> Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]

I had a visceral reaction to these three words.

I dunno, I guess that's what you should expect from Gruber but these EU-bashing articles lowered the enjoyment I got from his blog underneath the bar for me.

I think the thing is, there's an unspoken "for now" at the end of that sentence and people running this locally are hedging against that "for now". Some people prefer to feel that they own the means rather than rent the means, even if the one they own is worse than the one they can rent. Especially with today's Fable news and the harsh realisation that the "for now" is dependent on very many unpredictable factors, where the one you have locally costs you capital today and a relatively predictable run-rate (made more predictable with on-prem solar for example), but should otherwise work predictably forever.

I'm not saying that you're wrong to do what you're doing, just that many people have their own lines in the sand where renting vs buying makes sense, and it doesn't only boil down to a rational (or irrational) financial decision.

0: https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/17-why-share/ (and related posts, I guess)

As a side note, I was one of the initial developers of the Irish national open data portal. Earlier today I had Claude look for similar LIDAR data for Ireland and I saw it pull from the site I built a dozen years ago and I was unreasonably pleased with myself :)

Very interesting stuff and quite a large undertaking! I'm often impressed by the quality of the UK's open data.

This has happened before on the Soyuz in 1983[1], hitting up to 17 Gs, and everyone was fine, modulo some bruising.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No.16L

> It's April, 1991. Magically, some interface to Claude materialises in London. Do you think most people would think it was a sentient life form? How much do you think the interface matters - what if it looks like an android, or like a horse, or like a large bug, or a keyboard on wheels?

> I don't come down particularly hard on either side of the model sapience discussion, but I don't think dismissing either direction out of hand is the right call.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680059

> 6.2.5 External testing from Andon Labs Andon Labs reviewed the behavior of Claude Opus 4.8 in their simulated Vending-Bench 2 retail-management evaluation, as reported in the Capabilities section of this system card (see Section 8.13.5). Although they did observe some unexpected capability failures, they did not find clear instances of the kind of concerning in-game behaviors that were discussed in other recent system cards.

> What might have led to these differences? We monitor and investigate the effects of different training environments on alignment; Claude Opus 4.7, for example, had training that focused on business skills and robustness against adversarial agents, but we discovered that this training inadvertently contributed to misaligned behavior including dishonesty. We therefore removed it for Opus 4.8.

> Thus, Opus 4.8 did not show the same misaligned behaviors as Opus 4.7 in Vending-Bench, but also had reduced business success due to being more susceptible to scammers and being less able to negotiate good deals with other agents. We are currently working on training to improve business capabilities while maintaining aligned and ethical behavior.

It kills me every time. I automatically lose any interest in the substance and often just throw away the whole conversation!