woah

Man rebels against capitalist system by living off of proceeds of ownership shares of capitalist system

This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.

Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively?

Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.

Previous piece from this genre: https://short-edition.com/en/classic/story/mark-twain/a-tele...

Is that why it's so hard to get capital, credit, loans, and investment in the USA?

This is a core difference between common law and civil law. In common law systems, things tend to get sorted out after the fact, with a judge's discretion, only if things go really wrong. In civil law systems they try to design a perfect system of laws that makes problems impossible.

I did some software consulting years ago. Were we overpriced? Probably. But I also saw why we were brought in:

- A TDD loop where the Indian QA team played the role of the tests. The engineers would yeet some broken code at the end of the day, the poor QA testers would click through all the broken interfaces, and then the engineers would fix it the next day.

- A release process that was so slow and hellish that everyone just went to the DBA to have him add a stored procedure to implement their feature. He could get it in for you the next day.

- A frontend framework discussed in hushed tones, being built by a mysterious monk-like engineer, which was going to be the client's big secret weapon. In reality it was a terrible version of React built on top of jQuery.

- A core in-group of backend devs (most of these guys had advanced degrees for some reason), who would stay late every Friday, going through heroics to do a release of the client's email-templating app. There would be then be lots of back-slapping and congratulations the next Monday for these geniuses who were keeping the business afloat.

- "when in doubt, set timeout". They didn't know about callbacks

Usually consultants are brought in when upper management can tell that there is something very wrong and they can't fix it within the chain of command of their full-time staff.

This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.

On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.

Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?

I've simplified it and made it more flexible

3._1_415926535897932384626433832795_0_288419716939

In terms of aeronautics, went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 40 years. After that, everyone understandably thought that we'd be living in space and flying everywhere with personal jet packs in another couple years. Little did they know, it was the top of the S-curve, not the middle.

In the 60 years since, we've barely been able to adapt the 737 to fly longer routes.

Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not

At the same time, the only things that get built and sold are the things that someone is capable of building and selling

I believe that the issue was that the EU wanted Apple to open up their new AI agent interface (the ability to control every app on your phone so Siri can call you an Uber or whatever), and Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate.

There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.

I'd prefer they focus on safeguarding my data instead of playing a ridiculous game of brinksmanship with regulators to make a point.

I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp.

Why would someone else's unrealistic assessment affect your assessment of the actual abilities you see?

Seems like your opinion is mostly politics-based

These guys may actually just be angling to sell off the training data. diverse training data is more valuable

does it even work?

From my back of the envelope analysis for my own projects, paying per token on OpenRouter is competitive if not cheaper than running the same open weight model on a rented GPU. Per-token pricing is in the same ballpark (although more expensive) for closed frontier models and open weight models (cents to dollars per million). To me this says that the pricing is somewhat grounded in reality.

"If all you are is a proxy to an AI, exactly what value are you adding to the organization?"

Prompt Engineering

Thanks for your response-- it's really load-bearing.

you can do this easily with the api or with codex

Where are you following the comings and goings of small no name product managers like it's a baseball team?

Analogous situation to self-hosted communication encryption keys, where criminals can host military-grade encryption keys on any common mobile device, allowing them to discuss child porn and terrorism in a way that the police cannot monitor

Iran's chief strategy in this war seems to be to harm Iraq and Saudi Arabia

This is a heavily editorialized and misleading submission title. The only thing on this page that could be construed to have anything to do with the submission title is that this organization appears to be lobbying the EU not to make self-hosted wallets (where you control your own keys) illegal.

They're always pressuring me into "shipping" "features"

This is like when Bob Dylan went electric

Can you make your own CPU, locally?

they want the retail and institutional investor to be protected

That costs money, indirectly