fiat_lux

Yes, and lots of people in lower income countries do so using a Bluetooth keyboard.

Bless you for trying anyway. They’re truly precious, and I appreciate holding tiny sleeping babies takes absolute priority over photos.

I’m going to need more of these. Many more.

Export control as a concept isn’t new, but this a very new application of it. The ban seems to apply to all non-US citizens for a whole product version, not only one aspect of that product, or potentially even other versions of the same product.

The ban is also unlike cryptography in that this wasn’t a military tech with regulatory controls that began to be adopted by companies who knew there were restrictions. This is the reverse, a ban applied to a pre-existing application where there were notoriously no controls in place.

Anthropic has multiple offices internationally, so even if we put Karpathy aside for a moment, it would be an unbelievably complex task to silo off internal access and work allocation. It’s not like it’s a Netscape situation where they have to make sure the few people working with the RSA algorithm details are US citizens, and they have to ship a slightly nerfed fork alongside the US version, for a product that works entirely on a local single machine.

I’m certainly not angered by the situation, but it’s very clearly market manipulation with nonsensical justification, and far wider implications than just for Anthropic.

Very fair point. I’m still inclined to think this wasn’t primarily a marketing decision, because I don’t think they would point the finger so directly at the government if that were the case. Perhaps the directive was a blessing in disguise for them though.

Either way, I think this is pretty telling for what we can expect over the next couple of months before we see any public SEC docs from either OpenAI or Anthropic. If it weren’t for the immense damage it will cause for innocent people, I might have broken out some popcorn. Popcorn might be my staple food for financial reasons soon anyway.

New drama just dropped: The US government has forced Anthropic to block access to Fable and Mythic for non-US nationals, so they’ve blocked it for everyone.

They’re claiming they believe it’s because someone has managed to find a “minor” vulnerability, but if that were the case, the directive specified non-US restrictions, which makes little sense for an actual security exploit.

My assumption is this is part of the hasty xenophobic and protectionist policy the US is particularly fond of right now, but the government has failed to account for the multinational nature of the companies using them. I anticipate this restriction will be partly amended to accommodate that issue after they try to extract a pound of flesh from Anthropic.

I question how robust Anthropic’s geoblocking and data residency infrastructure even is. Their data residency info is littered with caveats that would make an EU market regulator shudder.

The move to block it for everyone does conveniently feed into Anthropic’s “it’s too powerful” narrative, but Anthropic is keen to demonstrate in this case that the issue they believe has been raised also applies to OpenAI, so I don’t think this was part of their original marketing strategy - even if it can easily be folded into it.

I think it’s more likely Altman is behind this as part of their IPO strategy. There was other murmuring this weekend about OpenAI considering drastic price cuts to compete. It’s an IPO race to the bottom.

It looks like AI use is quickly becoming what I assumed it would be, a weapon of the rich. The question for me is whether that weapon is a footgun, or has a much larger blast radius.

I appreciate you

Draft filings involve feedback from the SEC, so I think they may be throwing shade on government employees, whom they can’t fire or control directly.

But I’m also thinking they may be salty about the aforementioned “as soon as Friday” articles, and then Anthropic beating them to filing.

Hard to tell how much of it is what, they’re toxic inside and out.

That CFO thing was definitely the case, at least a few months ago. I’m sure you’re right about the internal chaos, even if that CFO drama has changed, and it would align with how non-committal this announcement is.

I would love to be a fly on that wall.

3 weeks after the “as soon as Friday” news, OpenAI has followed Anthropic and confidentiality filed their draft S-1. But they sure don’t sound confident about it. Whole post in full (sans legal fine print):

We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.

May, likely, if… Those are some weight-bearing subjunctive clauses.

Edit: also Altman’s eyeball tracker company is doing layoffs now

I think he’s saying that the call for “order, authority and economic freedom” is something out of the Nazi playbook, which it is. But if that’s the case, he really should have used at least a few more words to do so.

Notice there is no double sig in there. Also note that Rodnovery is a neopagan religion, associated with nationalism. It’s the Slavic equivalent the Norse pantheon fetishism you see in the West in the form of Odinism.

You should assume they’re Nazi symbols because they are, even if Nazis stole a lot of symbols from everyone else. The sig was first adapted into the double sig in 1929 to be used as the Schutzstaffel logo

I don’t appreciate having my photo posted without my permission, Isaac.

Sure, but they had an entirely different belief system, and those examples are up to a millennium later. Even the more voluptuous Graeco-Indian female statues from Gandhara got intricate drapery.

It’s possible that it is a more modern idea that we’ve attributed to being much earlier, that does happen a lot, but I’m inclined to think it’s not entirely baseless.

We know for example that the nude Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles caused enough of a stir to become a tourist destination, and even she had a conveniently positioned hand covering her goods. Kore statues always had clothes on too, unlike their male counterparts.

I could maybe buy the possibility that almost all of the nude women sculptures were stolen and later destroyed, either intentionally or accidentally, but that doesn’t quite work either. To not find any older nude sculptures in modern times, plus the odd detail that none of the nude ones we do have (copies, admittedly, and I don’t know all the statues either) have anything other than Barbie-smooth instead of even a delicate line suggesting labia… seems odd for an art culture that progressively got more caught up with hyper realism.

They did get nuder and more realistic with time, but we’ve got nothing from the archaic period without at least a skirt on, usually more.

What neat little creatures. The Green eye also is bioluminescent. Have 3 short videos: https://www.mbari.org/animal/strawberry-squid/

Phrasing. But yes, some of them - they seemed to prefer making plaster and metal fig leaves thankfully. Michelangelo wasn’t thrilled about being told to change his work either. Some of them were whacked off earlier than the Catholics, and some were whacked off by the Vatican even as late as the 1850s in “The Great Castration”.

Many of the lost appendages were accidental though, natural disasters and the like did a lot of amputation and decapitation, to the point where there are entire catalogue methods for mismatched heads on statues.

I wish I had both any cool ancient things and any basement to put them in. I think the oldest thing I own is maybe 100 years at best.

I think I’d be terrified to own anything much older too, conservation is hard.

OpenAI and Anthropic right now: oh no

Part of me wants to believe the whole S&P special treatment announcement was designed to bait them into disclosing numbers, but the more realistic side of me believes this is a nervous backpedal because they’ve realized the inevitable consequences of allowing this blunder to play out in full.

The penis thing is pretty hotly debated, but savagery comes pretty close to my understanding of the theory you mention. It’s not a hugely different concept from some of the manosphere stuff you find today though.

Basically the idea was (it’s theorized) that thinking with your dick leads to making hasty and bad decisions, but you want to be like the cool smart intellectual philosopher rhetorician dudes ruling society who are strong enough to control their urges. You want to be the civilized powerful master strategist, not the uncivilized weak-willed destructive glutton. So… because art needs to be about reality and be educational (there’s no place for that creative abstract shit), we’re going to de-emphasize the body part associated with urges that are difficult to control. These are powerful rational dudes afterall.

The biggest difference with modern manosphere bullshit is maybe the part where they shrunk the pps on the ripped marble dudes to make that point. Instead we get… social media statue and peacock “science” analogies.