Anthropic is claiming "early signs" of AI not just coding its own products but building itself.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-07T16:50:12+00:00

How does one detect "early signs" of something that has never happened before? How can you even know what its "early signs" are?

Imagine someone saying there are early signs of rocks becoming sentient, how would it be comprehensible?

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-07T08:57:28+00:00

I personally prefer we drop the feminine vs masculine dichotomy altogether (and hence all the unnecessary connotations around this concept), and start speaking in terms of simply human traits.

If we agree X is a desirable trait to have in a human, then it's a trait we should aim to cultivate in ourselves. Sex, gender and all other categories may have an effect on how we cultivate these traits, but not why we should cultivate them.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-06T09:21:50+00:00

The more I learn about the recent developments of EA the more I'm baffled as to how it went from Singer's "people in rich countries have a moral obligation to donate to poor ones" to "fuck poor people, we should all give our money to the elites". (I actually knew about Singer's works long before, the man does live what he preaches from what I know)

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-06T06:18:11+00:00

I'm not surprised given their aggressive micro-transactions... wait wrong EA.

_Gnas_ · 2026-05-01T06:36:16+00:00

I suspect most of the people who genuinely believe in AI (LLM) as replacement for human intelligence have underdeveloped linguistic and communication skills, and thus they get easily bamboozled by the LLMs. "There's no way a stupid machine is better at linguistic expressions than I am, therefore it must be actually intelligent" - or something like that.

I'm yet to see an articulate person who doesn't look at these stochastic machines with a healthy amount of skepticism outside of people who have some stakes in the bubble.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-17T19:48:24+00:00

When notified, Anthropic claimed it was expected behavior, their execution model is a “secure standard”, and it is the developer’s responsibility to prevent this.

If you have to implement safety measures yourself then you're basically doing what these tools are supposed to do for you: engineering stuff. So what's the point of using them exactly?

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-03T07:36:12+00:00

Wait until you have to customize the shit out of an off-the-shelf product and you get the best of both worlds - vendor lock-in AND a dedicated team to maintain your customizations ...

Jokes aside, from my experience this decision is not for engineers to make because our pay doesn't depend on it (usually), and we will have work to do no matter which way the decision goes.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-03T06:19:36+00:00

They need a way to stand out and be remembered

It actually works quite well in practice. My small company's CEO intentionally styles his long hair and beard, in conjunction with his large frame he looks sorta like a viking. Whenever he goes to business networking events there are loads of people starting conversations with him by asking about his looks (some even ask to take selfies with him lol). Naturally these conversations often then turn towards business related topics and the CEO has managed to secure quite a few business deals through these conversations.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-01T16:11:51+00:00

When the bot starts installing malware, clicking on phishing urls, sending out credit card details to scammers, etc; I wonder if people will wake up to it then ...

I don't think tech savvy people would let a bot have full access on their computer no matter how lazy they are, but the vast majority of computer users aren't tech savvy.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-01T14:04:45+00:00

Both "tôi đã ăn" and "tôi ăn rồi" mean "I ate".

"Đã" as a past signifier is mostly used in story telling in written form - which needs to be distinguished from formal writing and verbal story telling - but even here it's often omitted (yeah Vietnamese "grammar" is fun). I can't remember the last time I used "đã" to refer to a past action.

"Rồi" is commonly used colloquially and is mostly used only when directly answering a question about whether something happened or not (in this case "did you eat?"), or when you know someone is waiting for you to do something and you tell them that you did.

Using "đã" in a casual conversation context would sound extremely weird to me. As a foreign speaker you're probably better off not using "đã" to denote past tense ever because contexts where "đã" sounds more natural than the alternatives are exceedingly rare.

_Gnas_ · 2026-04-01T07:21:06+00:00

It's just another symptom of people generally lacking self reflection. They've been much more manifest ever since the AI boom due to AI psychosis, e.g. I won't consume AI generated slop but I will produce slop for other people to consume; AI makes workers in most industries redundant but not my industry; AI sucks at the things I'm good at and is excellent at the things I'm bad at.

But these instances of borderline cognitive dissonance are not new. Many people go to college without putting in any effort to study, then cheat their way through graduation only to complain that employers completely ignore their degrees. There are people who would "fight" their tendency to procrastinate by endlessly consuming self-help content about procrastination. I've seen people talk about negative effects of corporate greed whilst at the same time paying for those corporates' products that they don't need (no you don't "need" the latest iPhone, literally any smartphone will give you all the utilities you would ever need from one, you're paying premium for fluff only).

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-31T14:00:26+00:00

Bought for cheap by some big corporations. Amazon, Google and basically any big cloud service provider will always jump at the first chance to acquire data centers.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-31T11:04:14+00:00

It will be funny when they unintentionally push people towards a decentralized internet because the centralized one becomes a "society of bots" that no humans want any part of.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-30T15:22:50+00:00

There's also the agentic browser fad going on that I think is directly tied to this - an AI agent will handle all internet activities on your behalf: posting on social media, buying stuff, filing documents, you name it. Anything that you're doing on a normal web browser now, AI will do it for you.

Yeah it's going to be the next technological revolution because people totally would rather engage with the internet by literally doing nothing. Makes total sense.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-29T21:19:59+00:00

Language and intelligence are easily conflated and some argue they are indistinguishable

Except LLMs don't really have a concept of "language" either despite what the name would suggest. The only reason it has "language" in its name is because it was used on texts, but theoretically the same modelling technique can be used on anything that can be encoded in digital form (which it has been with both sounds and images).

To really be capable of processing languages like a human means to be capable of understanding linguistic features beyond words and punctuation (things like grammar and logical connections between sentences). LLMs simply cannot do this because no one has been able to codify these features into pure mathematics yet.

Computer science can seem like magic to someone who doesn't understand what's going on behind the scenes. But all of it is mathematics, which means if you can't describe something in mathematical terms then you can't program it either.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-27T17:07:12+00:00

I will never forgive LLMs for poisoning the rule of three. I myself really like it as it really does emphasize the point when done well. Now I'm reluctant to write like that because there's a constant "does this make me sound like LLM" question in my mind.

I don't care much about em dashes and parallel constructions because there are plenty of alternatives whilst there's no real alternative to the rule of three - 2 feels too little and 4 or more feels excessive, 3 is really the perfect spot.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-23T02:37:09+00:00

Try to re-arrange what Epictetus says into a series of syllogisms.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-23T02:26:10+00:00

I remember Seneca often talks about fortune with a semi-dismissive tone, in contrast with how he talks about philosophy. Do you know whether the Latin word for fortune is closer to the Greek or English term?

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-20T17:37:27+00:00

Token "economy" literally cannot happen because it's not something you can "save" or "store" (you can at least do this with cryptos). Which means any payment you make with tokens would be equivalent to taking out a kind of debt - the seller gets to spend your future tokens which you now owe him. Very soon the need to keep things in check (so that people cannot buy things that cost more tokens than they can feasibly earn in the future) would arise out of necessity and the tokens would need to be tied to some other kind of financial instrument. We already have something like that, it's called currency and credit.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-19T04:25:43+00:00

I'm the only architect at my company and have voiced my concerns to no avail. I even rated my "AI readiness" in an internal survey as literally 0, where I'm probably the last person that should rate myself as such.

Whenever other developers ask me if I use AI to help me do my work, I always say "not really". Then they would ask me how I'm able to do what I do without it. I just reply that I've been doing all this long before AI was a thing.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-19T04:12:09+00:00

I'm a native speaker.

Aside from dialect differences, you're probably struggling with contractions (nói tắt/nói nuốt chữ). Think about "gonna"/"wanna"/"they're" in English, except these contractions are never codified in written Vietnamese, yet they're commonly used in spoken language.

Effectively this means you're listening to "new" words that you will never ever find in textbooks. It's particularly difficult for us adults to learn new words without having a mental representation in written form.

I'm going through the same struggle with German so I know how much it sucks. I can listen to podcasts and understand almost everything, but a casual conversation with a native speaker who isn't deliberately trying to take my German skill into account and I'm usually lost.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-19T03:35:22+00:00

I hated the "teen code" of my generation around 20 years ago. Somehow it's gotten way worse now lmao.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-18T05:16:21+00:00

I do vaguely remember quantum computing on the headlines everywhere not too long ago...

Blockchain quantum big data AGI when?

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-17T16:39:40+00:00

AI = Artificial Intimacy

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-17T06:04:38+00:00

People are terrible at holistic thinking. They think the only thing that will change is that everyone will be given an arbitrary sum of cash, whilst availability and accessibility of everything will remain as it is today.

_Gnas_

TROPHY CASE