skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude (Wired) … …

    Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude (Wired)

    “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”

    …

    Anthropic now says it’s changing course, and that Claude Fable 5’s safeguards for AI development will be visible to users. If the company suspects a user is trying to use Claude to build a highly capable AI it will alert them that it’s either refusing the request, or rerouting the user to a less capable model.

    Anthropic reversed the policy after it received fierce backlash from the AI research community. Anthropic has already taken steps to limit competitors from using Claude to build closed and open source AI models, but critics say that quietly degrading the model’s performance for certain users went a step too far. Claude’s coding agent has become a favored tool among developers, including those working on open-source AI research projects, and researchers tell WIRED that the company’s latest policy could have led to a troubling future in which only a handful of leading AI labs could perform advanced AI research.

    …

    “These safeguards prevent foreign adversaries from using our most capable models in ways that pose severe safety risks. The US and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “These safeguards ensure Claude isn't used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example […] In deciding whether to make them visible or invisible we faced a choice. A hidden safeguard is harder to probe and work around. This means the safeguards can be targeted much more narrowly.”

    Anthropic says that because this safeguard around AI development is now visible, it needs to cast a wider net, meaning more benign requests may trigger its safeguards. The company says it’s working to make its classifiers more precise as quickly as possible.

    4 votes

  2. Comment on Interview with Eric Ries discussing his book about corporate governance in ~finance

    skybrian
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    The author founded the Long Term Stock Exchange (see Wikipedia). I haven’t read the book yet, but I assume it will promote some of the ideas described there:

    The author founded the Long Term Stock Exchange (see Wikipedia). I haven’t read the book yet, but I assume it will promote some of the ideas described there:

    The exchange has promoted a system of tenure-based voting rights, in which shareholders gain increased voting power the longer they hold their shares, capped at ten times the ordinary voting power after ten years. This proposal has been controversial, with critics arguing it could entrench founder control, while proponents present it as an alternative to multiple-class share structure.

    LTSE rules restrict the use of executive bonuses tied to short-term performance and prohibit companies from issuing quarterly earnings guidance, although quarterly results remain required under U.S. securities law.

    In 2025, LTSE filed a petition with the SEC to allow all U.S. public companies, not only those listed on its exchange, the option to report earnings on a semiannual rather than quarterly basis. LTSE CEO Bill Harts argued that quarterly reporting is overly burdensome and detracts from long-term management. The exchange’s representatives met with SEC officials in advance of filing the petition.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Interview with Eric Ries discussing his book about corporate governance in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    There's a dark underside to this business. It doesn't get talked about enough. I really wanted to try to do something about it, because I honestly felt like I was feeding one company after another into a meat grinder. I spent a lot of time trying to understand why are things the way that they are. And I found out through my own experience and through my own research that so many of the so-called best practices that we use today to build, structure, and govern companies — they're not pillars of capitalism, they're relatively modern inventions. But they're old enough to have a pretty good body of evidence available about how well they work, and the evidence is pretty bad.

    So it seems like we're teaching people a set of practices that's almost designed to guarantee they're going to have these malign outcomes. Let's stop following these best practices so blindly. More importantly, we have to develop a new set of practices that allow mission-driven, purpose-driven leaders to create the outcomes they want for their organizations.

    [...]

    I tell the story in the book of Whole Foods, which went through this self-destruction where it couldn't do what it needed to do. Its stock price fell. Activists came in and basically forced it to be sold. John Mackey's last act of defiance was to sell it to Amazon instead of the person the activists wanted to sell it to. Even in the end, his victory was kind of a form of defeat.

    Today, people hear these stories and say, “Well, Whole Foods is still around.” Yes, but the ethos — the thing that made it special — has been lost. Go on the Whole Foods Reddit forum. Go anywhere where customers of Whole Foods are talking about it. You will see the evidence. It fell off the Fortune Best Places to Work list, I think within two years of the acquisition, right away. Something special got lost, even though the activists who did that attack made about $500 million in so-called profit.

    I quote an economist who wrote an article right afterwards, the title of which was — forgive my language, but this is literally what he wrote — “The Greedy Bastards Won.” That phrase, the greedy bastards, is what John Mackey called the activists. He just said, “They don't care about the mission of Whole Foods. They're just greedy bastards.” Mackey framed the whole thing as a battle, the good guys at Whole Foods versus the evil villains. The press loves that framing. Even as entrepreneurs and investors, we love to talk about the personal dramas of these companies' success or failure.

    [...]

    It's a classic confusion in business whether high margins are a liability or a strength. We teach that they're a strength. But then in a different class, in your MBA program, you'll learn Jeff Bezos's famous dictum that your margin is my opportunity.

    So their margins were too high. Now here's the really fascinating thing. Do five whys. Why did they refuse to raise prices? Because they were afraid the stock price would go down. But why did they need the stock price to be high? Is that really an operational goal that's important to the company? People say, “Well, of course they want it to be high.” But why? Seriously, why?

    Maybe because they're greedy? No — John Mackey had literally donated all his stock options to charity, saying he only wanted to work for the love of the thing itself. His personal greed could not have been the motivation.

    “Well, it's important to have a high stock price in case you ever have to raise money.” There's a lot of money-burning startups out there that need it. But Whole Foods — this is the craziest stat to me of the whole story — Whole Foods was profitable every quarter and every year that it was a public company, including 2008 when its stock price dropped 90%. They didn't need it to raise money.

    What did they need it for? Maybe they needed it because financial gravity makes you feel like you need it. Because if they ever let the stock price go down, it would allow activists or some acquirer — it makes it cheaper to do the thing that ultimately happened to them. A high stock price is their defense, their moat against this kind of financial manipulation.

    [...]

    Going back to the “Greedy Bastards” article, the author says Mackey wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to have this lofty rhetoric about conscious capitalism and being a mission-driven company, but he also wanted to work in a bog-standard Delaware C-corp shareholder primacy organization. Obviously those two things — that chasm between the mission statement and the legal purpose — created the conflict that ultimately led to the company's demise. The author saw it as a personal drama, a personal failure. But of course, the question this book asks is, why should Whole Foods have been embodied in such a structure? Are there other or better structures available that would make these questions irrelevant? It turns out there are.

    [...]

    Costco illustrates the two most important ideas in the book in one story. Sol Price understood ethos — the fiduciary to the customer, the operational commitment to quality, to trustworthiness. That was really what was embodied at FedMart. But what he didn't have was the ability to defend that ethos from attacks from the outside. It was really Jim Sinegal who figured out in Costco how to build what I call a governance fortress, that even to this day protects Costco from outside pressure.

    [...]

    If you look at the data, Costco comes under attack every few years from raiders who are trying to dismantle this ethos. I quote a bunch of them in the book. Costco, by the way, has the worst possible governance rating scores from these governance rating agencies. It's considered to have bad governance through and through. So every once in a while, some good-governance reformer will try to attack, and they always attack on this basis — that Costco's governance leads to management entrenchment, which leads to poor performance.

    Really? Poor performance? Costco's one of the best-performing stocks in the entire stock market the last 40 years. What do you mean by poor performance? This has become an ideological commitment to the idea of shareholder primacy, divorced from the actual on-the-ground realities that a company like Costco embodies.

    [...]

    Let me tell you one exception story by way of illustrating what is going on here. In the 1920s, a woman named Marie Krogh was diagnosed with a terminal illness — diabetes, at a time when there was no known cure for diabetes. But her husband, August Krogh, had just won the Nobel Prize. They lived in Denmark at the time, and he convinced her, despite her fatal diagnosis, that she should accompany him on a lecture tour of North America. Being the dutiful wife that she was, but also a doctor herself, she went with him.

    During the lecture tour, she was sitting at dinner next to one of the other scientists, who told her that in Canada, a series of scientists had isolated insulin for the first time — a potential cure for diabetes. She convinced her husband that they should extend their trip, travel to Canada, and go see this technology for themselves. They did. They instantly grasped the significance of this breakthrough, and they asked the Canadians if they could license the technology and bring it back to Denmark, not just to cure Marie, but to cure a lot of people.

    Everyone agrees to do it, but they have a caveat. All four of the people involved are worried because they understand this simple truth about life-saving medicines. Imagine you have a life-saving medicine that I need to live. I have no problem with you making a fair profit by selling it to me. I want you to be in business, to have the money to build the facility to sell it to me. I'm very happy for you to make money. But I would live in fear. What if you wake up one day and say, “Wait a minute, Eric needs this life-saving medicine. I could charge him whatever I want.” I'd be powerless to say no.

    So years before Martin Shkreli, they understood this was a problem. They spent the trip going back to Denmark trying to figure out, how can we structure this organization to avoid this outcome? They settled on the structure that is now known as the industrial foundation structure, where the laboratory that they built is a for-profit company — they called it the Nordisk Insulin Laboratorium — but it is owned and controlled by a nonprofit foundation. If the term Nordisk sounds familiar, it should, because this is the origin story of the company Novo Nordisk, one of the world's largest companies.

    What's interesting about Novo Nordisk is it defies every inevitability story you can imagine, because it has had the idea of science as a public trust as its motivating principle for more than 100 years. All the betrayals that we've been talking about — people have tried it with Novo Nordisk. I tell a story in the book where the for-profit directors of the Novo Nordisk subsidiary tried to liquidate the whole thing and sell it in the early 2000s, when pharma consolidation was the hotness. The trustees of the nonprofit foundation intervened to stop this from happening.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Worldbuilding guide: airships - historical lessons in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Airships and aircraft would both have to wait until the early years of the 20th century when sufficiently powerful internal combustion engines would be developed. One of the pioneers of this field was Wilhelm Maybach, who happened to be based in the same area of Germany as one Count von Zeppelin.

    Zeppelin had been obsessed with the idea of powered, rigid airships for years. After being forced out of a three-decade military career due to a political spat, he was free to devote himself to his passion, which he also saw as a way to restore his honour.

    It turned out he had exactly the right mixture to make it work. Connections, obsession, timing, proximity to Maybach for engines and the world’s greatest chemical industry for hydrogen, and most of all lunatic optimism. Even so, it was a near thing. Zeppelin’s early struggles to get his idea off the ground mirror those of modern hardware success stories. He put everything he had into the project, eventually mortgaging his wife’s estate to pay for construction costs. He struggled to win over institutions but persevered anyway. He almost failed after technical problems destroyed his first two airships, but his third finally worked in 1906. This unlocked enough public support and government funding to keep scaling up.

    [...]

    The German government poured huge amounts of money into Zeppelin construction during the war, producing dozens of ships. It was the largest fleet of rigids ever built. But by the later years of the conflict, Britain and France had fighter aircraft with incendiary ammunition which could easily chase down and set fire to a Zeppelin (a death sentence for the entire crew). More sophisticated anti-aircraft defences were built in cities, with networks of searchlights and high-velocity guns. Many Zeppelins were lost almost as soon as they were sent into the field and a morbid atmosphere developed amongst the crews, most of whom would be killed pointlessly during the course of the war. A typical example was L-19, whose first and only mission destroyed a British pub and several farm animals; during the return journey its engines failed and it crashed at sea, killing the entire crew.

    [...]

    The pattern throughout the first few decades of the 20th century was for countries to become interested in airship development, build a handful of ships that the Germans considered inferior pieces of junk, destroy some in terrible crashes, see how expensive the whole enterprise was, and give up. The cost wasn’t just about the shipbuilding. Constructing an airship hangar was a vast expense, a landing site had a ground crew of dozens to hundreds of men, and ships valved thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen into the air on every voyage for buoyancy control.

    A good example of this pattern is Britain. Large airships were seen as a way to unify the far-flung British Empire, and two parallel programs were spun up in the 1920s to build prototypes: one government and one private. The novelist Nevil Shute (best known today for On the Beach) and Barnes Wallis (later to develop the “dambuster” bouncing bomb during World War II) both worked in senior roles on the private program. The “capitalist” ship, R100, was more conservative, while the “socialist” R101 pushed boundaries with innovative structural designs and extensive use of prefabrication, as well as a more refined aerodynamic shape. However, both were significantly delayed and did not fly until 1929. In 1930, R101 crashed on its first long-distance flight to India, coming down over France and killing virtually the entire design team as well as a thicket of important officials. The death toll of 48 was a dozen higher than the Hindenburg disaster. British involvement in airship development ended overnight; R100 was grounded and scrapped in 1931. One aspect of this that was repeated in other contexts was that all the leading airship advocates in Britain were killed in R101’s crash, leaving the movement rudderless.

    [...]

    Another question is safety. In my view, this is a mixed picture. Airships were remarkably safe, given that they were well-built ships operated as civilian vessels by experienced crews. Just like other kinds of air travel it took time and experience to develop safe practice for handling airships. Most nations never had enough Zeppelins to learn these lessons before their programs were wound down: their first attempts were usually flawed designs piloted by captains who didn’t really know what they were doing. This was the root cause of many program-ending disasters.

    But with a good ship and crew, all the main risks - weather, hydrogen, dangerous thermals, engine failure, and so on - could be managed. Graf Zeppelin, which crossed the Atlantic over 140 times with zero injuries, is proof of this. The flipside is that safety was not so much about big decisions like using helium instead of hydrogen or avoiding storms entirely, but about getting every little thing right. Eckener’s airship operations were more like a modern airline in this regard. This explains the dozens of airships that crashed almost immediately after being completed.

    [...]

    This contrasts with aircraft. Early planes crashed all the time and killed huge numbers of people. Air travel got off the ground because of a population of early adopters who were willing to risk a meaningful chance of death to get to their destinations slightly faster or see the world from above. But that was OK, because aircraft were much easier to build, so huge numbers were constructed by an ecosystem of competitors. Compare this to airships, where only a couple of hundred were ever built and Zeppelin maintained a decades-long monopoly on the technological state of the art. Aircraft offered many more chances to learn how to fly them properly and so they eventually became safe, despite being much more dangerous than airships in the beginning.

    This is another point that deserves emphasis. For a couple of decades at the beginning of the 20th century, expert consensus was that airships were the future and aircraft were too short-ranged and dangerous to be consequential. “Aircraft guys” were crackpots. Compared to the devil-may-care world of early aircraft, airships were a picture of comfort and safety: commercial airship passengers went 27 years without a single injury until the Hindenburg disaster.

    [...]

    I do think airships could have played a bigger role in the early 20th century had wars not kept getting in the way. This is yet another way World War I destroyed civilization and condemned us to the bad timeline, but DELAG was doing well and likely would have continued growing rapidly had war not broken out. It’s not inconceivable that this could have led to a profitable business operating dozens of airships and transatlantic routes in the 1920s. This happened a second time with the Nazis, who screwed everything up just as Eckener was starting to succeed with the Hindenburg. But aircraft were good enough at this point that Zeppelins were doomed anyway.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, subscriptions are significantly cheaper than "API" prices, and it looks like they'll be closing that loophole starting with Fable, after a temporary preview.

    Yes, subscriptions are significantly cheaper than "API" prices, and it looks like they'll be closing that loophole starting with Fable, after a temporary preview.

    6 votes

  8. Comment on Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    As long as they're supply-constrained due to datacenter capacity and there are customers willing to pay, they make more money by charging more. It's economics 101. This is expense-account pricing,...

    As long as they're supply-constrained due to datacenter capacity and there are customers willing to pay, they make more money by charging more. It's economics 101.

    This is expense-account pricing, but I assume that there will be businesses willing to pay more than I will as a hobbyist. Meanwhile, I'll stick with the Chinese models I've been using.

    I imagine prices will eventually come down due to increased supply, algorithmic improvements and competition.

    8 votes

  9. Comment on Nasdaq rewrites its index inclusion rules ahead of SpaceX IPO in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic …

    S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

    The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

    …

    However, the S&P Dow Jones Indices did “carve out one concession” by changing the investable weight factor rules for “lower-profile benchmarks” such as the S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, according to Quartz. That could allow an IPO faster entry into those indexes.

    12 votes

  10. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It's a web-based coding agent called Shelley. It's open source. It's being written by developers at exe.dev to run on the Linux VM's they provide. It should run on any Linux VM, but you'd have to...

    It's a web-based coding agent called Shelley. It's open source. It's being written by developers at exe.dev to run on the Linux VM's they provide. It should run on any Linux VM, but you'd have to reimplement authentication since it relies on exe.dev's built-in authentication.

    A web UI and a cloud-based VM works well for me because I can switch between laptop, tablet, or even my phone, and it doesn't shut down when I put my laptop to sleep.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I've read about people who have connected a coding agent to Slack (or similar team chat) so that the team works together more, and they seem to like the result. I'm a hobby programmer working...

    I've read about people who have connected a coding agent to Slack (or similar team chat) so that the team works together more, and they seem to like the result.

    I'm a hobby programmer working alone, so that doesn't really work for me, but I think it shows that we haven't figured out the best way to use these tools and there will be more exploration of different ideas on how to organize the work.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Some people claimed that the code was trash, but is that really proven? I didn't follow it all that closely, but there was a claim that using a regular expression was somehow wrong and it seemed...

    Some people claimed that the code was trash, but is that really proven? I didn't follow it all that closely, but there was a claim that using a regular expression was somehow wrong and it seemed more like a hot take.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    You can think about it if you want to. I usually ask the coding agent to write a design doc first because I care about how it will be implemented. It will go through multiple drafts. For bug...

    You can think about it if you want to. I usually ask the coding agent to write a design doc first because I care about how it will be implemented. It will go through multiple drafts.

    For bug fixes, I ask it to explain the bug and proposed fix before giving it the go-ahead to fix it.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Big tech companies have lots of internal code that is never released as a product. I think it's fair to ask what they're getting for it, but we can't really tell from the outside.

    Big tech companies have lots of internal code that is never released as a product. I think it's fair to ask what they're getting for it, but we can't really tell from the outside.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like the paragraphs you quoted also say that it’s not 8x productivity, and therefore it wasn’t “completely glossed over?” As for the quality of the code, I’ve heard bad things about...

    It seems like the paragraphs you quoted also say that it’s not 8x productivity, and therefore it wasn’t “completely glossed over?”

    As for the quality of the code, I’ve heard bad things about Claude Code and prefer a different coding agent, but we don’t know about their internal codebase.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Hmm. Okay, let’s hear the details on what they allegedly did.

    Hmm. Okay, let’s hear the details on what they allegedly did.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on When AI builds itself — progress toward recursive self-improvement and its implications in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It sounds like you will be skeptical no matter what they do?

    It sounds like you will be skeptical no matter what they do?

    7 votes

  18. Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Putin miscalculated, apparently due to having a very old-fashioned idea of imperialism. Such wars are no longer profitable. Trump miscalculated, apparently because Israel talked him into thinking...

    Putin miscalculated, apparently due to having a very old-fashioned idea of imperialism. Such wars are no longer profitable.

    Trump miscalculated, apparently because Israel talked him into thinking it would be easy.

    If leaders didn’t make blunders, maybe there wouldn’t be wars?

    1 vote

  19. Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This isn’t unique to the US. No wealthy country in the modern world is self-sufficient. The benefits from trade are too strong to give up.

    This isn’t unique to the US. No wealthy country in the modern world is self-sufficient. The benefits from trade are too strong to give up.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on The rise of build-to-rent housing in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Maybe that's true, but I think renters having a place to live is a good thing. The previous owner sold it to a corporation that built two small houses, so now two renters can live there. That...

    Maybe that's true, but I think renters having a place to live is a good thing. The previous owner sold it to a corporation that built two small houses, so now two renters can live there. That seems good for them.

    If the property had been developed as a single, more expensive home, and sold to someone who could afford the mortgage, it seems like that would be increasing inequality and shutting out the renters?

    (Also, when a home owner pays their mortgage, isn't that money leaving the area too?)

    2 votes