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I don’t think system prompts are particularly reliable way to do much at all. It’s better to put it as a hook after each response, or a skill at least so you can trigger it at will if you don’t want it everytime.

Do you think they're unreliable based on the position in the conversation or other factors?

Anthropic has probably RL’d the system prompt into nothing because of their fear of the user being able to control the model. If it listened to you about the slop language, it might listen to you if you asked it to help you with no-no tasks.

That’s not true in general. Plenty of jurisdictions do not allow you to use contradictory arguments in hopes that one is persuasive.

That sounds bad to me!

The TOS argument was so awful it deserves some kind of bonus loss, but let's put that aside for now.

Let's say I paint a fence, and my neighbor complains I ruined a particular segment that shouldn't have been painted. Why can't I argue that this segment was on my property and that my neighbor gave permission to use that paint on all segments on their property?

Let's say there's a 15% chance the survey was wrong about the fence location, and a 15% chance the court disagrees with how I'm interpreting the agreement. If I can use both arguments I have a 2% chance of losing, which seems fair to me. Both arguments are reasonable, so why should I have to risk it on only one?


In the context of this story (ie. US), it's specifically allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_pleading#Civil_law

One fun fact I’ve heard is that the strategic oil reserve requires like 100-150 million barrels of oil to maintain operational pressure and even be functional. This means we can’t draw it down to zero; not even close.

And indeed, already:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/15/strategic-petroleum-reserve-... "Depleted strategic oil reserve nears level that raises concerns about damage to caverns, operations"

https://fortune.com/2026/08/17/depleted-us-strategic-oil-res... “U.S. strategic reserves are getting so low the drawdown threatens to damage the 60 underground salt caverns storing American oil”


I encourage you to do some digging using filetype:pdf on a search engine. The amount of documentation available on the SPR is fascinating.

From what I found out, turns out the question of SPR design and operational limits is a complex issue to say the least. The SPR is a big system composed of many sub-systems and there are entangled legal, policy, technical issues at play. Interesting stuff!


Why can't they pump more water down there to create pressure?

The US’s most important export for many years was treasury bonds. As de-dollarization occurs, the United States is bound to face some economic reckoning.

It should be noted that even still almost all US debt is held locally.


12% for Japan vs 30% for USA is a huge difference though.

One aspect of that balanced budget that should be noted is that it does rely on a sizable funding increase from the state government.

Now, that state is legally required to have a balanced budget itself, so perhaps this is a small side note rather than a major change in perspective. I just think it’s not spoken about enough when discussing how that budget process went.


NYC had a deficit of $12 Billion before the current mayor.

“Promise endlessly” is an oft touted criticism of social safety net programs, when the reality is that reducing vast tranches of corporate welfare is typically more than enough to solve budget shortfalls.

Is it not clear that American election issues are directly related to those things?

One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.

I'd venture a guess that OAI doesn't mind if the HuggingFace hack gets confused in the public's mind.

My tongue in cheek immediate assumption was "so it's a guerrilla PR firm?"

It should be noted that suing gun manufacturers for murder has been done successfully. A more charitable comparison might be suing a torrent aggregator instead of the end users doing the distribution.

But if Amazon were harmed, wouldn’t they sue their customers first because they perpetrated the purported crime? This seems like going after the gun manufacturer for the claimed wrong that was actually committed by their customers.

> suing a torrent aggregator

Which has also been done :|


Right, which is why it is a charitable comparison of the lawsuit, showing how it may be successful.

My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.


Yes, although the DoJ policy change reflecting still says civil liability might exist if a cease-and-desist is ignored: https://www.wsgr.com/en/insights/doj-acknowledges-limits-to-...

Illinois makes it a state crime to violate terms of service.

Sec. 17-51. Computer tampering. (a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her: (1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data; (2) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data, and obtains data or services; (a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if: (2) the owner authorizes the public to access the computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;


That's pretty similar wording to the CFAA, which OP mentioned has been checked by case law.

Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys

And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.

I have clearly communicated the constraints of use on my site using robots.txt, which is the established standard for communicating things like these. You are expected to fetch it and figure it out. It is not necessary to build walls and lock doors when a no trespassing sign is clearly visible.

Seriously, though, making robots.txt have the weight of law would be a massive improvement for the ecosystem in general.


and what happens when the perpetrator does not reside where that law can reach?

But didn’t Amazon cite laws that it broke (allegedly)? Not simply their ToS?

The CFAA makes it a federal offense to intentionally access a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" so the sticky part is how far the site's ToS can go in defining what uses are authorized, lest it be a federal felony to use an ad blocker or whatever else might be forbidden in a ToS.

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