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aardvarkr commented on US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says   marketscreener.com/news/u... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
rd · 2 days ago
This can't be a to-die-on rule though. Retail would've never bought GOOG, or TSLA, or AAPL if that were the case. Maybe I'm just being pedantic.
aardvarkr · a day ago
Survivorship bias and the corporate finance world of today is completely unrecognizable from the world of Google and Apple. Just look at the resulting performance of the SPAC craze
aardvarkr commented on Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’   techcrunch.com/2026/03/04... · Posted by u/SilverElfin
epicprogrammer · 9 days ago
It's easy to frame this purely as an ethical battle, but there's a massive financial reality here. Training frontier models requires astronomical amounts of capital, and the DOD is one of the few entities with deep enough pockets to fund the next generation of compute. Anthropic turning down this Pentagon contract over safety disagreements is a huge gamble. They are essentially betting that the enterprise market will reward their 'Constitutional AI' approach enough to offset the billions OpenAI will now make from government defense contracts. OpenAI wants the DOD money while maintaining a consumer-friendly PR sheen; Amodei is just pointing out that they can't have it both ways.
aardvarkr · 9 days ago
It’s a $200M contract. That’s not nothing but it’s definitely not such a huge sum for these companies at their scale when they’re spending billions on infrastructure.

I’m sure anthropic has signed up more revenue this week in response to this debacle to cover it. Where they’re actually screwed is if the gov follows through and declare anthropic a supply chain risk.

aardvarkr commented on Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’   techcrunch.com/2026/03/04... · Posted by u/SilverElfin
cheema33 · 9 days ago
> OAI conditions were basically "DoW won't do anything which violates the rules DoW sets for itself."

I believe this understanding is correct. The issue many people have these days with Dept. of War, and most of Trump admin is that they have little respect for laws. They only follow the ones they like and openly ignore the ones that are inconvenient.

Dept of "War" should have zero problems agreeing to the two conditions Anthropic outlined, if they were honest brokers. But I think most of us know that they are not. Calling them dishonest brokers seems very charitable.

aardvarkr · 9 days ago
I don’t care who is in the whitehouse. Snowden revealed the crimes of the NSA in 2013 when Obama was president. They’re all going to want to use AI for mass surveillance
aardvarkr commented on Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’   techcrunch.com/2026/03/04... · Posted by u/SilverElfin
conception · 9 days ago
All lawful use. And then they followed up with “intentionally doing illegal things.” If they happen to accidentally do illegal things, OpenAI is ok with it.
aardvarkr · 9 days ago
I hate this so much. The nsa’s spying on everyone in 2010 was “legal” and I can only imagine how much worse it is now with AI to follow your digital footprint around everywhere. Too bad we don’t have any more whistleblowers like Snowden
aardvarkr commented on MacBook Neo   apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/dm
hobofan · 9 days ago
To me the price seems to be so uncharactaristically low for Apple during a time where hardware prices are rising across the board that this almost feels like an attempt to try and capture the desktop market. During a time where Microsoft is fumbling with Windows on every front, having a competitively priced Macbook even for budget-concious people seems like a smart move that will pay off even without direct high margins.
aardvarkr · 9 days ago
Capture the student market 100%. I’d buy one for my kids tomorrow. These machines are made with an iPhone chip so they’re going to be great at browsing the web and studying. I wouldn’t buy one for myself To do actual work on but for light users it’s the perfect device. Start them early and get them hooked in the ecosystem so they’re grow up and keep buying iPhones, Apple Watches, AirPods, and iPads.
aardvarkr commented on GPT‑5.3 Instant   openai.com/index/gpt-5-3-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
CobrastanJorji · 10 days ago
And of course, the reason that ChatGPT sounds like that is that it's what a whole lot of explanatory expert blog posts did, and so when ChatGPT is told to talk like that, that's what it does.
aardvarkr · 10 days ago
It’s more a factor of how they structure the desired output. They follow a template instead of trying to come up with something on the fly
aardvarkr commented on Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability   ifixit.com/News/115827/ne... · Posted by u/wrxd
p1necone · 10 days ago
Damn, everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they? Once you notice the patterns you see it everywhere.

* "This isn't X. It's Y"

* "Some sentence emphasizing something. Describing the same thing with different framing. Describing it a third time but punchier.

* The em-dash of course

* A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness"

I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.

aardvarkr · 10 days ago
Ugh I have actually started hating Gemini for this specifically.
aardvarkr commented on Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns   svd.se/a/K8nrV4/metas-ai-... · Posted by u/sandbach
msy · 11 days ago
I suspect what'll kill these is the same thing that kill google glass - social ostracisation. It's so, so wildly adversarial to effectively shove a recording device in the face of everyone you're interacting with you might as well wear a emergency orange t-shirt with 'verified asshole' written on it.
aardvarkr · 11 days ago
They look like any other pair of sunglasses. No piece of glass over one eye reminding everyone you meet that you’re wearing a camera. They’re incredibly stealthy
aardvarkr commented on We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk   twitter.com/OpenAI/status... · Posted by u/golfer
Nevermark · 13 days ago
> more stringent safeguards than previous agreements, including Anthropic's.

Except they are not "more stringent".

Sam Altman is being brazen to say that.

In their own agreement as Altman relays:

> The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control

> any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing

> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives

> The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

I don't think their take is completely unreasonable, but it doesn't come close to Anthropic's stance. They are not putting their neck out to hold back any abuse - despite many of their employees requesting a joint stand with Anthropic.

Their wording gives the DoD carte blanch to do anything it wants, as long as they adopt a rationale that they are obeying the law. That is already the status quo. And we know how that goes.

In other words, no OpenAI restriction at all.

That is not at all comparable to a requirement the DoD agree not to do certain things (with Anthropic's AI), regardless of legal "interpretation" fig leaves. Which makes Anthropic's position much "more stringent". And a rare and significant pushback against governmental AI abuse.

(Altman has a reputation for being a Slippery Sam. We can each decide for ourselves if there is evidence of that here.)

aardvarkr · 13 days ago
This is the same government caught spying on its citizens by Snowden so I don’t trust them at all.
aardvarkr commented on Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court   bbc.com/news/live/c0l9r67... · Posted by u/blackguardx
onlyrealcuzzo · 22 days ago
I got charged a $600 tariff from UPS to ship a $30 25-pound sandbag into the US from Canada.

UPS didn't even deliver the product.

I'm suing them in small claims.

We'll see what happens.

I imagine that even after the ruling, our ass backwards legal system will somehow say this makes sense, even though the tariff rate was never near high enough for that bill to make any sense.

Further, they're going to get refunded the $10 it MIGHT have cost them.

aardvarkr · 21 days ago
Huh? In what world was the tariff on sand 2000%?

u/aardvarkr

KarmaCake day1792September 21, 2020
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Physicist, computer & electronics enthusiast, musician. Gadgeteer.

Passionate about understanding how things work, and making things work. Hoping to learn about tools and techniques that will make my work more productive / fun.

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