quicklywilliam

Well, at least the name is honest

https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e842...

“The vast majority of this year's net loss, $72 billion, resulted from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments the company issued to raise funding, the Journal report said.”

Interesting, would love to know the details of this.

There are three kinds of people:

- those who needlessly reduce things to binaries

- those who articulate nuanced positions that tend to confuse and bore people

- those who lose the plot entirely by making self-referential meta-points

By the way, I've built my own system with AI to manage my todos. So even though I probably won't use yours in the sense of paying for your service, you have some ideas and themes in here that are really thoughtful and I could see working into my flow.

I really appreciate you sharing this!

I love that you made this, and that you told your story about why. Clearly a lot of thought went into it, both leading up to and during its construction. Thank you!

Like others, I'm skeptical about the business model. That's not really a knock on you (and I wish you the best of luck), but rather with the whole ecosystem of these kinds of apps. There are three big problems:

- Everyone and their aunt is trying to sell me monthly subscriptions for a few bucks. These add up, both in terms of $ and cognitive overhead (yet another subscription I need to remember to cancel if I stop using it...)

- I don't own this system, I'm just renting it. This is a trade-off I'm less and less willing to make for a whole host of reasons including my ability to vibe code my own thing, open source, enshitification (or, perhaps more likely, you deciding to abandon this project in the future) etc

- All the usual concerns about data security and privacy are heightened right now in this era of super-capable hacking agents and super-creepy AI companies

As a user of things, vibecoding is the most exciting thing about AI. I can make anything I want to use, built exactly as I please. As a maker of things, vibecoding is the most damning thing about AI. Anyone can re-make anything I've made, built exactly as they please.

I found the text to be the best part

personally I think the most valuable part is OP's post about their history with task management, what has worked and how they are using AI.

maybe a thread that is just these types of narratives?

Not only are the models and compute unavailable to the public, they are unavailable to anyone besides the labs, including the government. We better hope the furthermost tip of the jagged frontier stays in purely theoretical mathematics, because if it strays into the physical world then we may find ourselves in a situation where the power of the labs rivals the governments supposedly overseeing them.

The article is very dismissive of recent mathematical proofs. It mixes together ethical problems (plagiarism, "strip mining" proofs) with capability problems (proofs not being novel, overstating capabilities). Again, it's fair to be skeptical of what the companies themselves are saying (and why). But from what I've read, many mathematicians are taking AI quite seriously. I've recently read several thoughtful essays from credible folks who are calling for dramatic changes to the field in response. For example: https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/9/13/a-beginning-for-ma...

The article is also dismissive of the Hugging Face incident and other hacking incidents. This one is trickier, because we are more reliant on what the companies have released to piece together what happened. The METR report is probably the closest thing we have right now. Here again, I think the issue is that a lot of coverage blends the ethical issues (holding AI companies responsible for what their bots do) with capability issues (whether AI is or will be capable of developing novel and dangerous attacks).

Lots of anti-AI takes seem to fall prey to the moralistic fallacy (ie because something shouldn’t be, thinking it isn’t). I’m very skeptical of the claims AI companies make, their motives, and whether their impact will be anything positive. But I am pretty tired of takes like this that are so reflexively skeptical of anything AI that they carelessly dismiss claims about the dangers and real impacts of AI that are happening.

(And to be clear: I’m not talking about being skeptical of fantastic claims about things that have not happened- ie an AI takeover, runaway super-intelligence, etc.)

Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.

This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).

Thanks for writing!

Welp, here’s a way to make sure your content stays out of training sets

Better comparison IMHO is nuclear energy. Lots of potential for good, lots of problems. Managed by an insular, engineer-dominated industry who completely lost touch with and trust from the public. Public got the last word, industry suffered a 40 year ice age.

Ok, but do you really think this would have happened if OpenAI had a goal of never allowing an agent to do something like this? If a company making any extremely volatile explosives failed to take precautions and blew up a factory, shouldn’t we focus on their negligence?

Perhaps we might ALSO decide that this new explosive is so dangerous it needs specialized laws to protect the public, but that would seem premature if all available evidence indicated that the explosion would not have occurred if the company had taken the most basic precautions.

I see it as analogous to companies building fiber in the public ROW during the last big infrastructure bubble. Under the Telecoms Act, these companies had to allow competitors to use their fiber at a fair price.

Similarly, AI companies should be required to allow distillation at a fair price. Fair Use doesn’t make sense as a social contract if it only cuts one way!

It’s not different from any other tool. If you use a dangerous tool recklessly, you should be liable for the damages. That means holding OpenAI liable for HuggingFace hack because they ran the tests, and the same goes if someone did something similar with GLM.

Of course in cases of negligence a tool maker could also be held partially liable. That’s a matter courts can decide. The main point is we shouldn’t jump to making special laws around the development of LLMs. The starting place should be enforcement of existing liability laws. New laws take time and will be heavily influenced by AI companies seeking a regulatory moat for their business. Moreover, it is a distraction from the illicit behavior that is already going unchecked.

My takeaway: We should be not be concerned about AI bots' "goals", we should be concerned about the goals of the companies making them. Powerful but not sentient technology in the hands of reckless accelerationists is a plenty dangerous enough thing.

Just in time for midterms.

Want to be clear that this is not me endorsing the feature. It's clear Apple did think about the privacy/social implications of the design, but it's also clear to me that there are real and perceived problems with having automatic conversation notes. Real differences from written notes: - It was recorded and transcribed by a machine, not a human - There are time stamps and locations - You can't tell someone is using this feature (it is obvious when someone is writing notes during a conversation)

As far as perceptions goes, it feels very tone deaf of Apple to launch this feature in this way at this time. Read the fucking room guys.

Details the design and architecture of Apple Watch's new "Audio Intelligence" features. In particular, regarding Siri Recap which has been discussed elsewhere:

*How Siri Recap respects those around you* By design, Siri Recap does not create a recording, does not produce a verbatim transcript, and does not identify and attribute speakers. The output is a brief, high-level summary, comparable to notes a person might write after a conversation. There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.

Maybe this will be true legally (we wont really know until it is tested in court), but I think there's a huge difference in practice.

Siri Recap is an electronic record of a conversation that includes timestamps. Imagine for example that during a scheduled meeting with my boss, he threatens to fire me for not doing something illegal. I now have strong evidence that this was said (even if it cant be officially attributed to him) during the time I was in a meeting with him. Not saying this will hold up in court, but it certainly is more damning that having written notes (not to mention the fact that my boss probably wouldn't say this when I am taking written notes).

Agree with this framing, but we may find out that the answer is somewhere in the middle. Personally I think it is extremely unlikely that this is straight plagiarism in the sense of the model simply regurgitating training data from prior work by Tristan, but it is very plausible that his work (and others’) was foundational to the breakthrough. What is unfortunate is that the stakes are so high (and no I don’t mean $1M) and the timeline is so compressed.

I expect a lot more of this kind of drama in the near future.

The fact that this link is a Reddit thread should probably be taken as evidence that we don't have a clear picture of what happened yet, and speculation is rampant.

IMHO a blacklist would have been better than a whitelist

I think it’s important not to let AI companies control the framing here. This is anti-competitive behavior, plain and simple. The fact that xAI/Musk routinely break the law simply provides the fig leaf.

Distillation is a threat to frontier model companies, but that doesn’t make it dangerous or wrong. OpenAI can (and likely will) use the same logic to ban you from using open source harnesses.

We do

Tired.

This is what I did, tho I’m 41

The used EV market is a perfect storm of two factors. First, used EVs are finally reaching a price point where price-sensitive shoppers will consider them. Second, gas prices are making EVs look ever more attractive to those shoppers.

Even though this dynamic may not last, I think this is a really positive thing. Since their inception, EVs have been seen as a luxury item for tech elites. This is finally changing. More and more people start to see EVs as a good way to save money. This change will do far more for adoption than the tax credits we lost.

Long live the EV shit box!