Because the person found it fun is a valid reason. It’s kinda cool!

I’m pretty sure Apple will do this in macOS 28, and there are some details to improve (guessing from the animation, haven’t installed it). But, people can and should do things just for fun.

Don’t hate the player.

I have mad respect for people who can actually throw away a shit ton of financial security for themselves and their families for something they believe in. It’s rare for a reason. Everyone has a price.

If you can get financial security without selling your soul, fewer people would do that, across every industry where selling your soul for security is possible.

You can absolutely hate the player. You can even hate yourself if you know you’d make the same choice.

We’re all humans, we have agency. We’re not some pachinko ball bouncing through life.

I feel people who sell their souls to be in finance or work as corporate attorneys for bad companies deserve criticism, but people who sell their souls to work for an enterprise they themselves believe is at the very least going to destroy civilization absolutely are pathetic and evil.

How is AI going to destroy civilization?

If AI is going to do that, AI needs to at least get good enough to autonomously produce all the chips and energy it needs to execute. That seems like a pretty far way off, considering we don't even have robots that can fold laundry competently.

If AI exists but there are still humans producing chips for it, I don't think you would be able to say that civilization has been destroyed

> well better they be the ones in poverty and not me

I'm not this extreme, and don't wish for others to be in poverty.

But I do wish for myself and my family to not be in poverty or suffering.

If the system is designed for these to be in conflict, that's not something I have the power to change, beyond voting for the less-shitty of 2 shitty choices on a ballot. At the end of the day I will prioritize myself and my family, and I think that's natural for 99% of people.

> destroy civilization

My personal take is almost all capitalist enterprises are on a path to cause destruction to civilization. AI is not unique here, and every industry is "AI or die" right now.

As for short term survival, I don't have the option to just quit in protest without income, nor do I think that will be effective in accomplishing anything. If anything I will just pigeon-hole myself into becoming a worse future-victim of the system than I already would be.

How valuable will your money be once civilization is destroyed and you, self-admittedly, have no skills that would help you after the collapse? Seems like a better use of your time may be in identifying and developing those skills and cultivating a community around yourself (or joining in one) that can survive your predicted end of civilization.

Money is useful to weather the storm and relocate myself and my family to somewhere less affected by AI, or possibly have some minimal influence over redirection of resources in an AI-controlled future world. It's just insurance and optionality.

> have no skills that would help you after the collapse

That's not what I said. I only have 1 high-paying skill that can help me buy that optionality, and that's software engineering. I don't know of anything else high-paying that I could study quick enough, and other high-paying industries including lawyers and doctors are also predatory in different ways. I don't think the alternatives are better.

As for post-collapse skills, I think the ultimate is just being able to live off the land and move to somewhere that has the right climate and natural resources for that. Moving to another country isn't logistically straightforward, but money can help remove some of those hurdles, both in terms of residence permits and in terms of buying land and housing. So the priority is still financial. The learnings happen in parallel.

> Seems like a better use of your time

Not looking for advice on time management advice. I'm only trying to protect my family's future by building optionality. My individual decisions aren't going to change what the system is doing.

I guess my real confusion is this: You keep predicting the end of civilization in your comments, but you only seem to talk about collecting money to deal with it. Does your end of civilization not also involve the severe loss in value of our current currencies and other financial assets? How do you intend to grease palms to get into other countries if the USD (I'm making an assumption that you live in the US, adjust as appropriate) has become valueless because the US as a civilization has collapsed?

I don't keep assets in USD. I also don't think civilization collapse is the same as an economic collapse. In fact I don't think we'll have a long term economic collapse, but the new economy will be run by AI and will be absolutely terrifying for anyone who still needs to work for that AI to survive.

These all read like excuses for being a moral coward.

Was that supposed to be an insult? Maybe I am a coward. What do you want to do about it?

You are a coward.

Community sounds nice until you notice that any organized collection of humans inevitably succumbs to the will of sociopaths.

One big difference from Steve: it isn't the Steve show anymore. The people showing this stuff off are the people who lead the the teams that work on these things.

It's so much cooler to me to see the people closer to the work talking about it rather than just Steve Jobs, as amazing as he was to watch. I'll take slightly stilted any day of the week as a tradeoff.

Ternus did introduce a new rhetorical thing, though. He framed some of the guiding principles during the opening and throughout as ideas originating from himself, not Apple. Cook rarely said "I" in relation to a claim, other than "I'm so proud of" X, Y, Z. That's a bit more product guy, a bit more Opinionated. I am hoping for more of that.

I disagree twice. It was very cool to see Steve Jobs, and he was heavily involved in the work and design decisions, perhaps even more than the people presenting.

That’s very true—the dude was up everyone’s ass. But there is a difference between Steve being involved as a stakeholder and people who are closer to doing the work itself.

I mean yeah if I had to choose purely for entertainment value, I’d watch Steve all day. But I think it can also be true that seeing the people closer to the metal is very cool too. And I frankly prefer it to seeing Apple as only one person.

So replier is right here: Jobs had opinions about literally every detail, he pushed people to work out those details and challenge their own assumptions, and he talked about these things in public like a designer—not just about beauty but also HCI. You could see in his presentations that he understood the fucking details about why things were good. No tech CEO is able to tell you why their version of showing that a window is currently in focus is good, and on the off chance they do, they probably wouldn’t use the term “key window” because they don’t know it.

There was a Jobs story about how he was bothering the engineer who was working on the calculator so much about the layout that the engineer just made a layout engine Jobs could play with, so he could design it himself.

I do consider that fundamentally different from the people lower in the hierarchy though. That’s what I value about the Cook era keynotes: seeing Apple as not just a single person.

He was often critical down to the specific detail, such as amount of padding on a button.

I think you gotta set aside some of that to enjoy both as Sci-Fi games, not space sim games. In Sci-Fi, asteroids are close together and you can shoot them for resources or lose an enemy in them like a dark forest, because those things are fun. IRL, they are ridiculously far apart and not nearly as fun.

It's always a potential danger to one's enjoyment to know too much about something though. :)

I mean, I do, but there's a reason KSP is so popular despite all the flaws.

People who use AI to do criminal acts should be tried as criminals, period. Gotta stop this unaccountable crap. You pull the trigger, you did the murder.

They should, although I think the charge would (and probably should) be around some sort of reckless endangerment type crime. These are people irresponsibly using powerful tools, and should be charged as such.

This is like someone who removes a brake pedal from a tractor, uses a stick to hold down the throttle, and lets it loose on his field. When it leaves the field and runs someone over, that is criminal negligence.

The recklessness is moot though. We don't have direct access to how the models were prompted and asked to respond to certain events, so they could well have been incited to commit fraud or other illegal actions, in which case the persons in control should be held accountable as perpetrators.

You would have to prove they acted intentionally, though. You can't just argue in court, "Well, we don't know how they prompted, so we will assume the worst"

If the prosecution is able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person gave a prompt that was intended to commit a crime, then of course we can prosecute them for that. The AI is just a tool to commit fraud at that point, and is no different than a person who uses photoshop to alter a check to commit fraud.

Pragmatically, if too many people use LLMs recklessly, then we ought to regulate them.

Of course, it'd be better to not regulate, keep LLMs users reponsible and publicize this reponsibility in order to mitigate damage. But if this is not enough then we will have to move the needle somehow. Similarly to guns, drugs and so on.

But, your honor, I didn’t know it was a crime! My bad!

It has nothing to do with whether you know something is a crime or not. Many crimes require intention, such as murder and fraud, so you have to prove that to convict someone of that crime.

That doesn’t mean you can get away with anything as long as you don’t intend to commit a crime; there are many other crimes that don’t require intention at all, like involuntary manslaughter or gross negligence.

My point is that if you want to charge someone with a crime that requires intention, you have to prove that intention.

That's not what they are saying. They are trying to explain to you and others the concept of criminal negligence.

I would not recommend using any of those notes as evidence of internal “intent.” It produces them performatively—it is literally rewarded for thinking out loud in ways that seem plausible to humans.

There are several papers out there arguing that chain-of-reasoning-like output is performative, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05488

It would be awesome if we could reasonably purge all anthropomorphizing language like “tried” or “thought” entirely from AI discussions, because it introduces very sneaky biases in our thinking, but I’ve found it damn hard to do in practice.

My understanding was that the effort level settings on models is essentially throwing more compute at CoT, and it's trivial to see that more inference-time compute on a task results in better results. Is that not accurate? Because if so, I'm unclear on how CoT could be characterized as performative.

Suggests desperation, or delusions of grandeur, or both.

These are not trustworthy people. And they have everything to lose if they do not become the most powerful and valuable company in the whole of human existence, and, like their pet parrots, will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

So why not either create a crisis or lie a little or a bit of both? It’ll all be worth it in the end, right?

I think the core lesson of the story is knowing if your hobby is listening to music or curating a music collection. Optimize for one or the other.

I went from meticulously curated MP3 collection on Linux to letting iTunes do it for me, and I realized that the meticulous curation and hunting down album art and everything was a hobby I didn't actually love. But if you do love it, great! Different tools for different jobs.

Submitting to iTunes made syncing to the phone much easier, but I've been using claude to rebuild/repair my 20+ year old library, and have learned that iTunes has very weak if any support for "work" - a feature it has to split up classical music the way the CD does (once file per movement). Frustrating that there will likely never be a high-quality syncing player that works well with iPhones.

iTunes is trash on both of the jobs you mentioned though. Still waiting for a worthy alternative to foobar2000 on either Mac or Linux...

But foobar2000 already has an osx version (https://www.foobar2000.org/mac), I've been using it for years.

The non-story part is that they would include this risk even if it were 5 people.

I could easily find 5 people who hate SpaceX and yet that wasn’t mentioned as a risk

I think you’re going to have to provide evidence that this is a commonly documented risk

"Our AI products and X platform are subject to complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, cybersecurity, data use, data combination, data protection, content, AI, competition, youth protection, safety, consumer protection and notification, advertising, e-commerce, sanctions, export controls, and other matters. Many of these laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation, and we could be required to make changes to our products and business practices, and be exposed to monetary penalties, increased cost of operations, declines in user growth or engagement, or loss of customers, or other harm to our AI products and X platform. "

"Certain of our AI products, including Grok, offer features or modes designed to generate more candid, direct, or less reserved or irreverent outputs, such as “Spicy” Imagine Mode and “Unhinged” Voice Mode. These features are intended to provide users with greater flexibility and control in how they use our tools. Because these modes may be more irreverent and harsher than our standard offerings, they present heightened risks, including reputational harm, the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs, potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery, intellectual property infringement, or content that could be viewed as exploitative, harmful, harassing, abusive, or discriminatory. The availability of such features may also increase the risk of regulatory scrutiny, enforcement actions, litigation, or claims of harm, as well as reputational damage, user or advertiser backlash, or limitations on our ability to distribute or monetize our products in certain jurisdictions or through certain partners."

Or the wonderful:

"We, Mr. Musk, and other companies Mr. Musk is affiliated with frequently receive an immense amount of media attention. The actions and statements of Mr. Musk and his affiliated ventures, whether or not directly relating to us, may draw significant public attention and scrutiny to us and could potentially have a positive or negative impact on our business, relationships with customers and regulators, or stock price."

Thank you. Hopefully a good lesson for the GP to actually read prospectuses before making claims about them!

I should have specified the space part of SpaceX, of course the AI part has the same risk.

Market acceptance risk, geopolitical funding risk, reputational harm risk, for space flight and starlink specifically. The Musk risk section isn’t specific to AI.

Apparently >50% of a jury did not agree with you, in this case, and that is one form of democracy we have to make sure decisions come from the consent of the governed. Looks like democracy to me.