It’s mind boggling that in the UK there’s a law that says:
> “A plank of wood must not be carried along a pavement. It can only be moved if it is being unloaded from a vehicle or taken into a building.”
But big tech cannot be regulated at all.
We used to regulate any minor thing that was annoying enough, but a whole industry spying and prying on the whole population is fine.
Apple Music has a dedicated button to add a song to favourites, which I use. When I plug my phone in my car I can then say “play my favourites” and it plays it.
Until I’ve upgraded to iOS 27 and after saying “play my favourites” the phone responds now with “playing FAMILY favourites” (no idea what that means) and plays some random songs.
Incredibly annoying, great example of trying to be too clever for its own good.
Is it that different from members of the public asking cops what intentions they have using Flock?
Seems like everyone is concerned about privacy, the only difference is that the police is more organised and has more leverage to protect themselves vs (often) fragmented public.
I support the petition to draft a letter hinting a possible concert that should be considered to be put forward for nomination to be included in the backlog of things we might think of doing should we have suddenly run of things to do urgently.
No, sorry, I take that back: I strongly support it!
It’s because nobody gives a fluff anymore, seemingly. It used to feel like products were built by people who use them and take pride in them, but for a last few years it’s the opposite. Google bought Fitbit and the app started becoming less intuitive and readable. It’s continues enshitification where the goal of products is to capture market and extract profits first, rather than solve user problems. Maybe some products got too big and that causes a disconnect, but if feels like there’s too much of that to explain it this way.
For example all modal windows on iOS have a close button on the right, except the weather app that has a close on the left.
The narrative is being set for open weights to be banned globally, unless they are so restricted that they cannot possibly compete with us companies products and affects their bottom lines.
That’s assuming nothing else stops them from deploying more capable models. What if they’ve got scaling issues and simply cannot deliver anything better? Saying that would be disastrous, saying instead “we’re choosing not to deliver” doesn’t trigger investors panic.
27 got the slider so I though: finally I can turn it off even more. Turns out the max value of the slider is what toggling “less Liquid Glass please” was already doing in 26.
But at the same time they modified it and now it somehow looks eee worse? I don’t know whst they did but it’s just looking less readable, at least in dark mode.
And the worse thing about LG is the floating bottom nav bar that keeps shrinking to an icon when you least expect it, moving all elements.
Elon also advocated for that when he launched grok. The generous interpretation of this is that Elon cares about humanity, the more likely one is that desperately needed time to catch up with competitors (who were all ahead), so it would be great for him if everyone else paused.
The funny thing is that with $40T of public dept US is basically taking money from other countries (in exchange for a pice of paper saying IOU) and then using that money to force these countries to do what’s in US best interests (real or perceived).
And the bigger that pile of debt is the more every government is invested in us not going bankrupt, hence the leverage just gets stronger.
US is basically a private equity typo of global power - getting others to lend them a knife it stabs them in the back.
Saying sorry means admitting guilt.
If there’s guilt there some level of harm.
If there’s harm you can be sued.
Avoiding being sued due to causing harm usually means increased costs, because you now need to take care you didn’t take before.
Higher cost means you’re less competitive.
Being less competitive makes you less attractive investment target.
So as always it’s all about money.
Saying sorry == lower share price.
I find it particularly bad at writing test comments, I usually start fixing bugs by adding regression tests and Opus tend to put story into comments for these, including “but it fails because…” followed by bug description including line numbers and call chains. It just lives to narrate everything
It’s not perfect, it has shortcomings, it sometimes produces bogus outputs. All of that is fine for a tool, it’s not fine when it pretends it’s a conscious being, because errors start to feel like lies and it becomes a bit too personal.
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day.
Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
To be fair it’s also worth noting that it’s much easier to find a buggy edge case with existing code than it is to write bug free code that doesn’t have any edge cases at all. It’s so much easier to read some concrete logic and find holes in it, than it is to start from nothing and end up with perfection. It’s true both for humans and agents, but agents are better are validating correctness.
There’s been infinitely times where I was stuck at some problem and every single solution was complex, messy, over-engineered and somehow wrong, until I went on a walk or moved to a different issue and suddenly it would hit me that I was looking at it all wrong, and there’s a simple solution there but my tunnel vision didn’t let me see it.
LLM rob you of that, everything is instant, there’s no time to reflect, there’s no time to realise it’s a dead end, or that it won’t work with the next problem on your todo list.
Anthropic Needs to have the most intelligent and scary agents, so if OpenAI does something bad they need to prove their models can do even worse. Without that the whole valuation collapses. There’ll be more “our model outhacks others” for the next hype cycle.
Is it "anti-LLM" or is it anti "here's some code I don't understand that a machine generated for me kthxbye"?
Code is not just code, it's also liability and trust.
A bit of good old “it’s really good idea, I love it, great effort … BUT”
Mixed with “if kids can’t get semi dangerous drugs from the back of my van then they will be forced to buy from even shadier, more dangerous dark web van”