People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.

The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.

The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.

Germany cares about where the management of your company actually happens, not just where the entity is incorporated. So you're not going to avoid German bureaucracy, it's going to be worse not better.

Configure the CI to make a release with the artefacts attached. Then have an entirely private repo that can't be triggered automatically as the publisher. The publisher repo fetches the artefacts and does the pypi/npm/whatever release.

Government's not free to say, "We'll blow up your business with a false accusation if you don't give us the terms we want (and then use defence production act to commandeer the product anyway)". How much more blatantly authoritarian does it get than that?

The point of the supply chain risk provisions is to denote, you know, supply chain risks. The intention is not to give the Pentagon a lever it can pull to force any company to agree to any contract it wants.

Hegseth doesn't even pretend that Anthropic is actually a supply chain risk. The argument for designating them so is that _they won't do exactly what the government wants_.

People use the term "fascism" a lot and people have kind of tuned it out, but what do you call a government that deals itself the power to compel any company to accept any contract, and declare it a pariah on thin pretext if it objects?

By taking the deal under these conditions OpenAI is accepting this. They're saying, "Well, sucks to be them, life goes on". They're consenting to the corruption and agreeing to profit from it. But they'll be next, and if the next company in line has the same stand then yeah, the government can force any company to do anything. There's nothing normal about this.

Government: "Anthropic, let us do whatever we want"

Anthropic: "We have some minimal conditions."

Government: "OpenAI, if we blast Anthropic into the sun, what sort of deal can we get?"

OpenAI: "Uh well I guess I should ask for those conditions"

Government: blasts Anthropic into the sun "Sure whatever, those conditions are okay...for now."

By taking the deal with the DoW, OpenAI accepts that they can be treated the same way the government just treated Anthropic. Does it really matter what they've agreed?

It doesn't even matter if OpenAI is offered the same terms that Anthropic refused. It's absurd to accept them and do business with the Pentagon in that situation.

If you take the government at its word, it's killing Anthropic because Anthropic wanted to assert the ability to draw _some_ sort of redline. If OpenAI's position is "well sucks to be them", there's nothing stopping Hegseth from doing the same to OpenAI.

It doesn't matter at all if OpenAI gets the deal at the same redline Anthropic was trying to assert. If at the end of this the government has succeeded in cutting Anthropic off from the economy, what's next for OpenAI? What happens next time when OpenAI tries to assert some sort of redline?

What's the point of any talk of "AI Safety" if you sign on to a regime where Hegseth (of all people) can just demand the keys and you hand them right over?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180182

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If you push all that stuff at the same time, it's really easy to get away with this soft lie, "job done". They can claim they thought it was okay and it was just an honest mistake there were problems. They can lie about how much work they really did.

READMEs or diagrams that are plans for the functionality are fine. Docs that describe finished functionality are fine. Slop that dresses up unfinished work as finished work just fucks everything up, and the incentives are misaligned so everyone's doing this.

The fact is that no matter whether we review the LLM output or not, no matter whether we write the code entirely by hand or not, there's always going to be the possibility of errors. So it's not some bright-line thing. If you're relatively lazier and relatively less thoughtful in the way you work, you'll make more errors and more significant errors. You'll look like you're doing the work, but your teammates have to do more to make up for the problems.

Having to work around problems your coworkers introduced is nothing new, but LLMs make it worse in a few ways I think. One is just, that old joke about there being four kinds of people: lazy and stupid, industrious and stupid, smart and lazy, and industrious and smart. It's always been the "industrious and stupid" people that kill you, so LLMs are an obvious problem there.

Second there's what I call the six-fingered hands thing. LLMs make mistakes a human wouldn't, which means the problem won't be in your hypothesis-space when you're debugging.

Third, it's very useful to have unfinished work look unfinished. It lets you know what to expect. If there's voluminous docs and tests and the functionality either doesn't work at all or doesn't even make sense when you think about it, that's going to make you waste time.

Finally, at the most basic level, we expect there to be some sort of plan behind our coworkers' work. We expect that someone's thought about this and that the stuff they're doing is fundamentally going to be responsive to the requirements. If someone's phoning it in with an LLM, problems can stay hidden for a long time.

It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface.

The other thing is, tools change trade-offs. If you're in a team that's decided to lean into static analysis, and you don't use type checking in your editor, you're getting all the costs and less of the benefits. Or if you're in a team that's decided to go dynamic, writing good types for just your module is mostly a waste of time.

LLMs are like this too. If you're using a very different workflow from everyone else on your team, you're going to end up constantly arguing for different trade-offs, and ultimately you're going to cause a bunch of pointless friction. If you don't want to work the same way as the rest of the team just join a different team, it's really better for everyone.

There's no law of nature that says this has to continue forever, but it's a trend that's been with us since the birth of the industry. You don't need to look at AI tools or methodoligies or whatever. We have code reuse! Productivity has obviously improved, it's just that there's also an arms race between software products in UI complexity, features, etc.

If you don't keep improving how efficiently you can ship value, your work will indeed be devalued. It could be that the economics shift such that pretty much all programming work gets paid less, it could be that if you're good and diligent you do even better than before. I don't know.

What I do know is that whichever way the economics shake out, it's morally neutral. It sounds like the author of this post leans into a labor theory of value, and if you buy into that, well...You end up with some pretty confused and contradictory ideas. They position software as a "craft" that's valuable in itself. It's nonsense. People have shit to do and things they want. It's up to us to make ourselves useful. This isn't performance art.