Matisyahu's Blog

I got up this morning and it was raining so I did some free weights before work. It wasn’t too busy but there was a back log of office work that needed to be done with all the excitement about the Football World Cup. I love how it is now possible to work from home and being able to avoid the nasty weather which makes life a lot easier but even without going into the office we (my workmates and I) all keep in contact via Slack so one doesn’t feel isolated.

I was watching a video on YouTube of the trams that used to operate in Wellington:

And it reminds me of a conversation I had my grandma a few years ago about how the trams in Auckland were ripped up and how the council are now talking about putting down light rail. My grandma pointed out how silly it was to rip up the tram lines in the first place and now the rail lines are being put back down again. It appears that there is a habit in society of discarding something because it isn’t considered ‘modern’ or ‘the in thing’ only to find out years later that there was actually some wisdom behind having that there. I’m a firm believer in the idea of ‘Chesterton’s Fence’ – find out why it was there and is the reason for it being there and ask whether its usefulness still holds true today. I wish that humanity would learn from past mistakes but I guess humanity has a lot in common with the movie ‘Groundhog Day’.

What I find rather funny is how the AI industry is playing on this nonsense of every new model being ‘so super dangerous’ is starting to backfire on them. Well, they thought it was a great marketing gimmick but it has backfired with the government now putting export restrictions on Anthropic models and I could imagine now Anthropic are probably wondering whether their whole marketing hype has actually backfired and maybe they should just be honest with the public about what the model its actually capable of doing. On a side note I always find it funny when I hear the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talk about how Mythos is super scary and very dangerous it is but the claims have all the credibility of a new chicken wing restaurant opening up in town and their shtick is “we have the hottest wings in town, they’re super dangerously spicy so we’ll get you to sign a waver so we don’t get sued”. The hype dies down after all the influencers upload their obnoxious TikTok videos only for the general public to realise that the chicken wings are tasty but they certainly don’t live up to the hype of being super dangerous.