Corrado

All of this secret back and forth with pricing and models and such is really giving me the willies. I'm very much not on the AI bandwagon but I can see that it has it's uses. However, I'm starting to think that maybe it's all just a smokescreen to allow these big companies to do something more ... nefarious.

Are they just playing with parameters or are they doing something more? Is this really like a JVM, where there are thousands of knobs to turn and buttons to push and is' nearly impossible to make the right choice? Are they capturing our data and thoughts and dreams only to turn them back on us in the future?

I think every day that passes causes me to trust "AI", and the companies behind it, less and less.

I haven't upgraded to WiFi 5 yet and it looks like being cheap|lazy is paying off.

Seriously though, this is some pretty interesting|scary stuff. This new technique doesn't require any modifications to the WiFi network at all and can even be done without authenticating. It looks like someone could just sit outside the building and track people's movement through the walls.

I can see AI being a problem and a solution in this case. My view is that most "corporate" coding is not developer bound but PM bound. So, AI doesn't really accelerate development that much. However, in something like the Linux kernel we have lots of people working on lots of little things all over the place and I can see AI allowing a lot more code to be written.

Of course, the downside is that the maintainers have to wade through all the code and not all of it is going to be great stuff. In fact, the easier it is to generate the code the worse the quality will be, I think. So, just like everything else, this is a double edged sword.

“There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,”

I've heard this before in previous corporate jobs and the data ALWAYS ends up being used somewhere else. Usually in job performance reviews or tax documents about new vs maintenance work.

I think that an eventual consequence of using AI is that more and more of these things will happen. Like you, I'm experienced enough to know that you separate environments completely; nothing shared. This is wisdom and something AI will never obtain. The up-and-coming programmers and engineers using AI for everything will never learn these lessons because they won't be exposed to the problems or really forced to think about these outcomes.

On that topic, it’s always surprised me just how little Apple invest into their enterprise / business backend services. Everything about the way they integrate Macs into businesses is awkward. Apple could make so much money there if they wanted to. It’s a real missed opportunity.

Agreed! My $DAYJOB is an Apple shop and the Apple "Business" offerings are horrible. No support for a proper business developer account is annoying. A single human is responsible for this and when that human moves to a different company or role then you have to reassign the account to a different human. Configuring SSO is another trap. You have to capture a domain to add SSO but after you do that your users can't access the Apple App Store (for some reason).

There are so many places that Apple could improve their "Business" business, but they seem hell bent on not doing that. Maybe Mr. Ternus will address this issue.

I was recently at a "town hall" meeting in my community and spoke with a older woman about Flock cameras. Initially she was not concerned about it and was generally in favor of the idea.

I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.

I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.

Actually, that won’t work. The flock cameras don’t only rely on license plate information. They use “AI” to determine the make model and color of your car as well as any outstanding features, such as bumper stickers or roof racks.

I just saw this article on BlueSky and thought it reflected my ideology quite well. My frustration is that everyone around me seems to be going bonkers for AI and I'm just staring, wide eyed into the abyss. I feel so out of place because while I see the value as a tool I do not want it to take over all of my coding activities. I write code because I really like writing code. I do not want to become a manager and instruct others all day long. Is that weird?

I recently augmented some software that I support using Claude and it was ... fine. I used plan mode just like the author and reviewed everything, and it worked. But I didn't feel accomplished. The work got done but I don't feel like I gained any knowledge that could be applied to future tasks. Well, beyond the ability to tell Claude what to do, that is.

The whole thing makes me feel like a manager, a role that I've steadfastly resisted my whole career. Maybe the people around me really want to be managers and tell others what to do. Maybe I'm the weird one for wanting to know how the computer works, what the CPU is actually doing, and learning new things.

I think this is a pretty insightful article on how AI is working inside AWS. And I feel like this same attitude is relevant for other AI "providers" as well. The facts seem pretty slim on how effective AI is at replacing engineers. In fact, it feels like the exact opposite is happening.

If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.

This is a really good point. At one point in my career I lived close enough to the office that I could ride my bike to work. It was actually pretty nice to work that close to home and I didn't really mind going into the office.

You know, I never realized the "human collaboration" against "AI can replace you" dissonance before but I believe that you are complete correct.

As a healthcare company, we are currently going through the process of how to allow on-device AI activity while reducing the associated risk. I really like the idea of giving the agent a specific identity instead of globbing onto the credentials of the person operating it. I think I would like to go further and splitting the agent out onto its own hardware complete separate from the developer. Sounds extreme but MacMini devices are pretty cheap and fairly capable.

I really wish that Keybase would have taken off. I think it was a great balance between verification and ease of use. Again, Keybase didn't prevent someone from impersonating another, it just raised the cost. And sometimes that's enough.

Thank you for reminding me of Y2K! It's the perfect example of what happens when you forget about the people keeping things together.

My team and I worked really hard for several years to make sure that Y2K didn't have any effect, or at least a dramatically downsized one. It worked but I did hear from several people that they were annoyed that we spent so much money, time, and resources on something that turned out to be "not that big of a deal". Arrrgggghh!!

Unfortunately, you cannot hide by obscuring your license plate. The ALPR system recognizes vehicles by type, color, and any outstanding features (bumper stickers, trailers, etc.) So, even if you removed your license plate completely they would still be able to track your car as a blue, 1999 Toyota Camry, with a "I love Peaches" sticker in the back window.

I've known this for quite a while and have advocated for removing 3rd party A/V stuff from our fleet of macOS devices. Unfortunately, A/V software is listed as "required" from our SOC2 auditors and convincing them otherwise is not worth the effort. I wish NIST would recognize that OS vendor A/V is generally enough and to not worry about the 3rd party stuff.

I think this is an excellent move and the sign of a mature organization. I can hardly imagine the confusion and strife that would arise from the sudden termination of Linus' git repo.

When you say per account, do you mean per user account or per AWS account?

I think the whole point of this was to see if the "agents" could act like a real human and real humans use Gmail much more frequently than sendmail. Sage even commented that they had update their prompt to tell the agents to not send email and not just remove the Gmail component for fear that the agent would just open it's own Gmail (or Y! mail, etc.) account and send mail on it's own.

Are there really many unsupervised LLMs running around outside of experiments like AI Village?

How would we know? Isn't this like trying to prove a negative? The rise of AI "bots" seems to be a common experience on the Internet. I think we can agree that this is a problem on many social media sites and it seems to be getting worse.

As for being under "human supervision", at what point does the abstraction remove the human from the equation? Sure, when a human runs "exploit.exe" the human is in complete control. When a human tells Alexa to "open the garage door" they are still in control, but it is lessened somewhat through the indirection. When a human schedules a process that runs a problem which tells an agent to "perform random acts of kindness" the human has very little knowledge of what's going on. In the future I can see the human being less and less directly involved and I think that's where the problem lies.

I can equate this to a CEO being ultimately responsible for what their company does. This is the whole reason behind to the Sarbanes-Oxley law(s); you can't declare that you aren't responsible because you didn't know what was going on. Maybe we need something similar for AI "agents".

AWS just renamed their Security Hub service to Security Hub CSPM and then created a new service named Security Hub that is related but completely different than the original service.

I'm pretty excited about this because it's one of the cornerstones of why BambuLabs printers are so easy to use. One of the main issues in the past has been tuning your printer to use a certain type of filament; it has more options than a 1999 JVM. With BL printers and filaments you can just slap it on and the printer is automatically configured to optimal print you object.

Now, I can see why BL would not be excited about this. One reason I purchase so much BL filament is because it's so easy to use. Every time I've gone "off-script" and gotten a reel from another maker I have to do the work of configuring it to get the most out of the filament. It's not super hard, it's just really inconvenient. So, of course BL would like me to continue purchasing their filament and would not want to join this movement.

However, BL doesn't produce all types filaments in all necessary colors for everyone. Once (if) everyone else moves to this standard then BL is out in the dark, getting left behind. Orca slicer can be configured to use this new standard and is also compatible with my A1. I'm planning on my next printer being a BL H2? but if that day comes and all the other printers are supporting the new standard my plans will probably change. I think that it would be in BL's best interest to support the new standard, now and in the future.

BTW: one handy way to use up the remnants of an almost empty roll is to make the printer think that it's a different color. Start printing some utility object (where the color doesn't matter) with the almost empty roll and then have the printer automatically switch to the new roll of the correct color. This works pretty well, but it involves you forceably ripping the RFID tags out of the old roll, which is not super fun. It would be great if we could you reprogram the old roll to match the new roll and get on with printing.

Indeed this looks expensive and I'm not sure if it's certified by any safety agency (SNELL, DOT, ECE, etc.) but it sure does look nice. The built in lights that are linked to the bike seem like it would be a great addition to any helmet. I also like the audio features, though I wonder how useful they would really be. Would they block out too much information about what's going on around you?

I really liked Google Circles, a feature of Google+ social media. It allowed you to target content to specific groups of users. You could have a "family" circle or a "work" circle and not have to worry about cross posting something accidentally. It was a small thing but it made it really easy to manage your posts.

My favorite quote in this article is:

"There’s a lot of resentment here, and the job market won’t stay frozen forever. When it thaws, resentment always turns into resignations."

I think we are definitely losing our blue collar skills. This video[0] about building a grill scrubber in America really highlighted the problem for me.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

We're in the same boat; HIPAA compliant Enterprise license. Slack came to us with a 2 day notice; pay more now or pay a lot more later. We asked if we could reduce the number of users and they said no, if you change anything then you have to take the new pricing for double the current price.

The whole thing was super sleazy. We told them that we were moving to MS Teams (arrrgghhh!) and they said "Bye!".

Ender’s Game for lawnmowers

I completely agree. My father was a truck mechanic and I spent plenty of time under cars turning wrenches. I'm very happy that part of my life is behind me as an BEV owner. My wife still drives an old Accord and I dread the times when it needs an oil/transmission fluid change, muffler replacement, water pump, etc. All of that simply disappears when you switch to a BEV and it really is refreshing not having to think about it at all.