The talk about declaring anthropic a supply chain security risk (which doesn’t just remove it from DoW but also all the contractors and suppliers that supply DoW) was also accompanied by a completely different threat: to declare it national security need to take over then company.

Prediction: in time, OpenAI will be declared such to privatise profits but socialise losses

Interesting. George hotz has said his motivation to start tinygrad was the worry that nvidia would be nationalized.

There is just one rule. If they mention it, they'll do it.

this would pulverize the stock value then, right?

or would the government just buy the stocks on the market?

Horseshoe theory applied to nationalization of companies. It would be cathartic if it weren’t so grim.

Autonomous just means this narrative is what you’d see if you looked at the logs of the drone talking to itself in it’s head…?

This is giving me strong Dark Star vibes with the intelligent bomb forcing a philosophical discussion about existence and perception at the end.

(Spoilers for the ending of the movie: https://youtu.be/h73PsFKtIck?si=tTm9TidmEMBHsXq1 )

Assuming it's not smart enough to write logs that make it less likely to be prosecuted/ disabled by coming up with fake reasons.

It can just say you were a terrorist because you were an adult male traveling with something in your hands. Humans already do this to justify strikes, likely the AI would do the same.

> Assuming it's not smart enough to write logs that make it less likely to be prosecuted

Alternatively: Assuming it's smart enough not to consider logging to /dev/null a reasonable way to speed up execution times.

OpenAI step in to work with defence department on stuff so questionable that another company took a public stance to distance itself from?

Myself, I’ve always “followed the money” when the current administration has taken public positions on things from media company mergers to data centres etc. So a bit of me wonders how much of the “anthropic is a threat to national security” is genuine and how much is about getting another company into lucrative defence contracts instead?

Trump family has major investments in data centers etc and is heavy benefiting from OpenAI footprint but they recently declined an investment opportunity in anthropic citing it’s political leanings

Anthropic must be in some way better in that they do have some red lines and do truly stand on them (and if they didn’t, like every other company doesn’t seem to, we’d never have even known)?

anthropic previously agreed to deploy their models in this context with nothing but a contract to enforce their red lines -- they even disabled their safety systems!

per announcement, openai can include safety systems of their own making, including ones to prevent their red lines from being crossed. that seems to be a more robust solution, including in the face of an untrustworthy government

Notice that Anthropic doesn't support spying on Americans specifically - spying on anyone else is fine. Can't spy on three specific 300m people, but spying on the other 7.7B totally ok.

Well, yes.

But the desire and ability to control non-citizens en masse is nothing like the threat a government is to its own citizens.

In practice the two activities have very different natures and impact.

Except most of the world's population, and in fact large fraction of the engineers and scientists working on these things, are not US citizens.

Often embezzlement cases include crazy expenses.

Just put in my mind by the grift and corruption posts that are currently trending on HN front page right now.

I do not know about here, but back home in India, 68 M would be so juicy for someone in the organizing chain to not take a cut. People get fired all the time, but sometimes the gravy train can run for years before getting caught.

No first hand experience ... just anecdotes and some news reports.

They could peacefully protest

Protest only works if there’s someone to listen. The Republicans in Congress don’t care what their constituents want.

Sightseers see sights at sites? So perhaps not sic in this case?

I’m also a duckdb convert. All my notebooks have moved from Pandas and polars to Duckdb. It is faster to write and faster to read (after you return to a notebook after time away) and often faster to run. Certainly not slower to run.

My current habit is to suck down big datasets to parquet shards and then just query them with a wildcard in duckdb. I move to bigquery when doing true “big data” but a few GB of extract from BQ to a notebook VM disk and duckdb is super ergonomic and performant most of the time.

It’s the sql that I like. Being a veteran of when the world went mad for nosql it is just so nice to experience the revenge of sql.

I personally find polars easier to read/write than sql. Especially when you start doing UDFs with numpy/et. al. I think for me, duckdb's clear edge is the cli experience.

> It is faster to write and faster to read

At least on clickbench, polars and duckdb are roughly comparable (with polars edging out duckdb).

I use them both depending on which feels more natural for the task, often within the same project. The interop is easy and very high performance thanks to Apache Arrow: `df = duckdb.sql(sql).pl()` and `result = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM df")`.

For the bigger tasks, Exasol might also be a very neat option for you. We have a free personal edition that can scale regarding data volumes, #servers (MPP architecture) and complex workloads.

Recently, we have also compared ourselves against DuckDB and were 4 times faster even on a single node. We are in-memory optimized, but data doesn't need to fit in the RAM.

Disclaimer: I'm CTO@Exasol

There is one turbine near where I live in Scandinavia that is very noisy. It is a low thumping sound that penetrates houses and is horrid. Those living within a km perhaps more won a court case to remove it but the owner has appealed and appealed and during the years or appeals the thing keeps turning and keeps being noisy so people can’t sleep. My understanding is the simulation and calculations of the noise that were part of the planning process were flawed and did not accurately model the terrain.

Meanwhile, not 5 km away, there are a bunch of turbines with people living around them and no problem.

So the exact slopes etc of the terrain is very important.

That sounds very much like either tower thump or a broken bearing, I think the neighbors would have a better case if they pushed the safety angle because a turbine in a bad state of maintenance is dangerous.

Then they'll be forced to fix it and it will be quiet again. You can ask them if it always was that noisy, if it wasn't then that's an extra arrow in their quiver. I'm very much pro renewables but safety is a major concern and operators that do not work safely and/or ignore valid complaints are a net negative for renewables.

In this case it is the terrain. The sound is funnelled somehow. In the planning process the owner has to commission a study that reports if the terrain shape is ok and compute the noise on nearby houses etc. Apparently you can get what you pay for. In the appeal a more independent study pulled the original study apart.

Eh that is still encompassed by the term “pattern matching” in this context. Sure it’s complicated, but it’s still just a glorified spell checker.

I'm an LLM naysayer, and even I have no trouble seeing, or accepting, that they're much more than glorified spell checkers.

And we're just glorified oxidation. At some point the concept of "emergent systems" comes into play.