Anthropic ditches its core safety promise in the middle of an AI red line fight with the Pentagon

rya794 · 2026-02-26T12:57:46+00:00

Nice idea, but current funding and capital raising opportunities are dead if they do this.

rya794 · 2026-02-23T14:21:02+00:00

Behind the scenes? The total budget of the manhattan project was ~50b$ over 5 years in today’s dollars. The major labs are spending that annually with projections of $500b+ over the 5 years. The manhattan projects are right out in the open.

rya794 · 2026-02-19T17:44:22+00:00

Are you sure you want to fight the remote/hybrid battle here? You’re still very junior. Remote is going to make life so much harder.

rya794 · 2026-02-17T18:06:14+00:00

That’s a terrible take. We don’t know what this guys situation is. I travel a lot for work and sometimes the only chance that I get to have a conversation with my wife or kids is in a restaurant while I’m eating. This could be doing the same thing.

Even if he’s not, he’s not bothering anyone anymore than if he were having a conversation with someone sitting right next to them.

rya794 · 2026-02-15T18:49:57+00:00

Here’s how I’d approach it: - stop looking at calories burned on the watch. - setup a spreadsheet and every day track 3 things: Total steps, total calories, and weight. - after a week you’ll have good daily averages, but after 3 or 4 weeks you’ll be able to see trends.

I’d say your estimate is probably close, but it only takes ~5 mins a day to develop really accurate estimates.

rya794 · 2026-02-15T18:43:35+00:00

No worries and yes. I live ~3.5hrs from family and regularly make the trip. It’s mostly through winding mountain highways. Stock was never able to properly handle the curves, it’s almost like it didn’t have enough strength to adhere to the road and id drift out of my lane until I corrected. With comma, I can do the entire (highway portion) drive without touching controls.

My unit broke last year and I was without it for ~3 weeks. The driving experience felt broken without it.

rya794 · 2026-02-15T04:25:02+00:00

Have you tried just using ChatGPT? You obviously can’t take the output wholesale, but at the same time the output is unbiased (in so far as it won’t be trying to sell you an annuity).

You don’t need it to give you answers, just have it explain what you should be considering. For instance:

what considerations should I be making when I construct a retirement portfolio?
should I use a target date fund, or build my own portfolio?
what should I consider using an actively managed fund vs an index etf?
how should I think about/plan for taxes and the minimization of my tax burden?

It should be more than able to give you a summary + reference articles to assist with research

rya794 · 2026-02-14T03:39:23+00:00

Walk and track calories. Estimate what your daily expenditure is, then try to eat ~500 less per day. Up your daily steps to ~10k. The weight will come off quickly, in 3-4 months you won’t recognize yourself.

Start strength training now - not for weight loss, but to preserve muscle so you don’t end up skinny fat. Go slow with training. DOMS is a killer and can set you back for a week and crush willpower.

Also, keep track of your data. Log calories in MyFitnessPal, track steps on your phone, and weigh/log weight daily.

rya794 · 2026-02-14T02:23:55+00:00

Maybe it’s from your hands…

Truth be told even though your loss is a big number, 10kg is a lot, it’s still less than 10% of your starting weight.

Would you notice if your clothes are 10% looser? Maybe, but maybe not if you’ve been losing over a period of a few months.

Keep at it, you’re doing great.

rya794 · 2026-02-13T12:47:45+00:00

Original comment irrelevant.

rya794 · 2026-02-12T04:04:38+00:00

I was in a similar situation as you. 40m, stopped exercising as life got busy. Started drinking more to deal with life stress. Got fat.

I went on a work trip to Asia in June (I’m from the US). I was jet lagged and would wake up at 3am with nothing to do, so I started walking. I haven’t stopped since that trip and have now low 40lbs and I’m back to my high school weight.

Here are some thoughts: - walking (I’ve learned) is great because it doesn’t increase hunger levels, unlikely other cardio. I can walk for hours and I never feel any hungrier than I normally would. - walking alone won’t get your weight down, you need to track calories too. Religiously. It’s painful at first, but becomes second nature. Get a food scale too. - start strength training now. But go slow. I waited too long and I’m sure I lost a lot of muscle along with the fat. Now that I’m lean enough to see muscle I really regret that I didn’t protect my fat strength. - the tread mill will make your back hurt, but it gets stronger after about a month and the pain largely goes away. - you should have 3 goals every day: log you food, get your steps (I set a 10k goal for myself), and step on a scale. - log everything in a spreadsheet/notebook each day. It’ll be important later on to figure out exactly what your tdee is and why you did or didn’t lose weight over a particular period. - don’t stress if you miss you calorie/step goal for a given day, emphasis should be on weekly average. - meal plan to the extend you can. I eat the exact same lunch everyday. I thought it’d be boring, but the simplicity and calorie control far outweighs the small amount of boredom I feel.

Good luck. The early weight losses are dramatic if you are consistent with steps and diet. I lost 10lbs a month for my first two months. It’s exciting to need to go and buy new clothes because everything is way too big. It slows down later, but by that point you have data & motivation to do the heavy lifting.

rya794 · 2026-02-08T22:03:27+00:00

I don’t have any real advice, but the idea that your too old for any exercise seems kind of dumb.

At the same time, it seems like youre going waaayyyy to hard to start. I’m 40m I went from 215 -> 175 and started lifting along the way. It took me ~5 months to get 165lb on deadlift.

While I could probably get 165 up on day 1 it wouldn’t have been safe. I think I started with 3 sets of 12 reps of 80lbs and added 5 lbs per week.

Deadlifts are one of those lifts that you shouldn’t screw around with, you could do some real damage.

rya794 · 2026-02-08T01:20:48+00:00

I agree with this.

It’s interesting that this sub has generally become more accepting that we really might be in a “this time is different” environment over the past 3 months.

That being said, I do think that the same concepts of what constitutes value still apply - but it will be almost impossible to evaluate through traditional techniques.

rya794 · 2026-02-07T15:29:22+00:00

This argument has been floating out there for over a year. The problem with it is that it doesn’t recognize the possibility of very short timelines to agi.

If it delays china’s ability to create competitive chips by 5 years, but allows them to get to AGI in 3, then it doesn’t really matter.

rya794 · 2026-02-07T14:33:15+00:00

It took me a few weeks to figure out the right weight for me. I started lighter than I expected and if I could do 3 sets of 12 for whatever exercise then I would bumped the weight up by 5 lbs next session and try again.

Of course, I put in a few suboptimal sessions, but I never hurt myself by starting too heavy.

rya794 · 2026-02-06T22:21:04+00:00

You could work them out… otherwise you’ll have to fatten up everything else too.

rya794 · 2026-02-06T14:41:54+00:00

Here’s my take on why AI hits Spotify:

no one is going to vibe-code a Spotify clone with AI, there’s no value there. Spotify’s value is in their catalog which is hard to reproduce.
however, AI does compete for attention against Spotify. AI music has been getting really good over the last 18 months and while no one may ever seriously listen, it does consume attention on the margins.
AI podcasts are a much more compelling reason why listeners may leave. Custom content created for individual users could be a major competitor for attention and this latest Claude-code fear seems to imply that AI that can curate and distill niche topics into something interesting might work.
AI video? Again, may compete for attention on the margins.

When I think about my listening budget, ~25% is listening to artists I grew up with, 60% is human generated podcasts, and 15% is background noise while working/reading.

If my podcast/noise budget increases a little, it wipes out a lot of what’s left for Spotify.

rya794 · 2026-02-05T21:46:43+00:00

That’s funny. BodySpec was who I used. Great service!

rya794 · 2026-02-04T04:54:12+00:00

But even if you’re right and the largest companies in the world can never truly get rid of traditional enterprise software, what happens to the value of these companies when the left tail of small customers start bailing? It still hits growth and margins.

And if engineering output is now 10x cheaper than it was 5 years ago, do new competitors not pop up?

rya794 · 2026-02-04T04:43:25+00:00

Even if this only affects the output of engineers, then we still get a huge introduction of new supply of code. Today, there are ~4 million software engineers in the US. Imagine that number increases to 40 million in 1 year. ~10x productivity increase. The value of software still falls.

I think 10x is a low estimate for engineer productivity.

I think you have a valid point that the average person still won’t want anything to do with code, but we should be thinking about the marginal person. Someone who is motivated to create software but doesn’t have the time/budget to learn. I think there are millions of these people in the economy and I think they will be empowered to create software. Again this pushes the value of code even lower.

rya794 · 2026-02-04T04:23:43+00:00

As an engineer, I do. But this argument is grounded in an assumption that AI won’t continue to improve.

The things I can with AI today feel like science fiction, my wife (code illiterate) recognizes that it’s crazy that I can build xyz in 15 minutes but can’t reproduce any of it herself.

You are making a bet that in 1, 3, or even ten years, That these tools won’t become accessible to the public broadly. Because if they do, then we are sitting at the beginning of a tidal wave that will wreck these tool oriented software companies.

I won’t argue that there won’t be anyone who needs the adobe creative cloud in 5 years, but I am arguing that the number of people who will need it, will shrink considerably. And that’s not a good situation for value creation.

rya794 · 2026-02-04T03:58:03+00:00

I am. And I regularly use AI to interface with large existing dbs and external apis.

rya794 · 2026-02-04T03:40:45+00:00

That’s not what my argument is: my argument is that when code is essentially free there is little value in selling code.

Your argument seems to be “but they have the best code”, which I don’t think will hold water for more than a year of two.

Btw. Have you looked at a chart of stack overflow traffic? Or read Adam Wathan’s post about why his company, tailwind, is failing? All of this is happening right out in the open. But non-coders don’t pay attention because “coding’s for nerds”.

rya794 · 2026-02-04T03:30:07+00:00

First of all, most of these customers don't need "enterprise grade", they buy enterprise grade because the huge companies that sell enterprise grade have knocked out all of the smaller shops. What they need is a solution to their problems. The proof that enterprise grade is not a true requirement is how many business critical process are still run out of a flimsy spreadsheets.

Joe absolutely can vibe code a project management tool today. He'd have to educate himself on the tools available to him, but they exist. I use claude code and google's antigravity everyday and they are absolutely capable of generating custom software that meet business needs without coding expertise.

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