softwaredoug

Probably - The issue is more about terms-of-service and whether any company wants to go to bat on a years-long legal battle over this issue

Really feels like the govt + industry, through protectionism and fear-mongering, are propping up a "Too big to fail" situation. Long term, I think the best thing the economy could do is to m…

The only real monopoly you listed is search. And it’s really as simple as ChatGPT upset the apple cart Even then in search, Google still owns 90% of the market. The more interesting question: why did …

Yeah they may not be interested. But pretending you have that moat a dumb strategy that's not working.

Well its not law. Its more terms of service. For example, if OpenAI / Anthropic were actually open, other US labs could be building near-frontier open weights models by distilling off OpenAI …

OpenAI and Anthropic should enter into distillation agreements with other US labs. Turn a threat into a profit center. Other US labs cannot directly distill from OpenAI/Anthropic as it’s a violat…

If they did this in the US they would almost certainly be sued. Meta, for examples, doesn’t want employees to use Claude Code due to distillation risk.

I think it’s important to have some kind of domain knowledge that goes with software ability. Not just be a software engineer. The closest comparison to what’s happening today is writing. In olden tim…

To be fair the lag varies tremendously. When Deepseek first came out it was competitive with frontier lab models at the time.

I think GPT 5.6 Luna works great honestly for most boring coding tests. And saves money.

Is anyone using these models as their daily chat driver? I am skeptical. The vast majority of Westerners will interact with ChatGPT/Claude/Google in a browser. They'll use these models …

Something I did not realize. The White House instructed intelligence agencies to help in preventing distillation of US models. Whether or not distillation matters a small amount or a big amount, still…

Haven’t we been in this “China is 3-6 months behind” for a while now (maybe up to a year? Longer?) The actual difference is how much scrutiny and time was put into the Mythos / Fable and GPT 5.6 …

> By the same token, don’t expect China to do anything about distillation attacks on the frontier labs. I think it is mistaken to attribute all of the success of Chinese labs to distillation, but i…

It's hard to ignore the overall environment US has made itself visibly unaffordable, anti-science, and hostile to immigration. For top scientists at these companies, there should be clear upside …

Also the courts that let him get away with it. That said Congress can and does sometimes make the funding less discretionary. They can mandate expenditures. And make withholding legal funds personally…

When you see Chinese emerging AI dominance, you can’t help but connect it to the administrations hostility to immigration and research. We should be attracting and retaining the world’s top researcher…

It feels like an inflection point of lost US leadership in technology? A year plus ago you would say while China led in green energy and manufacturing, at least the US was ahead in software - as demon…

There are many people with unbridled enthusiasm and an ability to write fast Knowing Simon - he’s very much both :)

Whatever the headaches of the internals, I haven’t heard any substantive outcomes in hacker news that have been impacted by this change. Yes if we had a Zig->Rust transpiler maybe it would produce …

People shouldn’t overthink blog posts. Just write what’s on your mind and have fun.

Old and busted: benchmaxxing New hotness: pelicanmaxxing

It's also a meta-lesson about Kaggle. Kaggle winning solutions rarely make sustainable engineering solutions for teams. Maximizing just model performance against an objective is a small part of…

So Chinese labs are driving essentially towards commodotized intelligence. Even if its a few months behind the US. Is this a classic 'commoditize my compliment' situation? They want to sell …

I just write code. Not nearly all the code. Maybe 5% - the important code. To keep things sane, explore new areas, get a deeper understanding of the system, delete/simplify agent slop, improve te…