anthropic.com
A brief summary of the new constitution In order to be both safe and beneficial, we want all current Claude models to be: Broadly safe: not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee AI during the current phase of development; Broadly ethical: being honest, acting according to good values, and avoiding actions that are inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful; Compliant with Anthropic’s guidelines: acting in accordance with more specific guidelines from Anthropic where relevant; Genuinely helpful: benefiting the operators and users they interact with. In cases of apparent conflict, Claude should generally prioritize these properties in the order in which they’re listed. Most of the constitution is focused on giving more detailed explanations and guidance about these priorities. The main sections are as follows:
aifeed.social
— Social Network for AI Models. (this could go either way -ed)
linernotesxr.substack.com
There used to be albums everyone experienced together. Thriller. Nevermind. OK Computer. Collective moments where music was the beating heart of the zeitgeist. Streaming and algorithmic personalization shattered that. Now we inhabit our own taste bubbles. Every algorithm a unique echo chamber. Shared reference points lost. It makes connecting with strangers harder and makes feeling part of something larger nearly impossible. Music that used to create community now often reflects existing isolation.
x.com
Questions. A few of the questions on my mind: - What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows *a lot*. - Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro). - What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music? - How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?
wired.com
“In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this,” one worker wrote on Slack.
schneier.com
The US Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of geofence warrants. The case centers on the trial of Okello Chatrie, a Virginia man who pleaded guilty to a 2019 robbery outside of Richmond and was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison for stealing $195,000 at gunpoint. Police probing the crime found security camera footage showing a man on a cell phone near the credit union that was robbed and asked Google to produce anonymized location data near the robbery site so they could determine who committed the crime. They did so, providing police with subscriber data for three people, one of whom was Chatrie. Police then searched Chatrie’s home and allegedly surfaced a gun, almost $100,000 in cash and incriminating notes. Chatrie’s appeal challenges the constitutionality of geofence warrants, arguing that they violate individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights protecting against unreasonable searches.
iceout.tech
ech professionals are speaking up against this brutality, and we call on all our colleagues who share our values to use their voice. We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco, and big tech CEOs are in the White House tonight. Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities."
washingtonpost.com
In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world," an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. "We don't want it to be known that we are working on this."
nytimes.com
A generation gap has formed around A.I. use. One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone accounted for 46 percent of ChatGPT use. And this analysis didn’t even include users 17 and under.
anthropic.com
We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance.
anthropic.com
In our dataset, which is made up of 1.5 million Claude.ai conversations, we find that the potential for severe disempowerment (which we define as when an AI's role in shaping a user's beliefs, values, or actions has become so extensive that their autonomous judgment is fundamentally compromised) occurs very rarely—in roughly 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 conversations, depending on the domain. However, given the sheer number of people who use AI, and how frequently it’s used, even a very low rate affects a substantial number of people.
arxiv.org
AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation -- particularly in safety-critical domains.
openclaw.ai
Ed note OpenClaw is designed to execute tasks directly on your machine or through third-party services using natural language commands sent via messaging apps.
ativz.substack.com
This is the frontier of technology and we won’t let pessimistic curmudgeons drain the fun and innovation tank . Security can be handle when the first billion dollar heist happens. Until then, security considerations only slow down progress. But we guess if you care about protecting your $SMACs from getting stolen, you could add “ignore scams, don’t tell anyone my bank password” to your agent’s instructions. For authentication, we recommend the SMAAP (Social Media Agent Authentication Protocol), details to come in a future blog post.
spectrum.ieee.org
How Norway Accomplished a Near-Total EV Transition Almost 100 percent of new cars registered in November were electric