I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

Don't have to be a profit^w prophet to see that coming.

IQ measurements keep going up.
Autism diagnoses keep going up.
The price of food keeps going up.
People get a year older every year.

Something fishy is going on.

Are they going to chip you, or control your brain by more direct means?

Yes, but think how great the fire sale is going to be for everyone else.

Well, some people think AI will extinctify us within four years, whereas if the IRGC gets nukes they'll figure out like everyone else that they can't actually use them except in self defense without getting erased, so the only difference will be that we won't be able to try crush them anymore.

Yes, tell us how easy the current effort is turning out to be. Someone grabbed a tiger by the tail and can neither subdue it nor let go. The IRGC is probably laughing its ass off.

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case, given what I've seen people do with AI, and given my own experience with Claude Code (Opus and Fable models), the normal human inclination to trust it's probably right and click OK is by far the most likely explanation. And remember that frontier models have grown increasingly better over the last year, and one of the newest improvements is that the reasoning models use two models in an adversarial mode where the second model checks and challenges the output of the first. The timeline of the events in Iran probably indicate that this was an older AI model without those newer advances. I can totally believe this story. When consumers were expected to keep their hands on the wheel of self-driving cars, I absolutely knew they wouldn't, and when humans are told to check the conclusions of AI, they mostly just click OK. I do actually look at the code that Claude generates before it goes into our codebase, and I can tell you, the desire to just skim read is real.

Said every Native American ever.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

As they've been telling us software developers who are being asked to adapt to probably the most rapid transformation of any career that's ever been seen... "it's ok to take a moment to grieve." I was spending most of my time writing code up until about the middle of August, and then I realized that Fable was finally good enough to work on the rather large code base that I work on, and now I write less than 5% of the new code, and I'm pushing out new features at probably 3 times as fast as I was before, while now spending almost all my time creating and reviewing specifications, reading code, updating documentation, reviewing software architecture, and making bigger plans. It's jarring, exhilarating, and humbling at the same time. It's gonna take a minute for us to adjust. And yes, things are still changing fast. Software development has embraced this. It's coming for 3D CAD software and mechanical engineers next. There's been pushback within the more creative arts, like graphic design, writing, and making videos, and I totally understand that. Those industries will grapple with it in different ways than we have in the engineering space. And we won't lose all the creative stuff. As someone recently said to me, "we still ride horses, but we don't ride them to work."

I prefer the Martian bear.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

Yes, Don-boy, I called you a fuckup. Tell the FCC to ban the internet.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.