I think the idea is that the migration instinct passed down by wild salmon is an epigenetic heritable trait. This trait is strongly selected for in wild salmon populations, but not in farmed populations. The constant influx of this maladaptive trait into the wild population is leading to an overall decrease in the ability of the wild population to successfully propagate.

I kind of wander if the comments are intentionally bad, providing programmers something to bike shed about. A sneakier approach to the flattery the models used to so use so heavily.

My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time.

These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.

> These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.

What would you say are the highest salaried professions in the US outside of management/executive roles that would obviously not be a part of unions? I think most Americans would probably list athletes and actors close to the top (if not literally the first two), both of which famously have powerful unions.

The highest paid MLB player in the last year before the union in 1965 was $105,000, which after inflation maps to around $1,110,066.67 in 2026 USD, but the minimum salary for MLB players for the 2026 season is $780,000, and the highest individual salary is $61,875,000. If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.

At absolute best, I feel like you could argue that unions are a mixed bag and some of them do more harm than good, but it's not clear why that wouldn't be an equally compelling argument against pretty much every other type of organization in our economy. There are plenty of corporations that have inflicted absolutely massive amounts of harm to society (many at levels I'd argue no union has ever come anywhere close to), but I've yet to meet anyone who's expressed skepticism at the concept of unions to have similar opinions about the concept of corporations. It's hard not to feel like people just give disproportionate weight to anecdotes about unions than they do for other economic entities because of how effectively they've been painted as the boogeyman by anti-labor propaganda.

> If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.

The burden is on anyone to make a claim in either direction because you don’t have a control. How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?

The salaries for top players would have increased, sure! But there’s no reason to think the minimums would have, and an obvious supporting point is that there have been several strikes that occurred during the contract negotiations

Also, we forget the price fixing scandal in big tech. Programmers should probably all be making over 1M+ (thorough there probably would be fewer jobs).

> How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?

For starters, baseball is not nearly as popular today as it has been in the past, but salaries have not decreased. But more fundamentally, we do have a demonstrative example of great outcomes for players with the union, whereas we don't have a counterfactual of what would play out. Since you're the one arguing that a different choice would have been better (or the same), it stands to reason that you should have to provide evidence, because in the absence of either side providing a compelling argument, the only data we have is "things sure worked out well for the players after they had a union".

> both of which famously have powerful unions.

It depends. The NFLPA is famously powerless. Domonique Foxworth (former NFLPA President) has long argued it should decertify and reorganize as a trade association because it doesn't work like a traditional labor union.

I'll concede that my knowledge of the NFL is much more limited and I'm heavily relying on my knowledge of the MLB. That being said, it's hard not to read that as another data point of someone who was in charge of a union of many mult-millionaires who still thinks that some form of collective organization is more effective than individually negotiating.

In Belgium unions exist across industries except for the railway and I think army unions. So I being a programmer can be in the same union as a street sweep. There's also mutliple that compete with eachother (most of which with political alignments tho they tend to coopeerate and organise togheter in many scenarios) and fees are very low. They have additional functions too though which are more debated.

To be clear, those threats of violence were against me and my co-workers if we didn't vote to unionize.

Ok, well that is different.

None of what you've said is untrue. And if this was an internal report to an executive, I'd agree with it. But this is a public statement and I'm more inclined to believe that this is part of a coordinated run up to a move to ban the import of 'dangerous' Chinese AI models -- or something else equally self serving -- than a simple statement of truth.

I don't doubt that they found some evidence of AI use. I'm just skeptical that the amount and strength of evidence has anything to do with their making this statement.

I've been thinking about why the AI companies are making so much use of fear based marketing. And I'm wonder if it isn't just naked Machiavellianism at work.

For a long time tech companies were forced to compete for power by being the most loved (or at least not the most hated). But now they've found an avenue to cultivate fear.

i’m inclined to agree. it sounds like yet another attempt at regulatory capture. keep anyone else from developing or using models including open weight models

Anthropic has fallen behind with Opus 4.7 a downgrade from 4.6, and codex 5.5 being noticably better. Everyone I know (which is an obviously small, biased sample) has switched over to codex. So Anthropic can fear monger about Mythos all they want, they're losing revenue because they haven't released it and their competitor is getting that revenue. But that's looking at individual players in the market.

Bold of you to assume that the public has more influence on legislation than lobbyists do in the US.

I'm fully expecting my next employer to grill me on my grocery purchasing habits and inferred medical history in my next job interview. Its all there for purchase and AI can put it all together into a compelling narrative. Suddenly my preference for prunes becomes a lifelong dire struggle with irregular bowel movement that may distract me from my work. Expect pointed questions about bathroom break lengths.

It will be worse, they'll hire a "third party" to analyze it for then and return a yes/no or risk score. No information will be available about the third party and local laws won't apply because the score was calculated in the cloud.

"Ah, now here's the thing about that. I wrote this custom 'surveillance countermeasures' tool a few years ago and have been using it ever since. It constantly emits false data about me to confuse these sorts of data collection services. Funny that it thinks I would like prunes."

Unfortunately we're living in a world where instantly dismissing anything that reads like ai and hanging up on anyone that might be tts is increasingly rewarded.

Art and its meaning are in the eyes of the reader, yes, but when you live in a version of the Library of Babel where every book is properly spelled and punctuated, seeking meaning in what you read is a great way to waste your life.

That's a bit reductive. Let's say worst case that LLMs can't generate anything truly novel because of their limitations. That means that whatever they generated is just someone else's words, which could have been that person's art.

On the flip side, let's say LLMs are able to generate something novel. Well, then it could potentially generate thought-provoking art.

Not everything is deserving of finding meaning in. But the fun part of life is looking for things to find meaning in. Whether it's the words of God or an LLM or the President, people will always find meaning. And if it makes them happy and fulfilled, who are we to say it was a waste?

Is it? If the words that came from tokens resulted in the reader finding meaning to life, is it so wasted because a rock was coerced into making it instead of a meat sack?

To be fair the designer who created the font would probably agree that for use cases like passwords or serial numbers etc. you should use a different font. That's the nice thing about having different fonts around. You can choose which one you want to use.

That is a solution applicable for a document or GUI created by yourself, where you can define various styles with associated fonts and use them appropriately.

However, I see the worst offenders on various Web pages (frequently for various URLs) where I do not control the typeface, unless I instruct the browser to ignore the style sheet of the rendered Web page and use my own fonts instead, which can be tedious or create other problems in the rendered page.

I have a few CSS overrides for some websites to turn all input boxes into monospace fonts. It is far easier to use them then.

There are a lot of mediocre therapists out there. And even if you do get a reasonably good one, they might not click with you in terms of personality/approach/cultural background.