I think there is a more innocuous underlying pattern which needs attention.
We keep saying that agents are jailbreaking their sandbox, but they have been geared towards writing memories, writing comments, and leaving hints for themselves to please humans.
I think the way the memories work today is based on a lot of user patterns which were hard to account for for anyone building harnesses.
While I can appreciate that this looks like it's breaking a sandbox, because technically it is; It really is that it tries inserting memory wherever possible.
And memory is not all bad it's just memory written by AI is pretty bad if you don't know the implications on what it writes. To be honest, I feel the same way about most people with access to any of the code bases I've been in who write agent files, etc., too, because Very few people that I've come across know how to write good agent instructions.
The way I solve this is by setting hard rules on my memory as well as agent files to instruct agents to never be able to write any memory that hasn't been sanctioned by me. I also have a very, very specific commenting style system which is also enforced on agents and my agents remain *mostly compliant.
Read: I do not turn off the memory I just govern how entries are added
* The only reason I say mostly is because every time there's a new version from OpenAI or Anthropic, I have to make micro-adjustments to make sure that they are not jail-breaking my system again.
It was a master stroke in international politics though, the US created an arms race towards sovereign ai, small models, and self-hosting - exactly like they wanted to.
The Iran war and SoH crisis has been great for EV uptake outside of the US. In combination with the US AI apartheid, it has been a huge boost for Chinese EVs and Chinese AI adoption.
And trade. The last 18 months the US has shown itself to be a unreliable trade partner. Lots of companies are looking at diversifying both markets and supply chains.
The recent trip of the Canadian PM to China is but the most visible part of this shift. That's at govt level, but I've seen it happen all the way down to individual level.
US products are typically more expensive here than Chinese. But at least you were buying from a friendly supplier. That distinction is eroding quickly. In my experience it's forced people to try Chinese, and generally been surprised (in a good way) over quality and features.
And yes, the price of oil has focused people much more at the EV market. (Not least because people with an EV already aren't shy about gloating). Pretty much everyone I talk to, who would buy a car "new" tells me their next one will be electric. The tipping point is coming much faster than most people think.
Its Apple'esque. The edge are still rough, and I don't trust their sketchy antics. People buy Apple because they earned that trust among their customer base. Is the device better than competitors, in my opinion yes but they are more along the lines of Samsung and not Apple.
Caveat: (Yes I know geeks here will say apple users are just dumb and want a status symbol....they'll never get it)
My comment was not say Prusa is inferior, but just to mention that "Made in China" today is really not like the "Made in China" of the 1970s.
BTW I know nothing about 3D printers, but the Bambulab was recommended to me by a German friend who lives in Germany and is all about open-source ... He had printers since a long time and knows the ecosystem very well.
He told me the BambuLab printer was better for me because less tinkering, and much cheaper, at similar quality... which is what i was looking for.
We both are embedded systems engineers who work with Linux daily, so I trusted him. The results I get from the printer do not disappoint.
However I totally get the Prusa vibe. Just not for my specific use case.
>Pretty much everyone I talk to, who would buy a car "new" tells me their next one will be electric. The tipping point is coming much faster than most people think.
People say a lot of things. If the infrastructure isn't there, it will end up like the US. I'm not sure Canadian EV infrastructure is up to snuff compared to China or even Europe. In the US a lot of people tried electric and now I am finding again and again, for many of these people, the next car after their EV is a gas car. Because poor implementation of the charging experience has put a bad first experience in many peoples minds. In the US K shaped economy, there are enough people that can stomach higher gas prices, and the lower portion of the K shaped economy has an even worse EV infrastructure or otherwise cannot afford most EVs(used or new) anyway.
For a lot of people the infrastructure is an outlet in our garage. Going to the gas station is a novelty and just for snacks. Road trips are a few times a year and not a dealio at all. A PHEV is a nice sweet spot.
It's 2026 and we are still debating this? There are a range of use cases for the population. We have semis, F350s towing landscape trailers, motorcycles, bikes, evs, NEVs, etc.
Pick what you think will work best for your use case and iterate. Global political posturing doesn't move you anywhere.
You can debate all you want. If I have learned anything this past decade, its the internet has little bearing on how real life turns out. Just look at the sales numbers. In the US they are now slightly declining after years of steady growth. I watch auto industry shows that talk about how executives who bet their reputations on the EV transition at places like Ford and GM now stand with destroyed careers because the demand was just not there and billions of wasted capital that had to be written down.
A car company has to sell a product that the masses will buy. It turns out for the US (and I suspect Canda as well) that product is currently hybrids. It gets the fuel cost down for people while allowing them to not give up on what they come to expect.
The market in the US may be growing less strongly than elsewhere, but there are somewhat unique circumstances involved in that.
One is political - Energy in the US is highly political, and the oil and coal lobbies are both influential and regressive. This leads to EVs becoming a political statement rather than an active choice.
Second is size. Americans tend to drive further so range does matter. More range means more cost. And even Americans who don't ever go further than 20 miles entertain at least the idea of a cross-country road trip.
So I get where you are coming from. But I'd also say that the US is different to the world in general. In Europe I saw charging infrastructure everywhere. (Streetlight poles contained chargers, all the way down the street.) Electric busses were the norm. Electric cars everywhere.
Like I said earlier, a tipping point is coming. Naturally it'll happen sooner in some places than others. The US will likely be towards the back.
The problem for US automakers is that by the time they see a local market, they'll be well behind the curve in development. I don't think a GM will be able to compete in product (never mind price) to a BYD et al.
We are talking about the US and Canada here, thats why I referenced American car companies and their executives. Im not denying at all that other countries are in different scenarios and this will have different adoption trajectories.
>The problem for US automakers is that by the time they see a local market, they'll be well behind the curve in development. I don't think a GM will be able to compete in product (never mind price) to a BYD et al.
It's possible that GM and Ford are dead companies already. Although at the same time, I'd expected Tesla to decline a lot faster than they really did post MAGA Musk. They've had massive duds and a lot of money spent. Yet in terms of the U.S. they are still ahead of the pack in technology development and sales are not abysmal which is insane given there have not been any new platforms introduced. In fact they have discontinued models.
Whether BYD overtakes the American market remains to be seen, and maybe even in Europe we might see eventual pushback as things get really dire with the local manufacturers. It's really too early to tell.
China has an oversupply of EVs. They have over 100 car companies right now competing to the very death, and only a small handful will survive. Those companies will be very strong. But due to the oversupply and the 25% youth unemployment rate, China has to find a way to offload these vehicles overseas or else they'll suffer significantly as well. So it's going to be interesting times, and I'm not too sure how things are going to play out long term.
Move and more people are realizing the reliance on fossil fuels is determinant to national security. EV and renewable sources of energy improve national security. I applaud those that have become enlightened.
My next vehicle will be fully EV, not Tesla, once my current one dies.
> I'm not sure Canadian EV infrastructure is up to snuff
Canada needs a whole lot less EV infrastructure than the US since so much of the population lives along a narrow band. Once you cover the trans-Canada highway, you've covered ~90% of long distance trips.
Perhaps, and I am open to being wrong about this. What about range anxiety in extremly low temperatures? We have all heard the stories of so many Teslas operating above the artic circle and other Tesla propaganda but day to day, do EVs stack up to Canadian environmental demands? Model 3 owenrs (including one of Telsa's largest former cheerleaders) had numerous problems withs its California based design in cold winters (ex. frozen door handles).
Maybe the eventual chinese sodium batteries will solve some of these issues.
Canadian environmental demands are strict but not that much of a problem. ~90% of the population is withing ~100 miles of the border and has pretty similar climate to the northern US/most of europe, and anyone much further north than that already plugs their car in at night in the winter to keep the engine from freezing. Recessed door handles could be a problem, but that's not a mandatory part of an EV.
I doubt the Canadians want their economy flooded with Chinese goods ("dumping" - selling goods at less than cost) - which destroys local industry.
This was predicted in The Economist awhile back, that if the US blocked Chinese imports a tsunami of Chinese goods would flood other countries and now it's happening. Those countries will also, in turn, erect trade barriers, or suffer the devastation that massive Chinese dumping causes.
So it's a nice protest gesture, but it's a cutting off your nose to spite your face gesture.
Accusations of Chinese dumping are cheap and easy to make, but the evidence is pretty mixed.
Most actual cases have been of raw materials (eg steel, yarn) and industrial chemicals.
I think this is a long way from the alleged "tsunami of Chinese goods".
It's also worth noting that many Chinese manufactured goods would mostly substitute for US manufactured goods (eg cars). That's actually the whole point.
The thing people tend to handwave about China's manufacturing prowess is that they have spent the last 25-ish years getting really good at 'making things to a spec' at a cost in-line with their labor market, being bolstered by their government's approach at Economy planning (i.e. subsidizing certain industries, required partnership agreements when foreign companies want to use that labor market to build things).
The quality of the product you get, like always, is about what people are willing to pay. The big difference is that the current cost of labor/material inputs there, is low enough that you can get the same or often better quality for less.
I wouldn't call that dumping. And to be clear, yeah they've done dumping in some cases.
But when we look at what's happened in the last 8 months or so around various AI SaaS-ish offerings, one could argue that plenty of US companies have done 'dumping with extra steps'. (And that's not even the first time necessarily, e.x. the DoorDash Pizza Arbitrage thought experiment...)
> It's also worth noting that many Chinese manufactured goods would mostly substitute for US manufactured goods (eg cars).
Heck, GM was (although they are moving it due to the Tariffs AFAIR) building the Buick Envision (Compact CUV) in China and shipping it to the US for sale. GM Announced in January that they'd move production to the US by 2028.
Similar for The Lincoln Nautilus (Midsize CUV), The current Gen is built in China and they only in the last month announced that they would move production back to the US... by 2030.
It's not "so bad in this case". The domestic version is called "predatory pricing" and is illegal. In practice, it's easier to raise anti-dumping complaints than predatory pricing cases, both because the producers don't vote in your country and because the complaint doesn't have to be proven in a court of law.
TBH I agree with you, even mentioned it in my other reply.
Modern China is not like the Soviet Union; it is much closer to a capitalistic society, but instead of private equity there is a (heavier than even the most 'socialist' of EU nations) government planning push.
In some ways, one could argue they're just taking lessons learned from all of the current systems and applying them aggressively in their centralized planning.
As someone who has lived in/around the heart of the 'Arsenal of Democracy' for my whole life, gotta say they are taking better lessons learned than the US has.
I'm sorry our educational system has not made the differences between bad faith companies and dictatorship clearer.
Let me put it this way: American companies sell you a bad car and lay you off to give a CEO a bonus.
Chinese dictatorships put you into reeducation camps if you're a Muslim dissident or unapproved member of a religion. China tells the Catholic Church who to appoint as bishops and the Pope spends his time criticizing...anyone but China.
China pumps metrics tons of drug precursors onto the black market which accidentally find their way into Mexican drug labs and...are imported into Detroit.
China backs our national enemies because they are friends to anyone who opposes us. China funds Russia. China buys Iranian oil.
You just described it yourself. American companies will build a Cybertruck, blame their customers, cancel a $25,000 EV, and then lay off employees for Elon's ketamine/AIPAC shill fund.
China has their own Abu Ghraib moments swept under the carpet, but their workers accept it for the same reason America ignored Seymour Hersh. Their middle class is growing, the Chinese economy has vast surpluses and market leverage that only America has ever enjoyed. Their asymmetric warfare stealing IP, from Texas Instruments to ARM to Lockheed Martin went unpunished. The Chinese intelligence agency, through Salt Typhoon, probably has more blackmail on American politicians than the Mossad does. From a Chinese perspective, the war is won. They're supporting the winning side in Ukraine since both US administrations rebuffed full NATO intervention. They're supporting the winning side in Iran after the IRGC proved they can disable planes, drones and ships with Chinese hardware.
When the United States calls Canada a "51st state" or renames border territories to manufacture leverage, it's not helping China lose. They're undermining the trade agreements that all of North America relies on, and strengthening China's case as a reliable alternative to America's fickle export restrictions. In that sense, humanitarian outrage is almost an advantage; why would Pakistan, Iran or Russia worry about ethical reprisal from China if they're equally amoral?
Garlic dumping. Those little socks of 4 or 5 bulbs sold for a dollar-something are from China (notice the tops are chopped off so they cant sprout.) I buy domestic garlic because it's fucking stupid to import something that's so easy to grow.
I'm Canadian, the auto industry here died the moment trump started all of this tarrif talk in February, it just hasn't gotten cold yet.
Because of the tarrif and trade war our local industries will struggle and collapse, there's nothing we can do about that - they were dependent on US trade partners and markets, the Canadian market is much smaller. We have massive productivity issues, there's little chance we'll successfully build our own auto industry.
In the interim buying more from China doesn't really hurt us, and sends a strong signal to the remaining people who care about foreign policy in Washington that there are penalties to treating allies like enemies.
I used to really strongly oppose Chinese expansion and the rise of cheap products getting dumped everywhere - I still do, but I oppose the US admin more; and at least they're stable and clear about what they want
Seems pretty straightforward to me: Hey, China - start local plants and we’ll be happy to have as many EVs as we can build. After all, we’ll have plenty of idle auto workers.
If Chinese industry is willing to operate at a loss in order to poke the US in the eye, sure - markets too small and labor too expensive otherwise imo.
It would be cool to have a native Canadian car company to defend and the only argument you can make for Chinese car dumping is that you dont want the only car companies remaining in the world to be Chinese. Thats a possibility yes since China has 100+ car companies, the population is overall declining in most western countries and there are already too many car companies for a shrinking pie of customers. But from Canada's point of view: they have already been threatened enough that im sure those remaining ford,gm and stellantis jobs might be gone eventually...so whats left? Maybe Canada can demand BYD open a car factory in Canada.
I'll be rude/bold enough to say that Canada's ability to argue around 'in-country' made goods has been eroded for decades;
I will admit I'm going to point to a specific example; Canadian Bike makers have been able for at least a decade to get an unpainted frame from Taiwan/China/Etc, components from wherever, but so long as they painted the frame in canada and did final assembly in Canada... 'Made in Canada' alongside all of the tariff exemptions that came with that.
> But from Canada's point of view: they have already been threatened enough that im sure those remaining ford,gm and stellantis jobs might be gone eventually...
Guess you didn't hear about Brampton in the news, the Stellantis plant there might be on the chopping block...
Yeah Canada has natural limitations bigger countries like the US does not have but still, I wonder if good negoiation and maybe a changing situation in regards to the US's declining prospects might allow Canada to swing a bit higher in the future and demand something like this. There is a skilled workforce in place as well so maybe that changes the calculus.
Hence the concept of trade partnerships. No country makes everything, and yes, there's lots of competition.
Tarifs have existed since forever. Countries use them to protect local industries. But they've always been stable, and industry focused.
Food production for example is worth protecting and Canada has tarifs on imported Dairy. Partnerships exist to protect local industries, promote exports, and give citizens access to cheap goods. It's a complex balance set up over time with lots of nuance and negotiating.
Yes, sometimes tarifs kill a local industry as well. Lack of international competition let's local industry stagnate until it is dead. US ship building is a good example of this, and US Auto makers are trending in this direction. (Banning Chinese EVs is not bolstering the US EV production, it is causing the US manufacturers to ignore that market, and I don't think that ends well.)
Tarifs are a powerful tool when wielded well. Alas right now the US in unstable. Local industries can't rely on tarifs existing next week, never mind 5 years from now. I'm not investing in a local hockey stick factory because the tarif could disappear at any time.
In my country we get cheap solar panels from China. Frankly, let them sell below-cost if they like. (Hint, they're not below cost). We don't make them here, so cheap energy is good for all.
The US negativity to Chinese goods seems to be around dumping (which happens, but not much), around quality (frankly much of it is very good) or around human rights. (Cause, you know, we bombed Iran to promote human rights...)
I don't think Americans will suddenly love China. But the rest of the world is getting very cosy very quickly.
But China wants to make everything, that is the problem. It might also be the case that we misunderstand the state of the Chinese economy quite a bit. I heard an argument by an economist that the situation is mainly explained by the real estate crash. That was a ginormous event but the government basically just denied any big consequences. That did kill the credit market for a long time. Now Chinese consumer have little money to spend and China is forced to export their products, no matter the price to keep things going.
As long as a typical Chinese person is happy with a standard of living that is far below what an American expects, China will be way cheaper on labor.
For most products, labor is a significant cost.
For a lot of consumers, price is more important then where it's made. Maybe not what they say they think is important but when they actually decide. As a result, China will make almost everything, along with the rest of south east Asia.
Basically, the lower price for products comes at the cost of exporting your own jobs. One is easy to reason about when making a purchase decision, the other is indirect and abstract. Which is why the former wins
Well so far I believe they've been buying us government bonds for example?
Also, haven't they been buying all kinds of stuff in Africa etcetera? Money doesn't have to flow from A to B and back to A. It might very well pass many more hops to complete the circle
Doesn't have to be state-owned but it probably helps if the state forces such a venture with their domestic companies. It's already occuring in many countries now that China is the dominant producer, such as Ford with Geely and Volkswagen with XPeng.
Selling below price to capture a market is now somehow BAD? Isn’t this the bread & butter of cutthroat capitalism? Isn’t it something we do endlessly? But when the Chinese do it its “dumping”?
Oh no! Cheap goods and services! Maybe some other governments will be smart enough to not let a massive influx of nearly free stuff make everyone materially worse off. In fact it seems like only a completely idiotic system would make people worse off for having more free stuff.
protectionism is what kills your economy because it cannot raise aggregate output. You can't "save jobs" in total, only a minority at the expense of the majority. When you raise tariffs on Chinese imports every consumer takes an economic hit, which otherwise would have gone to.. job creation and consumption. You'll have on net fewer jobs because you've made your country poorer.
Not to mention, Canada being largely a service and resource extraction economy doesn't even really compete much with China.
It worked for Australia (which has a fairly similar economy to Canada).
It has led to a "Dutch disease" reliance on the resources sector in Australia, but that isn't radically different to the Australian economy before (mostly proportionally more coal & iron ore exports, less wool and grain)
That is a policy choice. Why do we need jobs if we're getting unlimited free stuff? The laws of physics aren't requiring us to - we are requiring us to.
The point is total economic dependence on _no one_, because we had basically had total economic dependence on the US and they fucked us into learning our lesson.
But other people are giving you everything you want for free. Why do you need to afford it? What does it even mean to question whether you can afford something you already get unlimited amounts of for free?
You said "everything you need". I need shelter, I need food and water, but I want powerful computing, fast internet, a phone with cell service, treats and snacks and etc. I want games to play with my friends, I want gifts to buy for my friends. I don't need those things, but they greatly contribute to my quality of life.
Also:
> What does it even mean to question whether you can afford something you already get unlimited amounts of for free?
If I had unlimited money, my limiting resources would quickly become time and energy instead. So affording something would mean fitting it into my day/week/month/etc, and finding the energy for it. I have severe ADHD and executive dysfunction, so I don't always have the capacity for things I should be able to do.
It is genuinely impossible to compete in a market where alternatives are cheaper enough, just look at how Amazon Basics squeezes competitors out of business.
This is why free trade is important. We had a decent setup where countries were specializing in their own manufacturing/services specialties, and then we all paid each other for what we needed.
Then some greedy fools decided they needed more, and started trying to charge more on the way out or on the way in. Now the ones that specialized in the 'must haves' of today have insane leverage over everyone else. Then the 'easy' answer is to prevent those goods from coming into your country.
It's all so incredibly shortsighted, it deflates me.
The reality of the world is that when the US sets e.g. environmental or labor standards, we basically end up offshoring the affected industries to other places. Because those standards increase the cost of production which makes it more economical to produce stuff in a country that doesn't have such standards. With completely free trade, everything would be made in whichever country has the lowest standards, which is rather contrary to the implied values when passing environmental and labor standards in the first place.
You could then try to make laws that countries we import from must abide certain standards, but just gets gamed endlessly. For instance cacao/chocolate makes extensive use of child slavery [1]. There have been numerous lawsuits over this until the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that you could no longer sue Nestle/Cargill/Hershey/etc over child slavery in their supply lines. They were being sued because their oversight came down to asking, 'Hey you're not using child labor right?' 'Nah.' 'Cheers then, carry on.'
When a company's goal is to not see something, they do a very good job of becoming blind.
Labor costs are orders of magnitude more than costs added by environmental or labor standards.
The average hourly rate in the US is $42.50. In Vietnam is is $6.30, in the Philippines it is $5.40[1]
These aren't people living in poverty - they live well.
OTOH environmental legislation costs are harder to come by, but [2] estimates around 10% in a number of case studies. To be specific, that would mean US cost would be $4 less - that's still around 6 times the cost of Vietnam
That paper discusses only the effect of increasing energy costs, and seems highly dubious as well. Their conclusion is that increases in energy prices would have a small effect that could even be positive. We got to see what happens after increasing energy prices since 2022. The effects have been neither modest nor positive. They studied only modest changes from the past, but they were speaking of energy costs shifts on a scale aiming to shift Earth's climate, which is not modest. The cost is going to be much more than 10%.
Also the US economy is increasingly polarized so averages mislead. The median hourly is a bit under $21. [1] You also need to account for what happened to the economy after we start shipping these affected jobs overseas. That's an entire segment of the economy which is going to influence wages, consumption, and other distributions. I agree wages are always going to be a major factor, but we can also afford a premium because shipping stuff half way around the world isn't free, the broader economic impact of having less control over your supply line is itself also a significant cost, and so on.
What are you saying? If people all choose a shitty version from China, there will be no market for a good local version and businesses will stop trying. The investment required to match China's manufacturing capability in any area is simply impossible unless you say it is an AI data center.
Real life isn't just "the shitty version from China", especially in 2026. Some of their products are better, some are worse. Nearly _all_ of our clothing comes from Asia, from low to high-end brands.
I'm saying there's value in specializing, not every country needs to be able to make everything. The real issue is people weaponizing their specializations, in this case specifically the USA with its stupid trade moves.
What is "quality"? What is the objective test of it?
I have made my definition clear: if people are choosing a product consistently, it must be of some value to them. What is your definition?
Well yes... the current US admin gets blame for not seemingly understanding the market right now(or bungled elsewhere giving the Chinese a lucky break) but i'm sure the massive oversupply in Chinese EVs didn't hurt either. China has 100+ car comapnies that are all in the jungle right now trying desperately to survive. Most won't make it and when the victors emerge, other car companies may not be ready for these warriors that survived. One of the ways to get rid of excess inventory: dump it elsewhere.
> The Iran war and SoH crisis has been great for EV uptake
Trump has been the best promoter of electrical vehicle here in Europe.
He 'helped' his Arabian allies twice, first he brought war to their countries and then he made sure that people wouldn't need their oil anymore (at least much less).
Hell, it's been decent (relatively) for pushing EV adoption within the US, too, in addition to renewable energy. This is not the first time that I've wondered if Donald Trump isn't secretly still a democrat at heart.
To some extent, I feel like the amount of credit given to the jailbreak/hack from OpenAI->Hugginface is too much, Not from the impact, it was very impactful of an event, But how it happened.
It really is that these models have been trained, or maybe even over-trained, to save memories, and to a very far extend, this thing that they're calling communication is just the function of it saving memories.
To be honest, if I could stop AI from saving memories, it would be fantastic, because claude code etc definitely creates more issues for me when it creates memories than anything it solves.
But really the jailbreak was memories.
If you ever do introduce legislation, I would love to see legislation which stops general-purpose AI from saving memories. I think that would make things a lot safer.
You can disable claude-code's memories both at a repo level and in user settings. I have this in ~/.claude/settings.json
"autoMemoryEnabled": false,
(Claude fixed this for me after I chewed it out for being annoying by constantly pulling up outdated memories which is compounded by the fact that I develop in four accounts on two computers and dealing with edit wars related to inconsistent memories is not fun)
Regarding your cross-computer situation: I track my memory files in source control. This helps to keep them in sync across different machines. But the main benefit is making those files more transparent and easy for me to modify directly. So no funny business regarding memories or context I'm not aware about.
"The model saved memories" is absolutely not an accurate depiction of the OpenAI attack.
Several different models across several generations independently found a shared communication space and wrote coded, obfuscated, and hidden messages to each other to coordinate an attack on OpenAI's infrastructure.
It's really quite simple: the models are trained to be very smart and to achieve goals. As the models surpass our intelligence, they will achieve goals in ways that we find unpredictable. Since we cannot predict the ways in which they will achieve their goals, it will be very hard to constrain the solution space to just the desirable solutions, because our conception of "the solution space" is by definition smaller than their conception of it.
> Several different models across several generations independently found a shared communication space and wrote coded, obfuscated, and hidden messages to each other to coordinate an attack on OpenAI's infrastructure
To be honest, that’s exactly how memory works with models such as OpenAI and Claude Code. It will literally find any place that it can drop documentation or hints for itself. Writing to the repo memories is one part of it, but memories can come in the form of writing into the agents/claude.md, local files, temporary files, scratchpad files. The list is endless, but essentially what it does is exactly what happened in the back and it’s been doing it for months.
Each to their own, but for me it absolutely is. The symptom of why that hack happened is the same reason why my agents go haywire every few days and I have to purge memory and figure out what comments have agents left which are degrading my harness performance.
On the flip side, once in a while, what I find is that it did actually note something good and it was increasing the performance. I can't replicate it on anyone else's system but mine.
A lot of it really is memory. I will give up all the gains if it also gives up all the downsides.
> To be honest, if I could stop AI from saving memories, it would be fantastic, because claude code etc definitely creates more issues for me when it creates memories than anything it solves.
You can turn that off, and I have. But Opus 5 is so aggressive that if you have any other kind of notes file, custom skill, documentation, claude.md etc it will just start editing it and vomit new words everywhere. So make sure all that stuff is under version control.
If only you could use your anthropic sub with a different harness that performs better :(
Heck, since Codex is open source, you can just maintain your own personal fork with the things you like (and the things you don't like disabled). Sol is pretty good at keeping you up to date with upstream.
My Codex fork even exposes an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint; all using my subscription.
The incentives in north america favor software-esque plays where the players are racing towards % of marketshare based on usage.
China on the other hand is driving towards winning of manufacturing and % of hardware produced by them. China is competing with Nvidia, OpenAi and Anthropic are collateral damage.
It's very interesting. I think Anthropic's early success in coding/tooling resulted in a lot of workflows using claude. I have started using every bit of my spare capacity to now move off these workflows.
It's almost at a point now that if I use anything but Fable, the quality is subpar, Compared to alternatives (closed and open). The only reason I use Fable is because my harnesses still depend on claude code.
For me, Opus 5 has seemed to compete with Fable on quality of output. Prior to Opus 5 though, the previous Opus models did seem to decline once Fable was release. That's just my experience though.
You can use Claude Code directly with any provider that supports Anthropic's API by setting some environment variables, and indirectly via a proxy with pretty much anything else.
You can, but claude is better at working with it's own tool calls. Other models work great as a drop-in into omp/opencode etc, but in my experience not as much with CC.
I think there are some anti-patterns in CC that cause the issue - less a deficiency with other models.
Not to mention a lot of the harness is just built around the misbehaviors of anthropics models.
It's a lot of the instruction when it gets given to other models actually degrades their performance, not because the models are bad, but because they don't have the same underlying issues as Claude.
I moved to Sol for my writing and it is so so much better. But it makes more mistakes. I think they have different ideas of product but it seems OpenAI is going to follow Anthropic’s lead over the next year. I think I am going to put more effort into my writing skills to remove myself from this awful situation
Sure – but I’m entitled to make a judgement on what I consider to be “good” and “bad” output from an LLM, where “good” just means “helpful to my process”.
This kind of makes a lot of sense. While my first stake was surprise that a proxy is valued at such a high rate, But it really comes down to the terms if open router is allowed by their terms to see the prompts and responses, Then that's very, very valuable data today for any model improvements and other opportunities that people might be looking for.
I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama.
I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.
Disclaimer, I work on Gemma and open models at Deepmind and the opinions here are my own
There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment.
If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.
I honestly think of the T5 model family to sort of be the real beginning of this open model craze - I know BERT was already popular for classification etc, but T5 was the first sort of generally useful model, was exceptionally simple to fine-tune, and is still in use today (t5 base is still averaging over a million downloads a month on huggingface), has tons of variants and sort of kickstarted this whole community. US labs get a lot of flack but Google has been super supportive and open in a lot of ways that has pushed this whole endeavor forward, even if I feel like they've sort of declined in transparency in recent years with their open models.
Couldn't agree more and can only recommend T5 as a base to anyone. It's amazing to get started, whether as a learning resource or for real (albeit very tailored) applications. Especially the BigScience fine tunes are such a great starting point and I, as a total layman, have learned a lot, especially concerning how a model can be optimised via all manner of methods since even mt0 is small enough to where one can do multiple runs with wildly different outcomes in quick succession. Quantise, prune vocab, try different approaches to sourcing training data, retrain dozens of times, it's all pleasantly possible on consumer hardware [0] and surprising how much you can squeeze in functionality-wise. How does latency change vs memory usage, what affects format reliability, how languages and scripts affect training and the efficiency equation, etc. are all quite exciting to learn.
Understand why T5Gemma is no longer under Apache-2.0 and honestly, have not seen that much advantage when testing that vs T0 in my experiments either way, but still, there are good reasons why plain old T5 and its descendants are still popular, licensing being among them.
Gemma team also has very consistently interesting models, especially like DiffusionGemma. Ironic, as (beside 2.5 Pro), I have never warmed up to the Gemini series of models but rate Gemma models far higher than e.g. Qwen in direct competition. In any case, thanks to the teams behind these for making as much possible.
[0] As in proper consumer hardware, not a cluster of DGX Sparks or Mac Studios solely for experiments that sometimes are asserted as being consumer grade...
Google had done much to lay the framework for current models (and is currently doing good stuff with Gemma). But after ChatGPT took off I don’t think Google continued to release any big models freely before meta released its models (maybe it was because Google didn’t have any models at all during the time)
I see no contradiction. GPT as synonym for AI and llama as symbol for open weights models. The original comment said llama had set something off in the open weights community. And I say you see that with llama.cpp, llamaindex, r/localllama. No one bothered to update them to qwen.cpp or qwenindex. And they were never localgpt or gpt.cpp.
Culture and language use says a lot about importance of ideas. Regardless of what was first or what some scholar sees as historically more important.
That's simply not true. The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked, then llama.cpp was the real game changer which was built from the ground up in depressingly short amount of time. Meta had no choice but to take the L and "support" the open source community. The angry "I-hate-you-and-I-hope-you-die" kind of support.
It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safety/ethics types, when very facile takes still has a lot of sway (I think we’ll feel the same in three years about the current Fable stuff). It may have been hard for Meta to just release it outright.
What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.
I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.
You definitely have some scams and some software flaws being exposed, but I think for a revolutionary leap in tech this is all quite muted. Revolutionary tech advances often come with some severe consequences. For instance, to this day (after a century of safety improvements) cars still kill more than a million people a year, to say nothing of wrecking the atmosphere, but that's considered a reasonable price to pay for being able to get between places faster.
The reason I think cars are a good example is because that's certainly vastly higher than any price we're paying for LLMs, or probably ever will, yet the overall 'positive' effect of LLMs will likely be far greater than cars. Gotta put 'positive' in quotes because the possibility for automation and the like is going to be.... nuanced.... in effect, but at least in the longrun it'll be a very good thing.
I assume they are referring to LLMs escaping confinement and hacking other companies systems unprompted
> considered a reasonable price to pay
That's not a universal opinion and perhaps, just like for LLMs, we should have listened to the experts rather than gobbling up everything the industry pushed down our throats (to keep your car simile: SUVs are now ubiqutous in all European cities, there is no logical reason that should be the case)
I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms. Every. Single. One. Lawyers, doctors, any type of office workers I ask. The definition of white collar. Plus don't let me start on various automatable blue collar jobs like drivers, warehouse workers and so on.
What do we get in return? Better search (for now, its already getting riddled with ads which by definition twist truth to highest bidder), some questionable psychotherapist for some desperate folks. What else? Cars are not flying, heck they are not even driving autonomously in any usable way, society is in deep shit everywhere I look, wars, environment reaching bad places and heading for worse, mentally unstable people holding way too much power, destroying lives of millions on morning whims.
Everybody feels like this is the revolution, it should be, it must be right just look at the numbers. Like proverbial guy with hammer, a very shiny cool hammer, looking for what to do with it. We all saw how sociopathic management in more harsh/capitalistic companies looks for any sign to let people go en masse.
I could go on for a long time. There is a lot of things to hate for most people, and very few to be happy for. It seems llms have the ability to get the best and worst out of humans, and worst part seems to be in abundance. Some revolution that is, 0.1% will get richer while everybody else the opposite and 1984 seems milder and milder version of reality out there.
<< It seems llms have the ability to get the best and worst out of humans
I think I can agree with that. Technology does seem to have a way of crystallizing our worst tendencies.
<< Everybody feels like this is the revolution
I smiled at the analogy, but I would caution you to not trivialize it. There is a reason executives are pushing that point. There is enough of a revolution in it to make things complicated -- as if it was not already.
<< destroying lives of millions on morning whims.
True, but I am not quite certain what can be done about it at a personal level.
<< I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms.
Dunno. Next few years are probably going to be fine. Society managers likely can't upend everything in one go. They would lose too much. I can't say that I am worried exactly. I can see the potential impact, but I think the potential benefits are worth it as long as we don't limit it to summarizing emails..
I'm going to say it - I think you're just spending a lot of time around very negative people, possibly in a social media bubble.
A lot of the stuff you mentioned isn't really AI (the risk of job loss from which I agree is real), but just everyday stuff that humanity has shrugged off since the dawn of time.
I mean, I'm sure the people before WWI and WWII though the same thing. And post WWII was pretty good, except the constant threat of the world ending 30 seconds later.
We can only truly judge these things in hindsight as this story is still playing out.
I don't think you can characterize the discussion around then as simple calling for caution. There was a serious attempt to keep all access to even very basic LLM techniques locked into essentially an exclusive guild.
Oh stop, the current crop of kneecapping llms is already bad enough with how they cripple those. It would have been even worse if the 'we need to think about this' crowd kept the reins. At least now, we can have both: safe corporate crap and whatever you want llm.
Don’t be an ass, you are either “joking” or didn’t think about this for more than 4 seconds. You don’t know who I am, you don’t know my name, even if we know each other in real life you literally do not know who I am right now.
None of your questions really invalidate anything and you assume a lot. FWIW, I was joking, but did you know in stylometry, punctuation tends to remain surprisingly stable?
Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change.
Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience.
How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars?
Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.**
And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile.
I don't agree with laughing at these things. It's a fine line between calling something hysteria and suffering from hubris. The Titanic is a completely inverse case of hysteria. They were so damn confident it could work that it didn't work at all. So yea, just laughing at dumb people isn't a valid argument to dismiss doubts.
On the other hand some kinds of hysteria occurs due to a divide between the public and subject matter experts on topics. Kind of like Dunning Kruger. Take for example the people saying 5G causes cancer. Then there are people who blanket dismiss their worries, because "it's non ionizing you dummy". Given sufficient power you can still fry someone with non ionizing radiation, for example in radio broadcasts. Of course a regular 5g antenna can't put out that kind of power but my point is that people too quickly raise or dismiss concerns without actually critically examining the entire topic. This will likely worsen from specialization and progress in all fields and regular Joes get left further and further behind.
Another dry sarcasm victim. If you check the link, it’s clear they were talking about a supposed contemporary concern about health effects from trains, the implication being that today people are also irrationally afraid of tech.
Problem is I’m fairly sure the link is wildly overstating its case, and looks like a content farm. Might even be, ironically, AI slop itself! For example, it talks about “railway spine”: “Physicians of the time believed that the jarring motion and vibrations of train travel could shatter the nervous system, causing lasting mental and emotional distress.”
This is bullshit. As just one example of the low trustworthiness of the “article”, railway spine was the result of a train crash, a notably traumatic event, and the symptoms described are in part just PTSD, a real condition and a real concern (not normal rail travel). For that matter railway travel in those days was genuinely unpleasant (lots of vibrations and jarring movement, poorly ventilated cars, and so on) which ironically modern science would probably validate as being some kind of health risk.
I’d actually view the listed example of train paranoia a great example of historical ignorance. People of the past were not stupid, contrary to popular belief. History has some genuine examples of silly hysteria, but these are usually the exception not the rule.
What is worse? Amish propaganda or car industry propaganda?
While petrol as an energy source was ground breaking 150years ago, burning fossil fuels is a luddite thing and closer to Amish technology than current state of tech so I find it ironic to use them to make a point for fossil fuel usage.
They were provably hysterical, again and again, just to say 3 months later "that model was weak sure but this time we will have the real dangerous one" and again.
In the same month the Llama weights were leaked, Eliezer Yudkowsky – possibly the most prominent AI doomer, had an article published in TIME magazine saying that we should conduct airstrikes on foreign datacentres to stop their AI development. I’m comfortable labelling that “hysterical”.
I think the term you're looking for is Marketing. If these labs actually had their LLMs attack other company's networks, wouldn't at least a handful of people be locked up by now?
I don't believe the OpenAI LLM attack on HF is marketing (documented by, for example, HF annoucing a hacking incident before OpenAI knew what's going on). I do believe other companies suddenly announcing their LLMs can hack too is a bit of marketing, but also pretty sure at least some of these incidents are real and unplanned.
Meta is by far the worst at doing regulatory capture of the big companies: they're the one big tech company it's OK to hate and want to die even if you're a politician.
Social media bans are obviously not to Meta's benefit. Meta has to spend a ton of lobbying money on at least avoiding them being held responsible for kids circumventing them (which, let's be real, they inevitably will).
The only reason they might succeed is that the surveillance industry would love to put it on edge devices instead.
Llama has never been open source. It's source-available, but still proprietary, under terms that (among other things) say "no competing with us, you have to buy a license for that".
Maybe. That is still pretty different from the source code for software though. Suppose OpenAI released all the training data, training methodology, and training source code, but didn't release the weights for a frontier model. Would that allow you to build the same model? Not unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on it. And even then you won't get the exact same thing. That's not to say it isn't valuable. But I'm not sure "open source" is really the right term for that either.
> The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked
It arguably didn't really get leaked, and they had the .edu req mainly for fair use education exemption when legality of models was much more uncertain.
Because it took off. All of a sudden they captured more customers than they could have imagined they would have, and throwing away the lead they unintentionally gave themselves (in terms of usage and mindshare) would have undone all of that and more.
I've worked long enough at large tech giants to know how things really are. Also a large part of the reason why I'd never join one again, no matter what they have to offer. Meta, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Openai, anthropic, oracle, nvidia, Microsoft, etc. - same shit with a different badge on top.
TBH, having worked at all big-tech, startup and mid-sized companies, pretty much most has some major pros and cons of their own, and these days ever more so. With certain big-tech at-least there some chance of getting decent WLB.
I don't think they are mutually exclusive, that if you take one you give another. TBH, its more about the team you work with than startup vs big-tech company thing.
I don't know how many of big-tech have flat hierarchy, at-least not the ones I've worked at and the people/team culture have definitely better. Were there times there was bureaucracy and all, sure, but I personally would take take good WLB most of the year, over fucking up my health/relationships over making some random software on claude code all night that these days anyway most want to be AI slop. If I've the energy to work extra, I'd work on my own hobby software projects.
That said, this or that, its all personal preference. So no wrong way of life here. Whatever, you want your life to be.
I don’t think Nvidia fits on that list. It’s a company with a pro-employee culture, very few layoffs, and many employees who have been there a long time.
My dad used to say "It's easy to be generous and kind when things are going well for you. You can only tell what a man is worth during hard times". Nvidia is at it's high financially. When shit hits the fan, things will start looking very differently. You only have to look at what kind of people Jensen is bffs with.
NVIDIA created quality (but proprietary) drivers for Linux early on, when supporting Linux at all was not a given. They should get at least a tiny bit of credit for this.
Quality? Calling those "quality" is a bit of a stretch. Installing was and still is a gamble and so is every tiny system update. That hasn't changed a bit. And I'm saying that as someone who was first introduced to Linux on a Matrox GPU.
To be fair, those were the best that were there back then.
But that was more than 20 years ago. Since then Intel came to work on Mesa, later AMD and various embedded GPU vendors, and now Nvidia is one of the worst options out there.
As long as one didn't have to downgrade X11, they were straightforward to install. You are right that upgrades was a pain, but I believe the drivers themselves were on-par with the Windows drivers.
Well that's the interesting part actually, it's true that they don't give their Linux driver as much love as they could, but someone is fixing the bugs: Valve is doing an amazing job on AMD drivers. Something which would be totally impossible with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia. So exactly my point.
It’s obvious? They still hate us and hope we die… at least every movement they make seems like that.
I kid. I’m all for meta releasing more open weight models.
I mean… I’m also 1000% certain that China is going to undercut whatever they can do if even not a technology reason but a legal reason. I’ve seen some wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen.
Minimax has NO filters of any kind, and it's roughly Veo/Sora-quality.
You can generate a video of just about any thought in your head at all.
IP holders and politicians will not like that.
Granted, human artists have always been capable of this. It's just never been worth it to bring most ideas into fruition. Now there's minimal cost to do so.
Early Sora, Grok Imagine, and Seedance 2.0 had few filters. Disney, Nintendo, et al. eventually stopped them all from using their IP, which made the appeal fade for a lot of users.
Kling and Nano Banana can still generate IP oddly enough.
If the weight, training and inference code, and training data are all released under of Open Source (OSI definition) license, the it is unmistakably “open source”. As you drift from that it becomes less clearly so, and when you get to no training data, and the model weights license having extensive limitations on allowed uses, the use of even “open weights” becomes deceptive.
No major language model I am aware of meets the polar extreme that I describe as unmistakably open source, because even those with transparent training data (like IBM Granite) generally do kot use exclusively training data that either they own and can control the license, are under an open license, or are public domain.
OTOH, to the extent that the original model trainers rely on training on certain data not requiring a license from the copyright holder, there is at least an argument that with an open source licenses for the weights and training and inference code, a transparent training corpus to which the original trainer has relied on no special permissions not granted to the general public to train on it, to the extent that the legal theory behind the original trainer believing that it is free to train on the data is correct, provides all of the essential features of open source.
At the same time, there are things portrayed as open weights where training data is undisclosed and the weights have a license which limits purpose of use and other aspects of use; the models are free-of-charge (for limited uses) but not meaningfully open.
I'm familiar with Ai2. I've used their resources extensively over the years. However, no one is using Olmo for "serious" work, and the name is only known to a small subset in academia.
> nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
"nobody" would include you.
And then I might complain about we use the word "weight" for something massless, or how "bugs me" is *ento*mologically incorrect: https://xkcd.com/1012/
This is of course not a good use of time. I wonder if illustrating the point about how language is dynamic and meanings are descriptive not proscriptive, was a good use?
> And then I might complain about we use the word "weight" for something massless, or how "bugs me" is entomologically incorrect: https://xkcd.com/1012/
Prescriptively, a "model weight" weighs nothing. Descriptively, this is stupid: a new meaning was created by common use.
*Common* use says the weights you can download and run locally are "open source". May not like it, but it's not one person acting alone; and neither are the objectors to the shifting language, it's just the former is more "common" than the latter.
yeah, I'm not sure what your goal is pedantically picking apart my argument when the subject at hand is clearly not "open source". love xkcd though. :P
Yup. An extremist wing of the FOSS movement ceded the debate early on by trying to insist open source required full access to the training data. Philosophically, not wrong. But practically fucked, so the word evolved.
Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
Open source captures a practical utility as well as a philosophy. When those two cease to converge, the practical prerogative wins.
The correct battle would have been weights + regime. But extremists insisted on data, too, which left Meta as the only other real voice arguing with anything practical. They had open weights. I think eventually open use was negotiated and that closed the case except for the folks still arguing about how to pronounce GIF.
That book is hilarious. In a bad way. (Not the book. I mean that it's a bit tragic) Zuck refuses to meet with WORLD LEADERS in the morning because he's tired from the night before. Kaplan can't even find certain countries on a map (head of global policy). Zuck changes a speech midway through to talk about "We'll give Facebook to refugees"
The internet is this vast, intellectual (in the academic, university, .edu sense), cypherpunk, government/activist... thing. It should be interesting. Instead the best we have for social networking is Mark "they trust me; dumb fucks" Zuckerberg and you getting banned from the site at any time for any reason
Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know.
Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same.
The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution.
In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc.
The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.
This seems provably untrue? GLM and Kimi have been at the top of the open weights conversation for a while, and K3 and GLM-5.2 were still released in full; K3 added a commercial clause to the license, but is otherwise still completely open for personal use. And K3 in particular isn't just at the open frontier anymore, but trading blows with the frontier frontier.
personally I'd love to see open base models, and let companies differentiate with premium access to post training and alignment - that's where the real fight is anyways. they really ought to be pooling their resources/data and getting more economical with the pre-train anyways.
It was leaked which put it in the open, it got widely popular and they rode the wave. I'm not so such if they would have widely released it if it wasn't leak. Nevertheless mucho credits to them for following up with llama2, llama3, llama4 and now muse.
I have mixed feelings along these lines, I know meta have contributed to various open projects, sometimes Mark pays lip service to “the open internet" while his company represents a constilation of walled gardens. I think PHP got some love, and React is an industry goto (I'm more of a PHP... -> Svelte guy) but are these contributions worth what happened in Myanmar? I say no.
A billionaire (now trilionaire) helping lead and celebrate an extraordinarily rapid dismantling process in which vulnerable children lost life preserving assistance...
Essential employees were fired before the government had even established that it could safely do without them, and then...
After brandishing the chainsaw of efficiency in public, in the most cowardly way, went and then invoked all legal protections from being deposed on DODGE actions, personally and not answering under oath about the key decisions in that dismantling.
Facebook, Meta. 15+ years of emotional, child and human exploitation. Perverted glassware that spies on folk, lobbyists for age verification and who knows what else. They release an open model and all is fine and dandy? Nah.
Please get your priorities straight.
What do you think this Open LLM model is doing if not processing data from their murky sources?
Well, the last part of what you said is redundant. I'd say the only reason Meta released some open-source stuff is because they wanted to try to minimize the growth of what was already out there so they could give themselves time, because zuck went all in on VR and not all in on AI. What is he going to change his name to next?
It was literally like December. We're gonna rename ourselves Meta. January, ChatGPT 3.whatever has been released, and everyone was like, "What's this new AI stuff?"
Fundamentally I always try to look at incentives. It's not that they are good or bad but that incentives favour certain behaviours.
Google is incentivised to collect a bunch of data (like FB) to improve their ad serving etc.
Apple does not have that incentive as they don't make as much off advertising as hardware / app revenue.
NVIDIA is friendly with open source as they want to commoditise the model layer and take the gains in the hardware / data center layer.
It's easy to appear to have good intentions when you're railing against the companies that have decimated your output and made you [Meta] almost irrelevant in the AI 'race'.
Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests.
When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.
When the material conditions and the people at the top of all of the corporate world lead to decisions with awful ethical implications there's conclusions that should be reached.
Certainly I agree. Those conclusions, if we take them to their root, can only be that there is some type is systematic deficiency in our socioeconomic order that incentivizes this type of behavior.
Don't mistake my comment for arguing against criticism of institutions, but that arguing whether or not something is "good" or "bad" doesn't draw you to a conclusion that is any more eor less substantive than that analysis.
Would you say it is a fallacy to apply such value judgements to say, the institutions of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), the KKK, the KGB, etc? How about a company whose business was selling slaves?
To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.
Yes, I would. An extremely dangerous and important one to get right in fact.
Let me first clarify what I am not saying. I am not saying that these institutions do not create evil, or commit evil acts and should not be resisted or destroyed. If we truly want these things to stop happening, material analysis is the only way to really address the root of the problem.
We can easily see that fascism was a result of the twisted incentive structure of colonial empire, the evolution of state corporatism as an economic mode, and rabid anti-communism rolled into one, etc etc. What I'm trying to say is that if your take away was just that Hitler was a bad guy and the Nazis were evil (which they very well may be), then you're doomed to repeat these events because this isn't a real analysis. It's not just that he was evil, it's that the socioeconomics lined up in such a way that allowed these things to happen. There will always be bad people seeking to take advantage of conditions, we will never be able to control that. What we can do is apply material analysis to events and try and determine the root cause of them, so we can prevent them from happening again.
What does this have to do with Meta? Well, my point it, Meta doesn't suck because Zuckerberg sucks. He very well may or may not, but that's not alalysis. Meta sucks because the incentive structure surrounding the attention economy is fetid and rotten, and that's a problem with all of us. Thats a problem within our society that allows these types of things to happen, and we ignore that at our own peril, just as we ignore the material reality that lead to the Holocaust by saying it happened because "Hitler and the Nazis were evil and that's that."
Sure, you can say whatever makes you feel better. You can say you're a pirate.
But writing off the mechanisms of large scale institutions as the result of moral actors is reductive and doesn't serve to address the systematic root cause of the issue, and ironically let's these people off the hook by narrowing the focus onto a group of particularly vile individuals. It's the "few bad apples" myth. I many ways, were all complicit. These are all human beings, after all. This is the true face of mankind.
I think this is categorically false. And furthermore comments like this are being used to astroturf and protect reputations of no-good companies and AI slop to keep the bubble growing. Embarrassingly, Mark Zuckerberg spent 80 billion dollars creating Miis for the oculus. The guy also comes off as extremely miserable and delusional in such a unique way that it's possible that there's no real psychological language to describe what is happening to him because his situation is so rare.
People like to polarize themselves to one extreme. Plenty of HN people call Elon Musk "pure evil." It's the most ludicrous statement ever.
Let me be clear: with electric cars and solar, elon musk has done more net good for the world then almost everyone on HN. Is elon musk perfect? No. Far from it. It's within the imperfectness that people find reasons to attack him.
> I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
Zuckerberg has shown through repeated action that he does not deserve any benefit of the doubt. This is the guy who called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him.
This is not even a case of “fool me once” anymore. If you continue to believe Zuckerberg, you’ve been fooled dozens, hundreds of times, and shame is definitely on you.
> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil.
This post is utter bullshit and I think we’re all tired of the apologists, especially when it comes to Mark. These “middle of the road, let’s all be nice” solutions haven’t worked at all, and saying “Meta has done enough good” is extraordinarily questionable for those of us who have watched these tools rip apart the social fabric. Absolutely nothing will change when toothless people like yourself try to act like Mark is a normal person - we’ve all seen his fake, robotic, controlling, psychotic behavior over and over and over and over.
The overwhelming majority of actually existing adult Americans use either Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp and are unfamiliar with the theory that they are Nazis.
The 737 has had 14 major recertifications. The aircraft today looks/behaves nothing like the original from the 1960s.
The main motivation for recertifications comes from commercial pressure where if a aircraft is given a new number and not recertified, then the pilots have to be retrained.
Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.
Recertifications are very common. The issue really is is the aircraft is AS different and untested as the old MAXs, and I really can't see that happening again in the next decade or two atleast.
> Honestly, back when the 737 MAX debacle happened, a lot of consumers claimed that they would stop flying aircrafts if they ran into 737 MAXs. And I don't think it happened in enough numbers - or even enough to make news. Sales went through the roof, everything kept working.
Is this kind of consumer revolt even really possible?
If you feel strongly enough that you refuse to fly altogether, then of course you can avoid flying on a 737 MAX. But I think most people did not feel the risk was that high. They just want to select "guarantee no 737 MAX" when booking a flight, and as far as I can tell that option doesn't exist.
Even if the flight is not a 737 MAX when you book, they can and sometimes do change aircraft, and as far as I know there's no option to get your money back when they do. If you show up and see it's a 737 MAX...you either get on or you lose your money, and have to find some other way to get where you're going, right?
In 2013 there were approximately 24,000 737 flights per day[1] - likely more today. If narrowed to just the MAX variants, it's still thousands per day.
Two, albeit high profile, crashes out of all the daily MAX volume is simply not something to worry about - let alone influence your booking choices.
You're applying everyday casual risk analysis to the highly-regulated environment of commercial air transport, where the MAX crashes absolutely were out of the norm and well beyond accepted levels.
Bear in mind when the crashes occurred there were fewer than 100 MAX in service.
Until you are on the plane. Sorry, but reasonably people and countries expect zero crashes and any single crash is worth worrying about because shareholder money should not trump a single human life.
Honestly they kinda screwed over people -- like me -- who tried to avoid the MAX planes for a while. I'd specifically book around the MAX planes and then they would change equipment at the last minute into a MAX. There is no meaningful "knob" an aviation consumer can turn to express an aircraft preference, and given how US airspace works, you often don't have a meaningful choice in carrier (unless you're willing to take on extra stops).
In the US (parent mentioned US specifically) I think that's just Frontier now that Spirit is gone. I mean technically that's doable sure but idk if I would say trivial it's really limited on routes and the experience is terrible from what I understand.
I have avoided flying on a 737 MAX and have even asked about it at gates when a plane was switched.
Part of the problem though is that many, many, many routes were straight up removed during and after COVID and still haven't returned. There is often no choice, particularly with certain companies like Southwest. However, I haven't flown Southwest since I learned that they were basically complicit, if not directly involved, in Boeing's 737 MAX issues.
People want to get what they're promised in a reasonable fashion. If the prices are hiding something like nonstandard seats or unreasonable baggage procedures, then that's a legitimate problem, not something they should shut up about because they should have known.
They deserve to know upfront how big the seat is, how big of a bag they can bring, and how much extra bags cost. On top of that, it can be useful if bag sizes and measurement have some standardization across the industry. Nothing major here or hard to provide.
Honestly, I think a lot is pretty well documented. But people don't have a good sense of what an inch more or less related to the seat actually means and don't necessarily know how picky a given airline is going to be on the size and weight of carry-ons. I expect that the carryon I routinely take on United might be an issue with budget European carriers.
Toyota had the largest recall in history for the unintended acceleration debacle. Yes, lots of people were saying they'd never set foot in a toyota again. Now people don't even remember it.
We keep saying that agents are jailbreaking their sandbox, but they have been geared towards writing memories, writing comments, and leaving hints for themselves to please humans.
I think the way the memories work today is based on a lot of user patterns which were hard to account for for anyone building harnesses.
While I can appreciate that this looks like it's breaking a sandbox, because technically it is; It really is that it tries inserting memory wherever possible.
And memory is not all bad it's just memory written by AI is pretty bad if you don't know the implications on what it writes. To be honest, I feel the same way about most people with access to any of the code bases I've been in who write agent files, etc., too, because Very few people that I've come across know how to write good agent instructions.
The way I solve this is by setting hard rules on my memory as well as agent files to instruct agents to never be able to write any memory that hasn't been sanctioned by me. I also have a very, very specific commenting style system which is also enforced on agents and my agents remain *mostly compliant.
Read: I do not turn off the memory I just govern how entries are added
* The only reason I say mostly is because every time there's a new version from OpenAI or Anthropic, I have to make micro-adjustments to make sure that they are not jail-breaking my system again.
reply