I definitely do not want a car with a giant touch screen. I have a 2014 Ford Explorer. The touch screen for that is modest in size but even so I would prefer some of the controls to be mechanical. I have driven a 2024 Ford Expedition belonging to a client. In many ways it is nice, but it has a knob instead of a gear shift lever, which I hate. It's distracting to have to look at a knob in the center console. Worst of all, it has a very large touch screen. It looks awful, but more important, it is very distracting to have to turn to it. Touch screens are okay for settings that you don't adjust while driving, but mechanical controls and gauges in front of you are much better for things you manipulate and look at while driving.

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

>On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
 
You're living in 2023 if you think any company worth their salt is still scraping the live internet for quality content. Everyone has their own curated library already Nobody has been scraping en masse for at least two years, unless there's a blog article about bleeding edge science research or something. Even then they will probably just scrape the scientific paper itself, rather than coverage of it.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?

No, I read the details explicitly quoted at the start of the discussion and responded to them.

Are you saying that this episode has not in fact resulted in (a) unplanned software being installed on end devices that will (b) automatically read data that is stored on those devices without the proper approvals? Either of those things alone can easily become a compliance problem if you operate in a regulated environment, whether or not things ultimately go any further on this occasion.

It was obnoxious enough when Microsoft started pushing this kind of unwanted "feature" on home users, then small businesses and professionals on Pro editions. There are real legal and regulatory concerns over this kind of change that businesses have to take seriously. If they've screwed up so badly that even their large corporate customers have been hit by the same thing and there isn't even a good way to undo the damage at the moment, this could lead to meaningful lawsuits from their customers and/or interventions by regulators.

I've been on google fi for... I dunno, probably at least a decade now? Maybe more. They just mail me a phone, I turn it on, and it figures everything out. I get a new phone ever 2 years or so. I couldn't tell you what the inside of a phone store looks like because I've never needed to go into one.

It is not obvious to me why a water system needs to be on the net. I understand having remote controls of various valves and pumps and so forth, but can't all of that be on a private local network?

>the AI bubble is going to burst and
 
Kimi K3 docs and tooling, and weights, dropped this morning. Kimi is selling K3 tokens at $3/million tokens and if you're running it using GB300 gpu racks @ $6 million each... the math mostly checks out. Anthropic is selling what some people call roughly equivalent Fable tokens at $50/million each. I don't think AI is going anywhere, but valuation of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI in the $500b-$1T range isn't sustainable when "open" models sell tokens at a profit at $3/million tokens.
 
Open Weight models have been catching up to SOTA for a while but the lead OpenAI and Anthropic have, has been eroding quite rapidly and their ability to charge a premium for their product may not continue indefinitely at this point.
 
Again I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the bubble is largely based on valuation and Kimi K3 is.... well positioned to pop that bubble.