aenis

Two problems.

PDFs may need to be further forwarded or edited on user's machine(s). Doing this in VM might save your device, only to pass the problem further down the road to a more vulnerable system.

The safe thing to do is to disarm the file - convert it in a blast proof VM. The conversion can and probably should be further tuned to explicitly disable some of the crazier, more moronic features of the format, sacrificing compatibility for safety. The same should be done with all other binary formats. It costs next to nothing, considering how crazy OP are today's phones. I wonder why it has not been done yet.

The other problem: I am not 100% sure if a clean rewrite would yield a safe viewer. As others have mentioned, PDFs can contain scripts. You'd always have to run them in VMs.

Its not just IOS. PDFs cause security problems everywhere where they are collected, and have been - for years.

We are running a service which collects documents from our consumers. We have a content disarm service which is basically a blast-proof container without any access rights, fed a stream of source bytes and outputting clean PDFs. Not a month passes without a burst of attempts at poisoning our systems with malicious PDFs. I don't remember when was the last time that we had attempts driven by malicious jpegs or pngs, just PDFs. Its one of those uber-shit Turing-complete file formats that should die long ago.

Would you care to elaborate? Grok is the only major model that I haven't tried. Was it that bad?

I call this stuff 'serious automations' -- where a process/decision tree has tens or hundreds of branches.

I see a lot of fluffy things, which are automating the simplest part of a process, leaving a lot for the humans to deal with. This is the thing that can be cloned a 1,000 times in 2 weeks.

I'll give an example. In the system I mentioned, people are scheduled for paid procedures. The procedure takes 2 days, but often we have no-shows on the 2nd day. This 2nd day can be repurposed for someone who was a no-show before - its already paid for, and every penny counts. So the chatbots chase people who may be able to make the appointment last minute, and decrease the costs to operate. There are multiple people in such pools, so the system needs to decide whom to approach, how much time to wait for a decision, and so on. Its gnarly, hard stuff to do right.

The system I mentioned has about 150 such cases, and previously just building the automation would be too expensive, and maintaining it -- too slow. Its a living organism, with thousands of people using the system every day, and more edge cases emerging constantly. It is thanks to AI coding that the thing was economical to build, and its thanks to AI that we can iterate quickly enough to keep it working well. We get all the value, and the AI labs selling us tokens got a pittance.

In my industry, the automation of such processes was always a stated goal - for at least a decade, but its the first implementation that actually works end to end, is not hated by the end users, and does not require a lot of manual interventions. It was still very hard, but at least coding wasn't part of the problem.

I am not arguing it. But if we didn't do it, others would. And I dont worry about 1000 clones, I worry about our key competitors building 3.

Edit: I'd also argue its not as simple as vibing a trivial solution. It took deep domain knowledge, which is not in the public domain, and is built on decades of operating this sort of thing manually, and integrating it with dozens of external systems that help make this into a moneymaker. I am not saying its impossible to replicate, but it's not something one can replicate by merely watching it function.

Customer service industry, roughly. Its a low margin business to begin with. We were able to expand into a new area, where we previously couldn't operate at a profit. We hired 3 people to run the new business, built them a tool, and it now runs pretty well and above our normal margins.

I think there is already one: ODE, a joint venture of sorts between Blackrock and Anthropic, if memory serves.

As for the cut, I am sure they will try. Where I work we have had a few projects that were built entirely with models - not a single line written or read by humans. One of them is now the fastest growing money maker for my company, reaching 89M of revenue on about 9% margin in 2 months of its existence, and growing.

It cost roughly 40k in tokens to build, 7 weeks from the first prompt to first production revenue, and was built and is being operated by 1.5 guys. Its a fantastic bang for buck for us, as previously such complex automations would have been impossible to build economically.

There will be an attempt to get a deeper cut of that value. We already see this, for instance, in Meta charging by message on Whatsapp from Oct 1, raising the costs for AI-powered chatbots delivered to consumers via whatsapp by 10-15x easily. More to come for sure.

Indirectly? They have contracted the capacity with the likes of Oracle, this is not 'debt' in accounting sense, but it is a financial commitment that will require either taking on debt, or getting more investors.

I dunno. There is a flavour of a physicist who is only ever dabbling in theory, and relies on others to experiment and verify their ideas. I don't see why that can't be usurped by LLMs. Its just match, data and Gedankenexperimente.

Sure they will. Case in point: Claude Code. I think its being vibe coded every afternoon, and indeed lots of programmers gladly take it with its various and often-changing quirks and small bugs. No biggie, it still gets the job done.

So, just like humans then?

But where they do differ is they do have an infinite stamina, and can work on problems in loops, self-correcting their own mistakes if a formal way of checking the correctness of the solution exists. Which does happen to be the case with math.

Is there any precedent for the majority of humanity to do something for the common good without being physically coerced to do it?

Imagine if you had 4 of them!

Wait what, so there is no content disarm between companies making ads, and the publishers? They can literally push whatever they want? Wild.

Edit:

the TFA answers: "Advertisers or DSPs may run HTML and JavaScript code when an ad is shown to the user." Its wild! I thought the ads are sanitized, go through a CDR of sorts, and whatever javascript is permitted is authored by ad networks, not the buyers. Sheesh. Thats just RCE.

My bet: wife had the cheap subscription. You get what you pay for!

Whats in data centers is already covered with a good deal of well designed cryptography - you can't steal a model from a data center running inference, and I don't think you can easily steal the checkpoints during the training.

I'd think the biggest risk is with the priviledged insiders who do get access to real raw weights and can handle them themselves. Those are real people handling billions of value which can be easily copied -- I am sure they are potential targets of serious blackmail, extortion and of course bribery. And it takes literally just one such person being successfully coerced to exfil a 10T-class model to leapfrog adversaries capabilities -- esp. as those models approach RSI capabilities. I think it is bound to happen given the incentives.

The fingerprints don't need to be long-time-stable to be harmful. Some companies have your stable datapoints (e.g., email) and your fingerprint. Other companies only have your fingerprint on the same day/week. Some companies have locations of edge devices and the fingerprints. And there are companies out there that will take all of those data streams, both from above board and not-so-above-board players and mix them for commercial benefit.

Ok, but where are the microtransactions and subscribtions?

What people do not have though is infinite 2.4ghz channels. I have around 500 zigbee devices over two networks, 2.4ghz wifi and I had to manually split the bandwidth to make it stable. Adding yet another network would probably be too much. I doubt I am the only person with a busy 2.4ghz range.

I keep saying: its worse than that. Companies that actually do not need to ask for consent do - because their compliance departments prefer to play it safe. My current employer genuinely does not share any data with anyone, the only stuff we process is for our own technical purposes, very well within the remit of GDPR. But year after year, a chief data privacy officer after chief data privacy officer, I lose the battle for "lets get rid of the obnoxious cookie consent banner, we dont need it". All big companies are like that.

And of course, cookies are no longer needed for invasive tracking, fingerprinting, and data disaggregation. Been this for years. But hey, bureaucracies never backtrack, so we will have the cookie consent until the thermal death of the universe.

Another cookie consent-grade success of the EU.

In my case, one of the external cameras points at where the bins normally reside. Each has a distinct colour. I wrote a simple algo that bins colours on the image coming from the camera, and, accounting for things like direct sunlight skewing the distribution, tells me which bins are currently on the street. That was pre-LLM age, these days I would have told claude to write that thing for me. Works as a charm, no batteries nor maintenance of any type. Runs on pyscript.

I think it's not generally 'much better' to use alerts. People - end users - are by now quite used to seeing things go down for a while. No biggie. But a infra oopsie can kill a company in ways a short outage won't.

And its of course not just people yolo'ing with AI. People were quite capable of causing such outages themselves just fine. Distributed, serverless systems are hard.

Huh? I am using cloud compute for 15 years now, I haven't noticed anything being 'ruined' about it. You pay some people money and they run your workloads, it mostly works, same as with local compute.

Not sure why they dramatise it so much. Want a corporate rebrand, have at it. The like changing things, I get that.

I've met dozens of ~$20M net worth people, they are just normal folks - in rich countries thats not even upper class money, thats "a nice home but thats it" kind of cash. $100M+ is "i can retire at will", while $500M are like a different species, surrounded by yes-men and usually quite damaged mentally from all the ass-kissing. So yeah, i think there is a meaningful distinction.

Except that in this case it's no longer 'collect money, move on to the next one'. It's 'collect money, become dynastically-rich, retire in 3 quarters from now'. After that, who cares.

As for the $400 a year, for years I'd cancel before the end of the subscription, ignore them for 2 weeks, and get a great offer for the next year. I haven't done it this year, though, forgot to set a reminder.

Great value anyway. One of the only news sources focused on facts and meaningful stuff. Its been my go to news source for at least 15 years. I don't work in finance.

Wow, this is very nice! I was thiniking about porting it myself this year, but glad I dont have to!

Omg. Mercenary was a game that left a huge mark on me. I played it on Commodore PLUS/4 when I was 9. The freedom to explore! The hidden elevator far outside the city. The destructible buildings. The satellite!

Surely, that can't be just one chip. Something needs to watch the watchers.