MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bawolff | 2026-02-28 03:03:14+00:00
I'm of the opinion that anthropic's "moral" stances are bullshit, not particularly coherent when you dig deep and more about branding. If so, this is grade A marketing.

They want to present themselves as moral. What better endorsement than by being rejected by the US military under Trump? You get the people who hate trump and the people who hate the military in one swoop.

At the same time its kind of a non story. Anrhropic says it doesn't want its products used in certain ways, US military says fine, you can't be part of the project where we are going to make the AI do those things. Isn't that a win for both sides ? What's the problem?

It would be like someone part of a boycott movement being surprised the company they are boycotting doesn't want to hire them.
by vlovich123 | 2026-02-28 03:03:36+00:00
OP doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Creating an object per byte is insane to do if you care about performance. It’ll be fine if you do 1000 objects once or this isn’t particularly performance sensitive. That’s fine. But the GC running concurrently doesn’t change anything about that, not to mention that he’s wrong and the scavenger phase for the young generation (which is typically where you find byte arrays being processed like this) is stop the world. Certain phases of the old generation collection are concurrent but notably finalization (deleting all the objects) is also stop the world as is compaction (rearranging where the objects live).

This whole approach is going to be orders of magnitude of overhead and the GC can’t do anything because you’d still be allocating the object, setting it up, etc. Your only hope would be the JIT seeing through this kind of insanity and rewriting to elide those objects but that’s not something I’m aware AOT optimizer can do let alone a JIT engine that needs to balance generating code over fully optimal behavior.

Don’t take my word for it - write a simple benchmark to illustrate the problem. You can also look throughout the comment thread that OP is just completely combative with people who clearly know something and point out problems with his reasoning.
by BuddyPickett | 2026-02-28 03:03:54+00:00
I love political theater, the Democrats are best at the really funny stuff, they crack me up. Stuff like Clinton going from,"I smoked pot but never inhaled" to "I did not have sex with that woman, ML." and now with, "I never saw or did anything wrong"
That is meaningless when he has no clue of what's right and wrong.
by minifridge | 2026-02-28 03:04:40+00:00
While the causative effects are not straightforward to prove, LLMs definitely have addictive qualities... This will definitely have some negative effects to people with certain predespositons.. Also, LLMs tend to isolate more people - many health professionals will confirm that isolation is going to be detrimental for people for mental health.

So the skeptiscism in the comments about the findings is a bit puzzling.
by ParentiSoundSys | 2026-02-28 03:04:49+00:00
Practically the entire tech industry, including many of the higher ups currently camping out on the right, used to be firmly in a sort of centrist-with-social-justice-characteristics camp. Then many of those same people enthusiastically stood with Trump at his inauguration. It's completely reasonable that people have their doubts now.

It's also completely reasonable to expect that if Anthropic is the real deal and opposed to where the current agenda setters want to take things, they'll be destroyed for it.
by hparadiz | 2026-02-28 03:04:54+00:00
The biggest problem right now with Starship is the heatshield problem. If it's a one and done flight it's actually still worth it but full re-use without solving the heat shield problem is not actually possible (right now). It turns out slamming into Earth's atmosphere at orbital velocity or higher is one of those things that pretty much every material we've thrown at the problem has had problems being used forever. We need to do experimental flights in order to provide more data to materials folks working on this. Honestly I respect the hell out of anyone working on this problem because it's the next big tech hurdle we need besides landing a booster. And this one is still not solved.
by fladrif | 2026-02-28 03:05:13+00:00
> political alignment I favour was as Big Tent as Donald Trump's administration is

I'm not sure how accurate this sentiment is. Your desire is to embrace your enemy without resolving the differences, and get what you want. It's not clear here if you're advocating compromise and negotiation, or just embracing for the sake of embracing while just doing what you wanted all along.

And evaluating Trump's actions against this sentiment doesn't seem to be the negotiation and compromise interpretation. Given the situation with tariffs and ICE enforcement, there is no indication of negotiation or compromise other than complete fealty/domination.

So as grandiose and noble your sentiment is, Donald Trump is hardly the epitome of it as you seem to suggest.
by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 2026-02-28 03:05:44+00:00
It'll never happen. As op said, it's laughably trivial to remove, and thus criminals will remove it.

Legitimate gun users will, at best, use their weapon in self defense, in which case they'll be sitting there waiting when the police arrive, so no need for microstamping.

The "crime of passion" so popular in TV shows are few and far between, and there's usually a huge amount of other evidence.
by TylerE | 2026-02-28 03:05:55+00:00
You should follow your own advice.

Their definition of "app store" is a mile wide: "(e) (1) “Covered application store” means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application."

Grats, github is an appstore. apt-get is an app store. You posting software on your own website is an app store.
by snickerbockers | 2026-02-28 03:06:13+00:00
i'm honestly shocked by how many people don't see the massive conflict of interest in allowing defense contractors to set military doctrine by leveraging the control they have over products they sold to the government. This specific situation only makes Anthropic look like the heroes because of the oddly principled positions they're taking after already signing a contract but in general this precedent is an absolute nightmare.

Can Lockheed's drones autonomously blow up hippies' houses for protesting wars? Can a weapons system patch out support for features the contractor is no longer interested in supporting? Can all the intel gathered by these products be automatically forwarded to the contractor to be sold off to third-parties? Will rifles spontaneously refuse to fire when they incorrectly judge an enemy combatant to be a civilian?

I think Silly Valley has been allowed to get away with too much for too long when it comes to abusing their customers. That only works with end-users because most people aren't going to spend $10k on a lawyer to argue with microslop over all these idiotic mandatory updates. If they want to suckle off the military industrial complex's teat they can't be allowed to behave like this. Otherwise they can just not sign onto contracts to develop weapons systems for something that calls itself "the department of war" like normal conscientious objectors do.
by panick21 | 2026-02-28 03:06:19+00:00
False. SpaceX development of Starship is much cheaper then SLS despite using more test vehicles. The claim that building hardware rich is more expensive is not really shown in the data.

NASA has done some analysis on early SpaceX and shown that their methods produced a 10x improvement in cost. And that was with the method NASA uses that often turn out to be wrong.
by trollbridge | 2026-02-28 03:06:34+00:00
I am aware - I use the all day.

But I think it’s a poor substitute for effective, well written documentation, tutorials, and examples. A lot of open source code (and commercial, too) is moving in the direction of nearly zero documentation and they just provide an LLM prompt to pipe to | claude -p.

This is not a great change. For starters, LLMs often get confused when a project is internally reorganised and mix different versions together. They will also often recommend using a module’s internal structures.

(I spent half a day fighting datamodel-code-generate with this exact problem, so it’s fresh on my mind.)

EDIT: the account I’m responding to appears to be some kind of AI and appears to be prompted with “make snarky, argumentative comments”. If you are a real human, please accept my apology for this accusation.
by eoskx | 2026-02-28 03:06:35+00:00
"Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.

In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.

AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.

We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.

We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.

We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place."
by CWuestefeld | 2026-02-28 03:06:51+00:00
No. But there are actual circumstances here that differ between China's actions and the rest of the planet. Specifically...

While the rest of the world was doing stuff like ensuring that as many of its citizens as possible were vaccinated, and letting the population gradually work up to herd immunity so that controls could be gradually loosened, China kept the population at a hard lockdown right to late 2022, and then opened up completely. It was as if they just opened the floodgates.

There were actually people arguing that China was doing this intentionally, with the plan being to thin out the top-heavy aging demographic in the country. I'm not necessarily advocating for this theory, but illustrating that the very fact that there's a colorable argument for it demonstrates how irresponsible Chinese leadership were.

The result was that in my father-in-law's retirement home, literally EVERY caretaker came down with the virus together, which obviously led to most of the residents getting sick. And given the way covid worked, that meant a whole lot of deaths.

Adding insult to injury, his death certificate attributes the cause of death to heart disease. As a matter of policy, all deaths were attributed to any other condition the patient might have had, however trivial, unless covid could be proven. And proving it would involve in declining to properly dispose of the body, paying for the autopsy and so forth. But there's no doubt (having talked to him every day on Skype) that covid is what killed him.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-28 03:07:36+00:00
That's part of the recurrent confusion with this administration. In previous administrations, including Trump 1, people didn't need to spend a ton of time thinking about what it means to make a legally effective proclamation, because there was a baseline of competence. When a government official announced "We're doing X", they would do so as a summary of a large amount of legal process with the intent and effect of causing X to be true. If you went to challenge it in court of course, you'd have to identify some specific action as the label, but everyone would understand that this is a formalism.

Here, Hegseth has simply made a social media post. He did not publish any official investigation which led to the report. He did not explain what legal power would permit him to impose all the restrictions the post claims to impose. There is not, five hours later, any order on an official government website about it. So we have a real question. If a Cabinet secretary posts "I am directing the Department of War to designate...", does that in and of itself perform the designation, or is it simply an informal notice that the Department of Fascist Neologisms will perform the designation soon?
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-28 03:08:07+00:00
> Anthropic should just say the unsaid thing here.

> DoW asked for the following thing: $foo. We won’t give that to them.

Anthropic has explicitly said that multiple times, including in the letter we are presently discussing.

$foo is the ability to use Claude for domestic mass surveillance and analysis, and/or fully-autonomous killbots.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-28 03:09:24+00:00
Given all the current talk (and the famous scifi movies) about the risks of AI, I am a bit puzzled how there are no similar activists groups trying to sabotage AI facilities.

I am not. Anyone who understands the various downside risks and has a basic grasp of how the technology works also understands that compute is fungible and that there's no way to point at a given data center and be sure about whether it's providing search functionality, hosting cat pictures, enabling online shopping, training AI, or keeping planes from falling out of the sky. Even if you receive guidance in a vision that a given data center is bad, how do you deal with the reality of load balancing and the knowledge that the evil computation you hate won't be just hosted on a different server instance?

The Terminator movie franchise

I agree with you in that people probably do understand the existential risks of AI run riot better than many other possibilities due to those movies. But the problem is that the movies all depend on time travel. The unwilling human protagonists are persuaded to undertake drastic life altering criminal action based on information from The Future: both absolutely compelling demonstrations of technology from The Future (to justify the moral decision) and highly specific historical analysis from The Future (providing the operational gameplan).

I don't recall the specific plot crises of every movie, but all of them have well-defined success conditions, such as: ensuring the Terminator is destroyed and Sarah Connor survives; ensuring Cyberdyne Systems and the Terminators are destroyed and John Connor survives; ensuring the bad Terminator is destroyed before it can push the Skynet OS to production on every consumer computer device etc. For every dystopia-advancing use of time travel, there's a good use of time-travel helpfully pinpointing exactly where everything went wrong and what to do about it.

But back in the real world, even if you have absolute moral clarity that the creation of Skynet/the Torment Nexus/the Basilisk is imminent and must be stopped, how exactly do you go about this? I can think of a few people who have tried to attack data centers (for political/ideological reasons) and not only did they end up in federal prison, they also had no operational impact whatsoever. Realistically, we maintain a social status quo despite approximately quarterly assassinations, massacres of schooldren, or similar atrocities; why would any rational actor expect to alter the course of history by targeting a faceless abstraction? Even if the top ten tech CEOs were all simultaneously assassinated tomorrow, would things be substantively different a month later? Once the public freakout subsided, the companies would get new CEOs with much more proactive security details, a bunch of restrictive new laws would be promulgated, and everything would carryon more or less as before.
by panick21 | 2026-02-28 03:10:13+00:00
Wrong. Both were lost because of a fundamentally BAD ARCHITECTURE. And that architecture was bad because the NASA engineers who designed it, had never designed anything like it before and were never able to test or evaluate any of their assumptions.

Columbia would not have been lost if the Shuttle was top stacked, instead of side stacked.

Challenger would not have been lost if not for the use of solid rockets to launch humans.

Both of these design decisions were done to reduce development effort.
by bg24 | 2026-02-28 03:10:15+00:00
Lot of skepticism about OpenAI's survival. I am a user of both Claude (max) and Codex (plus). Some neutral points.

- Anthropic owes to AWS for their enterprise growth. Yes, their own talent as well.

- AWS investing for a purpose - solving problems with multi-agent systems - "exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, which enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents.". I think the multi-agent landscape will be production-ready in 2026 for solving really complex problems. AWS saw something in Codex and OpenAI's models.

- On Circular investments - if you make $100B of your revenue from ecosystem of players who spend $50B on your infra... where else would you go?

I work for another cloud provider, not AWS.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2026-02-28 03:10:31+00:00
Very cool, but can I suggest the `add` CPU instruction instead? Supports 64-bit numbers, and it's encoded in hardware, and no need to cross a PCIe interface into a beefy, power-hungry GPU and back again. And chances are it's cross-platform, because basically every ISA since the very first has had `add`.
by charonn0 | 2026-02-28 03:11:17+00:00
Skimming the actual text of the law[1], I don't see anything particularly objectionable. Basically it requires a toggle when creating/editing a local user account that signals "this user is/is not a child". Applications could then tailor their content for child/not child audiences.

Which isn't to suggest that it's a good law, just not really "age verification".

[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-28 03:11:38+00:00
> I am sure someone will say that is not legal but when has that stopped anyone.

it has routinely stopped them as the courts have already struck down countless of nonsense by this administration, and they rely exactly on this bluster every time they try something else.

The issue is that even though courts work slower than a president with a smartphone eventually it will all get sorted out and they know this, which is why some people falling for this shock and awe behavior is so silly.
by dyslexit | 2026-02-28 03:12:07+00:00
You're making it sound like this is commonly practiced and a standard procedure for the DoD, yet according to Anthropic,

>Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action—one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.

Some very brief googling also confirmed this for me too.

>Everyone is fixated on the name of the rule (and to be fair: the administration is emphasizing that name for irritating rhetorical reasons), but if they called it the "DoD vendor exclusion list", it would be more accurate.

This statement misses the point. The political punishment to disallow all US agencies and gov contractors from using Anthropic for _any _ purpose, not just domestic spying, IS the retaliation, and is the very thing that's concerning. Calling it "DoD vendor exclusion list" or whatever other placating phrase or term doesn't change the action.
by vineyardmike | 2026-02-28 03:12:09+00:00
They won’t be brandished as a supply chain risk because the supply chain members are good at lobbying and they like Claude.

As an example, Amazon is a defense contractor and uses Claude heavily internally for development. They are also major investors in Anthropic. Amazon would not want Claude to be banned from use on developing AWS services that may be cross sold to the government. Multiply this by every defense company that uses Claude (eg anduril and Palantir).

They could totally try and punish Anthropic executives of course. That seems likely.
by dakolli | 2026-02-28 03:12:15+00:00
Sam Altman is lying and taking advantage of PR right now by saying that they've reached an agreement TONIGHT with the DoD. They've been approved for top secret use since last January...

https://x.com/sama/status/2027578580159631610

He's lying, they entered into this agreement last January. We also found out two weeks ago that OpenAI was built into a government panel for a mass surveillance network that looked for high profile people, and politically important people when their IDs were uploaded[1]

Altman and Elon couldn't beat Dario on merit, so they went the regulatory route and got their friends at the DoD to help them out.. Capitalism and free markets eh, I can't say I feel bad for Dario though.

They've been using their most dangerous model, 4o, in classified systems since last January.. The same model that made a bunch of people lose their mind and commit violence.. funny how that works.

[1]: https://vmfunc.gg/blog/persona

https://defensescoop.com/2025/01/16/openais-gpt-4o-gets-gree...
by sowbug | 2026-02-28 03:12:19+00:00
I ask this question as someone who can't do much more than confirm that your blog post is written in English by someone who knows math.

Does this result suggest that if we had N clever humans manually building an LLM, they might come up with something as smart as a frontier model, but potentially 45 times smaller? (1644 / 36 ~= 45, N = very large, time not specified)
by tacticalturtle | 2026-02-28 03:12:55+00:00
Ok Looking at Anthropic’s response they agree with the parent response:

> Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Legally, a supply chain risk designation under 10 USC 3252 can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts—it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-comments-secretary-...

Looks like the NYT might have gotten it wrong…
by belviewreview | 2026-02-28 03:12:56+00:00
The basic problem is that human hands are made of flesh, while robot hands are made of artificial materials like steel and carbon fiber composites. Flesh is a million times more complex, starting at the molecular level, and so it can do all sorts of things that artificial materials cannot.

Compare for instance a jetliner and a bird. The jetliner can fly fast and carry a lot of cargo or human beings. The bird is a lot smaller and slower, but it can do all sorts of things a jetliner cannot. This includes growing itself from a single fertilized egg, self-repair, defense against attacks of various types, finding and getting food, building its own shelter, and reproduction. All because it is made of biological cells. And note that for a jetliner, the similar tasks are carried out by human beings also made of biological cells.

I think a similar analysis explains why artificial general intelligence is impossible.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-28 03:14:07+00:00
So you don't have any evidence it was published the next day? You just made that up out of whole cloth?

The internet archive lists the first time they archived the document as August 31 22:23 GMT, which was August 31 23:23 in Geneva. That matches the reporting from NYT and Guardian from the next morning. Both of those reports are also available on the internet archive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220701000000*/https://www.ohch...