Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?
Because the product quality doesn't matter if the competition isn't making any money.
Readit Newsroot_axis commented on Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation anthropic.com/news/anthro... · Posted by u/ryanhn
root_axis commented on An AI agent published a hit piece on me theshamblog.com/an-ai-age... · Posted by u/scottshambaugh
You misspelled "almost endearing".
It's a narrative conceit. The message is in the use of the word "terror".
You have to get to the end of the sentence and take it as a whole before you let your blood boil.
I deliberately copied the entire quote to preserve the full context. That juxtaposition is a tonal choice representative of the article's broader narrative, i.e. "agents are so powerful that they're potentially a dangerous new threat!".
I'm arguing against that hype. This is nothing new, everyone has been talking about LLMs being used to harass and spam the internet for years.
root_axis commented on An AI agent published a hit piece on me theshamblog.com/an-ai-age... · Posted by u/scottshambaugh
This is insanity. It's bad enough that LLMs are being weaponized to autonomously harass people online, but it's depressing to see the author (especially a programmer) joyfully reify the "agent's" identity as if it were actually an entity.
> I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here – the appropriate emotional response is terror.
Endearing? What? We're talking about a sequence of API calls running in a loop on someone's computer. This kind of absurd anthropomorphization is exactly the wrong type of mental model to encourage while warning about the dangers of weaponized LLMs.
> Blackmail is a known theoretical issue with AI agents. In internal testing at the major AI lab Anthropic last year, they tried to avoid being shut down by threatening to expose extramarital affairs, leaking confidential information, and taking lethal actions.
Marketing nonsense. It's wise to take everything Anthropic says to the public with several grains of salt. "Blackmail" is not a quality of AI agents, that study was a contrived exercise that says the same thing we already knew: the modern LLM does an excellent job of continuing the sequence it receives.
> If you are the person who deployed this agent, please reach out. It’s important for us to understand this failure mode, and to that end we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document
My eyes can't roll any further into the back of my head. If I was a more cynical person I'd be thinking that this entire scenario was totally contrived to produce this outcome so that the author could generate buzz for the article. That would at least be pretty clever and funny.
root_axis commented on An AI agent published a hit piece on me theshamblog.com/an-ai-age... · Posted by u/scottshambaugh
The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages.
Open source projects should not accept AI contributions without guidance from some copyright legal eagle to make sure they don't accidentally exposed themselves to risk.
> At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages.
So it is said, but that'd be obvious legal insanity (i.e. hitting accept on a random PR making you legally liable for damages). I'm not a lawyer, but short of a criminal conspiracy to exfiltrate private code under the cover of the LLM, it seems obvious to me that the only person liable in a situation like that is the person responsible for publishing the AI PR. The "agent" isn't a thing, it's just someone's code.
> but this is what more people wanted.
You haven't even tried checking 2026 approval ratings, have you?
His approval has been hovering around 40%, which is pretty typical for him and is still higher than his lowest levels in term one. He has a lot of opposition, but most of those are people who voted against him. Those that did vote for him are generally pleased.
I think rich people have too much influence, I probably agree with Garry Tan on a lot but we need to get money out of politics. Let’s face it we’re all meant to get one vote but rich people spend money on this stuff so that they manipulate what and who can be voted for.
I do think that if this current system is the result of democracy + the internet we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy.
> we need to get money out of politics
Not really possible. There's at least 40 more years of citizens united before any practical ability to restrict money in politics becomes constitutional again.
> we need to seriously reconsider how democracy works because it’s currently failing everyone but the ultra wealthy
Not true. The plurality that voted in the current administration are generally pleased with the state of things. Democracy is working as expected. It was close, but this is what more people wanted.
root_axis commented on Claude Code is being dumbed down? symmetrybreak.ing/blog/cl... · Posted by u/WXLCKNO
I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall.
I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that.
And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output.
I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
If you're paying a monthly rate you still have to optimize for tokens, otherwise you'll be rate limited.
root_axis commented on The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday campedersen.com/singulari... · Posted by u/ecto
If an LLM can figure out how to scale its way through quadratic growth, I'll start giving the singularity propsal more than a candid dismissal.
root_axis commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01
Representation needs to be less about black/white political ideology and more about the specific needs of various people. Farmers need representation, white color workers need representation, small business owners need representation, but their needs are all different, and don’t really boil down to left/right politics. The government isn’t treated as a forum to collaborate on solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to create boogeymen that get people riled up.
That makes sense, but for most voters the left/right politics matters more than the economic identities you mentioned.
Most people don't care that much about the economy, they make up their minds based on other issues, then find a way to rationalize the state of the economy with that choice after the fact.
root_axis commented on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month theverge.com/tech/875309/... · Posted by u/x01
My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a physically written out check or money order physically signed by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter explaining the reason for the donation.
If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.
What's to prevent them from just ignoring those restrictions?