_jab

A bit off-topic from the core of the post, but:

> At Anthropic we’re committed to cracking down on industrial-scale distillation through our own practices, including identifying and banning accounts that use our models in this way. This is challenging—for instance, the relevant accounts can often only be identified after substantial distillation has occurred, and distillation often involves creating large numbers of fake accounts that form a moving target. The practices of any individual company cannot entirely solve the problem, which is why we have called for policy on this issue.

One thing I've never really understood is what sort of policy could possibly deter or hamper Chinese labs' distillation efforts. The only thing I can imagine is some sort of strict KYC regulation applied to all models above a certain threshold, which seems both painful for the broader US AI ecosystem and bound to fail anyways.

Both can be true simultaneously. Anthropic can probably be trusted not to train on our Fable sessions, but eroding ZDR as the industry standard still sets a dangerous precedent.

There's a parallel between data retention and general mass surveillance. Sure, both systems can be used for purely benign purposes, with appropriate safeguards in place. But history shows that surveillance systems are alarmingly easy to co-opt for nefarious means, and model providers do have a heck of an incentive to leverage retained data for internal means.

This is worth protesting, even if I believe this policy itself does not immediately compromise my privacy.

It's pretty simple; organizations are willing to tolerate paying $1500/month/engineer, which seems to be roughly inline with "normal" consumption for most full-time engineers. If that number grows significantly, then I bet companies will start exploring flash models more, as you propose.

While $835k is undoubtedly a lot of money for this man, split among Tennessee's 7M residents, this works out to be less per taxpayer than the sales tax on a latte.

Still, this idea bears merit for other reasons. Americans routinely underestimate how much money is spent on Social Security, healthcare, and debt payments, and overestimate how much money is spent on education and infrastructure. More clarity into that could help build real political momentum to actually balance the budget.

This agreement feels so friendly towards OpenAI that it's not obvious to me why Microsoft accepted this. I guess Microsoft just realized that the previous agreement was kneecapping OpenAI so much that the investment was at risk, especially with serious competition now coming from Anthropic?

> Vercel did not specify which of its systems were compromised

I’m no security engineer, but this is flatly unacceptable, right? This feels like Vercel is covering its own ass in favor of helping its customers understand the impact of this incident.

With intense competition for enterprise contracts coming from Anthropic, I thought this was OpenAI's time to get _less_ memey, not more. What the hell are they thinking?

Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.

Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.

Sure, but it's not as if the DoD was planning on using Anthropic to _collect_ the data either? I assume that the hypothetical DoD use case Anthropic shied away from dealt with the processing of surveillance data, just like what Palantir does.

I've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend - it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter and cheaper.

Completely agree.

Crazier question: what’s wrong with a well-intentioned surveillance state? Preventing crime is a noble goal, and sometimes I just don’t think some vague notion of privacy is more important than that.

I sometimes feel that the tech community would find the above opinion far more outlandish than the general population would.

I'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either.

But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.

Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

Next.js is still pretty damn widely used.

This argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Claude Code, like any product, presumably has dozens of external dependencies. What’s so special about Bun specifically that motivated an acquisition?