I was appalled when renewing my car this year that I now need a Texas by Texas account (https://www.texas.gov/texas-by-texas/), which wants... a social security number because why?!?!
More than that. Who cares if the state can read your chats/etc, when you believe you aren't the kind of people the state wants to persecute. Why deny the state ever more tools to go after people, as long as you think it's going to use them against the people you want it to go after.
Yes I found this very hard to follow. I appreciate expressing ideas in math like E_a[X] as much as the next guy, but there is no definition or even description of what the heck E or E_a or Var(x) even mean, so how is anyone supposed to understand the reasoning here? All I get from this is a claim that experienced latency is different than the mean, which sounds important, but I still have no intuition as to why this is. Which is sad, because Booker's blog is often deeply amazing.
This comment casts aspersions while making zero specific claims of wrongdoing. If you have something specific to say that goes beyond the vibes of "everything and everyone is corrupt and evil," that would at least be worth hearing.
This is great news. I wish they were keeping their other models updated. With Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.7 already available on OpenRouter, bedrock is just not keeping up at all.
FWIW, my team in AWS had help from UI designers who were cool people that impressed me with their work. We definitely had to push through some needless organizational friction, e.g., they were in a different org and frequently got left out of meetings, whereas we should really have been acting as one team. I don't think we saw it as everyone for themselves, we really tried to make it work and had a good, trusting relationship.
In the end, our leadership changed what we were building so often that all of the UI work was scrapped long before we shipped. We ended up launching a janky console, quickly assembled by SDEs who were racing against deadlines. We skipped virtually all operational readiness work to meet the launch deadline. After claiming the launch win, the director, two managers, and the pm promptly left for other orgs.
That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.
Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.
Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.
Here is an example of what I mean when I say optional stuff is a sign of failure to design.
I inherited some vibe-coded scripts that dealt with AWS services like Bedrock and S3. These scripts needed create various AWS SDK clients. These clients needed to know which account/region to use.
Had this been well designed, there would have some function/module responsible for deciding what account/region to use. This decision point might be complex: it might consider things like environment variables, configuration files, and command line arguments. It might need to impose some precedence among these options. Whatever these details, the decision would be authoritative once made. The rest of the code base should have expected a clear decision and just do what was decided.
Instead, the coding assistant added optional account/region arguments in many submodules. These arguments were nullable. When left unspecified, "convenient" logic did its own environment lookups and similar. The result was many "works on my machine" failures because command-line arguments affected only certain portions of the program, environment variables others, config files still others.
This is grim stuff. It's a ton of code that should not exist, spreading the decision all over the code.
"Every optional field is a question the rest of the codebase has to answer every time it touches that data,"
This is a beautiful articulation of a major pet peeve when using these coding tools. One of my first review steps is just looking for all the extra optional arguments it's added instead of designing something good.
Seniors are going to need to hold Juniors to a high bar for understanding and explaining what they are committing. Otherwise it will become totally soul destroying to have a bunch of juniors submitting piles of nonsense and claiming they are blocked on you all the time.
Hah. I remember some story about a chatbot that had been trained on slack conversations. You would ask it for an essay on whatever, and it would say "will do" or "I'll have it for you tomorrow." :)
Influencer seems like an insufficient word? Like, in the glorious agentic future where the coding agents are making their own decisions about what to build and how, you don't even have to persuade a human at all. They never see the options or even know what they are building on. The supply chain is just whatever the LLMs decide it is.
For a specific bad thing like "rm -rf" that may be plausible, but this will break down when you try to enumerate all the other bad things it could possibly do.
I was appalled when renewing my car this year that I now need a Texas by Texas account (https://www.texas.gov/texas-by-texas/), which wants... a social security number because why?!?!
Anyway, yet another data breach incoming.