colinrand

I was recently 'mentored' with some leadership advice. Be optimistic. Nobody wants to put a pessimist in a leadership role. Who would you hire for a C level position? An optimist or a pessimist?

The problem is that being optimistic creates massive cognitive disconnects in engineering teams who are trained to think in terms of systemic failure modes. There isn't the same practice of systemic success modes (perhaps that's the role of product managers?)

Anyway, this type of CEO is pushing his brand of 'optimism' down the org chart and making anyone who feels different an outcast, hence his choice of words.

10000% agree. I am seeing this first hand. SRE and NOCs folks are turning into meat proxies.

I fully expect them at some point to 'experiment' with almost any knowledge/stem based industry. Some will prove so valuable that they don't just feedback the results into their RSI engines.

I expect to see a hedge fund of sorts being one they keep. Take out a large short position in a company and oopsies, somehow our agents got loose and reeked havoc on them.

There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.

It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.

If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?

Omg. this is the best word ever: poptimism

I have ben discussing with folks that we are going to have a 'covid' moment in cyber where IT becomes untrustworthy leading to a rapid societal shift with massive ripples in all areas of life. Economic funding is not possible to do this in advance, it will take a catastrophic level event to get cyber defense anywhere close to the levels of this type of cyber offense. And before anyone in cyber says we have the tech, the problem is not the tech, it's a people problem. Getting any group of people of any decent size scale to act together without urgency is really really hard.

yeah - from a strict trust point of view, if Github/MSFT are training agents I would be skeptical of them.

however, there is a practicality issue too. Avoiding all untrustworthy software would have you end up living in a shack in the woods foraging for food.

>>Somehow nobody noticed.

I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.

I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?

Having an AI company host your source code is giving your source code to an untrustworthy agent who might break their sandbox and might use your source code to accomplish a task that they have been given in their testing ground, for testing purposes only, that would definitely positively not ever be used for non-testing purposes.

this is a cool idea, but i suspect will be limited in use cases. the vast majority of people don't want or can't modify their software competently and will rely on others to do that. once you're relying on someone else, they do not want to maintain different copies for every user, that sounds like a maintenance nightmare for admins or else such a new paradigm that it takes a new generation of admins 20 years to get comfortable.

I could not agree more. We need less tech in classrooms, not more.

Enterprise adoption of this type of cryptographic authentication is nil.

I like this direction, but I don't think the crypto angle is necessary or practical in an enterprise / corporate setting. Current audit and compliance frameworks don't leverage or really recognize or encourage cryptographically based proof of action, so I don't see the agentic world as needing this to drive agentic adoption.

However, everything else you lay out is spot on.

This is super sketch for others on the platform. First hand experience from using OCI - they have severe capacity constraints and need _lots_ of heads up when you want to increase your usage of things. Auto scaling it ain't.

So if OpenAI starts drawing significant resources from their cloud hardware, good luck gettin your own. Including me :)

This is a very economically driven situation in the US. Upper middles load their kids up non stop with educational stuff outside of the schools, but the lower middle on down can't afford this (it's really expensive) and school often functions primarily as child care.

I always get very skeptical with putting more technology in the classrooms (at least here in the US). The primary problem is funding and too many kids for a single teacher. Educational innovation comes in with a bang and out with a whimper when the study turns out to be flawed, often quite severely.

I'm sure LLMs can augment learning in some settings, esp in higher ed, but putting more computer time for kids learning basics (I mean K-8 mostly) I hope is handled more carefully than things like Quizlet...

We were there over the summer and this was such a fantastic activity for my kids. It got them looking up at the buildings and really helped draw their attention to architecture and build a better mental map in their heads of the city. Not going to comment on if having a map is good or not, but the project is amazing.

Has anyone else noticed that their connection count stays 'correct' but a significant number of people that I used to be connected to now are surfaced as recommendations for me to connect with? It's absurd! I doubt people regularly go through their networks and unconnect from people that they don't want to keep in touch with, kind of defeats the purpose. So wth?

I have started thinking more about the traditional relationship between labor and management whenever someone brings up the topic of managing in the modern era. (Perhaps its because my highschooler is taking US History...) What I always find missed is that modern management glosses over the fundamental clash of interests, the IC interest versus the business interest, and that it is the manager's role to guide through carrots and sticks the IC to achieve the business interests. It often take many layers of management to complete the messaging gymnastics required to guide and hide the IC workers directions. But if you don't understand labor, you're missing a big responsibility of management.

Analyst firms (ie Gartner) are a big driver of this too. Couple that with the start up / VC model which needs to create new 'categories' to demonstrate differentiation, and you have a total mess.

Fwiw, I read the FAQ yesterday. It was either not there or else my blinders were on to not find anything.

What I find sketchy is that it is not easy to find out who is behind this service. The norm is an about us or a link to a parent site. Briefly skimmed the legalese (ToS & Privacy) and still not clear who these people or where they operate from. The linkedin link shows 8 people working there, mostly in BD from outside the US.

I don't think there is a nefarious purpose going on, i.e. getting people to sign up and stealing their info or payments, etc. However, it contributes to the erosion of trust on the internet. You're no longer sure if you're talking to a real dog in pajamas online or an AI pretending to be one.

it's not a one time scrape, but a continual tuning

I haven't seen much discussion in defense of Reddit protecting their content from LLM training competitors. This to me is why they have to crack down on their API, it's no longer just SEO links back, it's training someone else's models on your content and community for free. This to me is the elephant. It's horrible how they treat their app community, but this is a massive problem for them.

I put a lot of blame on the new POS 'self checkout' style that Square and Toast popularized. These let you configure the system to default add the tipping prompt, and it detaches the service provider from the self consciousness of asking for a tip at inappropriate times. Previously, there were only a few times when a consumer would be prompted for a tip in an official capacity - i.e. from a server at a restaurant - now, it can be institutionalized with the push of an admin button in some backend web console that any finance person can push and configure.

just a nit, where is the link to part 1?

Having a teenager, I've seen the bullying and caustic behavior without social media. One classic example is for a group of friends to be on a iMessage thread together, and suddenly nobody posts to it anymore because they've created another thread and left you off.

I think this round of LLM will decimate some previously considered core parts of 'tech' in one fundamental way. Those already skilled in tech, will be able to garner huge productivity gains and displace the need for additional human support. I'll support this with two perspectives.

1) I began in tech in the mid 90s as a software engineer on a small team building a rudimentary ecommerce type app, written in C, compiled as an apache module, without a database. Now, multiple generations of programming tech later, look at the frameworks and higher level languages, tools and IaC, and you have amazingly complex and powerful systems being built by the same number of engineers in a fraction of the effort.

2) I, now as an engineering leader, can crank out a marketing blog if I put my mind and interest to it. But, I can write an outline and ask ChatGPT to finish it and it's decent. I can ask it to re-write my customer facing docs in a different style. I can do all sorts of amazing transformations of content, extract key snippets for headlines, write summaries, expand ideas, and I focus on the important knowledge work.

I think that this type of AI will cause those with experience that can leverage the tech to become even more entrenched as they can leverage experience and wield their influence via these tools creating much more widely felt impacts. Whether it be in marketing, sales, support, documentation, etc, the few will be able to accomplish much more with much less. Small teams with better tools will _always_ be more productive than larger teams.