Hazzard

As much as I think that's correct a lot of the time, something like Bruno has value too. Implementing complicated auth for an annoying service once and reusing it across several pre-written requests, useful features like a GUI and history to see prior responses from an endpoint, being able to share the "collection" in the repo as examples/developer tools that's maintained alongside the code, writing docs with each request to explain its usage, this stuff _does_ add value that isn't trivial to do with curl.

It’s usually pretty good about that, very apologetic (which is annoying), and usually does a good job taking it into account, although it sometimes needs reminders as that “context” gets lost in later messages. I’ll give some examples. In that same networking session, it disabled some security feature, to test if it was related. It never remembered to turn that back on until I specifically asked it to re-enable “that thing you disabled earlier”. To which it responds something like “Of course, you’re right! Let’s do that now!”. So, helpful tone, “knew” how to do it, but needed human oversight or it would have “forgotten” entirely. Same tone when I’d tell it something like “stop starting all your commands with SSH, I’m in an SSH session already.” Something like “of course, that makes sense, I’ll stop appending SSH immediately”. And that sticks, I assume because it sees itself not using SSH in its own messages, thereby “reminding” itself. Its usual tone is always overly apologetic, flattering, etc. For example, if I tell it bluntly I’m not giving my security credentials to an LLM, it’ll always say something along the lines of “great idea! That’s a good security practice”, despite directly suggesting the opposite moments prior. Of course, as we’ve seen with lots of examples, it will take that tone even if actually can’t do what you’re asking, such as in the examples of asking ChatGPT to give you a picture of a “glass of wine filled to the very top”, so it’s “tone” isn’t really something you can rely on as to whether or not it can actually correct the mistake. It’s always willing to take another attempt, but I haven’t found it always capable of solving the issue, even with direction.

Man, AI agents are remarkably bad at “self-awareness” like this, I’ve used it to configure some networking on a Raspberry Pi, and found myself reminding it frequently, “hey buddy, maybe don’t lock us out of connecting to this thing over the network, I really don’t want to have to wipe the thing because it’s running a headless OS”. It’s a perfect example of the kind of thing that “walk or drive to wash your car?” captures. I need you to realize some non-explicit context and make some basic logical inferences before you can be even remotely trusted to do anything important without very close expert supervision, a degree of supervision that almost makes it totally worthless for that kind of task because the expert could just do it instead.

Fair, I definitely haven’t simped for them in the past just because they post some good articles on AI safety. Although… I’ll say of them, they seem more like what OpenAI should be, actually trying to implement AI responsibly, and freely sharing that information. It’s good research, even if marketing is the motivation. Meanwhile OpenAI, the “charity” that’s supposed to guide us to a responsible AI future, moved their most addictive and mentally dangerous model to the highest paid tier instead of actually killing it until very recently. Although at the end of the day, Anthropic is a for-profit company, in a better world they wouldn’t have released models publicly before this research was actually done and pressing dangers like AI psychosis were actually safeguarded against. Better late than never, sure, but the whole industry has done a lot of damage already, and the work of resolving the issues still isn’t even close to done.

I mean… this is losing them a 200 million dollar contract. And to one of their competitors who will gladly acquiesce, so it’s hard to argue that this benefits them. Good marketing to a bunch of left-wing people who hate AI, I guess, but that feels like Elon joining the Trump administration in hopes of selling Teslas to rednecks, it might work on a few, but I just can’t imagine this is 4D chess that will make them a fortune when they’re abandoning that much money immediately. Their statement also came after the DOW threatened to put them on the list of companies that are totally banned from doing any business in America, usually reserved for Chinese companies that are deemed a national security threat, which would make it illegal for any company doing business in America to do any business with them, as they’d be added to the same list, which would have essentially killed Anthropic as a business entirely. You don’t have to love Anthropic because they did a good thing, they were fine with anything less than automatic killing and mass surveillance, after all, but I don’t think it’s correct to say this was sneaky and spineless somehow.

Yeah, I’m starting to think this is the heart of the cycle. When things are good, people stop worrying about the details and trust their governments to keep things as is, it’s only when things stop working that the average person starts paying attention and advocating for themselves, and history is forgotten until it repeats itself.

Exactly, actually, I’d say I agree. As much as we’re clearly in a bad state, I’d say for how late we are into this cycle, we’re still better off than in a dictatorship or the ways other systems unravel. I don’t think any political system can be incorruptible, so long as humans are involved (as they absolutely should be), and this isn’t the worst state imaginable. As a friend often says, “democracy isn’t perfect, but it’s the best thing we’ve got so far”, and I think the same goes for regulated capitalism, with working anti-trust and taxation.

Generally agreed. Unregulated Capitalism is the real issue here, we used to have, like… within the lifetime of people we know, very regulated capitalism and a market that really worked for us, the average person was rapidly getting richer and we had real quality of life. That said, a part of me admittedly thinks this may be inevitable though, because once capitalism is unregulated briefly, all hell breaks loose. Once any company has a monopoly and true market dominance, the only way to continue making line go up is to change the rules of the game by lobbying, and once money enters your government and corrupts its ability to regulate, the train never stops. I suspect it keeps getting worse until things go violently wrong and the system resets. But even then, I think we as a society forget, and “try” deregulating capitalism again in a few hundred years, kicking off another cycle that ends in revolution.