everforward

Their infringement is different, and would really be a trademark issue if we hadn’t just invented the idea of copyrighting a character separately from the story they are a part of in the ‘30s (they are not individually copyrightable under the original text).

There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.

It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.

I think you’re misunderstanding me; I’m not saying places will use an LLM instead (whether cloud-based or on-premise).

I’m talking about them training their own models with a much more specific purpose.

You brought up choosing a menu option in a UI. Jev is really good at something like “find the menu option that best fits the users prompt”. That’s general, and requires a big complicated model.

Companies are usually more interested in something less variable. Ie the menu option they’re looking for is fixed. “Take an arbitrary website and find the Login button”. That’s a _way_ simpler model, and well within the abilities of many large companies to train.

You only need to pay Jev if there are so many variables the model basically has to be general.

Eg classifiers are a separate thing from LLMs and are literally only capable of structured output. It will output one of the X options it was trained to recognize.

I think some of this is that the Venn diagram of people who like AI and the people who like machine learning isn’t a circle. There’s a lot of “intelligences” out there that aren’t an LLM or decision model.

I suspect they’re ignoring it because there isn’t money in it.

Jev is super cool, and it’s super cool that it can handle novel categorization. Most organizations aren’t spending the big bucks on novel classification, though. They’re doing the same thing a billion times, which means Jev has to compete with having a custom model built and doing your own inference.

It’s very hard to build something generic like Jev, but it’s fairly manageable to build something more specific that handles a single kind of task. Especially at the scale where OpenAI would care about your attention.

I don’t really understand neural networks and I managed to train one to do hand gesture recognition on an old Leap Motion. It’s a pretty limited domain, but it trains on the CPU of my decade old laptop in under 3 minutes. The accuracy is quite good too, especially when you discount errors from the Leap (like misidentifying which finger is extended).

It almost definitely won’t. I don’t think I can ever recall a corporate contract getting cancelled by a vendor because of a rogue employee.

They only ever get cancelled over money

Lately I’ve been starting to wonder if the world has changed in a way where long term planning doesn’t work anymore. If information and the reaction to it propagates so quickly that the world changes faster than your plans can adapt.

A long term plan for a company is _at least_ a decade. If your plan ended today, it started in 2016 so it has had to survive COVID, inflationary periods, several trade wars, the rise of AI and now the side effects of the war in Iran.

If your long term plan has to adapt to those in real time, is it even a long term plan? Or is it really a series of long term plans cut so short they became short term plans? I can see companies adapting to just drop the long term premise entirely.

I agree about the rationalization, I tried to imply that with air quotes.

> municipalities paying the full cost of policing

Since we're talking realpolitik, this will never happen. In a first principles sense, it won't because it's unpredictable at the locality level (how do you set tax rates for FY27 without knowing what you'll pay out for this?). In a realpolitik sense, it won't because a) people don't like their taxes going up and would rather bank on it not happening to them, and b) the police will throw a shit fit and refuse to work when they realize they have to consider property damage while doing their jobs, and that the public will be _pissed_ if they crash a cruiser into a parked car while LARPing John Rambo.

> Ultimately we need out of touch voters to realize that unaccountable government can easily turn its sights on them, as well.

Good luck and godspeed. The latest stats say 56% of US adults read at or below a 6th grade level, so say it slow and in monosyllabic words lol

Not in a criminal court, or really anything where the government is the counterparty. Philosophically it’s because those things are part of your “civic duty” as a citizen like taxes. Realistically it’s because the demographics of people getting the money would be unpalatable to the public. Recidivism is high, some large portion of it would go to people with prior convictions.

The absurd end of this spectrum is what happens when police damage a random persons property while chasing a suspect. They’re generally not liable for it, however most homeowners insurance won’t cover it.

I remember an early GoFundMe from a lady that went to work and a guy broke into her house and had a shootout with the police. She came home to being homeless (house got condemned because plumbing, gas, etc is bullet-riddled), and it’s a really disconcerting story to hear. I don’t recall if the city settled to quiet the story down or not.

Yes, this kind of thing happens a lot. The incentives are misaligned with the goal to a degree where you almost wonder if it’s intentional.

This happens a lot because at the individual level, it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to take the deal. The prosecutor wants $2,000 and 0 jail time and it all goes away. If you don’t take the deal, even assuming you win in the end, it will probably cost you way more than $2,000 and however long the probation check ins take. You will recover neither your time, nor the money you spent on lawyers/transportation/days off/etc.

At the macro level it happens because prosecutors get judged on their conviction/case closure rate, because we implicitly assume they found the right person. Browbeating people into accepting token punishments that technically close out the case counts for the metrics voters actually watch.

If I might lean a little conspiratorial for a moment, it also behooves the prosecutors office to flood the defense attorneys with cases. People will vote to raise the prosecutors funding to deal with criminals, no one will vote to raise defense attorney funding. Last I saw the average prosecutors office gets something around double the funding the defense gets.

It got so bad in some city in Oregon there was (is, really), a near constitutional crisis because the city got trapped between the provisions of the 6th amendment. Defense attorneys were so flooded they said they couldn’t take any new cases. The 6th amendment says the accused has a right to counsel, which is an issue. It also says they have a right to a speedy trial. The city was going to have to allocate money to the defense and get them lawyers quick, or drop a bunch of cases.

That never happened, the judge basically just said “Nuh uh” and I believe threatened the defense office with sanctions if they didn’t just assign the cases to lawyers who were already saying they had more cases than they could imagine.

I’m a little shocked we haven’t seen a huge wave of successful “ineffective assistance of counsel” appeals. Pointing to a signed, public statement your lawyer was overworked before you even talked to them seems like a decent starting point.

This doesn’t particularly make sense to me, can someone help elucidate why this would impact Chinese stocks more than an equivalent company in different geography/government?

Is this related to the US govt banning internal DeepSeek use? A currency thing and prices are USD denominated? Chinese AI stocks were used to hedge and now aren’t?

I don’t see a purported reason, and it makes me feel like the article doesn’t want me to ask that.

H100s are renting out at a few dollars per hour. An awful lot of people could run them if they wanted.

OpenRouter's DeepSeek provider is basically this. Instead of renting H100's for dollars per hour, you pay someone that arbitrages the $/hr to $/token conversion because you can't actually saturate an H100 for hours. It's still effectively the same as running it yourself because of the ability to change providers to someone else arbitraging the same thing, and that there's always the escape hatch of switching to actually renting the H100s yourself.

When it solves your problem. I don’t think it makes sense to globally qualify a model as “good enough” any more than it does with programming languages. Python is good enough for a web app, but not for an OS kernel.

To your point, I think we’re past the hump on the Pareto distribution. The models are good enough for most things, and the rate they’re improving at the things they’re bad at is dropping. The odds a new model is good at something the old one was bad it is okay, the odds it’s something you care about is dropping. It makes a lot of sense to discriminate on price rather than features in that environment.

I’ve never heard anyone say raw inference was unprofitable. It wouldn’t even make sense, I can’t see a rug pull for renting out commodity GPUs.

People are saying _training + inference_ is unprofitable (I don’t have a dog in the race and don’t really care either way). That’s a lot of GPUs and salaries that aren’t generating revenue at any moment.

Personally, I would guess Anthropic and OAI are profitable. I just suspect that they’re a pretty normal level of profitable and not the absurd, near-alchemical “can turn dirt into gold” level of profitable their valuation seems to have priced in.

I actually wouldn’t have been shocked if other countries had helped, and the powers that be may regret enforcing their sovereignty here.

Countries used to enforce this at their borders (for foreign information) because it largely worked. They couldn’t stop 100% of the copies of the book, but they could stop there being enough copies for it to be part of the cultural zeitgeist (most of the time).

Not anymore. The companies don’t have a local HQ to harass, and the information doesn’t flow through infrastructure the government owns. They’ve pretty much entirely lost the ability to control the flow of information, and they’ve largely lost the ability to control its direction either with the fall of major news outlets.

I don’t think they have the support for a China-style great firewall, but I’m not British so maybe I’m wrong.

I think it’s a good thing information is set free, but I see why they tried it. It’s the only politically tenable way they had to try to keep that control.

This lady appears to have been following the process. She got picked up when she showed up for an ICE appointment.

I do also think it’s not as simple as “they should follow the process”. A lot of those people are refugees _directly because of the US_. We backed their governments military dictatorship in the Face of a democratic coup, resulting in years of brutal reprisals by security forces, eventually leading to El Salvador being the absolute clusterfuck it currently is.

The same vague story applies to several South and Central American countries.

We owe those people. It was a terrible thing to do, and has caused decades of suffering. I’m not sure if the solution is citizenship, but I don’t think we can just tell them to go fix it themselves.

> not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities.

Those are the parts the LLM is bad at. The 1% of stuff that was interesting was worth looking forward to.

I’m unconvinced about architecture mattering much. I used to think that, but these days I’m leaning towards it being the product of a problem we don’t have anymore. Architecture used to be dangerous and time-consuming to redo. If an AI can do that safely for $100 or $1000 in tokens (one day), that ROI is maybe negative

The model is the part that’s hard to replicate, and it can be torrented.

No one has managed to prevent pirates paying $10/month for seed boxes, and likewise they’re unlikely to succeed at preventing people renting minutes on an H200 located in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care about open models.

A bunch of tiny fly-by-night companies will bundle them with some management software into a subscription, and they’ll be too tiny and numerous to be worth dealing with when it takes an hour to set them back up.

Piracy in the torrenting sense hasn’t really ever come back, although it is as popular as ever if you count bootleg YouTube re-uploads, ripping music from YouTube, and the other non-traditional forms.

Last I looked, the tax rates required weren’t insanely high if you accepted fixing it over a hundred years or so.

I suspect you’re right though. My fear is that systemic failure will happen too quickly for a reaction to the initial worsening. I worry we’re nearing a precipice where our debt will be unaffordable if our credit gets downgraded a couple decades in the future.

I looked and will give it a try, but haven’t had a chance yet because life.

I had debated building something like this, and I really want to see what the other fork in the path looks like.

One of the core tenants of mine is to not impose a workflow or set of tooling on the user. I specifically opted not to go with k8s because access to local files is going to be a pain, and I think people will still expect that. There’s all sorts of “I need this binary that’s not in APT”, or “you need this cert to test, and we can’t commit it” stumbling blocks.

Yours feels like it’s pushing me into an unfamiliar workflow, but opinionated tools are often better so it’s worth a try.

My only direct criticism is that I think k8s is a bad way to go for this (but is probably what people expect). For personal use, k8s is more than I want to deal with. For work use, I suspect lambdas would be cheaper and avoid a ton of maintenance junk. We tend to think of agents as a persistent process, but they’re sort of not. They’re a stateless process that is effectively dead until a new message comes in, let it be dead until something else comes down the pipe.

I know. I’ve been poking at just writing a middleware for my ACP proxy that transparently rewrites them to ./ but they’re often piped to something that expects an absolute path.

Maybe that’ll be my weekend project, I’m sure no one has ever been mad to spend a weekend trying to parse bash.

Pi notably ships without MCP support (or it did, I can't remember if they're adding it to Pi main or just the durable one). From a vanilla Pi perspective, I'm pretty sure but not positive that it can't. It would have to install an MCP plugin, and you would have to re-launch Pi to load that plugin.

It does have native tools, but they're also in plugins that aren't hot-reloaded. The LLM would have to write the tool, you close Pi and re-open it before it was available.

> Would you consider that a gap in security posturing?

Honestly, I think trying to secure the harness is a lost cause for the same reasons SELinux never really took off. They solve a real problem in a way so painful people would rather just live dangerously.

I actually wrote a thing to implement my security posture https://github.com/SethCurry/abyss TLDR it pretends to be an ACP agent, but runs the agent inside Docker (with optional bind mounts) and proxies the ACP connection into the container.

I'm also tinkering with WASM-based plugins in the ACP proxy to add some additional security and compliance posturing at the protocol layer (ie agnostic to what the underlying agent is). E.g. I slapped together a plugin that will automatically cancel a prompt mid-turn if an OpenRouter API token shows up in a) the prompt, b) agent output/thinking, c) agent tool calls. ([1], [2], [3]). The grand vision is slapping centralized management on that so security and compliance teams get a "firewall" of sorts to prevent leaking secrets, filter bash commands, censor PII, yada, yada.

1. Screenshot of it blocking something in Zed https://abyss.scurry.io/docs/guides/what-is-abyss/#i-am-not-... (I need to add buffering so it doesn't output any of the key)

2. Implementation of ^ https://github.com/SethCurry/abyss/blob/main/plugins/secrets...

3. Plugin architecture docs https://abyss.scurry.io/docs/guides/04-plugins/02-developing...

> No daemon needed for that. Like, at all.

There is, for the same reasons that people use screen or tmux (which some people do use for this). If I were queueing a prompt I expected to take hours to finish, it would be nice to be able to run it another computer so I don't have to worry about closing my laptop lid or the battery dying.

It's not world-changing, but I have had agents do `grep -r /` commands before and it would have been nice to be able to detach and let it run rather than having to kill it because I have to leave before it'll actually finish (WSL is sooo slow on that). It would be better if the agent did a better grep, but sometimes I'd rather wait 20 minutes than spend 7 minutes setting it all back up again.

Thats wild to me. When I lived in an apartment I couldn’t get out the door without having the crazy cat lady telling me her new smoking spot the cameras couldn’t see (she wanted to smoke on the rooftop). It was a riot, that place had some characters.

The suburbs were soul sucking to me, the people were largely insufferable. I knew my neighbors, but hated them because 90% of our conversations were some form of “I noticed your grass wasn’t cut this week” or “your cans sat on the curb until the morning”. There were some good ones, but like me they mostly hid in their back yard to avoid the Karen’s.

It does. It eventually sinks in that no one is watching nearly as much as you think, and are for the most part disinterested in what you’re doing. Not in a judgey way, but in the sense that nobody saw you do that slightly weird thing, and even if they did they’re still more interested in how fat the pigeon outside is than anything you do.

There’s two answers, depending on your personal cynicism.

The optimistic version is that the new zeitgeist is deeply recursive agents writing _huge_ swaths of code at once. The human side seems very asynchronous. You do a lot of queueing something that the agents churn on for an hour, so being able to detach/reattach would make sense.

The cynical version is everyone is realizing that nobody will pay for a harness, so they’re pivoting to a client-server model to try to PaaS-ify them. If they haven’t announced it already, they’ll have an OpenCode Cloud within the next quarter or two.

We’ll see how that goes. I’m not holding my breath that these will thrive as long as infrastructure teams exist. Agents are too simple from an infra perspective, and we’re seeing frameworks to make them stateless pop up already.

Unless I’m out of the loop, Pi can self modify in the sense that plugins are just code it can edit. It doesn’t live reload that I’m aware of.

Pi’s whole UI is customizable, so a lot of people were having their agents build their own interfaces.

The distinction is probably irrelevant for most people. I secure the whole thing in a container, because I lack the willpower to audit a bajillion lines of LLM code just inside the harness.

At that point he may be able to sue the state to fix it (or have insurance do it).

And if it’s your fence you can build one of the ones that’s cheap and easy to replace. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could put chain link back up after some straightening. You could use the downed tree to fix the fence if it was split log (not so good at keeping dogs in though)

I’m kind of surprised at the overlap in “has progress bar” and “is expected to take a few seconds max”.

I’ve never even debated it for files under hundreds of megs. It’ll show up soon, if I care I’ll do an ls in a loop to look at file sizes. Just log where the file is.

Eh, sort of. There are a ton of loopholes and practically no enforcement, but there are theoretically regulations.

I could go buy a car in cash today with 0 paperwork. It only has to be titled and registered if I drive it on public roads. Even that’s like 90% a technicality. I drove a couple thousand miles on tags that were 6 years out of date (didn’t drive it but moved and had to move it).

Most states also let you drive on dealer plates for 30 days or so. Steve Jobs notoriously got a new car every month so he never had to have real plates.

If the presumed goal is “acquire a car and do bad things with it immediately”, then no, there’s no regulation preventing that. You can buy a car off Craigslist and play bumper cars on the highway 5 minutes later without ever talking to the government or proving anything.

Basically the entirety of car regulation is to protect normal folk from normal problems, not preventing the insane from doing insane things.

It does apply to all HTML dev, my point is more the idea that more features means more changes and more incompatible versions (and thus more strife).

HTML is actually shockingly backwards compatible. I very rarely see pages so old they won’t render. The main exception is basically exactly what I’m talking about: Flash and ActiveX, that had to be abandoned for security (and some poorly advised iframe stuff).

> Most web dev frameworks exist in large part to solve the problem of templating.

This might be an agree to disagree area. Most web dev frameworks I’ve seen exist to make dealing with state easier. They do templating because you have to put the state somewhere, but the magic is all in the state.

There are some that only do templating, but they’re pretty rare. Hugo or Jekyll come to mind, though “web dev framework” is probably overselling them.

There are also web components, which sound vaguely like what you’re talking about. They’re not crazy popular, but they exist and work. The security boundaries make it kind of a nightmare, I remember having to do something weird to inject Tailwind into them because they’re isolated from global CSS. The kind of things you have to do when securing templates at runtime instead of compile time.

On the flip side, I don’t understand why you think AI is special. I do hear you, but that’s not special to AI and it sounds to me like a social panic.

Look at microplastics. They’re in the entire food chain; their “far fetched scenario” is we accidentally sterilize every chordate on the planet, and we die because there’s no food.

Or global warming. The entire planet drowns, dehydrates, overheats or freezes.

Or COVID vaccines, this is more or less the same tautology as people that refused vaccines. They didn’t do enough to detect and prevent far fetched scenarios, people didn’t want to take the vaccine.

I’m not saying some regulation wouldn’t be good (though I suspect the aspects we want to regulate differ). I’m just saying it falls into a broad category of “stuff we should deal with, but aren’t” and it’s not even really at the top of the list. We have some things already in motion we need to deal with that overrule things that we aren’t even sure will ever happen. It’s a hypothetical existential risk in a world with extant risks we are ignoring.