People aren't the target audience of that part of the post. They're hoping saying enough safety stuff will ward off the looming regulatory sledgehammer.
Anthropic is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Their comms are designed to appeal to a very wide readership.
HN is a bubble that's mostly out of touch with what regular people use or care about.
In 2007, HN was convinced that nobody uses Microsoft products. In 2016, it was that Facebook doesn't have any real users and is dying. In 2026, it seems like nobody cares about AI safety and everybody wants to run local models.
Presumably there’s a future where your ai agent posts all your videos / pictures / comments on every platform you have so we get around the idea of X, for example, being the only one to receive posts?
If the government is stupid enough to write law that it cannot enforce when applied by all citizens (and not only those with means), then we should welcome anything which will bring about the demise of those laws.
Lets consider something like the right to take sick leave. There is no strict definition of what "sickness" is. It is something that YOU feel impacts your ability to work. Maybe a bad nights sleep, sore back, headache, runny nose, bad tummy, etc. There's no need to provide any amount of proof to an employer when taking a single day off sick, and they need to pay at least the statutory sick pay, many companies pay full.
Most people agree that this rule works well in practice. Most people don't take a sick day because they don't feel 100%, even when its within their rights. If everyone decided to take Monday off because they're sick, that would be possible within the law, there's no need to provide proof you're sick. Yet, if that happened, the country would grind to a halt.
Now ask yourself, how could you implement that without eroding someone's rights and without introducing more friction?
Sometimes, you just have to assume that people are honest and won't take the piss out of the system. Or you have to introduce friction to discourage the exercise of their rights. The friction for sick leave is that you usually have to notify your employer ASAP and that you may have to fill out a return to work form.
Sweden has already successfully regulated so that the state-owned grid operator is collecting the profits. But other countries have privatized grids and don't particularly enjoy it when an operator forgoes grid expansion in favor of collecting on the price difference. I guess this will result in a compromise where grid operators are required to invest a minimum amount of their bottleneck revenues into grid expansion, while Sweden can take out the rest in a way that's less enticing for private operators. After all, that Sweden is negotiating at all indicates they would like new electricity market regulations in principle, just not this particular aspect of the current proposal.
The European council (which consists of elected country heads) nominates a Comission President and the members of the parliament (elected politicians) vote on the nominated president candidate and need absolute majority to confirm.
That president then tries to form the commission with one representative from each member state. The parliament then has to vote again to confirm the commission.
Sure it's not ideal. But compared to China, the population of the EU has influence.
Each member state elected their own government, which in turned determined their head of state by their own country's rules, then those heads of governments appointed VDL.
Do we even have a real choice with our governments? As a minor yet dramatic exemple, last year in France the Front Populaire won the last parliamentary elections, and according to republican tradition and common interpretation of the constitution, should have formed a government. But that was refused by Macron who named yet again an even more impopular proto-fascist government because it's technically in his power.
I hate to make this argument because the PRC is far from a political ideal for me, but the chinese political system also has elections and votes. Voting is not what democracy is about, and very indirect elections for a vast body with immense powers even less so.
I have yet to meet anyone happy with the european commission policies, except for very minor and timid arrangements such as the USB-C connector (and even then, Apple fanboys complained). The rest is all about destroying every pro-consumer/pro-worker/pro-environment regulation in favor of big multinationals who employs thousands of lobbyists across Brussels and Strasbourg.
Indeed. Every time it is mentioned(without fail) how undemocratic the European Commission is, someone points out that the demos has a say via 3 levels of indirections. But that is not at all what democracy is all about.
I am supposed to have a say about how the country I live in is run. That is democracy. Not that I get to vote on a person who votes on a person who votes on another person who may or may not agree with me.
It's why I live in Switzerland now, and not the EU.
Following that logic, any minister appointed by a head of government is "unelected and has the same level of democratic involvement as that of China's Standing Committee".
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