I think you CAN have it both ways: Announce at the beginning: "If you want, I will give you a B- (or whatever grade works) but to get this grade you must promise never to set foot in the class and never to speak about the topic of this course with anyone on campus. Otherwise, we will explore the syllabus completely free from the stench of grade-grubbers who are at the school in order to get some sort of imagined advantage in the world." Then, no tests. Grades or evaluations will be felt out as the class goes. The B- people will get the bullshit degree that they paid for, they might well succeed in the dumb-ass world, who gives a shit.

This crisis hasn't been brewing: university has always had two conflicting purposes: investigate interesting stuff deeply with people who have devoted their lives to this; and a mechanism to reproduce and reinforce the class system. This second purpose hides and piggybacks on the first.

LLMs are a new and developing set of techniques and computer people should be experimenting. The "speed" of development has been turned into "speed" of trying to BLOCK experimentation. We are being instructed to think of "AI" as something that only a few behemoth companies do. Like how "computers" are just MS and Apple, or "phones" are just AT&T, or "Christians" are just in Rome, or "voters" are only landowners, "writers" are only monks... This article is part of a bald and disgusting POWER-GRAB.

US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic WANT regulation in order to block weaker players from developing competing AIs because they can't conform to the regulations. The "costs" of running AI will be the cost of having massive data centers with all kinds of anti-copyright regulations, and a proliferating list of other phony safeguards, including "safe guarding" the companies' own interests in parallel with being moral police, fear mongers, and buck-passers. Chinese and independent developers will train on pirated data and will not need data centers because they will be able to run locally. This will give them some competitive advantages - so the US companies will push to make training data, i.e, all writing and reading, be regulated – no one will be allowed to read websites unless they are logged in and ID authenticated. US AI companies will pay for access. Non-payers will be accused of violating international trade pacts, etc. Their AI models will be banned and there will be a movement to consider them criminal, selfish, etc. The main foreign policy of the US will be to get other countries to agree to license training data, and this issue will dominate US policy. When I (me, a programmer) want to program/train my own AI, it will be made illegal or at least very difficult. Right now it is difficult from a tech resource and org resource POV. But soon all the difficulty will be strictly from a regulatory POV. My access will increasingly need to be monitored and blocked.

But all of this is just a continuation of the DRM fights and the Free Software battles of the last decades. It isn't even a huge shift. It is a disgusting and short-sighted vision of our values. The worst parts of our culture and business practices have come to dominate the world.

... sadly for the Americans, the rest of the world now knows they can't count on a US based provider for this kind of thing any more.

It was uncomfortable enough relying so heavily on American software back when it couldn't be switched off remotely on the say so of an idiot. Today it's an intolerable risk.

I tried hard in the last 2 months: I bought Claude, came up with a project I thought seemed reasonable: JS-based rich-text editor with plugin system. Existing solutions (CKEditor, TinyMCE, Quill, etc etc) are old, unwieldy, sometimes proprietary, and modern browsers have many newly supported features... My goal was an HTML web component of /

I tried to carefully prompt. Before coding I used Claude to help research the issues involved (dead standards, browsers handling edges cases differently, generated HTML questions, etc.). Claude was thoughtful and reassuring. I knew it would be more complex than Claude kept insisting, but that's OK. As usual with LLMs, at first I was more than impressed, I was blown away.

Still, bugs. That's expected. Fixes were easy and it was amazing how Claude understood the issues. But the more I tested, the more the bugs proliferated. Some issues activated Claude to rewrite whole architectural parts of the codebase, which broke dependencies. Fixing the dependent stuff introduced new bugs. I slowly had to learn more and more about the implementation specifics. More and more I had to audit the code changes, revert, try again. Soon I found myself questioning Claude's approaches in what seemed to be subtle ways. At times I was forced to really dig in, and the code – which looked so clean and organized – was a true spaghetti mess. Out-of-date comments. Repeated blocks of functionality with small differences. Convoluted back-and-forth paths across files, functions, classes. Each plugin had drifted to requiring its own long list of specialized one-off supporting worlds of code. Basic browser functions got overwritten with convoluted bespoke mish-mash slop with long interruptions of exceptions work-arounds and crazy shit.

Maybe the thing works. But the bugs are brutal! Everything is delicate! I've lost track of what the hell is going on.

But all of this was very familiar! It all looked like what USED TO happen to me before I got experience. What happened when I instructed programming newbies to take a crack without supervision. What happened when someone paid $5 to Upwork for something the boss thought would be easy.

We are not there yet. Not even close. It is 1998 and we are using for layout with the "100% td width" work-around.

well once they crossed 2 billion the signed integer representation made losses into profits

they don't have to make a profit on the investment. The investment is defensive. The goal is not to be outside the moat.

instead of explaining to my boss why he caught me spinning on my chair and stacking office supplies into Jenga towers as "I'm waiting for the compiler to finish" I can now tell him I'm waiting for claude to get back to me.

I was looking forward to tokenising the Swiss citizen. There would be fewer of them than bitcoins and not growing in populations, so by the same logic bitcoinETF use they would appreciate. And they are even backed by gold. Dang.. I'd have made a fortune.

...a lot of people online were saying there was an upcoming event called The Halvening that would change everything.

I guess this is it?

I swear I read the headline as
Beer can tools to solve problems

Seems to me 'dead' for a taxi isn't 'dead' for a static power bank. If I'm running a taxi I've got hard limits on how large my battery can be and how heavy, and I want to maximise the mileage I get between charges, because while my taxi is charging it's not out on the road earning money. When that battery is keeping only maybe 80% of its original design charge, and now I have to schedule one recharge too many per working day? Bang goes my business plan, so I'm replacing it.

If I'm storing energy for the grid I'm a lot less worried about that. It only stores 80% of what it did when new? Better than nothing, and the taxi firm is selling them off cheap. I'll stack them up!

Perhaps not, but if you pick your moment right then permanently stopping the work of some of the most talented researchers there could very well make a difference. A spectacular incident that makes the headlines might also deter others - bright graduates might decide it's far safer to take up a different line of work, subcontractors and suppliers might decide doing business with AI firms isn't worth the danger, investors might figure the increased risk of loss of premises and equipment into their projections, that kind of thing.

If people genuinely believed AI takeover was a real, present and imminent threat, then they wouldn't just be publishing essays online, they'd be forming direct action groups, along the full spectrum of campaigning: all the way from awareness raising publicity campaigns, through picketing, blockades and sit-ins, up through Black Bloc type actions, right up to menacing intimidation campaigns and terrifying physical force operations. But I don't see any Butlerian Jihad getting started. Which tells me they don't actually believe this at all; they're just bigging up their own importance. 'Oh yes, our technology is so incredibly powerful, if it were done wrong then imagine what could happen! Keep the money coming to make sure it's done right instead! Then all that power can be ours instead!... I mean, uh, yours, Mr Investor sir.'

AI stock valuations don't make a bit of sense unless the technology turns out to be every bit as powerful as that. If they don't keep that thought alive, then the bubble bursts right now. That's what all this hot air is about, and that's why nobody really pulls a Miles Dyson at the AI research lab.

The interesting thing about the Terminator movies is that when AI researcher Miles Dyson became convinced that his work had a high probability of resulting in an artificial general intelligence attempting to replace humanity, he did not go and post a ten thousand word essay on LessWrong about how he had updated his timeline and p(doom) estimates and discussing the full Bayesian analysis of the situation. He went to the lab that very night with some heavily armed companions and he blew the place up.

I keep hearing that one AI researcher or another claims that they believe as Dyson came to believe. Until one of them takes similar action, I simply do not believe that they actually think their research carries such a risk.

You have access to the lab where the work is being done? You regularly meet in person with leading researchers and talents driving the project forward? You are an American and you have the Second Amendment? And the entire future light cone is at stake? Quintillions of hypothetical future lives riding on the outcome of this project here and now?

What's the most effective, altruistic thing you could do for them?

Yeah, exactly. I've never heard of anyone shooting up their AI lab. Which tells me they don't believe their AI is at all likely to wipe us all out.

... and then to secure Ukraine into the European economic and defence structure as firmly as possible. At this point they're far ahead of NATO on how to use drones and robots in war, and they're clearly getting very, very good at building them too. European military and aerospace people both will have a lot to gain from cooperation with Ukraine after the war is over.

As cadets were so memorably told a generation ago: remember always, your duty is clear - to build and maintain those robots!