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I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.

> You prefer dark interfaces — your operating system told us.

oOoOohh my settings worked as intended, spooky!


Agree, sending my language, if I use dark mode or time zones is all data that can be used to give me a better experience so I don’t mind.

It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard

I can't stand this tone, it's truly the worst way to write, ever. Rapid successions of sentences 5 to 8 words long, where each must be impactful and profound but only end up sounding incredibly smug and abrasive. Fuck that.

That's what helped L figure out Kira was in Japan, and likely a student given the times of deaths, in Death Note. Ruled out 7.8 billion people in one step

> Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.

But I am the only person in this timezone in the world. It uniquely identified me!


The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.

China, famous for never putting ideology over policy.

unless you're going back to the cultural revolution, modern China is extremely pragmatic. It's a nominally socialist country that runs deregulated special economic zones with tens of millions of people and more economic competition than anywhere else.

The equivalent would be if the US started to run a socialist planned city of 15 million people somewhere, just for the sake of it. There's pretty much no other place that in the last 30-40 years has as much of a spread of policy experimentation as China has had.


It's mostly just a bad model. Plenty of people would be willing to overlook the baggage if the model was even marginally better than the competition.

I also used to see Grok boosting/slack-cutting on here/Reddit constantly back in Peak Subsidy when xAI was giving out hundreds of dollars of credits for free per month.

After they killed that and then stopped handing out free model access to users of every Cline fork for weeks following model releases, vibe coder hype moved back to Chinese models for cost and the SOTA models for quality.


Agreed. There's are plenty of instances where people here on HN do mental gymnastics to justify using a truly good product when the company that builds it is morally bankrupt.

Not a criticism (I probably engage in that sort of thinking myself sometimes), just something I've observed. If Grok were actually good, we'd see that phenomenon here, but we don't.


I just read a bunch of compelling “Grok is better at this” use cases in a thread yesterday.

I’m not rushing towards it, but, had to mention.


In my experience Anthropic positions itself as the "safe" AI company more than the "ethical" AI company. They're related but not the same thing.

The only way you could be surprised that Anthropic wants to be in bed with the US military is if you just never listened to anything Dario has said publicly. He's very open about wanting the US government and the US military to use Claude to win against China. That's why Claude was in the Pentagon before all the others in the first place.

>LLMs are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons anyway

This is obviously false, though that's not surprising from what I've seen from Zitron. Claude is probably too slow and clunky to go full mech warrior for the time being, but it would be trivial to hook Claude up to an autonomous drone with missile strike capabilities. Those things are mostly autonomous already, they just require a human to tell them where to shoot. Claude can easily do that with a simple API.

The rest is valid. I wouldn't describe Anthropic as an ethical company. On the contrary, if you believe that you losing the AI race is an existential threat to humanity, then it's easy to justify all sorts of unethical behavior for the greater good.


In that scenario the President would invoke the Defense Production Act to compel the oil company to supply the oil. They threatened to use that power against Anthropic, though it's unclear how it applies to something like AI. "Claude without guardrails" is not a product Anthropic offers, so they would fight it on grounds similar to how Apple fought against being forced to crack an iPhone.

The main issue here is that Congress is asleep at the wheel and has refused to implement any sort of guardrails around how the government is and is not allowed to use AI.


Secularism in the US began rising steadily in 1990 and has actually been declining since 2020. That trend doesn't line up well with any of the data we're talking about.


Unless the data is a lagging indicator


$60 billion worth of competent people?


I wouldn't be surprised if those enterprise relationships evaporate after this acquisition. There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers.


> There's a reason why xAI has zero enterprise customers

I’m curious where you pull these stats from


I've had hundreds of AI-powered vendor tools come across my desk as part of my job, and I have yet to see a single one that uses Grok. I'm also not aware of any publicly announced customers for Grok's enterprise offering. The Grok Enterprise website doesn't list any customers.


For Enterprises it's way easier to delist Cursor from the list of used tools than to have a relation with someone known publicly for neofascist aspirations.

xAI is not, and was not that bad, it's just everybody ignores it for anything serious due to obvious reasons.


I am not, I have a Grok subscription and I find Grok genuinely useful.


I hate Musk, but Grok is not a bad LLM. It's very useful for tracking down old magazines that I'm looking for, which are public domain or copyright orphans. Often the major players will outright reject searching places like archive.org as they immediately assume you are trying to commit some level of copyright infringement. With Grok it'll either just do it, or do it with a mild prod or jailbreak.


The Onion is owned by the billionaire founder of Twilio, there is no board of directors.


So you admit they don't have a half-decent board of directors!

Couldn't resist.


Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed.

For now she was only able to do that because I set up a modified version of my agentic coding setup on her computer and told her to give it a shot for more complex tasks. It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.


There's no such big opportunity, as the number of programmers' spouses is quite limited. Again, and as the GP rightly suggested, some of the HN-ers here need to go and touch some normie grass, so to speak.

More to the point, nobody wants to be more efficient for the sake of being efficient, we all want to go to work, do our metaphorical 9 to 5 without consuming too much (intellectual and not only) energy, and then back home. In that regard AI is seen as an existential threat to that "lifestyle" and it will be treated as such by regular workers.


correct. you cant trust this place for realistic takes - I had a post re. financial stuff downvoted when a former Investment Banker chimed in to back me up.

Comical. Truly comical.


> Just yesterday my non-technical spouse

> It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python

And she knows those a hundred lines of python work correctly and give her correct result because in this instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped her?

> It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.

Even though I agree with the sentiment, we've tried non-coding coding how many times now? Once every 5 years? Throwing LLMs into the mix won't help much when in the end you leave the end user hanging, debugging problems and hunting for solutions.


Scheduling solutions are easy to verify. For other problems, verification would be harder.


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