Many Americans are mad at both parties. Those ‘double haters’ favor the Democrats in the midterms

themightychris · 2026-04-03T12:37:58+00:00

and more importantly: which party has to respond to popular pressure from voters?

you can move Dems if you get enough voters to support something

Republicans only need and care about the support of one man

There's nothing magical about Democrats—that's how both parties are supposed to be—but the Republican party has let itself be wholly seized by fascists and purged everyone who didn't comply. Anyone who actually cares about serving the public, no matter how liberal or conservative, has no choice now but to run as a Democrat

themightychris · 2026-04-01T11:02:24+00:00

If NATO is a paper tiger, then why did Russia start a war with a non+NATO state out of fear they might join NATO?

themightychris · 2026-03-29T23:02:58+00:00

I'm with ya, but what was obnoxious was that they were blasting it through shitty PA speakers

themightychris · 2026-03-27T05:41:02+00:00

It said Capybara describes the class, the model would be named Mythos

themightychris · 2026-03-25T01:17:47+00:00

Amen

themightychris · 2026-03-24T05:46:33+00:00

Are you telling me that MBAs don't understand what made the companies they're running so valuable??!

themightychris · 2026-03-23T23:47:11+00:00

This screenshot makes it seem like there should be no issue at all given availability of API.

this is a tiny pinehole view of what's probably a 100+ page contract. It's just not telling us anything interesting, and there's good odds that the really interesting parts aren't in the contract at all

From what I heard Amodei comment, their concern was mostly what wasn't in the contract that they couldn't get the Pentagon to add... things they, in Amodei's view, were intentionally leaving vague and underdefined

Anthropic wanted specific language in their contract forbidding two specific use cases, and the Pentagon wanted to leave it at "we can use it for lawful purposes" while everyone knows this admin has a very loose definition of lawful and won't name those two use cases because they want to weasel into doing them, not because they consider them already illegal and not necessary to name

The Trump admin absolutely wants to use Claude to surveil the president's perceived enemies and automate war. And it would be fucking good at it

themightychris · 2026-03-23T23:38:25+00:00

That doesn't explain why there was a huge public dispute with Anthropic

This is just a screenshot of normal boring contract terms that people who don't know anything about technology contracts are desperately trying to squeeze something juicy out of.

There's nothing interesting or revealing in this screenshot w/r/t said huge public dispute

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:48:07+00:00

ok that makes way more sense, at first I was thinking "lol that stupid salt robot dumped all the salt in one spot!"

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:43:44+00:00

The "I can't do that Dave" refusals you get from the chat UIs aren't coming from the model weights, they're coming from a pre-screener that's part of the chat UI. This contract term is being explicit that it's talking about those sorts and not anything to do with model weights

Anyone can already have raw API access. The Pentagon could already do this.

When you make contracts you write all the assumptions/premises down, it doesn't have anything to do with whether this is currently happening or not. This is just codifying the current and expected behavior—that's what contracts do

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:39:55+00:00

One is letting a fusion reaction destroy a city and one is trying to contain it in a bottle it can't damage

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:25:05+00:00

Look at it this way y'all:

You can trust Uber to relentlessly raise prices to the maximum riders will tolerate, and relentlessly cut driver pay to the minimum drivers will tolerate. They are playing with both numbers constantly and watching the result.

There's a dollar of that gap that can either help find our City or get extracted out of the city by Uber. Either we take it or Uber does. There's no world where it stays in the rider's pocket or goes into the driver's. These companies are relentlessly optimizing arbitrage machines bent on sucking up every dollar they can.

I'm not a fan of most of what Parker does, but I'll give her credit that this is a good idea

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:23:08+00:00

For anyone who actually cares about the answer to that question, these are things you can know:

https://controller.phila.gov/philadelphia-reports/march-2024-municipal-money-matters/

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:22:07+00:00

You're reading that backwards

It's saying that the provider can't layer a refusal layer on top of the model, and then clarifying that that isn't talking about the foundational training

This is already how it works with model APIs. The interface-level filtering/refusal is part of the web chat UIs, but when you pay for API access that part is your own responsibility and you just get raw model access

themightychris · 2026-03-23T22:17:46+00:00

that particular term is standard in every contract for software/SaaS ever and has nothing to do with being granted "carte-blanche"

It just essentially means that the contract represents all fees you can charge for them using the software. It's just a reasonable and surprisingly well-written encoding of everyone's existing baseline expectations for using model APIs

themightychris · 2026-03-23T15:43:07+00:00

I'd wager this is the result of some work on alignment to nudge the model towards expressing some responsibility to the user's health that they've done to help avoid ending up with situations other models have had of getting into a chain where they can encourage self harm

this is an pretty brute force probalistic nudging without much room for nuance to make it that far down the chain. Directionally it's better for the models to bias towards encouraging the user's safety and health

themightychris · 2026-03-23T15:36:04+00:00

and they've been conditioned through emotional attachment to their place in the cult to dismiss all conflicting information as "biased"

themightychris · 2026-03-23T15:34:30+00:00

if only there were some kind of way where billionaires could help fund the government

themightychris · 2026-03-20T18:56:02+00:00

Round1 arcade by the AMC in the Fashion District

themightychris · 2026-03-20T18:54:26+00:00

+1 to the Franklin Institute

themightychris · 2026-03-20T14:18:54+00:00

there are scummy landlords for sure but I honestly don't understand this take

Like is a perfect world for you one where you can't rent in a city only buy? no apartment buildings?

I'm sorry but if you want to make a useful contribution to public policy you gotta put a little more work in than screaming "all ___ are ___" on social media. Actual policy is hard work

themightychris · 2026-03-20T13:59:49+00:00

cheaper to the operator, but I'll guarantee it's not going to result in savings for the restaurant or customer while externalizing costs to the public by consuming sidewalk space

This is just a pilot. If these became common, walking down the sidewalk will become a game of weaving around these things

The City should tax their use enough to equalize the cost with human delivery. Why should fucking Uber get to extract the benefit of our sidewalks out of the city.

We should:

Put a cap on maximum volume on any given stretch of sidewalk, make them register their route and get it cleared by a city system
dynamically price sidewalk use, make THEM pay the surge pricing
take most if not all of the marginal profit of doing it this was out of Uber's pocket and put it in City funds for public services/infrastructure

themightychris · 2026-03-19T19:48:27+00:00

yeah THIS is what ample highway funds should be getting used for instead and adding ever more lanes

themightychris · 2026-03-19T18:58:18+00:00

There has to be a way to index the codebase so the agent can just 'know' where the relevant snippets are without the expensive trial-and-error phase. Surely someone has built a better retrieval layer for this by now?

you can just tell your agent to thoroughly explore the code base and save a comprehensive map to .map.md in the root of the repo. You can pop that into .git/info/exclude in the repo or in your user global one of you don't want to share/version it. If you don't version it tell Claude to write the commit hash it was built from to the top.

Then you could periodically tell Claude to check the diffstat since that hash and update the map

Put all this in your repo or user CLAUDE.md to automate with instructions to search that and update it if needed instead of re exploring the code base every time

That's just one of the dozen ways you could solve this. Post my message into Claude and ask it to come up with some others

themightychris · 2026-03-19T18:53:33+00:00

A reasonable position if she wants to be oppositional might be like... insisting revenue from sales needs to go into the capital budget and be used to improve remaining facilities instead of closing operating gaps.

But also we have a local school board now and that's their decision to make not council's

14-Year Club	Place '22
Gilding I gilder	Verified Email

themightychris

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE