As a European user, I‘m not happy at all. I can’t fail to notice that non-domestic mass surveillance is not excluded here. I won’t cancel my account just yet because Opus is the best at computer use. But as soon as Mistral catches up and works reasonably well, I‘ll switch.
If you don't cancel your account now, I don't see what your problem is. Isn't it standard practice for allies to spy on each other? No reason to wait for Mistral to catch up when EU foreign policy already sealed the deal.
The whole article reads as virtue signaling to me. Anthropic already has large defense contracts. Their models are already being used by the military. There's really no statement here.
It's arguable that businesses are subject to the same morality-inducing processes that humans are. For example, as a human (with a soul?) what is at risk when we do something immoral? I see it to be a reputational cost at the highest level. Morality could be viewed from the perspective that it increases predictability/coherence in society (generates less heat).
How is it virtue signalling when sticking by these principles risks their entire business being destroyed by either being declared a supply chain risk or nationalized?
I read the statement twice. I can't understand how you landed on "take my money".
Looks like an optics dance to me. I've noticed a lot of simultaneous positions lately, everyone from politicians and protesters, to celebrities and corporations. They make statements both in support of a thing, and against that same thing. Switching up emphasis based on who the audience is in what context. A way to please everyone.
To me the statement reads like Anthropic wants to be at the table, ready to talk and negotiate, to work things out. Don't expect updated bullet-point lists about how things are worked out. Expect the occasional "we are the goodies" statements, however.
this article is _about_ kissing the ring and damage control. Are you seriously believing at face value? You're ok with spying non us peaceful citizens?
Zubrin's "Hydrogen Hoax" from 2007[1] is basically an ironclad critique. The physics are inescapably poor, and always will be. (Zubrin makes other points in that article which should probably be taken with more salt, but his critique of hydrogen stands).
I miss the old social media. I'd love to have it back. Having moved several times to various corners of the world, I have dear family and friends who are scattered across multiple continents. It's difficult to maintain ongoing 1:1 connections across such distances, but I used to be able to keep up with them and their families -- and them with mine -- via social media. It felt genuinely communal.
And then the posts from them became increasingly interspersed with -- and eventually outright replaced by -- advertisements, rage bait from random people(?) I didn't know, and then eventually AI slop. All with the obvious goal of manipulating my attention and getting me to consume more advertising.
It felt absolutely gross. Not something I wanted my personal life to be associated with. I stopped posting. So did my friends. The end.
But I still miss the old social media, and would use it if it actually existed (not just as a technology or a business model, mind you, but as an actual network with the adoption needed to create those kind of connections).
real question, how much would you be willing to pay a month for access to a healthy social network? (borrowing another comments clarification on the term vs social media)
healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom
scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads...
because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there?
its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people
do choose kale over oreos.
I absolutely appreciate and agree with the sentiment, but can't figure out what the proposition actually is. The thesis seems to be: "Here's a problem. We want to solve it." Aaaaaaaaaaaand ... that's it. Exactly how are you going to solve it? Or, if "exactly" is too much of an ask, could we at least have a "vaguely"? Seems like it needs more meat on the bones!
It says so on the tin. "Escape the chokehold of hyperscalers" is all that matters, really. Everything else will follow nicely from it. Compute density is so good these days, you don't even need major datacenter investment. There are modular DC designs that fit in a shipping container. You tow one around, connect power, fiber, cooling lines (to intercoolers in another shipping container) and that's it. You would be surprised how much can be accomplished with so very little. There are many advantages to this approach, like being able to bring up SCIF-equivalent inspectable spaces on the cheap, but considering we're all probably going to war sooner than later, it might as well become necessary. This is akin to how SAAB, and perhaps to a larger extent Ukraine, have changed airplane logistics.
Unless you're a hyperscaler yourself, hyperscaling is overrated.
Great, now how do you make that actually happen at a political / regulatory / cultural level?
It's already an uphill battle, because humans in large organisations seem to have an innately conservative bias which says that "nobody ever got fired for choosing ${giganticEvilStatusQuoCorporation}". That, combined with the fact that the US hyperscalars have, I dunno, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of ability to put their thumb on the political and regulatory scales, make this an uphill battle. There will need to be a specific plan for leveling the playing field.
I'm at a point in my life (personal bandwidth hovering near 0%) where I'm not getting involved in anything unless I have not just a good reason ("this is a noble agenda; somebody should do something about it, and hey, I guess I'm a somebody"), but a damned specific reason ("I have unique capabilities which can help this specific initiative in this specific way").
Anyhow, in this particular domain, I'm pretty sure there are people who could be MUCH more useful contributors than I. I'd love to forward the "manifesto" to them -- except I know that they're in the same position as me: essentially zero bandwidth. Any new project they get involved with means dropping something else that's currently on their plate, and is presumably important. They're not going to do that on a lark. They'll need need a damned good reason to participate, before deciding to spend time on something new.
To be honest, ANY real power-players will be in this position. They don't have free time on their hands; they won't just join up in the vague hope that maybe it'll be a place where things can happen. You will need power-players on-side, and without a much more specific proposition, you're not going to get them.
But I'm glad you've joined. Job no. 1: that manifesto needs to do a lot more manifesting before it's fit for purpose!
Agreed. There are mountains that don't survive getting crushed between two icebergs. If the sphere were made of solid tungsten, then okay, I'd buy it. Short of that, I have doubts.
Eh, they got further than New Glenn did on its first attempt, and it succeeded on its second. They obviously made it through re-entry / retropropulsion in one piece and with a stable attitude, which is an achievement in itself. Looks like an engine exploded at the start of the braking burn -- or in any case, they suddenly start combusting a whole lot of stuff that isn't methane. But that might just be a single point failure, and a whole lot had to go right for them to get this far. It's reasonable that they could succeed on their next attempt.
Airship To Orbit is JP Aerospace, not Bigelow. It seems like an utterly bonkers and fairly implausible concept and I'm definitely not equipped to analyze its merits. But the JP team have some legitimate accomplishments in the rockoon world, and appear to be honest, hardworking people. Definitely not grifters. I've been following their work on ATO since they first announced it at a Space Access conference in ... 2003, I think? Still can't figure out whether it's real or not.
Yeah, airship to orbit might still be a question mark, but there is a significant overlap in other useful areas.
You should be for example totally able to build an inflatable frame for a launch loop, making it possible to launch payloads from above most of the atmosphere.
Also for re-entry the more you lower the density of something, the less re-entry stresses there will be. So you could construct a giant low-pressure inflatable decelerator device and have it essentially float down all the way from orbit, incrementally shedding energy as it comes down over a longer period of time, taking care to balance the rate of descent, heating and internal/external pressures.
Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
That's great story and a wonderful counterexample to what I wrote above. Thank you!
Edit: you got me thinking about one other counterexample, which is the part of the "Children of the Beats" interview with the daughter of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). She doesn't go into much detail but it definitely doesn't sound tragic.
Finally, someone of consequence not kissing the ring. I hope this gives others courage to do the same.