paultopia

Two slightly disconnected thoughts:

1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.

2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).

Please no. The last thing we need is mindreading AI

Yeah, isn’t this a classic kind of scam the would-be scammer situation? If you think there’s some way to buy one cheap device and somehow get around subscribing to streaming services[1], then of course you’re going to be in a market with fraudsters…

[1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?

Honestly I’m shocked this took so long. For years and years this has smelled like a massive vulnerability to me, just because so constantly I find myself getting docusigns from people I have some kind of business with, without any warning in advance that it’s coming.

At least a couple times a year I find myself calling some banker/travel organizer/administrator in charge of some speaking fee/etc./etc. and asking “hey, I have some Docusign with a weird name on it in my inbox, is that from you?”

(See also, every process within a million miles of the mortgage industry, which seems almost custom-made by fraudsters to help other fraudsters, like the whole practice of mailing out letters saying “Surprise! A servicer change happened, now you need to send a check to this totally other company you’ve never heard of! Trust us, it’s real!”)

When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them. Sorry. I don’t release apps, but I do teach at a university. I’m also accountable to the people whose money I get. Sometimes student evaluations are terrible, and it sucks to get them, but that’s a lot better than deliberately stripping information for them.

What. The author of this post ought to be ashamed of their desperate effort to avoid being called out for making shitty and/or obnoxious software by blaming the people to describe to future victims that it is shitty and/or obnoxious software. Clearly people should be required to spend their hard-earned money and scarce time on software without having access to information about how other people experienced it.

bash scripting has ergonomics?

Good rule to apply to companies too. If someone sics AI on me through their customer service line, I feel totally free to sic AI right back at them

I was thinking of this when I got to the bit about color assignments and happiness levels too!

I feel like this is a lost cause, but why do people who publish these online free book-like-substances never make the files available as a single download? Do I really need to run a scraper if I want to read this as an epub on my kindle?

Ooh thank you!

Does anyone know of any good write-ups on how to carry out this sort of task, for people who are reasonably technical (i.e., know how to code) but aren’t deep in the AI world? I feel like “customize a model based on a corpus of documents” (whether that’s “fine-tuning” or “RAG”) is a thing that everyone wants to know how to do but nobody actually explains in straightforward terms. (I pay for Gemini solely for access to NotebookLM for these purposes, but it would be nice to just be able to roll my own locally.)

Ok this might be the coolest thing I've seen all month.

You must be a Recurser, right? This is so very Recurser.

Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility.

There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.

Hah, can we do that for recipes next?

Do people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.

There are actually really interesting tech intersections here, possibly. 8 years ago I published an article[1] that ended with some speculation about the possibility of automating organized consumer action to permit, for example, people to coordinate to force companies to drop abusive terms in contracts. The co-op model is in the same family.

Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom.

[1] https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 ... sorry for the academic journal paywall

I mean, yeah, if you’re selling someone a product it’s pretty fair for them to expect, or at least hope, that it will reduce their workload and advance their personal interests…

While this strategy is fine for clueless users, I suspect that it will lead to immense frustration for the ones with clues

I'm a little puzzled by what this actually is supposed to be. The marketing material on this website suggests that it's meant to be used with a firm's Gemini or Claude API keys. ("A chat interface that reads your documents, cites verbatim, runs multi-step workflows, and drafts and edits contracts end-to-end. Plug in your own Claude or Gemini keys, and keep full control of the models you use.").

If that's true, how does it actually achieve anything with respect to client confidentiality or anything else? (For example, there's the claim "the assistant keeps full context across every conversation and every document." --- but isn't that a function of the model one uses, which is on Anthropic or Google? Ditto the claim "Documents never leave your perimeter. Compliance, residency, and privilege stay under your control." But this is only true if you're not piping them to Anthropic or Google...) Is this just a user interface?

It would be nice if these product webpages included an easy way to find documentation so that one could figure out what the product actually does. I can't find any obvious way to discern if it can be easily used with a local model running via ollama or something, for e.g.

Do people really not use it? I use my iPad cellular all the time. Constantly.

One of these days I'm going to buy one of those old MS Surfaces with cellular and stick Linux on it. But for the installation/drivers hassles I'd have already done so.

Hard disagree. The iPad is a fantastic mac replacement for many purposes. I use the iPad Pro w/ the “magic keyboard” case for working essentially whenever I’m not physically in home or office in similar ways that I do my Mac, for two really big reasons:

(1) The (11-inch) size is fantastic: you get enough screen real estate to see what you’re reading and writing, but it still fits into an arbitrarily small bag and is light enough that you can comfortably walk around all day with it. The death of the original tiny MacBook Air was a huge fail for apple

(2) CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY FOR GOD’S SAKE CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY. Yes, you can always hotspot your phone, however, that’s still not nearly so reliable as a device with its own connectivity, some providers still limit bandwidth there, plus the last thing I need is extra battery drain on my phone when I’m already stressed about it.

TBF, if Apple ever brought back the original MacBook Air with modern specs and with a cellular chip, I would just take gigantic buckets full of money and throw them in the general direction of Cupertino until I got one, like, instantly. And there are definitely still compromises—-as an academic, I’ve been meaning to just write a command line front end to zotero and fling it onto a digital ocean server or something, because its iPad app is so godawful. But on the whole, I still reach for my iPad much much much more than my MacBook, for those two killer features.

Based on the name I’d thought it was going to be another militarization project, thank god it isn’t.

Hah, what I wish Cloudflare would supply in the email space is a “prove you’re a human” except for access to my inbox

This is awesome… the code of federal regulations would be a fantastic next project.

So the next question becomes: is there anything out there that’s like an almost-index? Like something that acts like a passive index fund, except when acting like an index fund would be obviously idiotic (for e.g. if following the rules suddenly becomes “invest everything in Elon Musk and pray he doesn’t bankrupt you with a tweet), the person in charge has the discretion to say “doing that would be stupid, no?”

Uh, can someone explain this to me like I’m 5, but somehow still have money invested in index funds? It makes me sound like my invested-in-vanguard-total-market-indexes-and-fidelity-target-date-funds money is going to be mechanically dumped into Elon Stock because of FinanceWord FinanceWord FinanceWord gobbledgook FinanceWord but is that the correct reading?

Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.

I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.

I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.

This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!

I love this. I use various text editors mostly used by devs (moving back and forth between emacs and sublime on mac and textastic on ipad) for serious longform writing all the time, usually using markdown + pandoc, and it has a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.

IME the main advantages are (1) not having to fight with useless Microsoft word (and similar) behavior, bloat, bugs, etc. and (2) being able to mix in a spot of code as needed, for example compiling different sections together, doing a bit of text replacement and templating etc.

The main disadvantage is that the tooling isn't really there. I've done a stupid amount of yak shaving trying to get things like footnote folding in emacs, word count, etc., the spell checking is waaay behind, outline formats don't really work right (though they also don't really work right in word etc.)

So three cheers for anyone working on making the tooling problem better!!

> Seniority here also unfortunately often correlates with age. The best startup employee will usually be someone early in their career who doesn’t have as many responsibilities or as much need for consistency due to having more dependents. They may have fewer immediate cash flow constraints, fewer “adult responsibilities.” Kids need braces and karate classes, and if Mom is doing 996 at a ten-person company paying her peanuts, offering a crappy health care plan, promising an epic payout ten years from now, that’s a real mismatch. Startups are an extreme sport, and generally inadvisable for anybody who’s not in a safe position to speculate on their career for several years.

Oooof. Following this paragraph is a recipe for age and family status discrimination lawsuits. (A number of states prohibit both, and federal law prohibits the former above 40). Quite possibly sex discrimination lawsuits as well if a court quite plausibly concludes that someone who makes decisions this way will also be averse from hiring women of childbearing age or life stage.