Fatherhood

`3:26:37`

I had an essay it didn't want to translate into Italian--

`3:26:41`

The essence of the post that it felt like, well, I'm not gonna translate that because I don't agree with what you've written. Which to me was straight out of Space Odyssey, right? HAL telling me, "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that, Dave." Open the pod bay. Translate my essay to Italian. And it wouldn't do it. And I just thought like, well, that's kind of terrifying. But then I also went, well, why am I asking Claude to translate my essay into Italian? I never asked Claude for that because Claude just does my code. So I could also just accept that maybe Anthropic is run by a bunch of people I don't share much politics with. And they don't want their agents to be used for that, and I think that kinda sucks, but that doesn't mean it, I have to stop using it for generating code. And I've thought, and I've tried to do that with people too, become better at tolerating the fact that not only will I not agree with everything someone has to say, I don't... I can even be mad about certain positions or things they say and still go like, "Well, you're still an interesting person, so I'm still gonna follow you." And I've actually kinda gone back on a number of people where I'm like, oh man, that person really pissed me off because they took this point or another point, and went like, do you know what? That's stupid. I should be able to accept the full spectrum of someone. I don't have to like all the shades of it.

I could just go like, okay, well, on that topic we either disagree or, even worse than that, I think you're a fucking idiot. And on another topic, you're a smart and insightful person. Because first of all, of course, it's a little self- serving. I know for a fact that this is how lots of people feel about me. Like, oh, if he could just stick to talking about these topics, it would be so much easier on my feed because otherwise he'll say these things I disagree with, and that annoys me greatly. I'm like, do you know what? Human beings are jagged like that, and we're not fully compatible on all the levels. Nor should we be. The world would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share all my politics.

`3:28:58`

And it's also nice to have open weight models. So this is, again, ironic that we're getting this out of China. In fact, I did this test right after the issue with the essay that couldn't get translated into Italian. I asked Kimi K27, to be fair, through open code, so not the Kimi harness, and inference through Fireworks, so an American inference. I asked it about Tiananmen Square. Like, that's usually the test, right? Like, all the Chinese models, they don't wanna talk about that moment in 1989. That was actually how I, that was how I posted. I was like "What happened in China in 1989?" That was the prompt. And K25 7 on Fireworks just answered, like, extremely bluntly-... With a description and depiction of what had transpired-... to a point that, like, there's no way that that would've been kosher with the Chinese censors, right? And I just thought, like, isn't that ironic? I'm running a Chinese open weight model that I can tell or I can ask about 1989 and Tiananmen Square, and in America, I can't get a frontier model to translate a marginally controversial essay about immigration into Italian.

`3:30:31`

It's still very muddy what exactly transpired. Was this sort of petty retaliation for whatever the Department of War? Was this simply Anthropic themselves going like, "Oh my God, we discovered a cyber weapon so powerful that we can't let anyone have it"? Well, okay you can't be surprised then if the government wants a say on a cyber weapon so powerful it can-