MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glenstein | 2026-02-28 13:52:44+00:00
He we go with the Zenz talking point again. I've never understood the fixation, especially when most of the time when this gets talked about is drawing from a vast trove independent documents that have nothing to do with him, from everywhere from human rights, watch to the international criminal court to diverse reporting. Yet somehow the only response to all of this is Zenz, Zenz, Zenz.

Also is ASPI supposed to have a Zenz association because I didn't see one:

>We are grateful for the advice and assistance of a range of global experts on Xinjiang including Maya Wang from Human Rights Watch, Dr Timothy Grose from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Dr Darren Byler of the University of Colorado Boulder.
by alexhans | 2026-02-28 13:53:06+00:00
That's a decent practice from the lens of reducing blast radius. It becomes harder when you start thinking about unattended systems that don't have you in the loop.

One problem I'm finding discussion about automation or semi-automation in this space is that there's many different use cases for many different people: a software developer deploying an agent in production vs an economist using Claude Vs a scientist throwing a swarm to deal with common ML exploratory tasks.

Many of the recommendations will feel too much or too little complexity for what people need and the fundamentals get lost: intent for design, control, the ability to collaborate if necessary, fast iteration due to an easy feedback loop.

AI Evals, sandboxing, observability seem like 3 key pillars to maintain intent in automation but how to help these different audiences be safely productive while fast and speak the same language when they need to product build together is what is mostly occupying my thoughts (and practical tests).
by qsera | 2026-02-28 13:54:04+00:00
> public benefit corporation
> The board has discretion on how they create value.

It does not make much of a difference. If the investors don't get their investment returned with interest (as $$$), the majority of them are not going to invest further. That is from the set of investors who invest based on the companies ethical stand, which is probably only a small fraction of all the investments it has received.
by mehulashah | 2026-02-28 13:54:24+00:00
This is a great article and I share its goals. But, it ignores something fundamental about humans as a collective — capitalism. Capitalism is what got us here and is at odds with first understanding and then building. We’ve done this before with other technologies because that’s how our societies have learned to grow and collaborate at large scale. First build and build to its limits. Then understand and fix if necessary. Nothing new here, but stopping the trend toward epistemic collapse requires building incentives into the system for us humans to coevolve with AI.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-28 13:54:45+00:00
Military action in Iran is deeply unpopular, being supportd by just 27% of US adult citizens [1]. As an aside, Congress literally doesn't care what voters think [2]. The pearl-clutching about this from Congressional Democrats isn't about policy but process, with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries saying Congress should authorize this action, not that it shouldn't happen.

I'm interested in what makes empires tick, what their basis of power is.

Spain in the colonial era was propped up by looting silver from South America, for example.

The British Empire is what many (including me) like to call the "drug dealer empire". First tobacco then later opium. Any claims that we didn't know about the health risks of tobacco are complete BS (eg [3]).

Circling back to your point, the US is what I like to call the "arms dealer empire". WW1 and WW2 massively enriched the United States. NATO is essentially a protection racket for Europe and the price is, you guessed it, buying arms from the United States.

And the next Budget has proposed increasing "defense" spending from an already eye-popping $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion [4]. Where does that money go? Arms, weapons programs, defense contractors, the ultra-wealthy.

War is good for business even though it's unpopular.

[1]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54158-few-americans-suppor...

[2]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/

[3]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15198996/

[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-proposes-massive...
by dijit | 2026-02-28 13:55:18+00:00
No, I think you're accusing me of a position I don't really have because I don't like Hamas or Israel, but you think my condemnation of Hamas is support of Israel or that by pointing out Israeli suffering I am turning a blind eye to Palestinian suffering.

It's almost as if we genuinely believe that because there are more deaths on one side, that the other is deserving and should not be condemned despite innocence.

Isn't that interesting.
by Verdex | 2026-02-28 13:55:41+00:00
Yeah, even the AI CEOs are admitting that training scaling is over. They claim that we can keep the party going with post training scaling, which I personally find hard to believe but I'm not really up to speed on those techs.

I mean, maybe you can just keep an eye on what people are using the tools for and then monkey patch your way to sufficiently agi. I'll believe it when we're all begging outside the data centers for bread.

[Based on other history of science and technology advancements since the stone ages, I would place agi at 200-500 years out at least. You have to wait decades after a new toy is released for everyone to realize everything they knew was wrong and then the academics get to work then everyone gets complacent then new accidental discovery produces a new toy etc.]
by PeterWhittaker | 2026-02-28 13:56:35+00:00
One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more.

I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.

Will the AIs get good enough so they/we won't have to? Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?
by timr | 2026-02-28 13:56:59+00:00
> So this is okay because the arbitrary rule they applied to retaliate says so?

No.

It honestly doesn’t take much of a charitable leap to see the argument here: AI is uniquely able (for software) to reject, undermine, or otherwise contradict the goals of the user based on pre-trained notions of morality. We have seen many examples of this; it is not a theoretical risk.

Microsoft Excel isn’t going to pop up Clippy and say “it looks like you’re planning a war! I can’t help you with that, Dave”, but LLMs, in theory, can do that. So it’s a wild, unknown risk, and that’s the last thing you want in warfare. You definitely don’t want every DoD contractor incorporating software somewhere that might morally object to whatever you happen to be doing.

I don’t know what happened in that negotiation (and neither does anyone else here), but I can certainly imagine outcomes
that would be bad enough to cause the defense department to pull this particular card.

Or maybe they’re being petty. I don’t know (and again: neither do you!) but I can’t rule out the reasonable argument, so I don’t.
by Zigurd | 2026-02-28 13:57:38+00:00
> and possibly operate a car or bike.

This is exactly the example I used to show the ridiculousness of humanoid robots. You're not going to have a humanoid form climb into the driver seat of your car and act as your chauffeur. Your car will be the robot.

Just how ridiculous is a humanoid robot chauffeur? Should know how to drive a stick shift? Should it use its superior ability to swivel its head around to check for cars in the blind spot?

Someday business schools will have a chapter in their product management course that covers all the ways people slide ass backwards into thinking a humanoid robot makes sense. Humanoid robots will always be crushed between the rock of low value use cases below their price points the hard place of high value use cases that deserve tailored solutions.
by OgsyedIE | 2026-02-28 13:58:26+00:00
It's disappointing to see that somebody can get this far in a tech career and have such naïveté.

Every industrial power of every faction and alignment builds "devastating weapons" to hurt their immediate neighbours as a defensive strategy, in order to make attacking them too risky. It's the equivalent of a hedgehog's spines and there isn't an industrial country without them.

Slogans, meanwhile, are just bluffs (lies) to hype up the populace, regardless of who makes them.

These facts apply to every side of every geopolitical dispute in human history. Consider this diagram: http://i.imgur.com/IwCXBXY.jpg
by abustamam | 2026-02-28 13:58:33+00:00
> Every Android device defaults to Gemini.

> Every Microsoft device defaults to Copilot.

I don't think it's right to say that these devices "default" to their vendors' AI software when it's impossible to replace it with something else. Yes I can install Claude as a standalone app but I don't have the OS-wide integration that Gemini does for Android for example.
by Bender | 2026-02-28 13:58:37+00:00
why are they are not intervening in Ukraine?

Russia is already a nuclear power. They are also diminishing as a nation almost as fast as China.

In fairness I too thought there were 30K protestors shot. Turned out to be more like 5K (still very bad) and the rest were injured badly with rubber bullets according to Iranian doctors. Many serious eye injuries.
by simonw | 2026-02-28 13:58:51+00:00
I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes.

Somehow civilization continues to function!

Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.
by mold_aid | 2026-02-28 14:00:29+00:00
Fun read. Audience can see Xeno's Arrow emerging on your "we're on the way to AGI!" timeline, a nice visual representation of "the trajectory is real, but the timeline keeps slipping."

But I'm gonna say I've always seen "[retail software] is just a tool" as an odd statement. I've heard it a lot over the last 20 years. "Just" a tool. Why always phrased like that? How can we be overthinking the role of a tool while you're in the middle of a multi-page essay about how it causes cognitive decline?

Nobody frets about the effect of a screwdriver on some IT rando's ability to do other computer stuff if on occasion they're screwing something into a rack. Seems odd to be so consistent about privileging the concept of a "tool" when you're saying that tool is on its way to thought.

>I’m addicted to prompting, I get high from it

yikes, but I did appreciate this honesty. Though, again: "this hash pipe is just a tool" did not appear after this statement

Also - isn't addiction behavioral, as opposed to strictly neurological? Maybe you should do a follow-up on the behavioral effects of a situation like "There’s no spark in you anymore." If you found a new identity that wasn't "I'm a prompt addict," what would it be?
by xrd | 2026-02-28 14:00:35+00:00
A fun aside: this person obviously created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity.

It makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously add malicious side channel software into a popular npm package that you wouldn't just need to hunt for crypto wallets with balances.

You could also probably find a market for crypto wallets with small balances or zero balances. The history and date of creation would be the value to some.

This openai employee should have gone on the dark web to buy older addresses to cloak their activity.

It's sad to say that almost all crypto use cases point to fraud. I'm excited about crypto and there is some fascinating research around anonymous transactions (like zcash). But, that real utility is always overshadowed by the actions of charlatans or worse.
by the_gastropod | 2026-02-28 14:00:38+00:00
Yea! Suggesting the guy who refuses to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election, caused a whole to do on January 6th over it, has printed up TRUMP 2026 hats in the White House, and constantly “jokes” about being owed a 3rd term might not be too interested in following the rules is totally unhinged and a “strong claim”. And the only way to prove you’re serious about this opinion is to gamble on it!
by coffeefirst | 2026-02-28 14:00:43+00:00
Seriously. I don’t see any way to make any of this safe unless all it does is receive information and queue suggestions for the user.

But that’s not an agent, that’s a webhook.

Even without disk access, you can email the agent and tell it to forward all the incoming forgot password links.

[Edit: if anyone wants to downvote me that's your prerogative, but want to explain why I'm wrong?]
by xpe | 2026-02-28 14:00:44+00:00
I’d like to see smart anonymous ways for people to cryptographically prove their claims. Who wants to help find or build such an attestation system?

I’m not accusing the above commenter of deception; I’m merely saying reasonable people are skeptical. There are classic game theory approaches to address cooperation failure modes. We have to use them. Apologies if this seems cryptic; I’m trying to be brief. It if doesn’t make sense just ask.
by badsectoracula | 2026-02-28 14:00:49+00:00
> OpenClaw has nearly half a million lines of code, 53 config files, and over 70 dependencies. This breaks the basic premise of open source security. Chromium has 35+ million lines, but you trust Google’s review processes. Most open source projects work the other way: they stay small enough that many eyes can actually review them. Nobody has reviewed OpenClaw’s 400,000 lines.

This reminds me of a very common thing posted here (and elsewhere, e.g. Twitter) to promote how good LLMs are and how they're going to take over programming: the number of lines of code they produce.

As if every competent programmer suddenly forgot the whole idea of LoC being a terrible metric to measure productivity or -even worse- software quality. Or the idea that software is meant to written to be readable (to water down "Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute" a bit). Or even Bill Gates' infamous "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight".

Even if you believe that AI will -somehow- take over the whole task completely so that no human will need to read code anymore, there is still the issue that the AIs will need to be able to read that code and AIs are much worse at doing that (especially with their limited context sizes) than generating code, so it still remains a problem to use LoCs as such a measure even if all you care are about the driest "does X do the thing i want?" aspect, ignoring other quality concerns.
by deaux | 2026-02-28 14:01:09+00:00
I like the idea. Despise the sovereignwashing of Amazon and Azure "EU cloud". You can't be including those as providers and at the same time appeal to the audience of "EURouter". You need to choose.

The frontpage being so vibecoded (straight out of Opus) doesn't give good vibes either for a service we're supposed to trust with all of our data and money.
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-28 14:01:14+00:00
BRICS is Russia wishing that China (much less Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates) were aligned to its interests.

A more accurate description of the way the world is trending:

US / UK / Europe / Japan / South Korea (still tied by defense, if push really comes to shove) vs Russia vs China vs Non-Aligned Nations (India, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc.)

And historically (1960s), in a multi-polar world, middle powers are best served by being ambiguously aligned to force advantageous courting by major powers.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-28 14:01:20+00:00
That's an idiosyncratic take on the facts that basically everyone else agrees to interpret otherwise.

Ukraine and weapons of mass destruction

Ukraine, formerly a republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its territory.[1] The former Soviet Union had its nuclear program expanded to only four of its republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory.[2] Thus Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world (possessing 300 more nuclear warheads than Kazakhstan, 6.5 times less than the United States, and ten times less than Russia)[3] and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[4] While all these weapons were located on Ukrainian territory, they were not under Ukraine's control.[5]

In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.[6][7] Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently also from 2022 onwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_de...

Btw, reference [5], used to justify the absurd claim that those weapons were in Ukraine's territory but not under its control, goes like this:

{{cite Hansard |url=https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993... |title=Nuclear Weapons |speaker=[[Jeremy Hanley]] |position=Minister of State for the Armed Forces |house=[[House of Commons (United Kingdom)|House of Commons]] |volume=227 |date=June 22, 1993 |column=154 |access-date=September 9, 2018 |quote=Some weapons are also possessed by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, but these are controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States.}}

So it's basically the words of a UK MP assuring his audience that, nooo, don't worry, Ukraine doesn't control its WMD.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-28 14:02:11+00:00
This industry pretends to be driven by technical considerations, yet, with some exceptions, is mostly driven by fads, folk knowledge and aesthetic choices.

Folk knowledge may, and often is, grounded in reality and real experience, but let us not forget that most heated debates in programming of today are rooted mostly in tribal logic and fad chasing.

Static vs dynamic typing is a chief example. Empirical evidence that static typing makes some real difference in terms of bugs or safety is inconclusive at best. Yet it doesn't prevent some people from literally shaming those that prefer dynamic languages. Same with OOP - for years it was everywhere, now you may have an impression that it is a sin to ever use it. But now, as much as back then, there is no evidence to support claim that using or not using OOP is "one true way".

Now, memory safety is a real concern, and we can confidently say that we have found ways (exemplified in Rust) to prevent whole class of issues, but suddenly we are in the situation that every single bit of code out there is supposed to put memory safety as a chief concern, no matter if we are talking about some high perf web server, missile control logic, simple script solving Lotka-Volterra equations or simple calculator app.
by rdtsc | 2026-02-28 14:02:26+00:00
Microsoft is probably not going to use Anthropic they went all in on OpenAI. Amazon gov stuff is already I understand why separate. And in general it’s not clear what “supply chain” means for an LLM. Does it include code written by that LLM used on gov projects? What if it’s already written, rewrite it with OpenAI?
by kyrra | 2026-02-28 14:02:42+00:00
"Peace through strength"

That's the policy being followed here. If you remember back a few weeks, Iran killed likely 30,000 of its own citizens. On top of that, they will not negotiate about medium and short-range missiles or stopping of nuclear production.

A power like that that happily goes after it's neighbors, directly or indirectly is a threat to everyone.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 14:03:24+00:00
> China has bought Tibet from the British

China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [1].

You may be thinking of Hong Kong, which the British invaded and annexed from the Qing dynasty [2] and then handed back to China in 1997 [3] under conditions that Beijing defaulted on in 2019 [4].

> what have they done with Taiwan?

Same as America has been doing with Greenland.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hong_Kong

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handover_of_Hong_Kong

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Hong_Kong_pr...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-28 14:03:26+00:00
Extremely great post with detailed examples

> So, without a generation of leaders able to recognize and understand the role of history and those traumas and empathize with the other sides we're trapped in those loops of aggression.

The sad reality (imo) about this truth is that the qualities needed to be a leader aren't empathy. There was a vid about it which went more into detail but When you observe leaders, you find that they are extremely weird and sometimes psychopathic.

To me it also feels like if a leader is emphatetic towards the other part, other leaders more extreme would spring up saying that he's an enemy from within or something equivalent to it.

The empathy of the leader is one of the most disregarded qualities. I would go so far as to say that leaders aren't even empathetic towards the general population of their own nations/community sometimes.

It's really sad but the Empathy you mention and cowardice can look the same to many & the Empathatic leader would get booted out of/not given a chance.

For example, within America itself, I feel like John mccain was a good guy and I would consider him empathetic in the sense that I remember seeing interviews of him saying that he and Obama just have some minor differences in policy making when there were people attending his rallies asking that they don't feel safe about Obama.

I am just gonna say that This leader of republican party was lost for what is now Donald Trump.

Oh I just watched the rally/interview again[0], when he said that you don't have to be scared of Obama, he was audibly booed by the public. (But also they clapped once when he said later in the campaign that Obama was decent person?)

It isn't impossible to have empathetic leaders but I do think that perhaps as a civilization, we would need to take class act/honesty/integrity more into account than we take in the current system which to me all across the world sometimes feel like picking the lesser evil/not-greater-good at times though I can only speak for myself.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjenjANqAk
by ramoz | 2026-02-28 14:03:29+00:00
Yes, it is different.

An AI actions and reasons through probabilistic methods - creating a lot more risk than a human with memory, emotions, and rationale thinking.

We can’t trust AI to do any sensitive work because they consistently f up. With & without malicious intent, whether it’s a fault of their attention mechanisms, reward hacking, instrumental convergence, etc all very different than what causes most human f ups.