If humans were directly making these attacks law enforcement would already be onto them. But because the humans routed these attacks through AI agents, it only makes news and contributes to AI hyperbole.
One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture, while both the US and China embrace entreprenuership wholeheartedly.
If they changed that they'd perhaps become world powers themselves.
> One thing that is common about middle democracies is that prioritize a bureaucratic elite structure over an entrepreneurship culture
No, that's just the 2010s propaganda fed to you by people who assert that not letting them do whatever they want is "bureaucratic". These very same people are completely fine lobbying legislature for more moat when they benefit from it.
The difference between "middle democracies" or whatever that means and the US is just that politics aren't corrupted enough yet that they can buy whatever they want.
I did some admin work for the startup around 5 years ago and I have to say EU countries specially mine Sweden is far more clear. In USA you are basically hopeless without a lawyer. but I did a search and for clarity of rule I searched and this came up using AI:
World Bank’s broad “Regulatory Quality” measure supports that direction: Sweden scored 95.28/100 and the US 90.57/100 in its latest comparable 2023 data. I couldn't find EU wide score.
I wanted to help someone to get work visa and I thought it is like Sweden and you just fill a small form, oh boy! We hired a lawyer for just filling the US side application.
I live in one, it's definitely true. It doesn't mean entrepreneurship doesn't exist, but there is a lot of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is iron law. They will go to any extreme to make reality align with the bureaucracy. For example if you build a building without permission, the police will come by with a bulldozer, demolish your building, dispose of the remains, and then bill you for it. Even if the building is hosting the world's first AGI, or whatever extremely important thing you can think of - there is no excuse for not complying with the bureaucracy. Whereas the US would allow you to keep it and maybe pay a fine.
> but there is a lot of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is iron law.
Yeah, an organized and powerful administration is the basis of rule-of-law system. The opposite isn't entrepreneurship, it's a state of widespread corruption where laws are toothless.
It doesn't benefit upstarts who want a fair environment to start a business, it benefits megacorps with their own militia of lawyers to bend the rules, and pockets deep enough to lobby for the removal of rules that can't be bent.
The optimal amount of crime is not zero. If someone does an illegal thing but it turns out to be good for society, it should be permitted, then legalized.
Think of AI copyright infringement. You know why the AI labs are in the USA and China and not in Europe.
Heavily country-dependent, in practice. The UK lets you set up a company online cheaply, quickly, and filing is easy. Insurance is plentiful and sensible, as are business bank accounts. The law is mostly straight-forward. Setting up a German limited-liability company OTOH involves putting down some ghastly large sum as a guarantee.
But yes, Americans are told they have the freest speech and the freest markets, and don't seem to question either.
You clearly don't pay attention to Canadian politics. Canada basically let McKinsey run their immigration policy[1][2] for 10 years and has now appointed the former CEO of McKinsey[3] to a business development role in government. I wouldn't say that Canada is just a satellite office of McKinsey, but it's getting closer.
Canada is corrupt as hell, just no one cares so it doesn't make international news.
Edit:
Oh yeah, forgot about the SNC-Lavalin debacle, where the ruling government tried to make the legal problems of their corporate buddies go away[4] by sneaking a new "slap on the wrist" law into an annual budget bill and then pressuring the prosecutor to apply it.
It's pretty clear the echo chamber you emerge from (protip - move to the US. I am 100% serious), but this is comical.
When your examples of Canada being "corrupt as hell" are such chickenshit nonsense, it betrays that you're just a partisan zealot that has literally zero sense of scale or reason.
McKinsey, a massive consulting firm, had a whole $32M in business with the government? Holy shit, basically the deep state! Sounds like the globalist infiltrated the government!
The SNC thing was embarrassing, but it was over its behaviour overseas (Libya, to be precise, where a dictator's family got wined and dined), and the government was concerned about a massive, major Canadian firm being crippled by domestic hand wringing.
When that is what you have to offer up for Canada being "corrupt as hell", in comparison to criminal shitholes like the US (which you think is much better, as you've explained elsewhere), wow. Back to shitty subreddits where your tiny group of laughable farces have your discussions about how dire things are.
I say it with absolute conviction that I desperately want every "Canada is broken" jackal like you to pack up and move South of the border.
It's interesting to me that people generally see Europe's regulations as interfering with entrepreneurship, while they see American decisions that give more power to multinational corporations at the expense of smaller companies as a normal part of a free market.
Starting a company is not the hard part of staring a company in any country. Many many companies do exist in the EU. It might be annoying but it's obviously hardly insurmountable.
Yes, I saw one just recently where the poster made obviously false statements about starting a company in Germany.
(Before you downvote this comment, please note that I have started multiple companies in the EU. I'm speaking from personal experience, not from something I've read on Hacker News.)
That's unfettered capitalism at work—"free" implies no bounds. Multinational corporations have never been more powerful now than at anytime in history.
And that hurts the free market. A free market should be transparent, have low barriers to entry, and not be dominated by monopolies or cartels. There's nothing free about American capitalism.
Your implied premise is that private companies cannot impede others' freedom, which isn't true. In unfettered capitalism, only the largest corporations have the power and money to be free.
You're getting downvoted now, but it's the Europeans who are running out of money for healthcare and public services (and voting for neo-fascist parties promising fixes that will never come).
European sentiment is totally out of touch with European reality. They'll post gleefully online about how much better their life is and then go back to their sardine flat where they can't afford to pay for heating, and it never ever occurs to them to reconsider any priors. They'll huff copium on Reddit about how bad American healthcare is, while waiting for years for desperately needed surgeries, paying far more for healthcare by way of taxes than any American does.
Are their ideas out of touch? No, it's reality that's wrong.
I've had that happen to me. I actually recently wrote a draft blog and looked over it, and it felt AI generated. My writing style has definitely changed.
Hah absolutely, after of a very intense project I’ve undertaken with Claude agent teams for a few months now, I have caught myself using opus expressions, since they come to mind now naturally because that’s most of the text I’ve read since then … I’m catching myself so far, but in a year or two maybe I will not, fable doesn’t do as much “mannerisms” and speaks plainly, so maybe by then we will all be running fable level models on hour local machines and just not notice it anymore?
Or maybe the frontier labs could run several "personality" variants of each model and route you to them at random. Sessions are already sticky because of cache so it seems like any given cluster could be assigned one out of several fine tunes.
I recently started noticing myself using the term "candidly" instead of "honestly" a lot more. The only term I doubt I will ever use is "churn". I still don't understand why Claude likes to plug that term into random sentences every now and then.
I can't name one but I can tell you these models keep getting stupider as they keep existing and their system prompts get inflated with what not to do. I have experienced this happen with Qwen 3.8 Max Preview where for the early days it was blasting through Rust code fine and then before the release it silently got replaced and started to suck hard. Claude still has the "blue button" problem so it is probable that a casual chat with it could have this exact outcome of forgetting what to do. I saw some models also have this thing where when you tell them a text restriction they first ignore it in thinking, creating the full text and then apply them in their thinking rewriting it fully causing your output tokens to be inflated.
Well yes, there are only so many attention heads (well whatever magical variant frontier models are using these days) that can attend to the context and so as the context grows attention becomes spread thin.
But with reasoning enabled I find that even with a large context that induces mistakes most of the time a decent model realises and corrects itself before output.
And it's always been known that prompting what it should do is far better than what it shouldn't, since just introducing "DON'T do X" into the prompt means that the tokens for X are present and can be paid attention to in the wrong way.
But even then I've used plenty of "Do X, not Y" recently, especially for tools "Use this for x, don't use this for Y" and models perform like 90% of the time.
I would be interesting to experiment to see performance curves given a restriction on reasoning tokens allowed to n% of context tokens and see if there's some magic number of "reasoning should be at least n tokens for a context of length p" even ignoring the complexity of instructions in the prompt itself.
I have the opposite, I can pick up AIsms much more now and they stick out like a sore thumb. A couple of years ago I had no such intuition, it just sounded like normal writing to me, but now if I try to use AI to write any prose it just sounds absolutely terrible.
Yet as a programmer myself, I've been in situations where I'm artificially separated from the customer against my will.
I want to build something useful for them but if they let me be too close to the customer, I'll be making important decisions that are supposed to be someone else's job.
> Did you enjoy the crafts, or did you enjoy the compliments? Did you enjoy the difficult puzzles or the identity derived from a career that gives you the reputation and perceived value of someone who can do a thing most people can’t?
I think in the end everyone will be happy. Those who just want to ship, make money and attain status and do not care much for the process will embrace whatever capabilities AI affords them and move on.
Those who get satisfaction from the process and prioritize craftsmanship will also do so and form their own subcultures where this is appreciated.
If software is eating the world as some say, then surely, there can't be just one way of doing software.
Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while the work hours are significantly more emotionally and motivationally draining because it's less fulfilling.
If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.
Welcome to the world everyone else has to muddle through.
The solution has long been, and remains, "Organize and demand enough money to live on from ~20 hours of employed labor a week, spend the rest of the time as you'd like."
Sure, I acknowledge that it was incredibly rare and lucky for "the thing I enjoy doing" and "the thing that pays" to have been the same for so long. That doesn't mean it's not painful for that to change out from under me - especially when I can't quite convince myself that the new way of doing things is actually better by any metric.
Well, the key is understanding that the old paradigm wasn't just rare and lucky; there's a good chance that it was unfair, and actively robbing someone else of dignity.
What's happening to you now may also feel unfair, but it's up to you if you're just going to be pissed on your own behalf, or if, now that you recognize that everyone else is going through what you've been newly-introduced to, you're going to go, "Hey, no one should have to live like this! Fix this crap for everyone."
Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era.
I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware.
There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?
Things have become measurably worse as open standards have been dropped.
An example is messaging apps. Today, if I want to remain in touch with my friends and family I have to juggle between Facebook messenger (thank the heavens for this app which means I rarely need to open Facebook itself), Whatsapp, Signal, etc.
In the early 2000s, even though I was on more services, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, a single app such as trillian or Adium was enough to communicate on all of them.
While today we have to go to a whole slew of walled gardens to read posts from folks, such as substack, medium, twitter, etc. earlier, the heavy use of RSS meant that a single RSS news client covered everything.
From a socio-political standpoint, “canceling” also wasn’t a thing, since you could trivially self host a blog and discovery would be no different.
Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.
> Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.
Yeah, that's one thing that is definitely noticeable. Online social services basically became data-driven psychology research companies, with the goal being to improve engagement. Every page refresh became an A/B test designed to keep you hooked.
That and venture investment has become bane of good.
When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors
An established codebase is already the best kind of context you could give an agent. It has all the patterns baked in so the agent simply follows established patterns. Such a codebase probably contains tens to hundreds of thousands of man-hours poured into it by humans refining it to do what it does - taking into account real world feedback and constraints.
When working on something from scratch, the best an agent can do is the average of whatever is in its training set and the clarity of the text prompts.
> When working on something from scratch, the best an agent can do is the average of whatever is in its training set and the clarity of the text prompts.
Nah. The best it can do is to use the best writing style a model learned. Post-training might fail to prioritize it, though. Autoregressive pretraining does not average things. It creates a predictive model for variety of programming styles.
It's been working great for me as the primary browser for a couple of years now.
Prior to that I was on Firefox (for the sake of browser engine diversity) but left as soon as they announced they were turning into an AI powered advertising company, and would use your data for training. However, I keep it around for cross-browser testing.
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