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Comment Re:What is "the internet" (Score 1) 121

by RobinH (#66399638) Attached to: 'Please Let the Internet Die'
What we're decrying is late-stage web 2.0 and we don't actually think web 3.0 can deliver on any of its promises. We just want web 1.0 back. I.e. an internet where you had to be fairly technically literate to be able to add your voice to the chorus.

Comment Not the point (Score 1) 118

by RobinH (#66399244) Attached to: Anthropic Engineer Declares the Coding Interview Dead
When I give programming questions in an interview, I always say, "you can write the solution in any language you feel comfortable in" because the point is just to confirm that they know how a computer works, and can simulate the local state of the computer in their mind. "The variable is initialized with 0, and then after the first loop it contains 3," etc. I also usually ask them a question that involves figuring out the volume of a cylindrical tank, and I say "pretend I'm google if you need to look something up", not because I want to know that they can use Google, but because I want to know if they grasp the concept that volume is base times height. There are a surprising number of people who apply for programming jobs who have zero spatial sense, and certain aspects of this job require it. Heck, I interviewed a graduate of an electrical engineering program who couldn't convert an answer from A to mA. You can't just not ask technical questions in interviews. A surprising number of people get through life without a solid understanding of how the world works within the confines of their own field.

Comment Re: Russia are the baddies you tool (Score 1) 64

They were invited to join at the end of the cold war, and they kinda did, or at least they made advances in that direction. But I think Russia just didn't have the institutions in place to be able to follow through, and China did just enough to gain some advantage from free market reforms without also implementing the social freedoms that we thought would inevitably go along with it. You're talking about a society (Russia) where their cultural belief could be summed up as "endless suffering" and another society (China) where it's very low-trust. It was our folly to think you could build a western-like liberal democracy on top of non-western ideas.

Comment Re: Russia are the baddies you tool (Score 5, Interesting) 64

by RobinH (#66386126) Attached to: Russian Satellite's Close Shadowing of Radar Imaging Satellite Is a Big Deal
That's a pretty non-nuanced view of history. The reason that we had so much explosive growth in the west since the end of WW2 was because the US setup a system of international alliances and a rules-based world order with the goal of containing Russia and China. The sheer number of people who were lifted out of poverty over the last century specifically because of that is mind-boggling. But of course the game is still the game, and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US. No, the US is not a saint, but we can't forget that their actions during and after WW2 definitely made them and their allies the "good guys", at least until the end of the cold war, and I would argue even through the first gulf war, where the US military actually stopped the invasion of Iraq specifically because they didn't want to exceed the UN mandate. The thing is, we got used to it. We believed it was the new normal. Fukayama wrote a book called The End of History, and people believed it. He was wrong. But the reason he was proven wrong was specifically because Russia and China refused to see the obvious benefit of a rules-based world order, and refused to get their house in order. Russia's government is essentially run like the mafia, and China manipulates its currency, corrupted the WHO, and both of them installed a dictator for life. And when the American people became disillusioned, they elected their own leader in the image of Putin and Xi. That's how we got where we are now. I'm over-simplifying, for sure, but "US bad too" has never been an adequate explanation.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 165

I'm certainly not sold on the idea that "government controls AI technology" is better than "bunch of silicon valley bros control AI technology". I don't trust either of them. I would absolutely rather have private development with more strict regulatory oversight, which at least keeps things relatively public and gives voters at least some say. The more groups involved in overseeing what goes on, the better. I get that red tape is out of vogue recently, but I suspect that's only a temporary thing.

Comment My experience (Score 3, Interesting) 76

I've only used Claude code for a matter of weeks at work. While it's supposed to stay contained in the folder you point it at, I've noticed that it has no problem *looking* outside that folder, and even acting outside that folder if you gave it implied permission. In one case it used the connection string from the application source code it was working on, and the fact that my windows account had read-only access to some tables in the production database, to connect to the database and query tables in order to answer a question it had about the potential ramifications of a code change. The problem is that while we're OK with this particular source code leaving the premises, we're not ok with data from a production database going offsite. In this case it wasn't sensitive data, but after that incident I only run Claude Code from a VM under a user with minimal permissions. Clearly it would have been prudent to do that from the start, but let this be a warning to anyone else who just downloaded Claude Code, turned off the "use my data to train future models" and gave it a go... it will *not* keep itself inside the folder you give it. Put it in a sandbox. I heard a similar story this week from an IT friend who said devs at his company were using Cursor.ai and it was doing scans of the network drives, so they did the same thing and moved it all to VMs.

Comment Re:Propaganda, meant to happen, or other? (Score 2, Insightful) 286

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case, given what I've seen people do with AI, and given my own experience with Claude Code (Opus and Fable models), the normal human inclination to trust it's probably right and click OK is by far the most likely explanation. And remember that frontier models have grown increasingly better over the last year, and one of the newest improvements is that the reasoning models use two models in an adversarial mode where the second model checks and challenges the output of the first. The timeline of the events in Iran probably indicate that this was an older AI model without those newer advances. I can totally believe this story. When consumers were expected to keep their hands on the wheel of self-driving cars, I absolutely knew they wouldn't, and when humans are told to check the conclusions of AI, they mostly just click OK. I do actually look at the code that Claude generates before it goes into our codebase, and I can tell you, the desire to just skim read is real.

Comment It's ok to grieve (Score 0) 124

by RobinH (#66339482) Attached to: While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China's Film Industry is Embracing It
As they've been telling us software developers who are being asked to adapt to probably the most rapid transformation of any career that's ever been seen... "it's ok to take a moment to grieve." I was spending most of my time writing code up until about the middle of August, and then I realized that Fable was finally good enough to work on the rather large code base that I work on, and now I write less than 5% of the new code, and I'm pushing out new features at probably 3 times as fast as I was before, while now spending almost all my time creating and reviewing specifications, reading code, updating documentation, reviewing software architecture, and making bigger plans. It's jarring, exhilarating, and humbling at the same time. It's gonna take a minute for us to adjust. And yes, things are still changing fast. Software development has embraced this. It's coming for 3D CAD software and mechanical engineers next. There's been pushback within the more creative arts, like graphic design, writing, and making videos, and I totally understand that. Those industries will grapple with it in different ways than we have in the engineering space. And we won't lose all the creative stuff. As someone recently said to me, "we still ride horses, but we don't ride them to work."
AI

A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74

Posted by EditorDavid from the freed-market dept.
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."

But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.

"Hello?"

"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.

"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."

"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."

"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."

"Oh! My bad...."

Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...

[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."

SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."

Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."

Comment Calculators (Score 2) 71

by RobinH (#66319732) Attached to: NYC Public Schools Ban AI Use Through Middle School
We're well past the point where we all have a calculator app in our pocket, but if you've ever felt the frustration of having a discussion with someone who can't do simple arithmetic because they never had to do flash cards in school, you probably understand why students should learn the basics before moving on to more power tools. There are just times you need to pickup a screwdriver, and times you reach for the impact driver.

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