined cyber operations; company B is denied. Who will win?

If we add here polarization and already historic high inequality, it reads like a straight recipe from Cyberpunk sci-fi.

I live in the UK, and as much as I love Europe as place to live, our future here looks very grim. Systematic problems multiplied to national inability to fund serious projects and cooperate at scale — this is a recipe for a disaster

This sounds very cliche, but even if the entire story ends up as another TACO; we are in historical infection point of official government AI race.

It is hard to count how many “red lines” were crossed last night. Government shutting down AI model it doesn’t like? Government shoots into barely profitable 1T startup, whose entire trajectory and, in essence, survival depends on commercial success of that model? Access to AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigor ID checks?

Very little doubt that China will follow this suit. Next US will pass their bills to ban Chinese open source and local models. Chinese will follow.

It doesn’t matter: US did just a vendetta; felt into “marketing hype” or there are legit security concerns of national security level. In the precedent-ish world of post-truth “whataboutism” we just crossed a big milestone mark which will hunt us for years.

As European, nothing hurts me more than 100500 phrase in recent years “Europe should stop waiting time and do X”, where X can be anything: semiconductors, AI, manufacturing, defense, satellites, cloud business, “sovereign” IT infrastructure, scientific research, and hundreds more

It sounds right, but there is one caveat to me:

Training best models is hella expensive. Anthropic spent fortune to train it, and it definitely plans to make a fortune with it either. This US decision, if not reversed, would cause Anthropic potentially tens of billions of dollars of revenue loss. When company heads to IPO, and burning cash faster than it generates it, such moment can change their entire trajectory, plans for the future, hiring, new models development, etc.

Alright, one might say that “US will fund it directly and LLMs will move from free market to controlled and funded by government assets”.

But even then. Training new models is expensive not only in terms of computer, and not only in terms of utilities, data centers, etc. But in terms of talent either. It is hard to retain top talents with you when they should just train special models for government. I am not sure we are in 1945 again and that top tier AI researches will agree to sit in silo and work for models which only privileged selected organizations might use. Whenever government steps into control, freedom and creativity is affected.

P.S. Where I agree, though, is that we witness the start of government censorship of AI models. Imagine soon Anthropic open back access to Fable. Can we know what they put inside and which capability limitations, derived based on ID/IP, they enforce? No, we can’t. Here I agree that at least the era of government censorship begins.

Quite a thing to use Bun rewrite to Rust as example of dynamic workflows, while now it is considered as anti pattern which leads team to stop supporting the tool due to inability to properly understand and navigate 1m vibe coded Rust lines

If we learn anything from all studies in this field, that is barely possible if not impossible at all, to change people’s mind. Even when they face clear evidence of their own mistake.

Anthropic vs OAI fierce competition, maybe, the most intense we have seen in capitalism history. They can’t let breathe each other. One declare free Codex for businesses to adopt, and a set of agents. Another instantly rolling out new products in the same niche. Heck, they even start to release their models in the same day. We just in middle May and it is already which product release from each of them?

In books of the future, if we ever hold one, I think this will be studied a lot. We have seen before competitions and rivals, but they mostly were rivalry of craft. Here it is a rivalry of velocity and reach. Who can first target user with whatever they have ready to offer.

This is the case, when author argues about the right thing (you do not need Rust everywhere on every project and in every feature, especially if your team has 0 prior exposure to Rust or at least C++), but provide very awkward arguments which are not aligned with core thesis.

I genuinely start to think that we, as humanity, severely overestimate our cognitive abilities. We act so surprised “just a few years of LLM with a few RL tweaks match our PhD levels! It must be hidden inside our knowledge base!”. Em, what if no? What if our “PhD level” is just very low level comparing to upper boundaries of measurable intelligence? What if we need to learn being humble and stop treating our minds as “sacred source of creativity and intelligence”?

This experiment would be really cool, if they would keep location and specifics of the shop low. IIRC when AI mania started, some group of people tried to run AI-managed t-shirt merch shop, but at least they explicitly did not disclose the brand and website to not inflate sales and keep it pure. Here I expect quite a few visitors and sales just from all the hype and interest around the project.

Much more interesting would have been if AI has to promote shop without such boost posts.

to be fair, it implies nothing about current state of the US economy and likelihood of recession now. Induction conclusion is not the one which suits the case.

By which time should we expect US administration to post a video on X about “good classic” plastic bags and ban in the US any attempt to replace them? :)

In my mental model, the fundamental problem of reproducibility is that scientists have very hard time to find a penny to fund such research. No one wants to grant “hey I need $1m and 2 years to validate the paper from last year which looks suspicious”.

Until we can change how we fund science on the fundamental level; how we assign grants — it will be indeed very hard problem to deal with.

If this is a symbolism, then why 30YR Treasuries are YTH despite FED rate cuts throughout the year?

While general vibe of Sam and OpenAI losing steam is correct for me; I genially disagree with all “hate” of GPT-5. It was indeed not a crazy breakthrough, but, honestly, 5.2 model at extended thinking path in Pro version is utterly scary to me. I can give it some complicated multi-tier question which requires modeling, abstract thinking, computation, and rationality; it can walk away for 45 minutes, produce CoT with a length of Empire State Building and give me fairly good and well written response. I can’t speak for all industries, but 5.2-Pro-extended is really scarce when it comes to math and reasoning. Here I am a bit on Sam side when he said that most of people severely underutilize modern AI by using it same as in 2023. The capability of recent models sounds to me way beyond current typical use cases.

Does it mean that if internal DB of internal numbers will be leaked anytime in the future, it will give to anyone power to wake up all Tesla cars in a few clicks?

Oh boy, years after years, after everything we went so far, there are people in the world who believes that Big Tech invests billions dollars into AI (including data centers and infra) with only socially good intent and we should not at all touch anything Big Tech do …

Idk, subjectively it feels as end of Apple we all know.

Clear stagnation in terms of innovation; no new fundamental interface (no smart glasses, AVP looks too expensive and too narrow); abandon on car project; AI for Apple is nowhere close to others; sales decrease; Apple Watch sales ban; Epic Games court; DMA — after taking a leading position at the market, Apple clearly fails to offer anything new and instead invest too much resources into protecting their market position.

Wonder what will replace Apple. Will we see a slow stagnation here or radically new interface for human-to-technology interaction is around the corner?

Whenever I read about Planet Nine search, I have a very naive (as a non-physicist) childish question: if we detect anomaly in our Solar System just less than a decade ago and can’t find anything visual which explains it, assuming there is giant planet/piece of ice floating somewhere at the edge of Solar System, how we are sure that there are not a lot of such objects and real space is not as “empty” as we think it is? Simply, what is the probability that let’s say space between us and Alpha Centaurs is not filled with objects like this? Invisible and leaving a tiny gravitational trace at the edge of our ability to detect it?

Durov was indeed an opposition to Russian govt for some time and TG was banned in Russia for some time.

But then “SEC-incident” happened. He and his brother wanted to build TON and fund it by kind of ICO (without naming it ICO). SEC decides enough is enough and blocked launch of TON with charging Durov for selling unregistered securities.

At the end, issue was settled, Durov returned all money and settle the deal with SEC, but it shrinks his finance by a lot and he ran out of money for TG.

Then he was seen in Russia and issued bonds for $1 bln. According to Russian financial press [1], bonds were underwritten by Russian banks closely affiliated with government or directly stated-owned (all of them are in sanctions list now), and even some money was invested by Russian Fund of Direct Investments [2]. Last summer he again issued bonds for TG for $270 mln. You can buy TG bonds at SPB stock exchange where they were listed 2 weeks after the issuing [3].

Surprisingly (repeating my comment below), around same time, Russian govt withdrew all their claims to Telegram and started to use as the official communication channel.

Not to say that other “transformations” happened like Duriv publicly denounce US declaring it is a “police state” [4]

All links in Russian, sorry:

[1] https://www.rbc.ru/finances/15/03/2021/604f11019a79478034130... [2] https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-56501991.amp [3] https://www.forbes.ru/finansy-i-investicii/424665-shirokiy-k... [4] https://te.legra.ph/7-prichin-ne-pereezzhat-v-Kremnievuyu-do...

More to this “lucky coincidence” it was unbanned exactly when Durov failed in trouble with SEC and raised Russian-state money to solve his problems. Around same time almost all official Russian institutions open TG accounts and Russian Parliament (if we can call that silly thing like this) representatives was saying like “we solved all problems with them”.

When war started, and Russia banned a lot of services like FB, they created list of communication platforms they have questions about loyalty and cooperation with Russian government. TG was not on that list and through the whole war the only issue was about Telegraph — supplementary platform to publish long notes. AFAIK there was 0 questions or criticisms to TG in those 2 years.

As for me, it says a lot

Thanks for the clarification on last seen, I certainly misread it. About messages: hm, I was sure it existed before but maybe again my brain just lags.

As someone who for some time created and moderated fairly popular chat (200+ people) for anti-war Russians, I have very long and complicated history of relationship with this service and have a lot of different grey-zone stories where it is hard to understand whether it is a mistake from users and whether it is a leak from the service.

Hence I have a little low expectation and overreact on their recent changes

This is a fundamentally different problem for a fundamentally different audience.

If we take privacy issue, it can be divided into 3 segments:

* Privacy of user data. The basic level. When you use Google or Apple, they collect data. Even if you minimize all settings — data is still collected. This data is used to train models and models is used to sell ads, target you or do anything else you have no clue about (like reselling it to hundred of “partners”).

* Privacy against undesired identification. Next layer of privacy. When you want to have some personal life online without sharing much about you. Like Reddit, anonymous forums, or Telegram (to some degree).

* Privacy against governments. The ultimate boss of privacy. When you want to hide from all governments in the world your identity.

Signal was perfect at first layer strong but not perfect at 3rd layer (e2e encryption, no data collection to share nothing with governments who seek for data, good privacy settings, always tell you if your peer logged to new device to protect from cases when government operates with telecom companies and use sms password to make a new login), and almost non present at 2nd because they have no public features except group chats where you share your number.

Now they in one move close gaps at 2nd layer — you can hide phone number and stay fully anonymous, and strength their positions in 3rd layer, leaving the last piece open: government still will know that you have some Signal account.

As for me, this setup solves 99,999% cases for regular people in democratic and semi-democratic countries and address the most fundamental one: privacy of data and actions online.

Yes it is not perfect but barrier for government to spy on me is that high that I reasonably can believe that in most cases you should never be worried about being spied, especially if you live in some places which are named not as Iran or Russia.

The only scenario, in my perspective, you can want to have a login without phone (with all sacrifices to spam accounts, quality of peers and usual troll fiesta in such places) is when you want to do something you don’t want ever be found in your current country.

But in this case, IMO, Signal is the last worry you usually have on your mind and there are a lot of specialized services and protocols to address your need.