I'm going to suggest what's going on here is Hanlon's Razor for models: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a model's stupidity."
In my opinion, we've reached some ceiling where more tokens lead only to incremental improvements. A conspiracy seems unlikely given all providers are still competing for customers and a 50% token drives infra costs up dramatically too.
I've been very happy with agentmail.to for a while with great success. You get 3K free emails per month with 3 inboxes. Paid tier starts at $0.20 per 1000 emails.
I used it, found it buggy, and quickly realized I could achieve everything it did with a long running Claude Code instance and a good mobile frontend. The joy is that you can customize everything to your hearts content just by asking Claude to build things for you.
- Background jobs? Cron? Huey + SQLite
- Memory? Create a job to write daily summaries to a memory/ folder
- Conversation log? Use hooks to write conversations to an sqlite file with full text search enabled
- SOUL.md? IDENTITY.md? USER.md? Stop wasting tokens and just use CLAUDE.md.
I only haven't quite figured out how to get channels working with 3rd party frontends.
I highly recommend everyone actually read the opinion. It's such a thorough legal takedown of Heppner, you'll learn how the law works and why it doesn't apply to a lot of the made up cases in this thread:
TLDR:
- Claude told him IANAL
- Claude privacy policies say they "may disclose personal data to third parties in connection with claims, disputes, or litigation"
- Work product doctrine, does not apply in the same way to plaintiffs
- Lawyers did not direct him to use Claude (i.e. the laywers did not direct him to do research for the case using a specific tool)
My takeaway is that, as is, I should not do any work without a VPN or in plaintext. Everything else was up for grabs even before this case.
Yes, but he's still using it to prepare his legal arguments and to understand the law.
The reason attorney-client communication is privileged is so that people won't interfere in people's preparation of their case, not because the lawyer is magic. The principled thing is for the courts to apply principles like this based on the principle.
According to the ruling’s citations, the purpose of the privilege is to provide protection for the mind of the advocate. If you’re not the advocate and you’re not talking to the advocate the privilege doesn’t apply. Should-bes in this case are imponderable to me but that appears to be what-is.
Yes, I think that's completely wrong. It focuses on the advocate as some kind of special role, but I think the core problem is preparing for a court case, and I don't think it makes sense to focus on him.
I think an accused should be able to make strategy notes for a court case and be able to have those be secret from the prosecution, and to look up things for these purposes, and, to use Google docs etc. if he so wants.
I also see that some other comments describe that work product has previously been treated as a broader notion with less focus on the advocate and more on preparing for the court case, so I'm far from convinced this has been decided correctly.
I understand why you feel that way, but the current policy is not in the direction you are hoping for. The important thing to understand is that all evidence is available by default, that privilege covers the exceptions to that availability. Privilege is construed narrowly, and for now, communications with your advocate, or notes prepared at the request of your advocate, are the sorts of things that are covered. Your own private notes, or chats with your friends about the state of your case, are examples of things that are not covered.
Work product was treated more broadly in one case by a lower magistrate court, but the court making the decision in this case is not bound by that lower court's ruling. What will be interesting is if this ruling gets appealed up to the sups. I doubt the decision will be overruled in any case.
But the actual rule for civil cases (federal rules of civil procedure) is
>(A) Documents and Tangible Things. Ordinarily, a party may not discover documents and tangible things that are prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial by or for another party or its representative (including the other party's attorney, consultant, surety, indemnitor, insurer, or agent). But, subject to Rule 26(b)(4), those materials may be discovered if:
So the "by or for another party or its representative" seems more like my thinking than the thinking you're describing.
I think considering other statements, Rakoff is certainly wrong. The documents were prepared as part of pretrial preparations. Non-experts need to be able to use search engines, books, etc. and which books someone was handed for their pretrial preparations, or what lookups they have made can't be the business of their opponents. You have an adversarial system. One party can't have access to the pretrial preparations of the other party, it won't lead to fair trials.
Is a VPN really going to help here? I guess if you can figure out a way to pay Claude anonymously. But if you are charged with a crime and your computer is siezed, and there is some way to discover your Claude account from the contents of your computer, then you will be up a creek either way.
My takeaway is: don't do crime, and if you must do crime, don't use AI in the commission of a crime, in a similar way as it is unwise for criminals to keep recordings of their own phone conversations or what have you (a surprisingly common habit for criminals!).
That's a great takeaway, but may not be practically achievable in the world where
> The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day.
I once saw a talk given by a lawyer on exactly this topic. It was a long time ago, unfortunately I won't be able to find it. Anyway, the takeaway is that there are plenty of Federal laws that are written in such a way that there is incredible room for interpretation by prosecutors. Vagueness and overbroad language to the point that indeed they can come up with some kind of crime pretty much any time they want to.
On the other hand, that kind of thing would not only be enough to bring a case. They use that kind of power to enhance their case against people they know are real criminals. Of course, the more the Justice Department becomes captured by bad actors, the less this applies.
I don’t think very many people charged with federal crimes are actually just innocent bystanders. So even if we grant that people are technically committing three felonies a day (which I don’t) I think the admonition can simply be read “don’t do crimes that a federal prosecutor might actually charge you with.”
Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.
Even after I explained the exact usage I was invoking, the attractive nuisance of all the science fiction that has gotten attached to the term still prevented you and Quarrelsome from reading my post as written.
I really wish the term hadn't been mangled so much. Though the originator of the term bears a non-trivial amount of the responsibility for it, having written some rather good science fiction on the topic himself. The original meaning from the paper is quite useful and nothing has stepped up to replace it.
All the singularity means as I explicitly used it here is you entirely lose the ability to predict the future. It is relative to who is using it... we are all well past the Caveman Singularity, where no (metaphorical) caveman could possibly predict anything about our world. If we stabilize where we are now I feel like I have at least a grasp on the next ten years. If we continue at this pace I don't. That doesn't mean I believe AI will inevitably do this or that... it means I can't predict anymore, which is really the exact opposite. AI doesn't have to get to "superintelligence" to wreck up predictions.
>the originator of the term ... rather good science fiction
I guess you are thinking of Vernor Vinge but the term first came up with John von Neumann in the 1950s:
>...on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue
The most interesting factor of the dynamic around things like near singularity is the things that I feel are coupled to it
Basically the ability to reason about first and second order effects
IE, before the cellphone was invented you could have predicted the it, things like star trek envisaged a world of portable communication
What impact the cellphone had was predictable to some people, on the one hand increased convenience of communication as well as the end of making a call and wondering who was going to pick up, which was a definite consideration pre-mobile when you called a place and not a person, now we just assume that when we call someone we'll get them and not their family
The second order effects were less obvious, ease of access to someone meant being always accessible, so now everyone could be contacted whenever someone wanted them, it changed the dynamics of life for many, not to mention the effects of different technologies combining, the personal computer and the mobile phone becoming one in the form of the smartphone gave everyone a computer in their pocket, let alone adding the internet into the mix
Each of these changes were completely unpredictable to the people pre-cellphone, once again, compare modern day trek and the originals
I still vividly remember the moment one of the characters in discovery asked the computer to give her a mirror, the same behaviour of countless people now using the fact that their selfie camera functionally gives them a portable mirror in the form of their phone, that was unpredictable
So that's one form of being unable to predict the future
But there's another interesting dynamic I think, which is each direction of technical development is accelerating, which means that we may soon hit the point that only a subject matter expert will be able to predict or perhaps even be aware of what happens in any particular field, so we may get a period where before we can't predict the future, we may have some strange middle ground where we're constantly surprised by the developments we see around ourselves and when we look into it find this new discovery has been around months or years
I certainly have experienced that once or twice, however I'm wondering if that may become the new normal
It's worth noting that after ~50 years[edit: to preempt nitpicking, yes I know we've been using computers productively quite a bit longer than that, but that's roughly the time when the computerized office started to really gain traction across the whole economy in developed countries], we've only extracted a tiny proportion of the hypothetical value of computers, period, as far as benefits to the economy and potential for automation.
I actually think a lot of the real value of LLMs is "just" going to be making accessing a little (only a little!) more of that existing unrealized benefit feasible for the median worker.
My expectation is that we'll also harness only a tiny proportion of the hypothetical value of LLMs. We're just not good enough at organizing work to approach the level of benefit folks think of when they speculate about how transformational these things will be. A big deal? Yes. As big a deal as some suppose? Probably not.
[edit: in positive ways, I mean. I think we're going to see huge boosts in productivity to anti-social enterprises. I'd not want to bet on whether the development of LLMs are going to be net-positive or net-harmful to humanity, not due to the "singularity" or "alignment" or whatever, but because of the sorts of things they're most-useful for]
it's an interesting question: how much more productive would we all be if we were all as savvy/literate/productive with computers as some hypothetical comparator (I'm not sure programmers are the right comparison to make)?
for example, i am in operations and strategy, but have always wanted to be more technical because i could see the value for many many tasks. however, the learning curve was steep and so learning and doing other things drove better returns for me.
now, LLMs make learning basic concepts and executing simple tasks extremely easy, and i am realizing a higher level of productivity then previously; i used codex to do a test data migration and then evaluate the data quality. i could simply not have done this previously, but it is a meaningful change for me, that i can execute on this.
there is no maintenance burden: i don't have to keep the code alive. it simply sped up an otherwise manual and non repeated task.
i think that's what's so interesting and concerning about this technology: i think power and productivity will flow more broadly across the workforce. this will result in relative winners and losers, and some who will experience no real change at all.
similarly to the costs and benefits of mobile devices diffusing technology access; it changed some things, it created winners and losers and yet our daily lives are recognizable to someone from 50 or even more years ago.
>Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity?
Because they are captives (to a system of incentives that is already "superintelligent" in comparison to any individual) who are hoping for salvation (something to make them free against their will; since it is their will which is captured).
Singularity, then, is the point at which the system itself "finally becomes able to imagine what it is like to be a person", and decides to stop torturing people. IMO, this is unlikely to work out like that.
We've had enough advancement to change the economy for many decades, but the powers that be have insisted that, despite the lack of need, we continue to toil doing completely unnecessary work, because that's what's required to extend their fiefdoms.
Not that the singularity has any relevance here, either - except maybe that the robots take over, and the billionaires have missed the boat? I don't know.
Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead.
Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.
> regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans,
AI isn't one thing though. Really its kind of a natural evolution of 'higher order life'. I think that something like a 'organization', (corps, governments, etc) once large enough is at least as alive as a tardigrade. And for the people who are its cells, it is as comprehensible as the tardigrade is to any of its individual cells. So why wouldn't organizations over all of human history eventually 'evolve' a better information processing system than humans making mouth sounds at each other? (writing was really the first step on this). Really if you look at the last 12,000 years of human society as actually being the first 12,000 years of the evolutionary history of 'organizations', it kinda makes a lot of sense. And so much of it was exploring the environment, trying replication strategies, etc. And we have a lot of different organizations now, like an evolutionary explosion, where life finds various niches to exploit.
My issue is I feel like some people treat intelligence as an integer value and make the crass assumption that "perfect intelligence" beats all other intelligences and just think that's quite a thick way to think about it. A fool can beat an expert over the course of towards infinite hands because they happen to do something unexpected. Everything is a trade off and there's no such thing as perfect, every player has to take risk.
that's kind of optimistic. for example a misaligned super AI might engineer a virus that wipes out most of the 7 billion humans. that would put a damper on the adaptability of the human race...
and then might overfit the lack of danger in that aftermath, leading to those fragmented humans doing something to overthrow it. For all we know this AI might get bored and decide to make a cure, or turn itself off, or anything really.
What about plain JS without React or another framework? I don’t do much front-end these days but I’d love to toss out as much front end-complexity as possible
I kid but any reason you can think of applies to app development too.
1. Good abstractions decrease verbosity and improve comprehension
2. Raw HTML/CSS/JS are out of distribution just like assembly (no one builds apps like this)
3. Humans need to understand and audit it
4. You'll waste time and tokens reinventing wheels
This inuitively makes sense. LLMs mimic human behavior and thought, so for all the reasons you'd get lost in a pile of web spaghetti or x86, so would an LLM.
In my opinion, we've reached some ceiling where more tokens lead only to incremental improvements. A conspiracy seems unlikely given all providers are still competing for customers and a 50% token drives infra costs up dramatically too.
reply