retsibsi

I think a specific song becoming irreversibly memeified is different from a person lacking the ability to engage unironically. I don't know if you're from my generation, but if you are, I imagine what they are experiencing is similar to how we would feel if we watched an old movie with Never Gonna Give You Up played completely straight at a key emotional moment. (But worse, because The Sound of Silence is a very delicate and emotional song, whereas Never Gonna Give You Up is inherently a bit cheesy and fun, so the contrast between the original intent and our experience wouldn't be so extreme.)

You're taking that phrase out of context. If you look at the parent and grandparent comments of the one you originally replied to, it's pretty clear that "the answer is profit" was pointing to the insinuation that Anthropic is deliberately causing Claude Code to waste lots of tokens for no reason other than short-term financial gain, and that's what solidasparagus was disagreeing with.

Are you talking about fixing conducted by the exchange / bookmaker, or just gambling-related fixing in general? The latter is of course happening, and I'm sure you're right that there will eventually be more public scandals. (And I agree with you that sports betting is very socially harmful.) But I thought the conversation was about fixing conducted by legal betting exchanges (sorry, 'prediction markets'), and I don't think your claims hold in that context.

> literature, you can trivially read all the classics by the time you are 30

I don't think this is true, at least not for an ordinary person, unless you're dedicating your life to it (hardly trivial) or ploughing your way through for the sake of completion rather than absorbing them intellectually and emotionally. Writers like Joyce can be difficult to even parse if you're trying to read their work quickly, and to truly understand it you'll probably need to engage with secondary sources. And then there's the likes of Proust, which aren't exactly difficult to read but are extremely long (and probably won't do much for you unless you take your time with them). There's no objectively valid set of 'classics' but we're talking about certainly hundreds and arguably thousands of books. A book a week every single week from the age of 15-30 would do it if we're taking about a medium-sized set of classics...

> Calling that an opt-out is so rich, like calling suicide an opt-out method. 24 hour waiting period to do something on a device I own.

What?

You only have to change that setting once, and you can do it in advance (before the restriction takes effect). So you don't even have to wait 24 hours at all.

I can see this change having negative effects on the android ecosystem, but the direct impact on your freedom to install apps on your device is basically zero. If that's not the case, please tell me what I've missed.

Metric rules and imperial drools, I agree, but I reckon if we put our minds to it we can multiply by 0.9 and 1.6 (or 0.91 and 1.61 if you are genius). Keeps the mind sharp in this age of outsourced thinking!

You say this like it's obvious, but I don't see the logic. When free users waste tokens, this costs Anthropic money. When subscribers waste tokens, this probably also tends to cost Anthropic money; the only way it benefits them is if it causes the user to buy a more expensive plan (or open a second paid account). If you or your company are paying per token, then sure... but is the amount of money they're making via this kind of wastage really enough to outweigh the risk of driving users away?

How many people are spending tokens on this in a way that is valuable to Anthropic? Free user tokens are a cost; subscriber tokens are either a cost or neutral, unless they cause the user to hit their limit AND this causes the user to buy a more expensive plan. And each customer they annoy might go to a competitor. So I think they almost certainly have an incentive to fix this, unless almost nobody cares about it.

I may have it wrong, but I think 'architecture' can include relatively low-level details: you could even design a program down to the level of what each function does, and still only be doing 'architecture', not coding, so long as you're not writing the code or specifying exactly how it should work.

You may be right that they are in a bind wrt public opinion. But that is not a defence against any specific criticism. What is your opinion on the conflict of interest mentioned above?

The point is that we don't know how to ensure they are aligned with anyone: not the company, the user, or the rest of humanity.

If someone claims that a model is 'aligned', it makes sense to insist that they specify with whom it is aligned. If someone claims that 'alignment is far from solved', they're probably pointing out that nobody understands the models well enough to be confident they are robustly aligned with any chosen set of values (including 'do whatever lukewarm707 wants').

Hah, I just watched it on your recommendation. I think they were going for the vibe of a cynical sitcom... but they forgot to put any decent jokes in, and they didn't do what successful sitcoms do and paper over the nastiness with charisma and some moments of warmth. So it's just 3 minutes or so of stress-inducing bleakness.

I definitely don't think it's unique to academia. I think some systems are more tethered to reality than others, though -- some are more like a ship, where even though the various crew members' interests are far from perfectly aligned, they all have a strong shared interest in not drowing, and most of them have a shared interest in getting to the intended destination efficiently. So although the system might become brutal and unequal, it's unlikely to shift toward a set of processes and norms that don't actually work at all.

My impression is that large portions of academia (and not just the most obvious candidates) are too close to the other extreme, with nothing to guarantee that indefinite cargo culting is not a stable equilibrium. And even when people notice this and get mad about it, they're more likely to flip the political sign of the problem than to actually fix it. But I hope this is overly cynical.

I think there's an equally large meta-incentive problem: the people who have power within the system are generally incentivised not to rock the boat, and the people who would like to rock the boat generally don't have power. This bind could be broken by external pressure (from government, itself incentivised by popular pressure) but it's very hard for most outsiders to understand and evaluate proposed changes, so even if the will was there, I don't know how much would be accomplished.

As an interested outsider myself, it's pretty depressing seeing how high the risk:reward ratio seems to be for people within academia who are driven to clean it up and call out bad actors, and how high the reward:risk ratio is for those who are willing to cut corners (or just plain cheat, if they do it in a minimally competent way).

I don't know HN's rationale, but: if you try to ban self-promotion, then in practice you're only banning honest self-promotion. And if you allow it, but try to ban accounts that only exist for that purpose, then in practice you're encouraging them to spam mediocre comments in other threads to dilute the signal. [edit: I see that the guidelines do say not to use HN primarily for promotion. I'm willing to bet this significantly increases the amount of insincere engagement, but obviously the admins/moderators here are more aware of the tradeoffs than I am, and they have decided they are worth accepting.]

IMO the important thing to try to crack down on is vote manipulation; if you have that under control, then you can probably happily allow self-promotion and trust that only the interesting stuff will rise to the top.