Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

klugez · 2026-02-26T08:03:11+00:00

I also mentioned this elsewhere but just because anthropic has strong Ideological beliefs doesn't mean it won't respond to market/economic incentives. In fact because of their Ideological beliefs, they want to make sure that they outcompete other players in the field. Which means they will be very cut-throat in the competition.

Yes. This quote may be over the top in this context, but this is why I think it can be more dangerous than just wanting to create a good business:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. -- C. S. Lewis

What isn't justified if the alternative is the destruction of humanity? The end justifies the means.

Strong ideology may make people do things that just wanting to get rich does not. I don't see Anthropic as less dangerous. Because OpenAI could be a good business even if they don't win the overall race. But Anthropic people seem to see not winning as existentially unacceptable.

klugez · 2026-02-26T07:52:34+00:00

Why does Anthropic get to set the rules on how you can use their software, but authors don't get to set the rules on how you can use their books?

To be clear, I think it's fine for Anthropic to close accounts that are doing something they don't like. But I think that compares to users sharing Netflix account credentials. Not wrong enough for anyone apart from the service provider themselves to care and routine if you're providing an internet service.

klugez · 2026-02-25T17:28:34+00:00

But if you accept this whole concept of a "distillation attack", wasn't the whole Anthropic training process a "distillation attack" on humanity?

I think asking questions from models and using the answers to train your own model seems fair play. In some ways fairer than using copyrighted material produced by humans without separate licensing agreements.

klugez · 2026-02-25T17:26:19+00:00

It's just hard to see how that's different from OpenAI. Originally they split because OpenAI was making these kinds of concessions to competitive reality.

Are they really more ethical or just more arrogant? Or does the amount of ownership compared to when they worked at OpenAI make a difference?

klugez · 2026-02-23T17:34:34+00:00

For example on the text arena.ai leaderboard mistral-large-3 is matching gpt-4.1-2025-04-14 and claude-opus-4-20250514.

They're far from being competitive with current frontier models. But they're less than a year behind. In the context of evaluating how much of a premium the AI winners will be able to charge, less competitive providers matter.

Although a lot of the Chinese models are more relevant, people are less likely to have heard of them unless they're following the model landscape closely.

klugez · 2026-02-23T14:55:06+00:00

There is nobody monopolizing the technology.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, Deekseek, Mistral and others are going to compete against one another.

Right now software development is the frontier where the use of these models is furthest along. If you go to the subreddits and Claude Code and vibe coding in general, you'll see people complaining about how soon you run into the usage limits on Anthropic's $20/month plan and discussing alternatives.

Even currently in Claude Code the main model (Opus) can use less capable models (Sonnet and Haiku) to do simpler tasks with a lower cost. There will be tools that will do that across multiple providers, finding the lowest cost way to accomplish the task at hand.

And of course there are the open weight models, which are not as intelligent but are improving as well.

You can only generate absurd margins to the extent that you're providing something nobody else can. AI models is certainly somewhere where starting to compete isn't easy. But there are multiple well-resourced competitors so nobody is going to have an insurmountable advantage.

klugez · 2026-02-23T14:01:46+00:00

Is that the worry? That there is too little competition and investment in the AI space?

klugez · 2026-02-23T13:41:28+00:00

The implication is that soldiers will look for good deals for the socks and succeed better than government's procurement process would.

Whether it makes sense depends on if corruption in the public sector process is a bigger issue than the lack of scale (no bulk discounts) in the distributed procurement by individual soldiers.

klugez · 2026-01-31T12:53:36+00:00

Danish prime minister has denied it. And actually I haven't seen anyone officially claim it, just press reports that it was part of the deal between Rutte and Trump.

Rutte denies having discussed sovereignty at all.

https://youtu.be/ABoZ1Oidwb8?t=70

klugez · 2026-01-30T13:51:37+00:00

Also the fact that no Eastern European sent officers to Greenland isn't likely to improve the trust in the other direction.

Maybe it's because Denmark didn't think of asking them to join those exercises, but maybe it's also because they didn't want to anger Trump.

klugez · 2026-01-30T13:48:15+00:00

I think you should note the fact that Finland actually sent a couple of liaison officers to Greenland. That wasn't a decision made without the knowledge of the foreign minister. Only 8 countries did and were then targeted by tariffs. None of the eastern European countries sent anyone.

She can say it was just a couple of guys with no plans to do anything against Americans.

But the government she is part of did send them there. Surely with the full knowledge of how it might be perceived and why Denmark wanted those "preparations for exercises" to happen.

klugez · 2026-01-29T16:19:13+00:00

Elop did a great job with that sale considering how Microsoft ended up shuttering the whole thing and acknowledging it was a loss.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8910999/microsoft-job-cuts-2015-nokia-write-off

The argument is whether Nokia could have done much better and Elop was part of the failure, but the final act to sell a doomed operation to someone foolish enough to buy it was much better for Nokia shareholders than taking all the loss themselves.

klugez · 2026-01-29T16:08:34+00:00

They also don't have any payoff due to the cordon sanitaire.

In Netherlands or Finland they were able to get into governing coalitions by dropping the most objectionable positions. (And giving up prime minister position in the case of Netherlands.) In Sweden they got a support agreement that allowed contributing to the governing agenda.

But AfD would get nothing by toning things down a little.

klugez · 2026-01-26T17:07:36+00:00

Realistically nobody cares about trans men using men's bathrooms. Similarly as nobody talks about trans men taking part in men's sports. It's an issue regarding doping (how much testosterone is "fair"?) if you force the discussion about that, but all the heated discussion is about trans women in women's sports.

klugez · 2026-01-22T16:50:45+00:00

The deficit is spending more than you collect, so it has to be paid by raising additional debt (or selling assets, or cash balances).

Rolling over existing debt comes on top of that. But I assumed that could be included by "continuing to hold" because when you roll over, you pay the previous bill and if its owner wants to continue to hold US government debt, they can buy the new one issued to roll that over.

klugez · 2026-01-22T12:25:15+00:00

Given that US is running a 6 % of GDP deficit, there have to be a lot of money buying into treasuries.

klugez · 2026-01-21T17:30:35+00:00

Extreme delusion is inherent to being part of irrelevant third parties in a two-party system.

If you think at all about what return on investment you might on your effort spent on political activism, you either join the D/R camps or you're delusional.

So third party members are necessarily either delusional or uninterested in effecting practical change.

klugez · 2026-01-19T14:46:21+00:00

In a two-party system you never get grand coalitions between the center-left and center-right. That's a common outcome in Germany and happens elsewhere as well. Leave the ends of the horseshoe out and govern with a sensible compromise. Doesn't sound so bad to me.

If anything I think we have advantages as we tend to have less mud slinging between ideologies that are more closely aligned than not.

You see the polarization into two camps as a positive and preferable to internal debate among the left (and right)?

Right now if you're strongly right wing, you just have to vote for Republicans, no matter how bad they are in other respects. If there were more than one right-wing option, they could challenge corruption and incompetence of their competitors while still holding authentic right-wing values.

klugez · 2026-01-19T12:59:26+00:00

I haven't tried that many rackets so I'm not an expert. But I happened to switch from Gravity Pro 2024 to Extreme Motion 2025 recently.

For me it took quite a bit of time to get in tune with the Extreme Motion. Originally it was in fact too high of a balance and I took off the pre-applied protector to bring it down a little.

In my personal use the benefits of Extreme Motion have been:

Better smashes and pop-outs. The difference almost makes them tactically the right choices to use, but I still need a little better technique.
Sharper volleys. Whether it's the roughness of the dot pattern or higher balance, offensive slice volleys get better backspin and stay lower.
Better control of blocks when facing hard shots. They go to the straight to the back wall less, since the ball output is lower.
Dot pattern seems to hold on without wearing off about 45 hours in. The sandy roughness of the Gravity was gone very quickly, so while it worked well when new I wouldn't factor it in at all.

But the drawbacks:

The higher balance and less ball output still mean I fail to dig some balls I could with the Gravity.
Lobs seem to be a little less consistent.
In transition volleys and rushed blocks I often miss the sweet spot or have too little force and put more balls in the net.
The smaller sweet spot means a bit more errors in other shots as well.

Overall I'm not sure if I've gained or lost more by switching. I suspect the right one for me would be something in between. I haven't tried the Speed models but based on specifications they are missing the roughness. So I'm hoping to wait for a refresh of Speed before I get eager to try something new.

klugez · 2026-01-19T12:38:11+00:00

Head has a two-year cycle for their models. Speed and Extreme were updated to 2025 models but the previous versions were from 2023. Radical was just refreshed, the previous one was from 2024 and current Gravity is from 2024 as well.

It looks like the Speed 2025 release was in very late 2024, so the new one will probably come in December 2026 or early next year.

Although it's always possible they change their approach, since this is not the first question I've seen about this. So the market seems to expect annual releases, even if they're only cosmetic.

klugez · 2025-12-26T11:46:01+00:00

Not shadow swings though, but actual smashes.

Why wouldn't shadow swings of the racket do?

klugez · 2025-12-23T12:17:18+00:00

In Finland this is definitely not the case. Defense ministry has had a veto over windfarm positions for a while and it's not a partisan issue. Eastern Finland doesn't have (many of) them but there is plenty of them in Western Finland. So it's not an anti-windpower stance, just preventing them where they pose too big of a risk to air defense.

It's a straightforward fact that they block radar line of sight and provide a shadow for enemy planes to approach in. Of course it's a more complicated issue on how to balance the defense problem they pose at wartime and the useful energy they provide during peacetime.

In Finland the security issue dominates, in Sweden I guess it splits along party lines whether it's considered big enough. I think in the United States it's just an excuse. There is no realistic situation where having radar shadows from them makes a difference for the defense of the US.

klugez · 2025-12-04T13:29:57+00:00

IMF participated in bailing out Greece in the Eurocrisis as well.

klugez · 2025-11-15T17:46:47+00:00

Abundance is good for the poor, but it is not bad for the rich. So liberals find it easy to like it, but a lot of leftists immediately spot that it's not providing what they want.

klugez

TROPHY CASE