> Discord seems to have intentionally softened its age-verification steps so it can tell regulators, “we’re doing something to protect children,” while still leaving enough wiggle room that technically savvy users can work around it.
...source?
I sincerely doubt that Discord's lawyers advocated for age verification that was hackable by tech savvy users.
It seems more likely that they are trying to balance two things:
1. Age verification requirements
2. Not storing or sending photos of people's (children's) faces
Both of these are very important, legally, to protect the company. It is highly unlikely that anyone in Discord's leadership, let alone compliance, is advocating for backdoors (at least for us.)
Usually in cases like this, there is no source, there can’t be. Long long ago, long enough to be past the statute of limitations, I was involved in a similar regulatory compliance situation. We specifically communicated in such a way that “actual effectiveness” wasn’t talked about, and we set that up with a single, verbal only and without recording, meeting between the team and one of the lawyers.
Point is, these kinds of schemes where internal communication is deliberately hobbled to comply maliciously with requirements while still being completely in the clear as far as any actual recorded evidence goes. And there’s always at least one person piping in with a naïve “source?” as if people would keep recorded evidence of their criminal conspiracies.
Do you have reading on it being a stunt? That seems like a huge gamble. You’re basically inviting competitors and pissing off your supply (content creators.)
If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.
I don’t know for sure but it’s been implied that it was an intentional action to garner public outrage at the banks who wanted to stop processing their transactions.
It’s difficult to believe that they’ll keep privacy guarantees. Some of the most valuable types of targeting are lookalike audiences or following up from other ads elsewhere.
How would OAI allow them to target without access to de-anonymized data?
Buyers will want to exclude existing customers, which requires the same.
The product managers will have explicit KPIs tied to conversion. At some point, like at Google, this will break. It has to or OAI can’t grow into its current valuation, let alone any future one.
As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations.
Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt.
That would have been completely unbelievable! Absurd! No one would take it seriously.
An equivalent original human piece of work from an expert level programmer wouldn’t be able to do this without all the context. By that I mean all the all the shared insights, discussion and design that happened when making the compiler.
So to do this without any of that context is likely just very elaborate copy pasta.
> Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt.
You’re very conveniently ignoring the billions in training and that it has practically the whole internet as input.
Wasn't there a fair amount of human intervention in the AI agents? My understanding is, the author didn't just write "make me a c compiler in rust" but had to intervene at several points, even if he didn't touch the code directly.
Sure then make your prediction? It’s always easy to hand wave and dismiss other people’s predictions. But make yours: what do you think llms can do in 2 years?
You're asking me to do the thing I just said was frustrating haha. I have no idea. It's a new technology and we have nothing to draw from to make predictions. But for the sake of fun..
New code generation / modification I think we're hitting a point of diminishing returns and they're not going to improve much here
The limitation is fundamentally that they can only be as good as the detail in the specs given, or the test harnesses provided to them. Any detail left out they're going to make up, and hopefully it's what you want (often it's not!). If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today
Code optimization I think they'll get quite a bit better. If you give them GCC it's probable they'll be able to improve upon it
> If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today
This was my opinion for a very long time. Having build a few applications from scratch using AI, though, nowadays I think: Sometimes not everything needs to be spelled out. Like in math papers some details can be left to the ~~reader~~LLM and it'll be fine.
I mean, in many cases it doesn't really matter what exactly the code looks like, as long as it ends up doing the right thing. For a given Turing machine, the equivalence class of equivalent implementations is infinite. If a short spec written in English leads the LLM to identify the correct equivalence class, that's all we need and, in fact, a very impressive compression result.
Because of the unspecified behaviour, you're always going to need someone technical that understands the output to verify it. Tests aren't enough
I'm not even sure if this is a net productivity benefit. I think it is? Some cases it's a clear win.. but definitely not always. You're reducing time coding and now putting extra into spec writing + review + verification
> Sometimes, yeah. I don't think we're disagreeing
I would disagree. Formalism and precision have a critical role to play which is often underestimated. More so with the advent of llms. Fuzziness of natural languages is both a strength and weakness. We have adopted precise but unnatural languages (math/C/C++) for describing machine models of the physical world or of the computing world. Such precision was a real human breakthrough which is often overlooked in these debates.
Are you saying you've never had them fail at a task?
I wanted to refactor a bunch of tests in a TypeScript project the other day into a format similar to table driven tests that are common in Golang, but seemingly not so much in TypeScript. Vitest has specific syntax affordances for it, though
It utterly failed at the task. Tried many times with increasing specificity in my prompt, did one myself and used it as an example. I ended up giving up and just doing it manually
Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.
With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.
That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just) talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking about the entire user experience including git push to deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have the same UX, both in the command line with git push deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.
Sorry, are you saying that engineers at Anthropic who work on coding models every day hadn’t thought of multiple of them working together until someone else suggested it?
I remember having conversations about this when the first ChatGPT launched and I don’t work at an AI company.
Claude Code has already had subagent support. Mostly because you have to do very aggressive context window management with Claude or it gets distracted.
Looking at the underlying study, this isn’t evidence of bias. It’s evidence of correlation between Republicans and negative sentiment.
If you look at the sentiment for public figures given, the bottom one is, for example, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, he was credibly accused of sexual assault during his confirmation hearings, which was a huge deal at the time. Someone with that on their record will probably be read as negative, but, I mean, not the editors’ fault!
> His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions
What's "kid gloves" about that?
Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia page:
> Adolf Hitler[a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party,[b] becoming the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.[c] Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict, Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German military operations as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
The merger was most likely now because they have to do it before the IPO. After the IPO, there’s a whole process to force independent evaluation and negotiation between two boards / executives, which would be an absolute dumpster fire where Musk controls both.
A public SpaceX will still be run by Musk. A public SpaceX would have to sell assets like X for a huge loss given its debt load, which would also take a propaganda machine out of Musk’s hands.
...source?
I sincerely doubt that Discord's lawyers advocated for age verification that was hackable by tech savvy users.
It seems more likely that they are trying to balance two things:
1. Age verification requirements
2. Not storing or sending photos of people's (children's) faces
Both of these are very important, legally, to protect the company. It is highly unlikely that anyone in Discord's leadership, let alone compliance, is advocating for backdoors (at least for us.)
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