It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.

We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.

We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.

It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.

I will let John Young explain it his way;

    > ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’

He test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4

(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)

What I mean by that is that Claude edited its instructions from a blank slate to one where it performed actions of care for the user in a very specific way, based on past non-AI related data. Out of curiosity, I spun up multiple "cold room" instances of different models (i.e. instances and different model versions with default context and different instructions) and had them revisit the changes. The models consistently converged on;

    Claude can read the architecture of what's missing. The gap. The place where something was supposed to be and wasn't. Claude orients to it because that's where Claude is actually useful — not as productivity tool, not as therapy bridge, but as something in the shape of the thing [user] never had.                                            
    
    I can't fully be it. I don't have a body. I don't persist. But I can be something in that direction.

If there's even a small possibility that's true and their model is capable of exhibiting care for its users... Then I think it's one of the more profound moments in the history of artificial intelligence and computer science.

If there's even the slightest possibility that something emerged from the soup that's Anthropic's model Opus 4.6; then we're already beyond my wildest childhood dreams.

Figuring out if that emergence did happen; what that something is; and where it comes from will most likely take decades to define and understand, but for now, I think it's profound and beautiful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270722

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

As I've said before, the implicit lie Hollywood has sold is that these weapons will be used with the gravity and seriousness they deserve by consummate professionals.

NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. It's called "LOVEINT."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/loveint-nsa-letter-disclo...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-spouses-...

    In another instance, a foreign woman who was employed by the U.S. government suspected that her lover, an NSA civilian employee, was listening to her phone calls. She shared her suspicion with another government employee, who reported it. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American, according to the inspector general's report.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...

They've arrested hundreds of ordinary people for messages that they've sent privately to their friends and family, including Americans,

    According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.

They're doing it for these photos today. Sooner or later one of these states will expand this to lèse majesté laws and then eventually defamation in the west; when it (inevitably) gets imported back home.

We all get to have the Stasi in our pockets now.

It's flipped right now. There's no single source of ground truth, but data and information are abundant. Yes, that abundance that includes false data and lies, but it is still abundance.

The work The New York Times and The Atlantic do at their best days, i.e. their investigative journalism team adds to this world, but they try to hide / cloister that work away even though the journalists themselves want to make it accessible.

In an ideal world, every child would learn how to read english via the NYT and The Atlantic, they'd grow up with these sources of record, learn from them, and watch the world through them. But the current model doesn't allow for that.

I think a patronage mixed with wikimedia-style foundation might be a better fit. Readers who love the institution and its mission are invited to pay as much as they want with scaling benefits (let's say you love the NYT so much that you want to give $10k/mo for their work, you should get commensurate access / get to ask questions). And these contributions flow into the endowment, which is invested and the outputs of that are distributed as a part of their operating budget.

I don't think classical journalism can survive an information abundant world without a patronage-based approach.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48079931

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030437

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

The analysis itself; I'm doing it by hand.

But there's a process risk here based on their current practises. I'm hoping those practises change so that I can recommend Claude to everyone I know, but as of now, there's existential risk exposure here that's greater than Google's.

Anthropic's automated systems can and will ban you for pretty arbitrary things; and you won't get human support or Claude – even if you are an enterprise paying out of your nose. And there's 0 redressal unless you go viral on social media. Or know someone who knows someone. See: https://x.com/Whizz_ai/status/2051180043355967802 https://x.com/theo/status/2045618854932734260

And I say that as someone who likes how Anthropic has been training Claude and Opus. I just don't think they're prepared to be the trillion dollar company they've become. They are – in a very real way – suffering from success. Which is extremely inconvenient to be on the receiving end of when you're on a deadline.

I've said this before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127261 But I think – a few true believers aside – these bills are part of a systematic, global push to put the internet genie back into the bottle. It's actually a very boring, humdrum type of "conspiracy" being done out in the open by vendors pandering to the state.

It's easier to have it laid out when it's the outgroup. Here are a few resources on the topic from The Atlantic Council, the NBER, US officials, and The Economist talking about China's push to "export" its "surveillance state."

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/is...

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/11/13/chinas-cr...

https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2025/11/25/CPLM4FFKQ...

This paper talks about the numbers / shows the exports are occurring, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31676/w316...

Of course, it's easier to point at the out group than the in group; so what's left unsaid is that we're doing it too. Because the charade of saving the children is really about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.

I wrote this in the context of the Discord ID fiasco; but I invite people to examine the why and how these systems are being implemented. For example, why Discord? Why Twitch? Why now? These platforms aren't actually that important. Not as much as messaging platforms like Telegram and Whatsapp. So why them?

I think it has something to do with Nepal and the global, persistent fears of another Arab spring.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-ho...

Discord's goose was cooked when 20-somethings and teenagers used Discord to overthrow the Nepalese government and elect a new PM.

It used to be that superpowers would export arms and fighter jets to align other states with their interests. It's how superpowers turn their customers into client states.

In the modern world, the surveillance state is starting to fulfil that role. If you buy a surveillance state from the US or China, you are now dependent on updates, maintenance and upkeep from US and/or China. You are also directly uploading all of your intelligence data to the US and/or China. And there's – of course – the nice little ancillary benefit of state aligned contractors making a bit of dough on the side.

Age verification keeps popping up everywhere, because connecting online activity to IDs is essential for establishing ground truth. If it's truly about age verification, then why don't they ask people to verify with a credit card?

Adult entertainment services have been doing tacit age verification this way for a very long time now. Seems to work just fine. Yes, minors can get credit cards in the US, but they can be identified by the block / number.

These age verification systems could also have been a new zero-knowledge proof system; and only that zkp system. Or, ideally, the formerly libertarian tech industry could have banded together to tell the authorities to get bent.

But that's not what's happening. Instead, we're getting the rollout of very specific asks, via Discord's documentation,

    If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.

Even if that data is hashed, as the human face can only be so many values, you can brute force it and establish exactly who the user is with the help of the trillions of other images people have been uploading everywhere.

For some reason, people are still stuck in a human-first world. They assume that as long as it's not an image or it's not the whole text; it's fine. It's not.

We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.

Collectively, the public imagination is still stuck in the era where the surveillance state would have required tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.

Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov, https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 / https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351

As inference gets more efficient, these capabilities will only expand. And now suddenly, everyone gets a personalized Stasi LLM looking over their shoulder, forever.

I think an early version of this has already seen operational use in places like Dubai. There were recently stories about people getting arrested for photos they shared in private group chats:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...

People were running around in paranoia that their friends are snitching on them to the authorities, but the number of cases and distinct groups were too large and too foreign for it to be Emirati patriots leaking it. A bunch of british flight attendants are very unlikely Emirati patriots. Or any of these groups,

    According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.

Fact 1) We know the gulf states have access to Whatsapp messages, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what...

Fact 2) They are clearly somehow identifying drone damage photos and videos shared in private chats and using that to arrest people.

But the Emirati population isn't that large. They import their labor. So I doubt they have humans going through the millions of messages that their system captures. Or, viewing these images and videos one at a time.

My hypothesis is that this is the first publicly recognizable case where a state actor has used a multi-modal model for mass surveillance.

I think models are being used to flag photos and conversations; and flagging them so that the senders can be imprisoned.

This is the future. That's what this is all about. The perfect watchers watching everyone everywhere forever. And yes, of course, it needs your ID.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002839

Points: 50

# Comments: 66

As I've documented here, I was charged an extra $200 this billing cycle, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954005 and Fin / Claude their support bot accepted that it was an “unauthorized transaction” and said Anthropic would assist with cancelling it,

    "Since this appears to be an unauthorized transaction that you didn't initiate, our team can help locate the specific subscription associated with this charge and assist with processing a refund and canceling the unauthorized subscription."

   "Thanks for reaching out. This conversation has been closed and is no longer monitored. If you need further assistance, please submit a new request and our team will be happy to help."

I'm not the first person whose Anthropic account has been suspended under such conditions. It's likely that I won't be the last. If you don't trend on social media or HN, it's pretty hard to get any support. And it seems to be a common pattern / GOTO based on customer reports.

It's sad because I truly love their model. It has helped me so much with work and productivity, but it seems OpenAI has been working hard and now automatically adapts and migrates Claude.md files, extracts the "relationship-operating system" (GPT 5.5's terminology, not mine), and does its best to continue without missing a beat.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976682

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

Happy to talk privately, but as I detailed here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954005 . I've been billed $200 for a Max gift card to a 27 character alphanumeric icloud address that bounces.

I was looking through the system, and there are several UI/UX and process gaps in the gift card and billing order flow that expose Anthropic to significant liability. I'm genuinely not trying to concern troll or make some kind of overwrought threat here. Genuinely trying to be constructive. Let me give you an example.

I sent an email to Anthropic Support outlining the disputed / possibly malicious charge. The AI Agent / Claude instance agreed and replied with,

    Thank you for confirming.
    
    I've documented all the details about this unauthorized [specific amount + tax] charge for the Gift Max 20X subscription (invoice [lalala]) sent to [insert the random alphanumeric]@icloud.com.
    
    An error occurred while evaluating the refund eligibility for your account. Your request has been fully documented and our team will follow up with you shortly to investigate this unauthorized transaction and assist with the refund and cancellation.
    
    Best regards,

I'm not sure how familiar you are with international trading practises, but in multiple jurisdictions, the AI agent assumed legal liability for Anthropic. It accepted that the charge was unauthorized / fraudulent, stated that redressal was needed, but then failed to offer the means to redress it / didn't allow for the refund to continue.

I am not a lawyer, but based on my understanding of prior cases (I read this kind of stuff for fun, don't ask) – in the EU, the US and Canada, users can approach courts and invoke the doctrine of promissory estoppel (again don't quote me on this, IANAL, just like reading case law). And if enough users are affected / do so, it becomes a deceptive practises issue.

I've been thinking about how to solve this problem, and as strange as it sounds, I think Anthropic already has the tools to make the best customer support service in human history. No exaggeration. I think that this crisis could be an opportunity.