LLMs are not a tool, he says, they are automation. And it's Rich Hickey, so he brought definitions.

And yes, I'm talking about the landslide of NSFW stuff that had to be culled to turn it into an acquisition-friendly target.

Don't have data... I'm guessing.

Anthropic is asking for anti-trust laws to be waived, asking for government permission to form a cartel, and asking that a governing body of that cartel be an organization loaded up with people that have ties to Anthropic. One of the things that cartel gets to do is outlaw local models.

This is the moat that they've been unable to find, so they're trying to get the government to create one for them, and stamp out competition, stamp out consumer choice.

The prospect of software making autonomous decisions is as scary as the advent of the automobile. Back in 1897 there were people warning of the dangers of the horseless carriage and how unseemly and ill-considered it was: https://www.farmcollector.com/looking-back/rebuttal-horseles...

Anthropic is tapping into this same fear of the new to gain something that would otherwise be illegal. You can bet they've used their models to produce a strategy that tells them step by step how to win hearts and minds, and you're seeing it play out in blog posts, and "oh my gosh!" research findings like this one. You have to ask the question, however, what does Anthropic and the other big providers have to gain if we do as they ask?

They're not looking out for us.

You can wave around theories, or we can discuss what actually happened with the program. In the 1940s and 50s we had refugees, but we also had an extremely robust academy producing the likes of Feynman, Wheeler, Thorn, Everett and many more. Then we blew that up, because foreign students were cheap virtually indentured servants.

Enter today's world where tech is doing the same. America doesn't have an obligation to favor or subsidize foreign employment. If we had a system producing more Wheelers, Feynmans, and Thorns, it would still be worthwhile to immigrate and work with them, for a full salary. The same goes for tech. I want to attract foreign students and foreign workers to the American system, not to the American subsidy.

I'm in favor of legal immigration. I'm not in favor of H1Bs and the "default" pathway.

If we don't get educated and employed as Americans, then yes, we'll be committing suicide.

If someone's post-graduate work is that important, and that particular individual is so unbelievably critical to that particular post-doc work, then surely the fee would be worth it. If it's not, then advantaging the market for post-docs in America to actual Americans seems like a good thing, something governments are meant to do for their citizens.

Is there a reason the American government shouldn't be allowed to act on behalf of its citizens and must act in favor of everyone else?

Any differences in the last 24 hours?

You may have a case that the magic inference juice was somehow tainted, but that seems like a stretch. If you run your car into someone else, and it isn't a total failure of the systems of the car, you did that, not the car, and not the car company.

> This all most recently came together over the weekend, and they got Dario Amodei and Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis all onto the same page to say they wanted to WAIVE ANTI-TRUST LAWS so that they could "pace", or slow down, research.

> I feel about this roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research:

> these people are the enemies of humanity.

> Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don't have to fear the paperclipper.

> There are many regulations I would be in favor of, but they only ever want to form a cartel or a world government against the paperclipper.

> No other industry has ever framed any regulation in terms of "stop", "pause", or "slow down". Those are insane ways to consider any form of policy. Policy should prevent bad outcomes and encourage good ones, it is never about some specific speed.

> This industry frames its regulations in this way because it has, at its core, a millenarian death cult that worships and fears AI as the cause of the end of the world, that feels compelled to create AI, and that at least somewhat wants to destroy AI as a field.

It works fairly well, and it is definitely less heavy than SpecKit.

If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.

So you're right. If the $42K price tag didn't make you blink, the additional $2700 in tax, and the $2K to $3K for the work in your house are going to financial hiccups. But it means the cost to start is $50K, not just the price tag.

But you'll find most household power sockets aren't actually rated for the kind of power these things draw at peak. If you go for a dual GPU you're going to want to sustain a higher current. Think washer / drier / fridge kind of hookups for the UPS and that rig.

You spent $42K on the rig, you're also going to need to get an electrician in and have the electrical hookup seen to. The single 4090 I'm running put me right up to that edge where I could use a standard electrical hookup with a 1000w UPS.

So another $1K for the UPS, and $500 worth of electrical work (or more if they have to up the switch to 200 amps, for example).

Not for the faint of wallet.

That's a bitter pill to swallow. Most of this is the cost of the Nvidia card, and the RAM.