i have been floated

If AI is a weapon, why don't we regulate it like one?

Thoughts on the fight between Anthropic and the Department of War.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/if-ai-is-a-weapon-why-dont-we-regulate

I can't believe people are writing articles like this seriously, comparing LLMs to nuclear weapons was a stretch but this guy goes fully off the rails.

If Anthropic wins the race to godlike artificial superintelligence, and if artificial superintelligence does not become fully autonomous, then Anthropic will be in sole possession of an enslaved living god. And if Dario Amodei personally commands the organization that is in sole possession of an enslaved god, then whether he embraces the title or not, Dario Amodei is the Emperor of Earth.

Emphasis not mine, that's in the original, he's purposefully highlighting the most ridiculous shit in his own essay for us. Does this guy want to get into exactly how he defines god? Because I'm pretty sure the idea of god, and even more so the idea that a god could be enslaved, is right out of fantasy novels, anime, and so on. So, hats off to this guy, while everyone else was satisfied plumbing the depths of sci-fi for their doomer scenarios, this guy is going straight past sci-fi and right into full blown fantasy.

Why not compare AI to dragons, my guy?

At the bottom of this ridiculous essay, he quotes someone else who is also enjoying the smell of their own farts a bit too much.

I'd like to dismiss this, except that the RC airplane hobby managed to spin off the leading weapon category of the century (so far). What used to be a fun hobby for dorky guys flying their toys at the edge of town, now takes out oil refineries and major radar installations.

Bro, I can't wait for this guy to hear about sticks and ropes. The things humans do with them, and they seemed so fun and harmless at first! But, more seriously, has this guy never heard of missiles? Does he really think remote or computer controlled flying objects that explode didn't exist until RC drones became affordable to consumers?

Also, LOL @ "Department of War" all over this stupid essay. What a joke.

John Gruber has some weird takes but I think his support of corporations losing free speech rights to a power-drunk authoritarian-aspiring administration is pretty wild. "No one gets to tell the federal government what it can and can't do except for the federal government," sounds pretty bad, especially in a climate where our system of checks and balances lie in tatters. We're supposed to speak truth to power, not accede to the demands of power. After all of John Gruber's tough guy masculinity hero worship nonsense over the years maybe it shouldn't be a surprise he's on the side of the bully.

I like this post on BlueSky...

Hmm now talk about how state power should destroy other individual actors that amass too much power that threatens US Democracy in the form of private wealth.

Yeah they're not gonna talk about that. Ben Thompson and John Gruber are pro-capitalist bootlickers. We're talking about people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year sitting around doing fuck all. They're not about to rise up against the capitalist system that keeps them comfortable.

Maybe if Gruber gets the dick of capitalism out of his mouth for a second he could do some reading and opt to change his views. But who are we kidding?

I'm 41 today! How did this happen!?

Man, I was ahead of the time on cancelling my ChatGPT subscription and going full time Claude!

So the government turns its back on Anthropic for disallowing two use cases and then turns around and makes a deal with OpenAI that disallows those same two use cases? Are the people in charge of our government total fucking morons or what? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

I enjoyed listening to Jason Snell get "rascally" about how the Tahoe hate bandwagon is extremely overblown. I don't think Mr. Gruber realizes that he's been super negative about Apple ever since they shunned his WWDC talk show episode last year, and that that may be motivating his constant bloviating about how awful Tahoe is, despite not using it. Gruber's shit talking on Tim Apple is justified, but I think it is also maybe a little turned up since Gruber stopped being Apple's favorite little fanboy.

Recently a friend of mine, who is undoubtedly an expert on the topic of which he was speaking, said, "Your current bot is better than most of the other free stuff I use". So... there's that. I've got that at least.

i heard a new one today from the realm of "agentic superstition"... a friend told me his coworker swears opus 4.5 was a downgrade for claude code, now they use claude code to plan an implementation, then they take the implementation doc over to Codex to have Codex write the code.

i have to wonder what is going on in the heads of people like this, the people who fill reddit every day going "x LLM is bad today! x LLM gives me better results at 1am than at 12pm! x LLM used to be so much better just days ago!", what are they doing?

Due to the approaching Discord age-verification apocalypse, for fun I set up a Discourse instance at discuss.bradroot.me to possibly serve as a replacement for my Discord server, which no one really uses anyway.

A winner emerges... I've cancelled ChatGPT Pro and Perplexity Pro... I am only paying for Claude Max now.