Every statutory requirement is still being fulfilled. There’s a lot of talk, but we still have a Dept of Education, even if it’s reduced in staffing 50%
The issue isn't that they can't be stopped, it's that they don't fear that they will be.
If you or I knowingly and flagrantly break the law, our understanding isn't that we'll be stopped and nothing else, it's that there will be punishment, that justice will be done.
How are we at a point now where we all know the administration is breaking the law. That they know they are breaking the law. That they can be stopped months or years later, but there is no justice. Not even the hint or thought of justice.
These people should fear the consequences of their actions, but at the moment there are none.
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
You can argue that banning insults is a bad look, bad move, that the insult is warranted or whatever, but are you really going to die on the hill that calling the company Microslop isn't insulting?
People do work at Microsoft though and they're probably aren't very happy when their work is called slop. You could even say they are feeling insulted or offended.
I'd agree but if you ever been on the receiving end of a meme-train you'd see that it's not driven by rationality. I'm not familiar with this issue but my bet would be that even hand-crafted personal projects were being called slop because once meme runs away from initial meaning it just becomes closer to swear word than a meaning.
If there was a lot of handcrafted personal projects coming from Microsoft, their reputation would change. But there isn't. I would imagine anyone who is interested in "handcrafted personal projects" sees the writing on the wall and is at least looking to leave Microsoft, which seems to be positioned to be the Prime Slop Factory.
See, that requires the code to be written by an actual human being, who has agency and a sense of pride and ownership about their work.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
Anthropic doesn't get to make that call though, if they tried the result would actually be:
8 AIs running on 8 machines each with 10 million GPUs
AND
2 million AIs running on 2 million machines, each with 10 GPU's
If every lab joined them, we can get to a distributed scenario, but it's a coordination problem where if you take a principled stance without actually forcing the coordination you end up in the worst of both worlds, not closer to the better one.
I think your scenario is already better, not worse. Those 8 agents will have a much harder time taking action when there are 2 million other pesky little agents that aren't aligned with them.
reply