birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
5hr ago
I think it's somewhere between humorous and telling that this is happening at the same time as their fight with the Department of War (ne Defense Department).
They won't offer unfettered access to the foundation model because it's "unsafe", but they're simultaneously willing to give up on "safety" as a core principle. That's a real hoot.
I don't remember who, but somebody on this forum once posed a test that could be shorthanded as "if they were serious". For example, if various left wing figures were truly serious about Anthropogenic Global Warming being real, solvable and an existential threat, then nothing would be off the table to solve it. Carbon credits in exchange for machine guns in vending machines? Let's do it. Electric car subsidies in exchange for a border wall? Get the bricks. However, what we're seeing instead is leaders of the movement buying beach side mansions.
Now compare this to Hegseth. If he genuinely believed that Anthropic held the seed of a nascent digital god, of course he'd do everything in his power to make sure it was pulling in the USA's direction. If he has to strong arm a few weirdo Californians to do it, no problem. If he has to seize entire companies and put hundreds of people under the fist of US state power, that sure beats what would happen to them if thousands of nuclear Chinese murder drones popped up from San Francisco Bay. In his mind, we cannot possibly afford to get behind in the AI race.
But, what makes him think that? Is it Amodei saying things about detonating entire industries every year or so? Is it Amodei talking about superintelligence? Is it Amodei talking about a "nation of geniuses" in a data center? Is it Amodei making proclamations that Claude is going to commodify bioweapons?
Most of us here have some capacity for bullshit filtration. LLM tech is impressive, and by burning enough money to fund several dozen Manhattan projects, we've managed to make it scale far enough to be truly surprising. Nonetheless, I don't think many people here take Amodei's maximalist position at face value. We know, on some level, that the God Machine isn't going to gift us with the apple of terrible knowledge in the next year or so. We subconsciously filter out those claims. On the other hand, a lot of people in DC haven't been marinating in this stuff since the old "I had an AI make d&d spell names" posts.
I question how much of this is the result of Hegseth and his crew not understanding the various silicon valley shibboleths and coded language and taking Anthropic's statements at face value. If I actually believed everything anthropic's leadership was saying, I would be shitting my pants. I'd be shitting my pants, then shitting a second pair of pants, then likely shitting somebody else's pants due to the raw, unfettered terror of thinking about what would happen if China (Anthropic's favorite boogeyman) got that tech and not the US.
Maybe Amodei simply scammed too close to the sun. It's a lot easier to say "safety" rather than "not ready for that kind of work" when you're staring down the barrel of an IPO in a few months.
birb_cromble
12hr ago
I love chatbots but I hate agents though.
That seems to be where I and a lot of my coworkers are landing these days. The chatbot interface is like a portal into an alternate reality where StackOverflow actually tries to be helpful.
birb_cromble
14hr ago
I'm seeing some reports that the company is also slashing raises and non-salary compensation like equity grants. Is that true?
birb_cromble
1d ago
Was this pr cover for shedding bloat? Maybe
Given how far their stock is down from the peak, and how this cut puts them closer to 2019 headcount than not, I can't help but feel like this entire thing is "AI washing", for lack of a better term
birb_cromble
1d ago
If you wanted a job that AI can't replace without going back to school, what would be good?
I've been asking myself the same question a lot recently. Right now, it seems like my best bet is "bartender". I've done it before, and if you're good at it the pay can be decent by the standards of unskilled labor. Waiting tables also isn't bad if you can find the right place. The pay is good enough that I could live on it
Anything beyond that is probably going to require some sort of certification, outside of sales, and sales is its own special kind of hell.
birb_cromble
2d ago
One important thing I've learned is that I have some very specific triggers for migraines. One for me, for example, is blood sugar fluctuations.
Have you managed to nail any of those down? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of laying in a dark room.
birb_cromble
2d ago
eating out is just expensive now.
God it really is. I remember when I used to be able to hit an all you can eat Chinese buffet for $5. That got me through the first couple of years out of college.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Committee meeting went great, can graduate whenever apparently.
Congratulations
birb_cromble
2d ago
Your intuition is broadly correct here. If the tool can do this at all, it's almost certainly going to be faster than a human doing the same work. If it can't do it, it doesn't really matter.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Thanks for keeping me honest.
Spending for the year so far is $1200.77 less than the same time last year. Month over month spending is $153.02 higher, spread out over gas, a quarterly utility bill, and taking my partner out for dinner and a margarita.
I'm a little disappointed that the spending was higher, but I'm reminding myself that I can't be a complete miser all the time. Being able to go out and do something nice for someone you love is worth it.
I'm still hitting a 60+% personal savings rate for the year by the federal definition. That will likely get blown to hell next month when the dental work comes up, but I tell myself that's why I'm doing this now.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm assuming things like the Pentagon threatening to invoke the defense production act on anthropic would still go in the culture war thread?
birb_cromble
3d ago
That's been my experience - if it can't one shot it, I generally give up
birb_cromble
3d ago
For those who aren't going to click the link
Did you forget the link?
birb_cromble
3d ago
This is why I would run it against a proprietary suite that actually does a bunch of real, fully integrated runtime tests
birb_cromble
3d ago
I'm not an LLM defender here, but I think most Tarantino movies fail this rubric.
I don't know why but that's fucking me upore than it probably should.
birb_cromble
3d ago
But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities
Honestly this might be part of it. You can't really immerse yourself in Latin without a time machine, but you can get by pretty well if you spend a long time banging on the grammar, which is exactly how we teach most languages today
birb_cromble
3d ago
If LLMs/AI are posed to completely disrupt all the knowledge work, why do we not see it in stocks?
IBM's stock is absolutely shitting the bed at the moment, and roughly corresponds with anthropic claiming they can handle cobol now.
Here's a request. It's not identical to some of the stuff I do at work, but it's close enough that I'd like to see how it goes on 4.6 vs 4.5 and a cheaper plan.
https://github.com/petrandreev/jBPM3
I'd like to see this modernized. You can stick to only the core project for simplicity. That includes, but is not limited to:
- Migrating to Jakarta
- Upgrading to hibernate 7
- Replacing the now-unsupported xml mappings with annotations
- Compiling against java 17, and producing Java 17 bytecode
- Upgrading to JUnit 6
- Finding replacements for dependencies that are completely dead and rewriting the points where they interface with the code.
If you can get all the tests to pass and post the jar + dependencies somewhere, I can run a local test of the output.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.
But the OP says:
Yes yes, I haven't used every model and every scaffold (some of the systems he discusses are not publicly available at any price).
There is also a quote about the use of frontier models.
This is the second time this week where you have not engaged with the the actual content and delivered this "free models" swipe. What's going on here?
birb_cromble
6d ago
Once you're over 30, you really need to be using a larger mic. By the time you're retirement age, it should be at least ten feet wide.
birb_cromble
6d ago
There are significant costs involved in serving tokens
Both you and @RandomRanger expressed this sentiment, and I'm a little perplexed. When I've noted concerns about the financials of some of these big AI companies, people have assured me that the inference side of things is profitable. Is this a different enough use case that it would be a significant cost, or are you including all the infrastructure necessary for it in this calculation as well?
birb_cromble
7d ago
I'm a huge fan. Looking forward to the new one coming out this year.
birb_cromble
7d ago
If anybody has recommendations for multiplayer cooperative games that can be played in 20 - 40 minute chunks, I'd like to hear them.
Examples include:
- Helldivers 2
- Darktide
- Vermintide
- Jump space (getting a little long)
- Phasmaphobia
Bonus points if you can tell me why it's fun.
What they probably have in mind is government programs where agricultural surplus products were processed into shelf-stable products like powdered eggs and distributed to low-income people.
As somebody who grew up poor, those programs were awesome, and I'd like to see them expanded.
One of the biggest problems with food stamps back in the day was that you could just... sell them. When we stayed in one place long enough to get benefits, my mother would barter food stamps for booze or other ineligible goods. I, on the other hand, would get saltines and mustard for dinner, if we had the money for it. Sometimes I'd just get a big glass of water. The EBT card system probably makes that harder, but not so hard that it doesn't happen.
On the other hand, programs like government cheese were fantastic if you were a hungry kid. It wasn't fungible in the same way food stamps were, so it usually ended up sitting in a big box in the fridge and you could just... eat it if you were hungry. The real, undeniable, fundamental foodness of it acted as an extra guardrail against abuse in a way that is probably impossible with financial assistance
I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.
I know there's supposed to be an accent over the e, but I consciously choose to omit it as an insult to the French.
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