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Challenging UPS and FedEx, Amazon Opens Its Shipping Network to All Businesses (geekwire.com) 79

This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services."

The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..."

"Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix." Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business...

In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms.

The article notes that in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers."

Comment What's the problem? (Score 1) 82

With all of GitHub's great new AI features, it writes all your code for you! It doesn't matter whether the site is up at any given moment; just download your newly completed app at some point then the site is online. You're free to kick back, relax and scroll your social feeds because you don't actually have to do anything anymore. This is truly a golden era!

Comment Re:We need humility, not arrogance (Score 1) 172

Formal verification mathematically proves code implements a specification. It does not catch bugs that are specified.
There are entire classes of bugs (logic bugs) that LLMs can find that formal verification literally doesn't even try to.

So you prompt the LLM to "find all the bugs".

Even if the LLM can find every last bug (which in turn assumes that this type of problem isn't NP-hard or has some issue that Godel would point out), just defining to the LLM exactly what a "bug" is seems to be pretty much the same thing as those formal specifications that you just convincingly dismissed as inadequate.

I don't think that there's anything magical about LLMs that would let them get around fundamental mathematical roadblocks.

AI

Claude Code Leak Reveals a 'Stealth' Mode for GenAI Code Contributions - and a 'Frustration Words' Regex (pcworld.com) 38

That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World.

The more than 500,000 lines of code included:

- An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases
- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code
- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude

"But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases — including f-bombs and other curses — that serve as signs of user frustration." Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of — -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f — you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.

Comment Re:Intel's political marketing has always been bad (Score 4, Insightful) 23

If you read this post it shows that AMD stole Intel's design and reverse engineered it.

If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.

There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.

(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)

Comment Re:Clean room? (Score 5, Interesting) 125

Even if you use an AI to extract an extremely condensed specification out of the source code, it's hardly clean room if the LLM was pre-trained on the source code any way.

I once worked at a place that had a clean room process to create code compatible with a proprietary product. Anybody who had ever seen the original code or even loaded the original binary into a debugger was not allowed to write any code at all for the cloned product. The clone writers generally worked only off of the specifications and user documentation.

There were a handful of people who were allowed to debug the original to resolve a few questions about low-level compatibility. The only way they were allowed to communicate with the software writers was through written questions and answers that left a clear paper trail, and the answers had to be as terse as possible (usually just yes or no). Everyone knew that these memos were highly likely to be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

I highly doubt that any AI tech bros have ever been this rigorous, and I'd bet that most of these AIs have been trained on the exact same source code that they are cloning.

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