Guesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.
Wube is such a unique game studio. They do a lot of very solid technical work and look like they have fun doing it. I particularly appreciated their recent post about porting Factorio to ARM64. They had a business reason to do it but it's clear the team was mostly just curious about whether ARM64 was a viable gaming platform now. And then shared the results with us. They seem like fun hacker guys.
This is so interesting to watch. For a couple minutes I was in awe of how quick and cheap it was. Then I saw just how bad the decision are and how it would get stuck in strange loops of going in and out of the same door to no end.
This seems like a technology heading in the right direction but not quiet there yet. Excited for what they are cooking up but probably won't start building around it yet.
> For one, Apple was unwilling to have visible barcodes printed on the envelopes — but it wanted every step of the shipping and delivery of your card tracked. That wasn’t something the US Postal Service did. Apple and the printing company created an invisible barcode that was sprayed on the envelope, visible only under certain UV light, so that the envelope itself would remain unadulterated. And the USPS agreed to scan cards when sent, when processed at mail facilities, up to and including when they went out on a mail truck for delivery.
I just spilled my coffee; sorry for the trivial remark, but the name means 'pubic hairs' in Romanian. Apologies.. I thought it's better for you to know and ignore than not to (not quite a big population target for you, I imagine, anyway).
There is an effectively unlimited supply of people willing to take sums of money to work on anti-human endeavors, so long as they and theirs are not the humans involved.
One interesting quirk of the AI-written READMEs these days is how they can include every detail on how it works, thoroughly document every optional flag, known limitation, experimental result, and still not communicate the essence of the project and the problem it solves.
I have read through the project and I still don't understand what this thing is for and why it is to be preferred over the harness's native memory management tools.
I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
> Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June. And while individual users are free to use limited versions of Copilot’s chat experience, its most powerful tools are reserved for subscribers to the company’s M365 apps bundle, which has about 90 million paying users.
It needs to be more widely known that if you cancel a (home) 365 subscription, you'll be offered a cheaper version without AI integration.
The larger issue with the HF incident is that before it occurred, OAI already knew the agents were exploiting Artifactory, turning it into a message board and then gaining full internet access through it. OAI's response to discovering this was not to airgap the test, but instead to simply block that particular Artifactory exploit, rebuild, and then resume. That's ... nuts.
Oh, and after resuming the tests, the Artifactory message board was reestablished almost immediately, but it took a number of days to fully breach HF. In all that time, after seeing Artifactory compromised the first time, nobody even bothered to check if those naughty agents were at it again.
This is all documented by OAI, with a timeline, here:
To know that there was a serious weakness in the sandbox, and to just patch an exploit and resume with nothing else changed and no monitoring, in a test where all guardrails were off, the bots were thirsty for some internet juice, and Artifactory was a clear target? This is where even a half-skilled human should have decided that this wasn't a great idea.
The more you look into the details of this thing, the more it does your head in.
OpenAI has hacked several prominent entities and is allowed to do business as usual but Anthropic putting guardrails on the military's usage of AI is the national security threat while Pentagon itself said that over reliance on AI lead to that attack on school in Minab.
I have also learned that OpenAI's president is a big maga donor and now I am thinking of cancelling my OpenAI membership todau and signing up with Anthropic again.
Edit - i am not a OAI hater and i don't hate anyone. I am just saying Anthropic is kinda getting bullied and OAI is not being punished enough for their actions. It is time for me to support Anthropic (with my $$$) instead of OAI.
I wonder if this is going start being abused soon.
If I was Palantir or any other GOP aligned company, I would be completely against this. What's to stop a Democratic president from doing the same thing and destroying them?
Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
Because what they did is kinda trivial. Its basically like the Dropbox comment really[0], except here you don't need petabytes of storage and infinite VC pockets.
After chatgpt everything in AI mostly became LLMs and building wrappers around them. It's like people forgot how to do ML.
To those of us who actually trained models back in the day, its kind of cute to see people wowed by a classifier. Yes, this is 0 shot and doesn't need training (most people wanting this would've used structured output, this is cool because it's cheaper and faster). But anyone with basic ML knowledge could've built this in a few hours.
The question is mostly why wasn't this productized. And it's interesting indeed that it took this long to become a finished product.
I find it strange to see people writing articles like this as if everyone has used AI for decades. I've programmed for decades. I thought I retired three years ago but got an offer I couldn't refuse. Already there were little things I'd forgotten how to use.
Over the past six months I tried using Claude, chatgpt, Grok and Gemini. At best I got reminders of how things worked. People online say they use them to write their code. The code they supplied to me has NEVER worked or was so convoluted that I threw it away and did it myself.
At most, I use these tools as search engines. Even then some references are poor.
I'm starting to think this is becoming a sad, sad world and AI is just the new TV of the programming world.
> can only create a sandbox that a half skilled human operator could have broken out of easily
The exploit:
> The ExploitGym evaluation environment did not provide the models with direct Internet access. To gain Internet access, the models identified and exploited a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Artifactory, a package registry cache proxy. We disclosed this vulnerability, along with other Artifactory vulnerabilities our models identified as part of our review, to the vendor. [1]
Are "half skilled human operators" "easily" able to find zero-day vulnerabilities in a sandbox with only one line to the internet (the commercial package registry cache proxy)?
An aggressive first principles approach often leads otherwise well-intentioned technologists into strategic / ideological dead-ends.
Do we do things because it's the "right thing" to do in the moment, or because of the final outcome that will eventually result?
The most ideal answer is somewhere in the middle. I am far more interested in the total area under the curve than a single instant in time.
In lieu of intentional higher order thinking, simply working backward from your customer on a regular basis will generally accomplish the same outcomes.
Selling a pen labeled "this pen will refuse to sign certain orders" is not sabotage or malicious and is thus not a supply chain risk. The DoD is free to not buy from Anthropic, but designating them as a supply chain risk is incorrect, as well as arguably arbitrary and capricious given their public criticism of Anthropic's beliefs.
The hard part is that we've structured life such that you are on a fixed income at the end of your life in no position really to deal with inflation. At least when you are still working, in theory at least your wages will go up with inflation. This is really why prop 13 happened to pass at all: the idea of being displaced at the end of your life out of the home you already paid off due to market forces you aren't even a participant in is actually widely unpopular even if it makes better economic sense.
> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?
I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.
It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.
Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wildly expensive pipeline from API to UI and back to API again. I wonder how long the legacy ‘human-oriented’ layer in the middle, and the industry that's been built on top of it, will last.
(Separately, chatbots are not great as a UI for most things, and the problem of building the universal UI still also stands. But it turns out for a lot of things people would rather have a bad universal UI than a good special-purpose UI for each task.)
> The only people this is appealing for are people who fancy themselves analytically minded economists with no interest in the practical humanity
Most states in the US do not have Prop-13-like laws and get by just fine. For the few states that do, they are less restrictive taxation-wise than California's.
Prop 13 has completely distorted the housing market; it is, perhaps unintuitively, a co-cause of CA's housing unaffordability issues. (Prop 13 discourages new development, and is an enabler of housing NIMBYism.)
We of course shouldn't just abolish Prop 13 overnight, or lots of people will get displaced, also overnight. But we should absolutely reform it and phase it out over time, while building more housing, as fast as we can (something that will be a little bit easier to do as all the NIMBYs realize that if they keep shooting down housing projects, their property taxes are gonna go up a ton).
> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
Because the modern Democrats are primarily a corporate dominated party. They haven't really had any hard hitting legislation nor legal regulation/rulings on corporations in easily the last 30 years.
I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. They are a private entity, so they can manage and change their primary system any way they want.
I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.
Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
> Imagine having a virus escape a sandbox, why are we worried about the virus but not the incompetency of those who are responsible for setting up the sandbox?
> Should we worried about people using LLMs for attacks? Yes, but not in the premise of LLMs going rogue but someone with the intention of abusing it to cause harm.
[Why-not-both?-meme]. To use your example, when you discover prions (a class of pathogen that is much more robust to standard disinfection methods than viruses) you should both be worried about your concrete outbreak of BSE (UK in the 80s and 90s) as well as the wider implication (e.g. do we need to change the sterilization methods for our surgical instruments?).
Seriously, I find the way these discussions are done to be super frustrating, because often people implicitly form tribes that oppose everything the other tribe says. When someone believes AI companies push greatly exaggerated stories of dangerous rogue AI to force out competition via regulation they often implicitly conclude that their argument is fundamentally wrong, whereas in reality the lies that work best are those that distort the truth.
Companies should be punished harshly for the deeds of their AI agents AND we should not allow them to force out competition AND we need take the threat of autonomous AI agents as a new class of danger serious AND we need to worry about the socioeconomic implications of AI companies privatizing new means of production.
Yes, there is competition of these ideas in the attention of the general public, but the methods we can use to solve these problems don't compete with each other. AI slowdown for example helps with all the other topics.
Features:
- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)
- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data
- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim
- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation
It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.