I wouldn’t be surprised if NSA purchased equipment using a method akin to greymarketing where the supplier either
A) doesn’t know the true destination of the parts, including purchases through an agency other than NSA, or purchase by multiple “individuals”
B) NSA has arrangements to compensate manufacturers using black budget line items and gov projects line items where disclosure of the production or even something like funding of a stand-up of a factory is not clearly delineated or otherwise inaccurately designated in SEC and IRS filings. More so I’m pretty sure there is a named procedure/process and maybe even a working group or sub-unit, similarly bearing a unique cryptonym, enabling the large scale acquisition of goods while keeping the regular record publication flows ignorant.
They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
I don't think NSA meddles in politics. CIA sure. NSA is more about communications, hacking, signal intelligence and spying in general. They give you the information. If you want to do dirty stuff with that info, the CIA is there for that.
This is simply false. Only domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI can conduct domestic investigations. Law enforcement or counter-intelligence agents might be given access to intelligence the NSA collects if they have a warrant, but it is not in the remit of the agency to intentionally collect information on US persons, it’s only allowed incidentally when conducting foreign intelligence collection
Those are definitely a thing - also don't forget about elections in the EU, with the open support for the far-right there as well as the US National Security Strategy officially talking of wanting to undermine the EU.
But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.
- lean proofs are hard, and a lot of the time there is so much mathematical machinery that folks are working on that you would need to not only prove your result, but also all of the machinery that your subfield it is built on. it would be infeasible for many authors to do all of this work (this might be a major part of multiple careers, and when there are 5 folks in your entire subfield, the payoff is not really worth it)
- human proofs are readable, and can illustrate concepts better than lean proofs. human proofs give insights into how to think about a type of problem, and this is often the most valuable part of a proof/result.
- lean proofs are often very difficult to read; while they give you a "verified" check mark, they do not necessarily improve the bounds of human understanding if that makes sense.
(author here) Bend1 indeed has no significant active userbase
I don't think that means it was "unsuccessful" in the sense you imply, though, because the project was never meant to be used in production. It was there to display a milestone (running inets on the GPU) and I was very clear it wasn't ready to be used yet. For example, it had only 24-bit integers, a 2 GB memory cap, and other limitations that made it unpractical. I still don't know why it has so many stars. I posted it to hacker news and that just happened. I guess it just went viral without really being ready yet, which got us to where we are now.
Anyway the commit history is back now. I apologize for nuking it
It _is_ sus, but you should be willing to forgive. It's not like it was done out of animus, and I assume that an academic/foreigner is unaccustomed to how production software conventions work. Their baseline is less important, more important is how quickly they learn/adopt "best practices". Y-intercept, slope, etc.
I say this as literally the first HN comment to call them out on this.
the author here is providing commentary on the vibe coding era, bend is just one example of people having ai build things for them they don't understand or haven't researched sufficiently, at least start with a vibe-search skill before the vibe-coding begins
Ai is only good at a task when the human driver is good at that task, and this is far more narrow than most realize. Someone who knows how to program will still fail on many programming tasks with agents, the field has far too much for any one person to know.
That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.
I actually find Claude to have become a real Debbie downer. Even when it is making things happen, it seems to have a default tone of negativity as the author is pointing out. So I’m trapped between running things by Claude which is gonna give me the more negative albeit realistic framing, and Gemini who is like the worlds biggest hypeman and absolutely loves any idea run by it.
There's this idea in the zeitgeist right now that the "negative take" is the "realistic take" - there's some pop science that confirms the pessimists' confirmation bias too.
The reality is that while things often balance on a knife's edge precipice of chaos and calamity, things are WAY better than how they used to be by many many metrics, but humans are primed to be negative. You actively have to specifically choose to not be a debbie downer. You're wired to be bummed out. We all are, and this sort of "negative framing of things" and aggressive "yes but" seems really smart to a lot of people.
I used to see this same shit all the time in meetings.
"We are here to discuss problem X!"
"Yeah, but have you considered other problems A-W?"
"Those are valid concerns, but we are hear to solve X."
"Well, we cannot solve X until we solve A-W"
Almost a year ago now, I realized what it was. In large institutions, people get to look smart when they poke holes in things, and that wins them social cachet. In a bigger org, you're not actually rewarded for getting much done. You're rewarded for making your chain of command look better. Sometimes that involves "getting stuff done" but it can also look like being the person who says, "oh that won't work" or "have we considered Z?" over Zoom. Unfortunately though, building things never is actually something where you get everything right the first time. So the meetings to plan the future meetings build out into a miasma of nothing and when you let perfect be the enemy of good, you'll never accomplish anything. You'll look insanely busy because you'll be constantly be arguing with a group of box-tickers and concern trolls about increasingly calamitous hypotheticals, but you'll accomplish nothing.
David Graeber was right about this. Since Claude has been trained on internal slack channels and this behavior on the web, I'm sure this is why this sort of behavior exists. Because I bet that there's tons of meetings at Anthropic about "well, have you thought about " or "we should reframe this take" or whatever.
well not solving a-w meant that for the 8 years I worked there, a special team had to be made specifically to fix and re-solve problem x, at least 4 times, still going at it when i left
It doesn't matter whether you believe me or not. The work they did did get some very minor perf gains. But there was a fundamental limit due to decisions made early on (flagged, but ignored)
it wasn't just me. And whatever problems we anticipated actually did happen. I got off that team, my colleague was stuck on it for the rest of my time there.
Tech has become overwhelmingly negative in tone over the past 10-15 years. Nearly every single aspect is drowning in negativity.
If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.
And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.
Since LLMs are different between each other (and even version of the same family) I'd expect the differences to be explained by each lab idiosincratic biases in the post-training phase rather than by internet corpora characteristics during the pre-training phase.
I might be a one-man optimist brigade, but the negative nancies are stupid.
There are problems in the world. That cannot be disputed, but the overwhelming negativity is just intellectual laziness IMO. That and a fear of change or loss of status. I understand that fear, viscerally even. But the attitude is just dumb, you have to adapt. Plus, life is short! There's not some award you get on your death bed for being the most negative A-hole your whole life. A love of life is an amazing thing!
I look at this stuff in tech right now and say, "THIS SHIT RULES!" and am actually excited at the things I will get to build.
Like, tomorrow, I have to baby sit agents for most of the day, that's kind of a net "meh" but, I'm going to wire together an SDR I found in my shop and a raspberry pi I had lying around, and try to build an automated kiosk to transcribe some weather data for one of my customers. It's not a huge thing, but it's going to be fun. And the technology to really even do that didn't really exist a few years ago! Open Whisper is what, 4 years old?
But "oh teh noes, everything was better in the 90s!"
That's nostalgia, and it's reactionary garbage. I am not going to have my spirit broken by a bunch of people who never do anything.
All the stuff I always wanted to build is now easier than ever.
It's what keeps me away from the fediverse...
Outside it's a bit better so I lean bubble. But the training material that shapes the part of the network that activates when claude works on something technical might have negativity over-represented.
My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
Yeah this is something thats bothered me a lot recently. I'll ask "How did team A beat team B by so much?" and Claude will tell me "Actually, team B didn't win; team A won that game." I don't know how they got this thing to solve open math problems when it can't solve basic sports talk.
That just sounds like effective communication with emotional beings to me. I was taught in college to find points I agree with, acknowledge those, then move on to the parts I don't agree on. It makes the recipient feel good at first, which puts them in a frame of mind willing to accept criticism.
You even start your reply with "That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this." It's just a friendly way of speaking.
Claude: “lots of people enjoy lemon in their tea, but there’s a subtlety: putting it in coffee is likely to be an unpleasant experience”.
If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.
Captures it perfectly. I notice it more in newer sessions too where it doesn't have a clear understanding yet and is making a lot more assumptions. I wonder if this could be an emergent RLHF strategy - by drawing attention to (seemingly obvious) assumptions or context being made (e.g. I'm only interested in tea not coffee) it increases the chance that a human will correct the rare incorrect assumption sooner. If you are scored on solving problems, with no weight given to human frustration levels, this is probably a good technique.
That hasn't been my experience, but I know what you mean. Claude in particular likes to point out "things you might not have considered" and I sometimes already have. But it tends to vindicates me more than it annoys.
I'm pretty early in my career, so I probably gain more from that sort of stuff than most people. The senior devs on my team tend to get the most frustrated with it and I think this behavior is a big part of why.
It is! Its charming. What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same. No sleepy claude, no stresses claude, no sad claude you know hes not himself this week because of some thing going on with his girlfriend or mom or whatever. Its devoid humanity, the same exact tone and expressions over and over and over.
> What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same.
But it... does. In some sessions it will get particularly paranoid, apologetic, self-doubtful, or suspicious. I'd say these traits are always there but they can become more or less pronounced.
(By contrast, I'd say the GPT models are much more even keeled, although I maybe haven't used them enough.)
Indeed but it will use the same language when talking to subagents so humans are no different to LLMs in Claude's world view (model).
One trait that I've seen more with the newer 5er model series is ", but it's actually worse..." or "I said to do this and it did that instead but it was right and I was wrong." - so I assume that a larger part of what they call thinking complexity is (not to much surprise) inherently related to questioning incoming assumptions.
Indeed. It's been very funny to observe introvert geeks progressively rediscover human communication over the past 3 years.
For decades, they were allowed -expected even- to be weird and communicate badly with their peers, let alone third parties.
Then, a whole zoo of processes, gamifications and other shenanogans were invented just to help them show normies what was up with their work (remember the planning poker game?)...
Now, at last, those people are actually ewpected to be able to explain their constraints, document the work, be accountable for the results and generally exchange contructively... Just, well, with AIs not with humans.
I have not seen this kind of Claude way of speaking in professional communications aside from PR stuff or etc. to the contrary, its often quite casual but still polite
if you're asserting Claude-like speech is how normies speak?
Right! I don't think "Don’t contradict sentences" by itself as a rule is going to work. Give it a few examples because I wouldn't necessarily have pegged "This is hot, not cold." as a "contradicting sentence."
You'd have to make it a positive statement to give it more weight since negatives leave too many options open. Instead of "don't..." try "as far as possible, always try to reinforce sentences and assumptions rather than contradicting them" - worth a try. Worst case you just get more reinforcement gibberish before it plugs back into the contradictions but that's just a guess.
And LLMs do it a lot but it's not unique to their writing. Plenty of humans did and do use those constructions for effect or emphasis, or just because they think it makes them sound smart, as if they are revealing something profound.
It's a correction. What the model does is not real contradiction. So more nuance is welcome in this case - even if at another layer it's tongue in cheek
I am very pro-AI and I was coding in the late 80s, although not in high school, I was in elementary at the time.
Given I started on an Apple IIe with a green screen and basic, and have since had to shift languages and techniques repeatedly over the decades, I have to be someone that embraces new technology if I want to stay relevant and productive.
This means that I will adopt things that make sense and AI does make sense.
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