_verandaguy

10-20% efficiency is enormous considering fuel is by far the dominant lifetime cost of operating an aircraft.

New fuels (SAF) and the technology to use them have been developed for less.

This is all to say nothing of the continuous work done over decades now to make aircraft more efficient; as these effects compound, intuition says that returns would start diminishing, so 10-20% is even more impressive.

I think this is missing my implied point. Is this desire for AI integration actually coming from most people? Or is it a handful of decision makers who aren't thinking about the technology critically for one reason or another (either due to lack of information/understanding, or a financial stake)?

AI is still seen very negatively in opinion polls across multiple countries, and anecdotally, tools which were often obnoxious to use before AI are now much more so, at least to my flesh-and-blood self. It really seems like we're making things worse for ourselves just to help support this would-be self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why is it Slack's responsibility to help agents flourish?

I ask about Slack here because it's pertinent, but I've both seen and experienced firsthand this inversion across the industry where we must adapt our workflows for AI.

Isn't a tool supposed to work for you, not the other around?

Last time I read about this, this was due to the well-known pitfall of UID mapping across container boundaries.

It's a common misconfiguration and one of the footguns available through containers, which I don't say a wholesale condemnation of the technology, but certainly as a UX facet that could use reevaluation.

Generally, I agree!

But it doesn't matter how good a best practice is if the industry doesn't adopt them wholesale; and even then, if your container or VM is configured with inappropriately-permissive passthrough (which, from experience with similar misconfiguration in the past, will widely happen), it could be for naught in many orgs.

That said, I do hope these become the norm if LLMs are here to stay.

ACLs, nothing, we've known about in-band signalling since forever and still this whole segment of the industry seems to either not know about it, or forgets about it at a cadence so regular it may as well not know about it.

System-level ACLs; mandatory or discretionary access control; secure-by-default application and network configurations are all for naught if you take an LLM, run it with all the privileges you'd have an accountable, judgemental operator, and then tell it to act based on arbitrary untrusted input which might include prompt injection attacks, something which cannot generally be sanitized.

Well-defined, well-enforced security policies can mitigate disasters, but many in the wild right now just don't account for this kind of threat model.

I will keep banging this drum until people listen:

Trying to use markdown files to limit access should never be treated as a security guarantee at all.

This is a form of in-band signalling that goes into a machine that, among other things, tries to read between the lines of your requests, extrapolate user desires, and please the user.

The only sane way to address this is using a control plane. A well-built harness can do this; a sandbox can do this; hell, a carefully-chosen `umask` can do this; but both of those are liable to introduce notification fatigue in the user.

I know public opinion polling supports that, but the parts of my social circle which are outside of tech seem to be, at worst, apathetic (and at best enthusiastic, though that's not a big fraction).

That said, I think it's a good thing that this sentiment is coming to the forefront.

I'm perfectly happy with Apple not becoming an "everything we do is AI-centric" business.

I'm fatigued by it all at this point. It's streamlining the interesting and fun parts out of my job (by practical necessity of use there), and if I used it half as much outside of work I'm sure it'd do the same there too.

At some point you end up hitting the law of diminishing returns. I think this is a case of that.

    > 150M at 5B revenue is not great

- A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice

- A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big three (alongside Sony and Nintendo), and have been since the early 2000s, arguably, for crying out loud.

At a certain size (typically as measured by market capture) the expectation for growth needs to be reality checked. This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.

Every year. For a company that's already putting money towards opex in the form of developing new games and new content for existing ones, for a ridiculously broad portfolio.

To be clear: it is Microsoft's and Xbox's prerogative to pursue more profit, but I reserve the right to call this out as absurd under the circumstances.

If you want to make the argument that Xbox has suffered from a lack of focus in the past decade (... or even longer), or that there's been mismanagement (I would say since around the time 343 got created), then those are fair arguments, though I don't think those are justifications, on their own, for cutting thousands in headcount.

Allowing this org to balloon to fourteen levels of management on any vertical is a joke. Allowing the absorption of so much of the game dev industry and still being unhappy with $150M in annual profit after being such an active participant in the oligolpolization of console gaming is just a bit unserious.

But why?

I imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :)

But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.

I'm still trying to figure that out. Something diplomacy-adjacent would be interesting to me; maybe conflict studies, or international relations.

Based on word from my friends who work in the field, a lot of it is people who have a lot of respect for the field, and a lot of professional respect for eachother. It's also a field I feel is unlikely to suffer from the same kind of scams that are taking over software while still offering an engaging environment.

It's also work with real-world impact, which is nice, though obviously comes with its challenges.

    > I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.

I'm not enthusiastic about the field anymore, which sucks, because I used to love working in programming.

My issue with this is that it's a form of "soft" reproducibility, where it'll work for many (maybe even most!) people, but that depends on the way the original prompt was formulated (read on) and the state of the random noise in the system.

On the prompt formulation; prompts with very similar formulations (in terms of both semantics, hamming distance, or both) can lead to _wildly divergent_ outputs in my experience. It's not rigourous, and when that divergence happens, it's extremely difficult (arguably impossible, by nature of the architecture of transformers) to identify why the divergence happened and where.

All things aside, I think this misses the forest for the trees on the halting problem.

It's not about being able to throw claude or codex at a loop and having it evaluate it for halting, it's about being able to do this for arbitrary code. Computer science rigourously defines the halting problem as not computable and undecidable. within the framework of using something akin to static analysis using any deterministic Turing machine.

There's not really a question of "solving" the halting problem like there's some as-yet unknown way of generally figuring out if arbitraty code halts. Turing proposed a proof in 1937 in favour of undecidability of what we now know as the halting problem, building on ideas first articulated by Church a few years prior.

Frankly, if anything, it's reasonable to say that the halting problem's been solved, just in the direction of undecidability rather than decidability.

Anyway, back to LLMs; as code gets more complex, the robot will need a bigger context window, more hardware resources, and more time, all of which will be variable due to the noise inherent in the system. It'll be difficult to put a useful upper and lower bound on how much computing power and time it'll take to figure out if a program ever halts. Which is all a bit moot, frankly, in the context of halting, but useful to keep in mind in the more general context of using these things as analysis tools.

This isn't really a reasonable approach, is it?

The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.

Thank you for this meaningful contribution to the discussion.

This is a bit of a traffic circle way of explaining the joke.

Isn't it usually "souverainiste?"

Driving everyone's QoL to be as bad as possible will lead to increasing enshittiffication in the entire market.

Consumers will be spoiled for choice between deeply mediocre options.

Besides, what's the point of adopting new technologies if it's not to increase the quality of life? If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?

Believe it or not, the library predates the understanding of monads as a mathematical concept! Though it can be argued it is an example of a functor (the library is mapped over two countries).

It would be good to understand how exactly a frontier lab is approaching "removing the model's ability" to do a thing.

There's an ocean of difference between e.g. preventing the model from routing to something at the firewall level and just updating the prompt (especially given models' historically poor understanding of negative prompts, relatively speaking).

    That's true. But if America is so bad, why are you still in it?

Leica started doing this a few years ago in response to the first wave of AI images[0]. Other, bigger manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, Sony as well I believe) have also joined, though with less fanfare. Adobe is in the loop.

As someone with a passing interest in infosec and cryptography, I'm sceptical of the long-term viability of this kind of product; it only takes one person successfully extracting a signing key to undermine the entire project.

    [0] https://leica-camera.com/en-int/news/partnership-greater-trust-digital-photography-leica-and-content-authenticity-initiative

Historically, it isn't Canada that's been threatening to leave NATO.

I'm saying that the truth lies somewhere in between, and that Anthropic's current revenue is being, in part, propped up artificially.

We're also in a place where a lot of the usage guidance around these tools is still nascent. People are cowboying a lot of stuff, even as larger companies start to organize AI policy/safety/responsible use working groups to try and policy around the shortfalls of the technology.

IMO: if this technology persists, and if we figure out a way to use it in a broadly safe way, the value proposition will probably trend down rather than up, at least on the code generation front.

As a research tool, it shows some promise, though I still find the ethics of the technology disgusting.

With respect to Simon, whose writing I've usually agreed with in the past and whose insights I've liked: this is a bad take that overlooks the extent to which corporations are imposing the use of AI on employees, and in particular ICs, who make up a majority of the AI-using workforce by headcount.

Many of us are either openly having our performance reviews tied to AI use, especially at larger enterprises. Whether that's measured by sheer token count or just "how many of your tasks are you using AI for these days" (combined with the implication that question carries at many orgs which are heavily invested in AI).

You don't have to root for or against anyone in this fight. It's perfectly valid to oppose both actors and both outcomes, and the stakes of the fight.