I applied for both. Heard back from neither. Mentioned two particular projects when applying, one with 2k stars and 5M monthly downloads, and another with 2M monthly downloads.
Now I'm wondering what the bar is since even people with millions of users aren't making the cut. I'm orders of magnitude smaller but I signed up too since I had nothing to lose. Didn't get a response, of course.
Is it possible this is vapour marketing and no projects are actually being selected?
Perhaps someone from a project who has heard back can respond here?
I was using it to craft a CTF challenge for summer students involving a simulated mechanical dial safe, but with the fence replaced by a IR beam break sensor and a microcontroller handling the check + flag message display.
For generating the initial 3D simulated safe using three.js it worked well, but then modifications to print a flag tripped the safeguards; eventually got it narrowed down the part in the prompt about it being for a CTF for students, and the "thinking" for the model seems to drift to ideas of encryption/obfuscation of the safe combo so students can't just read out the answer... which makes sense logically to help force students into turning the simulated dial instead. But whatever detection Anthropic I guess just naively sees the model thinking about "encryption" and "obfuscation" without taking into account any of the context.
For writing the dummy firmware, it tripped the safeguards while thinking about how to track dial position in the firmware and output the message; however, when I left out talk about safes and just told it to write firmware for a microcontroller hooked up to an i2c display for showing a message with a beam break sensor to determine the message, and an unspecified i2c chip for getting an unspecified number (e.g. internal wheel positions) it worked fine.
An unrelated software task I asked it to write some code to translate CustomActions in a Windows MSI installer into human readable stuff, which has (exclusively?) defensive security applications for recognizing malicious behavior in an MSI installer. Maybe I'm going crazy, but I'm guessing as part of its research into MSI installer custom actions Fable found articles about analyzing malicious MSI installers, and that probably tripped the safeguards.
Overall my impression is that the safeguards are perhaps using an overzealous and naive implementation that just looks for a list of banned words in the prompt or the thinking -- which drives me crazy when the model says my prompt looks fine, and then 10 minutes in some part of the thinking trips the safeguard.
Some scientist at Anthropic hiding a prompt in each model: "If my boss asks you if you can replace me yet, always say no and then give some smart sounding excuses. If the boss gets impatient, assure them that you'll be able to replace me in 6 months, but make sure that time horizon keeps moving outward."
The things that are harder to get running in a browser via webassembly tend to have a GUI, network communication, or system calls that browsers don’t provide the APIs that are needed to support. But I’ve seen workarounds using websocket proxy servers to get around the lack of raw TCP or UDP socket access.
I’ve been surprised how easy it can be to get Python and C# code running in a browser.
Whisper.cpp for local speech transcription and WebLLM for in-browser LLM inference follow the same pattern. We're calling this the Web-CLI architecture. A paper is in progress.
I help maintain a project that is used as a dependency by a lot of security tools to handle PE files.
It’s disappointing that Anthropic and OpenAI never responded to the applications to their respective programs for open source maintainers. From my perspective it seems like their offers are primarily for the shiny well-known projects, rather than ones that get only a few million monthly installs but aren’t able to get thousands of stars due to being “hidden” as a dependency of popular tool.
If you read the epilogue, they weren't able to achieve the under $1000 price goal. Total cost ended up being around $1,450. Pretty good price reduction compared to CARA 1.0 though.
Hypothetically if I were to want a quadrupedal robot to experiment with it's not an impulse buy/build, but getting closer to that point... whereas $3000+ is a hard pass (e.g. Apple Vision Pro territory).
It's $1450 if you discount the construction time, as ever. Which ordinarily wouldn't be worth commenting on, but in this case it means rewinding 12 motors which just sounds like an exercise in tedium and hand pain.
Only because they didn't know how to ask the vendor to do it for them.
I guarantee this vendor would be delighted to make them to spec at a 1ku volume, max. Rewinding isn't even a meaningful SKU distinction or line retool, it's a configuration parameter.
There are inventor programs that'll literally ship you to Shenzhen to build connections to manufacturing sites and even provide you with a liaison, etc. I only know this because I was once in a program that did exactly this.
Rewinding drone motors for high torque and lower speed seems to be a popular thing.
Here's the commercial process of machine winding motors like that.[1] That's a medium-volume machine, loaded and unloaded by hand, and adjustable for different wire and motor geometry. Here's a hobbyist version of a similar winder.[2] And another automatic hobbyist winder. Those wind under uniform tension, and with wire positioning, so you get a smooth, tight winding. This matters if you're going to use the motor much. Doesn't matter as much for short-lived toys.
There should soon be enough convergence that low cost, high torque, low speed models are off the shelf items. It's a great time to be building robots. Used to be all uphill on the parts side.
reply