JambalayaJimbo

What do you even consider advertising?

If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.

How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?

How exactly can you ban an open source model? It’s effectively an algorithm. The US tried to do this with cryptography algorithms already

Even if the process of creating software was 100% cost-free and bug-free (which we know isn't true, even the most efficient LLMs actively burn tokens and cost you money) - pre-built software still has the advantage of being opinionated and having features I never thought to ask about.

I might have the general desire to play a video game with my friend where we shoot WW2 like guns together. I'm willing to bet that a video game company with artists, game designers, historians, etc. is better able to articulate that into existence than I can. Especially given I might not be willing to spend the time to do that...

If you don’t do chores are you able to perform magic? It’s an important question…

IMO there’s a ton of room for innovation in the IDE space.

It looks like software dev is going the way of natural language as the final spec that humans see. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it’s happening. My boss asked us not to write any code manually starting in Jan, and now has hinted that we should stop reviewing code too.

Natural language as spec obviously has a ton of limitations. And here an opinionated IDE that can define this sort of workflow better is primed to gain a lot of market share, devs clearly aren’t fussed about switching between IDEs right now.

I should be able to, for example, click on a plantuml diagram and see what the endpoint definitions are, See where the request schemas are.

If I have Agents.md files scattered across my codebase I would like my IDE to help me manage them

Have you ever tried to use an LLM to add a feature to a really nice, pre 2023 codebase? It’s incredible how much easier it is to do, how much of a difference you instantly feel

We’re conditioned to interact with language models as chatbots and in that sense strong language understanding (implicit - some sort of world knowledge), is probably necessary for that?

But I’m sure we can have a small model that’s really strong at programming concepts, JavaScript syntax, and that’s about it. You’d interact with it differently, at specific seams in your code base - review a PR, merge two functions together, investigate these logs.

Or maybe I’m just not adequately absorbing the bitter lesson. Idk

Sure that’s a valid use case, 100%.

Program specific permissions (separate from the user operating them) are part of the Linux permissioning system already right? That doesn’t seem like an issue to me.

I guess the main problem would be finding an API client that can easily plug into your harness, with a nice UI for turning specific APIs on and off.

What do you mean by sandboxing bash? Isn’t this about just having a tool like curl or Postman?

Implanting an MCP client in your agent code isn’t all that different from calling requests or whatever

Measuring area is a different use case to looking at the world map to get a sense of relative sizes - of continents, countries, regions, etc.

This in turns influences how you think about history, population density, travel times, etc.

Re write the assistant message and see how easy it is to bypass a system prompt. How far do you have to stretch to get a human analogue? Short term amnesia?

Your example actually demonstrates why anthropomorphism is a bad idea.

LLMs are vulnerable to classes of attacks that humans just aren’t. In your framework, the way to prevent attacks is to… invent human consciousness?? It’s an impossible goal.

The fact that mathematicians cannot devise a method to factor that large product, despite large amounts of money and research time, is what’s valuable!

But even then your argument breaks down when you consider more complicated cryptographic structures.

In cities the benefits don’t necessarily outweigh the risks yet cities are designed entirely around cars in many places to their detriment.

Yep. I was timed when working at the drive through at a fast food restaurant.

What I found comfort it in was turning the crank and then using extra time to upskill in various other things (including non software dev domains). Things that weren’t immediately useful to my employer and I never would have been directly assigned, but did pay off after sometime.

Now I’m basically expected to do what my boss wants me to do every minute of the day, it’s gotten much more micromanaged.

As a car driver, you should understand a little about how your car works. What if you get a flat tire? At the very least, you should know not to drive on that flat tire.

Software is full of leaky abstractions

So first of all, usability features are security features. There is the classic example of an uncrackable 18 character random password string that only results in frequent password reset attempts and the bank’s support staff getting totally overwhelmed.

We can have a discussion about FaceID specifically, but “convenience” is not considered trivial within the security sphere.

Second, I work for a (very large) bank, and you actually do not want to trust them with your biometric data directly. You can be absolutely assured of the privacy of your biometric data with the bank, better than with a Silicon Valley tech company. But I would not trust the bank’s data scientists to come up with a model that will not have an extremely high rate of false positives and negatives.

The reality is, if such an initiative was started at a bank, it would be shuttered after years of delays.

All the senior developers I have worked with are absolutely allergic to coming into the office, working closely with junior developers, and in general talking to people.

Whereas juniors are eager to chat, have lunch with you , and share what they’re working on, the seniors are guarded and solitary.

Maybe that’s just my workplace though!

And yes, the office is important.

This just sounds like a bug. Haven’t delved too deep into it technically though.

Anyway flawed implementation doesn’t mean that hardware attestation is a fundamentally useless primitive. Apple Wallet is responsible for millions of transactions a day.

My banking app already trusts Face ID right now!

I mean it’s a free country either way then. Elastic can change the licensing and Amazon is then free to compete with a fork of the software pre-licensing change.

Amazon doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in objection here. Building a platform to re-sell an open source project may end up fracturing that open source community’s user base, that’s a consequence of their own actions.

What about Apple Wallet?

The reality is that there is software dependent on the user being unable to modify it. This safeguards the server against fraudulent users.

The whole point of UUIDv4 is that you don't need to check if it's conflicting and can just use them right away. This falls apart if you let untrusted sources of UUIDv4's enter your system IMO

>Competition. If I ask my OS-level AI assistant to find a social media reel about a elephant dancing, the social media app that exposes a set of APIs for an AI agent might get used more.

This is the exact opposite of what will happen (and in fact what has happened). Reddit is suing Perplexity right now for scraping.

Meta will not serve content to some other app for free - for what benefit? They will not see advertising data.

If you’re a manager you have people under you that care about the code they write and the direction of the company, not typewriter monkeys.

"Miserable" is subjective obviously. If you're regularly working evenings and weekends at your high paying law firm, I'd characterize that as miserable. If you're living cheaply in some exurban place but can only see your friends or family twice a week, I'd characterize that as miserable. But I can't speak to anyone else's state of mind.

This is cool! I'd love if you could explain the issues you had with CSP and serving content.

I was just tinkering around with MCP Apps the other day, and I had a really hard time serving images (this is for rendering in VSCode Copilot). Did you serve static resources through resource endpoints in the mcp server, or via another mechanism?

Pricing is way too good to be true? If they’re claiming a 4 month engagement, this would be much more believable if they actually charged a reasonable price for those 4 months.