That’s a good point. Having an SLA page is an indicator that a business offers SLAs, not having an SLA page is also an indicator that they offer SLAs, just secretly. If you think about it all of the people constantly complaining about uptime and saying stuff like “I would pay money for an SLA from Anthropic if I could” probably means that they are killing it with all those secret SLAs.
I mean obviously they have to offer them, because they exist, as otherwise you’d have to believe something crazy like “they don’t currently offer them” for reasons “that they haven’t disclosed”
Again, many companies will do things they don’t ordinarily offer for the right price. I’ve seen it happen myself (on both the buyer and seller side) on many occasions.
It goes to the extent of the company itself! Very few businesses publicize that they’re for sale or put their company’s purchase price on their website. But acquisitions happen all the time.
Anyway, I don’t appreciate your sarcasm coupled with what seems to be willful ignorance about how the world works, so I won’t be participating in this discussion with you anymore.
I don’t get it. If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it, why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA from Anthropic that Anthropic offers SLAs? And then admit that you don’t actually know and then double down?
Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu (they do) I wouldn’t start by saying “They have the ingredients to make onion rings, therefore they sell onion rings” (they do not). They offer burgers with lettuce instead of a bun (“protein style”) though. That’s a fact that you can verify by going there or calling them and asking about it. I didn’t rely on my assumptions based on other fast food restaurants, I relied on my knowledge of the topic!
Edit: It seems like bad faith to admit that you’re using “probably” interchangeably with “I don’t know” and then editing in “for a billion dollars” several posts into a conversation.
I guess enjoy posting about entirely unrelated conversations in other threads though. (otterley’s post about my having previously had a short amicable exchange with dang in a different thread was deleted, but I’ll leave this part up. I think digging through people’s post histories to find unrelated grievances is icky, for lack of a better word, and wildly unhelpful for any type of discussion)
Even with the “for a billion dollars” addition, admitting “I don’t know” and “probably” are interchangeable doesn’t really change anything from a logical standpoint. Nobody argued against you not knowing, so I don’t understand the purpose of the repetition.
> why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA
That hasn’t been established. There’s no evidence that they went to Anthropic and tried to negotiate one.
> that Anthropic offers SLAs
I didn’t. I said “they probably will for the right price.” There are two modifiers in that statement. And the price is unspecified. Their first offer could be a billion dollars. Too expensive? Negotiate down.
I would invite you to notice your interlocutor's assumptions, especially as revealed in his prior comment. Look at how he misunderstands the situation:
> If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it...
> Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu...
You are discussing business. He is understanding you to be attempting to "mog" him, because he cannot adopt a perspective wherein the conversation represents anything other than a vacuous social challenge or "brodown."
I looked up “mogging” and I’d think “my assumptions about stuff are valid because I’m a lawyer and don’t know what you do” would count more as mogging than “that doesn’t quite sound right, this is a conversation about something specific and not your general cleverness” but I’ve got a Benny Hill archive to get through
Those are not assumptions on your interlocutor's part. You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid. I know you don't understand how, but that doesn't change the fact of it.
:( you are right. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost an argument because hours into a discussion somebody introduced “what if a billion dollars” or “magic amulet” or “ブルマの母” etc
I appreciate your kindness. While I’ve got you, did you know that the Benny Hill show started in 1955 and a good chunk of what aired from then to 1969 was lost? There are a lot of fans that don’t even realize that what is sometimes labeled as season 1 is season 15! Crazy stuff!
I had not known that! In a similar vein, there exists an Alice in Wonderland-themed Muppet Show episode, starring Brooke Shields, which has had to be left out of home video releases due to so far unresolvable music licensing issues. Not quite totally lost, but somewhat hard to find!
A billion dollars is just an example. I could have said a million. When someone says "a high price" that's unspecified, you can use your imagination to hazard a guess at what that might be. Such a figure might seem unreasonable or unrealistic to you, but deals are done between companies under terms most individuals wouldn't come close to considering.
The only reason I mentioned being an attorney was because someone in the thread above accused me of not understanding SLAs. I don't ordinarily bring it up unless we're talking about law or contracts and I feel the need to defend myself or correct misunderstandings. I don't try to use it to browbeat anyone into submission, although I do believe that respect for others' lived experiences and education is relatively uncommon here on HN.
I also don't care for my words to be misconstrued to mean something I didn't say. I rarely speak in absolutes because I've learned over time that there are very few absolutes in the world. Thus, I include qualifying language in nearly everything I write. So when someone accuses me of making claims of certainty that I didn't make, I can get pretty defensive about that.
You know, I had come away with the impression of you as someone able to take embarrassment with good grace, to "walk it off" without either crumpling under the weight of unhandled insecurities, or letting your ego insist on turning it into an escalation dominance (0) contest. There is always something to learn from the experience of having made a fool of oneself (1), and you struck me as someone prepared, imperfectly perhaps but plainly in earnest, to do so. That is a rare and always welcome capacity to encounter in anyone.
Disappointing me shouldn't make much nevermind to you; you don't know me from Adam. But think of the people in your life who care for you and vice versa, or of the kind of folks you would like to be there. Wouldn't you rather behave so they may regard you in the way I just described?
It's hard to acknowledge a situation like this one, especially in its moment, especially when you're young. Being able to do hard things, well and gracefully, is another skill we do very well to cultivate. You were putting in some good practice, and the other gentleman (esq.) has offered some good advice in consequence.
In short, up to now you were doing a pretty solid job of ameliorating your embarrassment by recovering your mistake - a little awkwardly, sure, but that improves rapidly with practice. It'd be a shame to ruin all that here at the very last moment, don't you think?
(0) This phrase seems to have been made to mean something new of late, which doesn't actually make a lick of sense. I use it in its original or "RAND Corporation" meaning, describing a readiness always to retain the initiative in a conflict by threatening to escalate its severity, a tactic which relies for its chance of success on the opponent being unwilling or unable to match it through further escalation. In that sense the foreign policy of North Korea in the early 21st century is a good example of how a successful strategy may be built around escalation dominance as a core tactic.
(1) Ever shit yourself in public, right there in front of God and everybody? I did that once, about ten years ago - there was a time in this town before the health code had teeth, when eating at the wrong place or on the wrong day could just about put your life in your hands. Let me tell you, after that day - complete with an hour cleaning yourself up with paper towels and tap water in a sandwich shop's toilet, followed by the train ride home - discovering you have inadvertently said something a little dumb on the Internet falls naturally into something much more like the perspective it is due.
It is okay that I stopped engaging with the poster that got so worked up by my saying that there is no indication that Anthropic generally offers SLAs that they went digging through my post history.
> Ever shit yourself in public, right there in front of God and everybody? I did that once, about ten years ago
No but
> an hour cleaning yourself up
Do you have a blog? I would read a long form version of this story
That is, indeed and of course, okay. I feel myself bound to note that such behavior as his is very much par for the course here on the "orange website," whose culture is strange even among its cohort. It's part of why the design makes all comments public. But it's just a website and no one can reasonably dictate how someone else feels about it. (Not that that would stop many here from trying! But it also isn't quite perfectly true to say you stopped engaging, is it? Posting a meme isn't the same as posting nothing, and acknowledging when someone else is due the last word is also a skill I find worth having.)
This is a strange website even among websites. At different times here I have been accused, quite in earnest, of being a paid influence agent of FSB and of MSS - that is, of the Russian and Chinese foreign intelligence services, respectively. That was a pair of positively comedic conversations! I've been told that I'm insane, that I'm evil, that I'm a criminal for working, that I'm a criminal for talking critically about my work, that I don't deserve a livelihood, that I shouldn't talk about my childhood abuse, and oh, good grief, I'm sure I'm forgetting far more than I am likely to recall before coffee.
In spite of all that, and often enough in spite of itself, I have found this place more or less worth the effort. Among other things, it has been a splendid arena for the bareknuckle practice of that ancient and worthy science called rhetoric. But, contra Mr. Gackle, who I think suffers the verderer's easy failure to notice the borders of his forest shrinking over years, this place really isn't what it was thirteen years ago, or even five. (No blame; it's an accurate reflection of the industry. And feel free to review my comment history, of course. I think it is a reasonably good illustration of what it looks like when someone spends ten years 'learning in public;' what I no longer agree with I now know better than, and - even though I say so myself - there are lots of good parts.)
I do not at present have a blog. My previous one [1] is now of beloved memory, but do feel free to check out what was there. Where I stood to take that cover photo, it was even more beautiful than my camera made it look. In that place now stands a self-storage unit, full of garbage some American consumer pays to store who does not want it and fears to lose it. So it goes. Maybe in fifty years we'll make tires there again.
As to whether I will have a blog, I'm sort of in two minds at the moment about Internet publishing - which is a hell of a thing for someone to have to say who built his first website, and took his first paycheck for that work, in 1995.
Frankly, I'm no longer sure I see the point, or at least not as a primary medium. That isn't primarily a statement about AI, either. It's just...well, it's kind of hollow, isn't it? Messages in bottles, constructs of light and shadow, ships failing even to pass in the night. Nothing human, nothing even evidence that humans were here, because what is here? Where is there a here to be?
I'm not talking about AI, but I am talking about why AI is so much more fluent here than humans, I think. John Perry Barlow was an idiot and a madman, a liar and a mountebank: there is no place here. Nothing but words, 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' That soliloquy is the obituary of a cowardly man for his own soul. To quote it here, in this no-place where nothing is ever more real than a word, feels condign.
I'm happier writing in my diary, which as of last night is 3150 pages long. (It takes up a shelf!) I'm happier taking snapshots with a shitty Samsung phone camera whose only destination is on paper: I literally print them at 4x6 on an Epson Ecotank and put them in cheap little plastic albums, just the same as you would get from your local one-hour photo in 1993. I'm happier making things, I find, than frowning at flickering lights and fantasizing.
I would much rather spend a day every month making paper booklet newsletters on my guillotine cutter and saddle stapler, and send them around in physical correspondence among we who enjoy writing and reading such, than spend one more mortal hour fucking around with CSS in order to make something that doesn't even properly exist, you know? Or not more than a thought unrecorded.
Oh sure, I'll put shit on the Internet eventually, maybe. But it's not going to live and die there.
I mean obviously they have to offer them, because they exist, as otherwise you’d have to believe something crazy like “they don’t currently offer them” for reasons “that they haven’t disclosed”