Halvar Flake

I will have to print & frame this tweet :-))

This is a good post about how involved it is to rewrite load-bearing functionality in a memory-safe language: swift.org/blog/migrating… Bonus points for a 13% performance improvement!

The government should not be regulating AI to this extent. Not like this. I’ve been against onerous regs when Anthropic and the safety community was pushing for it. And I’m against it now that they got what they asked for.

@pmarca @grok could you please rewrite this tweet in very short and concise, applying the principles of Zinsser's "on writing well"?

You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation: If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it. But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.

IDK I didn't notice any difference, Fable 5 is working just as well as it always has for me

@kchonyc @robertnishihara @soumithchintala @bschoelkopf @LeonBottou It is such a great paper.

sometimes , it really does take a decade for me to understand a paper and appreciate its insight and foresight. <Discovering Causal Signals in Images> is one such paper. wow ... david, @robertnishihara , @soumithchintala , @bschoelkopf & @LeonBottou really did see the future.

@braidmon No to write code to do so.

@halvarflake What? Are you using an LLM to compute a Groebner basis?????

Fable just downgraded to Opus because I am calculating a Groebner base on one round of the block cipher PRESENT. This is absolutely ridiculous. I can essentially not use Fable to review my 2008 MSc thesis without triggering "cyber safeguards". A friend of mine had the down...

@danielrmay I think I did months ago and got approved?

@halvarflake Did you apply for the guardrail removal? They move quickly on approval, but it's not perfect: still blocked some network analysis I was doing yesterday...

The fact that I can't touch my academic research from 18 years ago with Fable without triggering a model downgrade due to "cyber" is ... baffling.

@nudehaberdasher Coz I like things that function.

@halvarflake WHY DO YOU HATE SAFETY!?

@0x464D I think I'm surprised that calculating groebner bases over a toy block cipher is deemed a "cyber risk". Like, that's largely one step away from gaussian elimination?

@halvarflake If they would have said that they don't release Mythos/Fable because of the bio risk, I would have essentially _wanted_ a model that just blocks any topic that sounds remotely like biology, because I would have never triggered those bio safeguards in my actual cyber work

Making this work will imply a revolution in CAD.

...grade happen when they asked whether PTRACE allows catching all signals in the traced process, as they are writing a profiler.

@dankrad I'm certainly not libertarian, and I find silent sabotage if you work on math they deem competitive to be upsetting regardless of political leaning.

Question to all the people upset about Anthropic adding safeguards to Fable. I think most of you come from a libertarian viewpoint? But from that perspective, isn't it also Anthropic's right to do whatever they want with their model?

@anpaure Thank you for the link and the push back on any case, I'll be less stupid when I fall asleep tonight.

@anpaure That's a highly counterintuitive result. I'll read the paper, but I find the claim so extraordinary (why would output from a model be different from extra textbooks?) that I'll need a ton of evidence before I accept the premise over a baseline assumption of methodology errors.

Uh. Distilling from a model with guardrails somehow equips the trained models to learn things the teacher refuses to teach?

Invisible safeguards is such a nice word for deceit & sabotage :-)

@anpaure Ok, arxiv.org/pdf/2601.13528 is the relevant paper. Will read and digest, but I strongly suspect that just fine-tuning the open model on a bunch of chemistry-specific texts might have a similar effect?

@anpaure Hm. So they provide extra domain-specific training data (that was generated by a frontier model) to the non-frontier model, and it improves it's capabilities on that domain. Ok, fair. Would the same not also be achieved by having human experts write more prose on the topic?

I don't think people in Europe (and the UK) are taking our technological (and therefore economic) divergence seriously enough. A few disparate datapoints: 1. Our compute is woefully behind; three American labs each operate more AI compute than all of Europe combined 2. OpenAI has paused Stargate UK (indefinitely); our energy costs and regulatory environment are actively driving frontier infrastructure away 3. Mistral reportedly considering acquisition by SpaceX; Europe’s most valuable AI company is struggling to get the necessary resources to compete 4. FluidStack cancelled plans to build in France and moved HQ from London to the US; a company founded in the UK, that signed an MOU with the French government, chose American capital and contracts 5. Project Glasswing launched as a coalition of US firms - the most powerful AI model ever built was shared with Americans first and Europeans are still negotiating access 6. A Trump executive order gives the US government up to 30 days of exclusive federal access before a model's public release, and a say in which 'trusted partners' can use it first (American strategic interests are being baked into the architecture of who gets access to frontier AI, and when) Those who wrote Europe 2031 are some of the few people taking this seriously. Well worth a read.