CEO & Co-Founder of KangarooBox; We make IT simple!
I love music, my Kids & Wife, and my computers but not necessarily in that order. An old skateboarder, I now go to soccer games and sometimes get to sing in an 80's band.
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rnhurt; my proof: https://keybase.io/rnhurt/sigs/yf-A2iAWYxGJxrPupmyfInVChpIw_5GWppftF581UVI ]
All of this secret back and forth with pricing and models and such is really giving me the willies. I'm very much not on the AI bandwagon but I can see that it has it's uses. However, I'm starting to think that maybe it's all just a smokescreen to allow these big companies to do something more ... nefarious.
Are they just playing with parameters or are they doing something more? Is this really like a JVM, where there are thousands of knobs to turn and buttons to push and is' nearly impossible to make the right choice? Are they capturing our data and thoughts and dreams only to turn them back on us in the future?
I think every day that passes causes me to trust "AI", and the companies behind it, less and less.
I haven't upgraded to WiFi 5 yet and it looks like being cheap|lazy is paying off.
Seriously though, this is some pretty interesting|scary stuff. This new technique doesn't require any modifications to the WiFi network at all and can even be done without authenticating. It looks like someone could just sit outside the building and track people's movement through the walls.
I can see AI being a problem and a solution in this case. My view is that most "corporate" coding is not developer bound but PM bound. So, AI doesn't really accelerate development that much. However, in something like the Linux kernel we have lots of people working on lots of little things all over the place and I can see AI allowing a lot more code to be written.
Of course, the downside is that the maintainers have to wade through all the code and not all of it is going to be great stuff. In fact, the easier it is to generate the code the worse the quality will be, I think. So, just like everything else, this is a double edged sword.
“There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,”
I've heard this before in previous corporate jobs and the data ALWAYS ends up being used somewhere else. Usually in job performance reviews or tax documents about new vs maintenance work.
I think that an eventual consequence of using AI is that more and more of these things will happen. Like you, I'm experienced enough to know that you separate environments completely; nothing shared. This is wisdom and something AI will never obtain. The up-and-coming programmers and engineers using AI for everything will never learn these lessons because they won't be exposed to the problems or really forced to think about these outcomes.
>On that topic, it’s always surprised me just how little Apple invest into their enterprise / business backend services. Everything about the way they integrate Macs into businesses is awkward. Apple could make so much money there if they wanted to. It’s a real missed opportunity.
Agreed! My $DAYJOB is an Apple shop and the Apple "Business" offerings are horrible. No support for a proper business developer account is annoying. A single human is responsible for this and when that human moves to a different company or role then you have to reassign the account to a different human. Configuring SSO is another trap. You have to capture a domain to add SSO but after you do that your users can't access the Apple App Store (for some reason).
There are so many places that Apple could improve their "Business" business, but they seem hell bent on not doing that. Maybe Mr. Ternus will address this issue.
I was recently at a "town hall" meeting in my community and spoke with a older woman about Flock cameras. Initially she was not concerned about it and was generally in favor of the idea.
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
Actually, that won’t work. The flock cameras don’t only rely on license plate information. They use “AI” to determine the make model and color of your car as well as any outstanding features, such as bumper stickers or roof racks.
I just saw this article on BlueSky and thought it reflected my ideology quite well. My frustration is that everyone around me seems to be going bonkers for AI and I'm just staring, wide eyed into the abyss. I feel so out of place because while I see the value as a tool I do not want it to take over all of my coding activities. I write code because I really like writing code. I do not want to become a manager and instruct others all day long. Is that weird?
I recently augmented some software that I support using Claude and it was ... fine. I used plan mode just like the author and reviewed everything, and it worked. But I didn't feel accomplished. The work got done but I don't feel like I gained any knowledge that could be applied to future tasks. Well, beyond the ability to tell Claude what to do, that is.
The whole thing makes me feel like a manager, a role that I've steadfastly resisted my whole career. Maybe the people around me really want to be managers and tell others what to do. Maybe I'm the weird one for wanting to know how the computer works, what the CPU is actually doing, and learning new things.
I think this is a pretty insightful article on how AI is working inside AWS. And I feel like this same attitude is relevant for other AI "providers" as well. The facts seem pretty slim on how effective AI is at replacing engineers. In fact, it feels like the exact opposite is happening.
> If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office.
This is a really good point. At one point in my career I lived close enough to the office that I could ride my bike to work. It was actually pretty nice to work that close to home and I didn't really mind going into the office.
As a healthcare company, we are currently going through the process of how to allow on-device AI activity while reducing the associated risk. I really like the idea of giving the agent a specific identity instead of globbing onto the credentials of the person operating it. I think I would like to go further and splitting the agent out onto its own hardware complete separate from the developer. Sounds extreme but MacMini devices are pretty cheap and fairly capable.
I really wish that Keybase would have taken off. I think it was a great balance between verification and ease of use. Again, Keybase didn't prevent someone from impersonating another, it just raised the cost. And sometimes that's enough.
Thank you for reminding me of Y2K! It's the perfect example of what happens when you forget about the people keeping things together.
My team and I worked really hard for several years to make sure that Y2K didn't have any effect, or at least a dramatically downsized one. It worked but I did hear from several people that they were annoyed that we spent so much money, time, and resources on something that turned out to be "not that big of a deal". Arrrgggghh!!
Unfortunately, you cannot hide by obscuring your license plate. The ALPR system recognizes vehicles by type, color, and any outstanding features (bumper stickers, trailers, etc.) So, even if you removed your license plate completely they would still be able to track your car as a blue, 1999 Toyota Camry, with a "I love Peaches" sticker in the back window.
I've known this for quite a while and have advocated for removing 3rd party A/V stuff from our fleet of macOS devices. Unfortunately, A/V software is listed as "required" from our SOC2 auditors and convincing them otherwise is not worth the effort. I wish NIST would recognize that OS vendor A/V is generally enough and to not worry about the 3rd party stuff.
I think this is an excellent move and the sign of a mature organization. I can hardly imagine the confusion and strife that would arise from the sudden termination of Linus' git repo.
I think the whole point of this was to see if the "agents" could act like a real human and real humans use Gmail much more frequently than sendmail. Sage even commented that they had update their prompt to tell the agents to not send email and not just remove the Gmail component for fear that the agent would just open it's own Gmail (or Y! mail, etc.) account and send mail on it's own.
I love music, my Kids & Wife, and my computers but not necessarily in that order. An old skateboarder, I now go to soccer games and sometimes get to sing in an 80's band.
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rnhurt; my proof: https://keybase.io/rnhurt/sigs/yf-A2iAWYxGJxrPupmyfInVChpIw_5GWppftF581UVI ]