It's also a very clear differentiator for them relative to Google, Facebook, and OpenAI, all of whom are clearly varying degrees of willing to sell themselves out for evil purposes.
It will also cost openai dearly if they don't communicate clearly, because I for one will internally push to switch from openai (we are on azure actually) to anthropic. Besides that my private account also.
Given the history of US military adventurism and that we’re about to start another completely unjustified war of aggression against Iran, yes. Absolutely yes.
If it wasn't for US military power, Russia would have already overrun Ukraine. And if Iranian nuclear program is destroyed and the regime falls, it would be a good thing. For context, I'm from Czechia.
I'm from the US and strongly disagree that either of those things are a benefit to me as a US citizen. All it's doing is taking my money and putting me more at risk, and in the case of the attack on Iran: making me complicit in the most immoral acts imaginable.
> What about all the weapons forbidden by the Geneva convention?
Some weapons are prohibited Geneva convention because they are designed to cause suffering or indiscriminately kill non-combatants:
"Weapons prohibited under the Geneva Convention and associated international humanitarian law (including the 1925 Protocol, CCW, and specific treaties) include chemical/biological agents (mustard gas, sarin), blinding lasers, expanding bullets, and non-detectable fragments. Also banned are anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions.
Key prohibited and restricted weapons include:
Chemical and Biological Weapons: The 1925 Geneva Protocol and subsequent conventions (1972, 1993) banned the use, development, and stockpiling of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, including nerve agents and biological weapons.
Blinding Laser Weapons: Specifically designed to cause permanent blindness (Protocol IV of the CCW).
Non-detectable Fragments: Weapons designed to injure by fragments not detectable in the human body by X-rays (Protocol I of the CCW).
Incendiary Weapons: Restrictions on using fire-based weapons (like flamethrowers) against civilian populations (Protocol III of the CCW).
Anti-personnel Landmines: Banned under the Ottawa Treaty (1997) due to risks to civilians.
Cluster Munitions: Prohibited due to their indiscriminate nature.
These treaties aim to protect civilians and combatants from unnecessary suffering and long-term danger."
Would "good hands" choose weapons that are designed to cause suffering or that kill indiscriminately?
> Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick
I don't know, staff at my two Costcos feel much more disinterested and rude then I remember a decade ago. It used to feel fun but now it's miserable.
At peak times they run out of carts and tell the customers to go hunting in the lot for them, door greeters shouting at members across the floor, checkout queues stretch the length of the warehouse, they start half blocking the gas station entrance 30mins before close so trucks can't get in, so maybe they're turning those profit screws.
Ah, right, by being actually good, as in - being okay with mass surveillance as long as it isn't being done in the US, being okay with Claude assisting in killing people as long as it isn't fully autonomous, and being actively hostile to open-weight LLMs and open research on LLMs? This kind of "good"?
No, OP is right, their PR department is doing a great job.
Correct. Protect our citizens' rights, as we are the ones under the jurisdiction of our government. Yes, design competitive weapons systems that can stand up to the threats that adversary powers are creating, but do so while maintaining human control.
Sibling comment summed it up pretty well; my country is considered an ally of yours, but even left leaning Americans seem to take it for granted that we deserve mass AI surveillance/blackmail/manipulation if there’s a chance it could benefit us citizens in the short term. I suppose we deserve it for being complicit in American crimes for so long
You're assuming things I didn't state. I don't particularly want mass AI surveillance at all, but considering how much more dangerous a government's mass spying is to its own citizens living in it 24/7, it's not unreasonable for that to be the focus.
> You're assuming things I didn't state. I don't particularly want mass AI surveillance at all
That's fair, sorry for that.
> considering how much more dangerous a government's mass spying is to its own citizens living in it 24/7, it's not unreasonable for that to be the focus
The US government is actively trying to influence politics in my country and spending huge amounts of money to do it. The US government is a much larger threat to us than our own government.
All of our tech is owned and operated by US companies, which means the US government has read/write access to all of our data. If we attempt to incentivize domestic software production (e.g. by taxing imported software, or by stipulating where our data can be stored and who can access it), the US government will destroy our economy. This has played out a few times recently.
I can't believe we were so foolish as to let this situation grow. Its going to be a painful few decades.
It's funny, because even if they walk it back, they still would come out ahead in PR versus if they just rolled over. Because at that point, it would look like a hostage victim reading a statement that they are being treated well by their captors in front of a camera.
Do you think that bad things happening is just hilarious in general? Do you like to see good behavior punished? I'm really trying to understand what you get out of making this comment. Also what happens when ... This doesn't happen? You just polluted the epistemic commons a bit more with some cynical bullshit sans consequence? Enough. I think it's time to start calling this garbage out when I see it.
Two things can be true at the same time. It can notionally be a “good” decision and also a straightforward act of Anthropic continuing their PR that they’re some sort of benevolent entity despite continuing to pursue a typical corporate capitalistic structure. It is what it is. The game is the game. But I’m not going to sit there and pretend their virtues are as pure of snow. I’m sorry that’s upset you.
This whole saga is extremely depressing and dystopic.
Anthropic is holding firm on incredibly weak red lines. No mass surveillance for Americans, ok for everyone else, and ok to automatic war machines, just not fully unmanned until they can guarantee a certain quality.
This should be a laughably spineless position. But under this administration it is taken as an affront to the president and results in the government lashing out.
If you're a billionaire there's no risk to "sticking to principles", so there's nothing to admire. Also that's not what they're doing. These are calculated moves in a negotiation and the trump regime only has 3 years left. Even a CEO can think 4 years ahead.
It's probably in Anthropic's interest to throw grok to these clowns and watch them fail to build anything with it for 3 years.
i disagree. 3 years is an insanely long time in the AI space. The entire industry pretty much didn't even exist three years ago! Or at least not within 4 orders of magnitude.
Also, every other company has bent the knee and kissed the ring. And the trump admin will absolutely do everything they can to not appear weak and harm Anthropic. If it was so easy to act principled, don't you think other companies would've refused too? Eg Apple
And there is real harm here. You're reading about it - they get labeled a supply chain risk. This is negative and very tangible
why does it need to be a completely different, trained model? AWS doesn't provide unique technologies in their goverment cloud, beyond isolation and firewalled access; Anthropic can do the same thing. Probably need to cough up enough to register a new domain name!
I can think of two reasons. One, to have the plausible deniability with the necessary future statement "Claude is not used by the DoD/DoW to conduct domestic mass surveillance or autonomous killing"; by having the model be properly a different from the one used by the public, they can wrangle over the language with technicalities and still avoid outright lying. (With their IPO in sight, let's keep in mind that everything is securities fraud.)
And two, I suspect that some of the guardrails have been "baked in" to Anthropic's model. Much in the same way as the Chinese open-weight models have a strong bias against expressing positive sentiments about Tiananmen Square, Tank Man or Winnie the Pooh, the "Standard Claude" would likely have the fundamental product biases trained into it.
Taken together it would therefore be both politically and financially sensible for Anthropic to create a separate, unrestricted[tm] almost-Claude for the morally unconstrained military / intelligence purposes.
So much left unsaid. So much implied. Let’s make it explicit and talk about it. Here are some follow questions that reasonable people will ask:
What was Anthropic’s role in the Maduro operation? (Or we can call it state-sponsored kidnapping.) Who knew what and when? Did A\ find itself in a position where it contradicted its core principles?
More broadly, how does moral culpability work in complex situations like this?
How much moral culpability gets attributed to a helicopter manufacturer used in the Maduro operation? (Assuming one was; you can see my meaning I hope.)
P.S. Traditional programming is easy in comparison to morality.
Somehow its target user group includes my father, who is 90 years old. As far as I can recall, we got him using Firefox years ago and he became a committed user.
I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and usability is universally a nightmare.
There's really interesting research about children/people learning to read without formal instruction; as John Taylor Gatto points out in Dumbing Us Down, back when Thomas Paine was writing, there were ~600,000 copies of Common Sense printed for a population of three million. People learned to read on their own or with very little instruction because they were interested in reading.
There's a convincing body of evidence that the way you get kids to read books is pretty simple: read them books that interest them and then give them access to more interesting books as well as time to read to self. Unfortunately, the lethal combo of Common Core and No Child Left Behind has left teachers at best too time-strapped (or, at worst, uninterested) in doing so because of mandatory curriculum and testing.
I read to my kids, make sure they see me reading, and talk to them about both what I'm reading and what they're reading. They've done fine despite awful reading instruction at school.
> We are doing state capitalism without China’s “serve the people” bit. Hm, maybe there’s a name for that type of government, idk.
Except China doesn't actually serve its people. Things are way more cut-throat there, with much less safety net. The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
There is a significant difference in a population of 70 million educated workers who need to be maintained for high performance and 400 million low skill workers who are highly replaceable.
I am trying to make no judgement here, just explaining then 'motivational environment'
This math of course is in flux to a degree we haven't seen in maybe 1000+ years though right now.
I think you can it's just shifted by several decades because China took a long dark detour through the Cultural Revolution. QoL exploded in the US in the Post War period, partially imo because we were the only industrialized economy that didn't have significant homeland attacks during WW2 so the US got a straight shot to the top of the heap. China got a similar QoL lift through a similar path, mass manufacturing (this time business taken from the US by being far cheaper) and growth of in country expertise. Now even China is feeling a similar cost squeeze drawing some business to smaller neighbors. They're also just so much larger they can sustain a larger gradient between coasts that look closer to '1st' world costs and poorer interiors where cheaper manufacturing can be done.
Sure, but what's relevant is what sort of political and cultural pressures we're all experiencing now. Maybe China is just a few years behind on the same crunch trajectory we're on, maybe not, but that doesn't matter much to what's going on today.
Well if the complaint is China is experiencing/experienced much more recently a big uplift in QoL vs the US it's because China was behind the US in it's economic development so it had easier gains to make.
We're no where near experiencing the same political and cultural forces because the US and China are vastly different on many axes both in their structure and culture and importantly we're very very different economically.
> Eh, quality of life has gone to the moon in China in living memory. Not nearly as much a positive delta here in the US.
The Chinese rural population still isn't eligible for local equivalent of social security in their old age (that's only for city folks), and IIRC there was a huge unwillingness to provide financial assistance to individuals during COVID.
> A few hundred million of that rural population have become city folk.
Not legally, IIRC China has an internal passport system, and workers who migrate to the city from the countryside typically remain must registered in the countryside (and are therefore denied access to city benefits).
hukou has changed a lot, particularly since 2014 and you'll find that it exist in its strictest form only for cities > 5 million inhabitants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Reading reviews of this type of keyboard is really interesting to me because their use is such a subjective experience. I have found that the glove80 has far and away the most comfortable thumb cluster for my hands as well as the most comfortable positioning for my pinkies.
I couldn’t make the corne variants work because tucking my thumbs hurt. The ergodox is too big. Even a keyboard like the ZSA Voyager just doesn’t fit me right. However, the glove80, running a 40 key layout that I’ve come up with after doing a fair amount of heat mapping my own keystrokes, gets rid of all my hand and wrist discomfort. My only complaint is what a hassle it is to haul around.
The only “wisdom” (hard earned) I would pass along is:
- Make a heat map of your keyboard over a few days to see what keys you need.
- tweak your layout to make it easy and comfortable to get to the keys and key combos you use.
I have a Chocofi (36 key, 3x5 + 3 thumb per half). My complaint with the Cornes is that the keyboard doesn't have enough stagger for where they thumb cluster is positioned. Either the thumb cluster should move out like the ZSA voyager or more stagger is needed like Ferris sweep and most newer boards at a similar size including mine.
I'm curious but not particularly enthusiastic about keywells because I find the biggest improvement with a split keyboard is the tenting. My personal setup uses heavy tenting+tilting (basically half of a square base pyramid split on the square's diagonal) with the keyboard in my lap and my forearms resting on the chair arms locks me into a neutral wrist position without any active muscle effort. Keeping a good wrist position through the entire day instead of just the first half makes a noticeable difference.
Finally, I use the neutral thumb keys for shift on hold but I don't use any other thumb holds because I believe it has stress injury risks[1]. They're used for important but relatively infrequent keys: backspace, enter, tab, esc.
Yeah, I have found it most comfortable to use two keys on each thumb cluster. Space, Enter, Layer 1, Layer 2. I also like how ZSA's thumb cluster it moved out (Keyboardio really did it the best imho), but for some reason the keywell on the glove80 makes it much easier on my pinkies than the ortho layout on the voyager.
How did you find an ideal tent + tilt setup? Whenever I've tried I've wound up with sore wrists or hands, so just gave up. It seems like the glove80 w/out wrist rests does "good enough" so I stopped trying to optimize, even though the temptation remains.
I've seen some members of the erg keyboard community design and print their own pcbs based on their hand dimensions. I just don't have the time for it and fear how far down the rabbit hole I'd wind up if I did.
I had the idea that the best position for long sessions would be the most relaxed one so I put my hands in my lap on top of a lapboard (old Wacom tablet) and tried to put they keyboard halves under my fingers. I cut up a shipping box for the tenting stand. It took me eight iterations with three fresh starts but doesn't take that long with cardboard and tape. Stick the keyboard onto the stand with double sided tape, fill the cardboard pyramid with change for weight, and it's been like that for eight months. I'll come up with a more permanent solution at some point but it's working well so I'm not in a hurry.
The positioning was mostly about getting the wrists straight with the keyboard halves in-plane. The in-plane part was, naturally, the tricky part and that was mostly about getting the pinky corners set and then small adjustments until the index corners felt good. I have it set so perfectly aligned requires me to slightly lift my arms off the armrests which prevents sore spots on the forearms. At rest with the sides of my palms on the lapboard my fingers are off to the side of the keys but I can still type.
> I've seen some members of the erg keyboard community design and print their own pcbs based on their hand dimensions
I follow the reddit community and see those as well. Someone started up a business selling fitted keywell boards (Cyboard) but the general consensus seems to be that the glove80 is good enough. I have some patches on my local ZMK (mostly changing chord detection) but no particular desire to do the hardware side. If I had a 3d printer I might consider it since apparently hand wiring isn't that hard if you have a print to hold the switches.
> glove80 has far and away the most comfortable thumb cluster for my hands
If I'm reading your reply further down the page right then you only use two of the 6 keys. Is that right? For me, I think I'd want to use at least 4 or 5 keys in my thumb cluster before I could call it comfortable.
After developing a wrist pain which made moving my right-hand thumb ache, I discovered the usefulness of reprogramming the home keys to tap (letter) and hold (shift-Ctrl-Alt) on my Ergodox. Also, I shifted Space and Return to the left thumb cluster.
One does indeed not need to use all the keys. Lesson learned!
Others can make more informed recommendations; to the best of my knowledge it's going to depend on your keyboard and what firmware it runs. (There are some os-level heatmappers you can use, too.) When I used a Voyager I used the Heatmap feature in ZSA's keymapp app. When I was using a corne I used Via/Vial to do it. I finally found my way to the glove and used the data from those.
An EV that's designed to be user-serviceable, has modular upgrades, and isn't full of surveillance technology? This checks all the boxes for me. Can't wait to play with it.
For wide cleats, check out Mizuno. I get mine on eBay from sellers in Japan. I tried literally every other wide cleat I could find in the US and nothing fit as well as Mizunos.
The Monarcida line is less expensive and has 4E sizing (the SW or Super-Wide models) but I’ve never really liked them because of the synthetic material they’re made from and the studs on the shoes.
The other option, which I’ve gone with, is the Monarca line. They’re usually made from Kangaroo leather (which can be stretched) and have a relatively wide sole plate. There are different Monarcas, looks for the “classic” ones not the alphas which have a synthetic upper and are said to run more narrow.
Of the Monarca line, the MIJ (Made In Japan) shoes are supposed to be the widest and highest quality.
After so many years of wearing minimalist shoes I’ve found that cleats aren’t too comfortable to run in so I’ve gone to just wearing turf shoes. Mizuno’s previous models had a very bendy sole that lets my foot move pretty freely.
