> distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se.
Just because it is legal, that doesn't mean Anthropic wouldn't reasonably want to prevent that from happening (which, from my understanding, isn't illegal either).
I love the asymmetry. When small fish tries to protect itself, big fish hits small fish with "It's not illegal" pole.
When small fish points out that what the big fish is crying about is "not illegal", big fish has the right to be above the law to prevent the problem themselves.
Having values requires equality. They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life works by reaping what you sow. Now they are at the reaping stage.
"It's not illegal" is only an argument against lawsuits / law enforcement involvement. Those PoW anti-AI things people put on pages aren't illegal either.
No. From my interactions, I have understood that some people use the same argument to wash their consciences from any guilt. What they do is unethical, but not illegal, and they hide under the same argument to drown the ethical angle.
In other words, being honest to oneself is important.
Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.
I’m still frequently shocked by the entitlement people feel to other people’s work/ideas/data/bandwidth/server load, to feed a multi-trillion dollar industry. I find the totally cynical “well when you’re making an omelet…” types to be a bit pathetic, but I understand their motivation— they’re simply greedy. But I just can’t understand the genuine indignation about people attempting to limit or stop ingestion of their own work, even if it’s just for the bandwidth costs. Go ingest your own shit.
It's good to agree that some don't have a conscience, and maintaining an appearance matters more. And appearances change based on what's legal or not.
They could detect the other AI labs and also silently burn the tokens at a faster rate providing fewer tokens for money, which does sound illegal to me.
The comments only further prove that without more regulation around this, big AI wouldn't have a "don't be evil" attitude going forward.
Anyone who called for regulations/guardrails of any kind were shouted down as Luddites who hate progress. We all knew this was going to be a mess but $$$ so screw it right?
No, the ordinary netizen, who runs their personal web servers, who are hit by crawlers, their content ripped from their hands and their servers chocked during the process.
Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards, this asymmetry you note is kind of the whole point a company would want to grow big. Growing an organization has some super-linear costs and generally sucks for most individuals living through it - including the management - but it's still considered worth it, precisely because big entities can do things small entities cannot, and escape the threats from smaller competitors.
It's so basic it's actually part of the reason we exist, and animals of various sizes exist, and generally why evolution didn't stop at single-cellular life.
> They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life works by reaping what you sow. Now they are at the reaping stage.
Yup. Except what they're reaping is insane cashflow and ability to pull stunts like these. We can call out the hypocrisy until our throats run dry, and in ideal fantasy land this would've meant something, but here in the real world, they sow the seeds of success, and now are reaping the right to be hypocritical and continue to get away with it.
I've actually heard it quite a few times from different people who want to climb the greasy pole to get heard or resources. Idk it just seems rather soulless and slightly psycho to me. It also seems like that kind of system is rather broken and unstable, if the only way you get impact is to climb up the ladder and whatever that entails.
Change this from humans to companies and I still think it feels slightly wrong.
I disagree with your assessment that large organisations are beneficial.
We can see with our current crop of large organisations that they really struggle to create anything new; most of their new products or services were developed by a small organisation and then acquired. A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up.
Large organisations are inefficient (everyone has stories of people in large organisations literally doing nothing all day). They are horrible to work for because of the politics. They mistreat their customers and their employees. Their executives tend to lose touch with reality, surround themselves with yes-folk and descend into authoritarian psychopathy.
My personal opinion is that we would be much, much, better off if we had fewer large organisations and more smaller organisations.
Needs a little more precision: not "those with an equity stake": those with a disproportionally large equity stake.
Otherwise it's just an opener for the old excuse of "they might be ruining your life, but it's all good, it's also your pension fund, little man, that's profiting from your life getting ruined, you should celebrate them!"
Large organizations are necessary if you want things like airplanes and rockets and computers and MRI machines to exist. And if you feel you benefit from those things yourself, then large organizations that create and operate[0] them are beneficial to you, too.
> A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up.
That's not caused by org size. It's how modern economics work because of ad-backed business models and few other things (a tangent for another time). Importantly, small orgs and especially startups are very much complicit in this - the venture capital business model in software settled around a symbiosis, where startups create toys (er, MVPs) and growth-hack the shit out of them, in hopes of winning an acquisition or IPO lottery (aka. "exit"), where a big org buys the whole thing for ${a lot}, and enshittifies it further in an attempt of extracting a positive multiple of ${a lot} from the market. Both sides know what they're doing, exits are planned from day 1, and at no point in this process "creating useful products" is ever a driving goal.
Note this symbiosis: it's a recurring theme.
> Large organisations are inefficient
In some ways. Small organizations are inefficient in others. More at the end.
> (everyone has stories of people in large organisations literally doing nothing all day).
Some (not all) cases of this are about maintaining slack in the system, which is necessary for efficiency. A system at 100% capacity is extremely fragile to breaking completely due to tiny, random workload spikes. Breakage is inefficient. Some degree of idle capacity improves overall efficiency.
> They mistreat their customers and their employees. Their executives tend to lose touch with reality, surround themselves with yes-folk and descend into authoritarian psychopathy.
That description fits small business owners much better IMO. In our times, at least in non-failed western countries, there's a limit to how abusive or careless a large organization can be with their customers or employees - their very size makes them easy to target legally. It might be hard to get through their well-funded legal defense, unless the case is slam dunk, but that's still much better than the armies of small businesses flying completely under the radar, flagrantly violating basic health and safety regulations, or flat out lying to customers in their face, because they're not worth the effort of investigating.
(Of course I'm using a biased sample; I don't know many CEOs of big orgs.)
Symbiosis angle: for abusive practices they can't get away with on their own, big organizations are more than happy to outsource to small orgs and then look the other way.
--
Anyway, key point: *there is no categorical difference between "large organizations" and "small organizations". You need a certain amount of people and communication (and capital) to do high-complexity endeavors. The difference between a well-integrated big corporation, and a hundred of small businesses that kinda end up together delivering something big, is just that the latter is using the market as management layer.
And yes, you need big orgs to create things like commercial airplanes and MRIs, simply because the big org is a boundary layer, within which you have a non-market based incentive structure, and this lets you build things the free market just cannot reach on its own.
--
[0] - Airports and hospitals are themselves large organizations.
At risk of losing the metaphor, they reaped stuff across all the lands, even ones that were not theirs, and it is questionbale that they even did most of the sowing in the first place
> It's so basic it's actually part of the reason we exist, and animals of various sizes exist, and generally why evolution didn't stop at single-cellular life.
It's also quite natural to want it to stop at individual human life instead of us getting absorbed by some next bigger thing.
Which I'm fairly sure is also the desire (as far as they can be said to have any) of these animals of various sizes you speak of.
> We can call out the hypocrisy until our throats run dry, and in ideal fantasy land this would've meant something, but here in the real world, they sow the seeds of success
Just because they pulled a mirage over people's eyes doesn't mean it suddenly became the "real" world.
What Anthropic is doing is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don't know about the legal situation for the Chinese domains they mark, but steganographic data extraction without user consent would definitely be illegal in the EU, for example.
I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.
The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).
But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.
And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.
It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
Yeah, this isn't the HN I remember, but the one I am, unfortunately, stuck in.
Slow but steady reddification of HN audience (judging by the comments) is its biggest existential threat imo. And the worst part is that, unlike with the actual reddit, this isn't due to the platform owners/admins at all (as I can only think of good things to say about @dang and the HN itself).
I mean, even in China, Apple users can still use VPN to get around the great firewall. And that's despite the fact that their government already imposed quite a few extra requirements on Apple in terms of iPhones sold in the country + any China-based accounts. I also don't think that any of it really applies to general purpose computers at all there (as opposed to smartphones).
So I don't see VPNs going away with that recent UK requirement. To be clear, I am 100% fully opposed to the ID verification requirement from the UK, for plenty of reasons that were discussed on HN and elsewhere to death by now. My only point is that even if China didn't get to forbid Apple from allowing VPN, I don't see UK succeeding at this either.
P.S. For those curious about what "extra requirements" for Apple look like in China (only listing the directly relevant ones to this discussion, as there are more of them that aren't):
* iCloud is operated by GCBD/AIPO Cloud, a Guizhou-based Chinese cloud operator, rather than directly under Apple’s standard global iCloud entity.
* Apple also moved the relevant iCloud encryption keys into China. This means Chinese authorities can pursue access through Chinese legal procedures without needing to go through US courts or obtain data from US-based servers.
* App Store is much more heavily censored, but that's not really relevant. VPN apps aren't as easily available, but nothing is stopping a person from just connecting to the same VPN providers through the iPhone VPN settings (they just get to type info in a few fields, as opposed to a one-click-app solution).
It’s very difficult to setup a VPN from inside China. I had to use a China specific VPN provider when I visited a few weeks ago as all the main providers are blocked. You can still get an eSIM from Hong Kong that bypasses the firewall
> Only one side is being armed and funded by our tax dollars
I mean, yeah, I would heavily prefer for one of the sides in this conflict to be much better funded and armed than the other. Specifically, the side that I consider to be fundamentally in the right in the conflict.
Whichever side I am talking about is not relevant to the point. What's relevant to the actual point I am trying to make, is that I don't think that one side being better armed and funded serves as a reasonable indicator of which side is right/wrong in a given conflict.
> I would heavily prefer for one of the sides in this conflict to be much better funded and armed than the other.
Most Americans would prefer that we fund neither.
And this isn’t 2012, majority of Americans today do not see Israeli’s, who steal, spy on and try to get Americans killed through wars they start as the “good guys”.
> I'd say, based on the latest election result, this isn't true.
The Israeli-Palestine conflict is far from the #1 priority of things US voters consider when voting in presidential elections.
Also, winning by one of the narrowest margins in US election history, and with less than 50% of the popular vote is hardly a decisive mandate to give Israel a blank check. [1]
> Apple said they're 'integrating into the OS' (which can really mean a lot of things)
Well, it can mean a lot of things, which is why Apple outlined plenty of specific use-cases and details of what they meant by "integrating into the OS" here.
What did they outline? We had "browser use" for a while now, but it is still way too slow to be usable. Not to mention whatever OS integration they are making.
The grandparent explained exactly why it is an issue though. It isn't because US is somehow just magically more legitimate than Denmark.
As they stated, it is because the population of Denmark is very homogenous, as opposed to the US. If you are trying to make a generalization that applies to a range beyond just white people, having Denmark as your sole sample is clearly flawed.
Along the same lines, picking Japan for the purpose of generalizing to wider racial/ethnic groups would also be a bad idea. Not because their research is untrusted/considered non-reputable (it is quite the exact opposite), but because their population is too homogenous.
> As they stated, it is because the population of Denmark is very homogenous
If you know about vitamin D, you'll note that sun exposure is one of the primary reasons location matters for this study. It would be similarly relevant if they only studied students in Miami or southern California.
Essentially: sun exposure helps you create vitamin D, and so you shouldn't naively generalize this study to other lines of latitude
I don't think it invalidates a study as long as you do things on relative terms and have a control group. Another study can see if the same delta effect is reproducible in an e.g. homogeneous Asian population and report on it.
It is probably a logistical nightmare to do a study of this sort in multiple countries and regulatory systems simultaneously.
It doesn't invalidate the study at all! On the contrary, if you're measuring vitamin d levels from blood tests, it is easy to adjust the dosage to match.
It's just an important factor - if you live much further south or spend a lot of time outdoors, your target dosage will be different than someone in _Denmark_.
> I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?
It (Claude Code) does, I discovered it by accident recently, having never used daily routines before. Haven't touched Claude Desktop at all, outside of playing with it for 30 mins or so months ago.
TLDR: I used Claude Code to build a command that scrapes job postings from a few employers I am interested in (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist). At the end CC asked me "do you want me to re-run it daily?" I said yes, and it generated a daily routine and gave me a URL to my anthropic account page where I can see all my daily routines.
There, it says that I am currently using up 1 out of 15 "free" daily routines that come with my personal subscription, and I would have to pay extra if I want to have more than 15 active at a time (I assume by switching to per-token pricing for anything beyond 15, but not sure).
What does detaining someone over an unlawful (per the written law) protest have anything to do with corruption?
Corruption involves bribes, selective enforcement of the law, unethical favoritism when it comes to legal decisions, "favors", etc.
Your links just describe people participating in a protest that was against the law on the books, and then that law being enforced upon them. You can call that specific law unfair, undemocratic, authoritarian, etc., but what's the corruption angle here?
Just because it is legal, that doesn't mean Anthropic wouldn't reasonably want to prevent that from happening (which, from my understanding, isn't illegal either).
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