growing ARR is easy when you are selling dollars for cents. people hyping ARR as an meaningful investment indicator are a dead giveaway that we are in fact in a bubble.
the most likely weakness is in the ECC implementation. i don't understand the math (who does?) but what the debate over https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ tells me is that very few people know what a "weak curve" is but people agree that they exist. this has always made me sketch on ECC in general, especially since it is also used in Tor. Another possibility is compromising the RNG used for creating the pvt sig? which since these are early addresses they would have been from a very early version of the software, and might have used a shitty RNG. If this is a crack it could definitely be state level actors (who has the US pissed off lately? who have they not?). Whether it is state/private the goal would be to extract as much real money as possible before creating a panic, so will be interesting to see where the money goes.
FYI the “safe curves” charts are garbage self-promotion for his own crypto algorithms. I generally respect DJB, but he didn’t even try to be unbiased with that analysis.
computer programming and law are very similar. computer code is called code because it is the law that dictates the behavior of the computer. law is a bit different because it is a program that runs on people, who aren't as deterministic as machines, but in theory law and the interpretation of law are also supposed to be completely logical, and you can translate back and forth directly from the logic of law to a logical expression in a computer program.
i specialize in programming, and LLMs are very good right now, if you set them up with the right tooling, feedback based learning methods, and efficient ways of capturing human input (review/approve/suggest/correct/etc).
with programming you have compilers and other static analysis tools that you can use to verify output. for law you need similar static analysis tooling, to verify things like citations, procedural scheduling, electronic filing, etc, but if you loop that tooling in with an llm, the llm will be able to correct errors automatically, and you will get to an agent that can take a statement of fact, find a cause of action, and file a pro se lawsuit for someone.
courts are going to be flooded with lawsuits, on a scale of 10-100X current case loads.
criminal defendants will be able to use a smart phone app to represent themselves, with an AI handling all of the filings and motions, monitoring the trial in real time, giving advice to the defendant on when to make motions and what to say, maximizing delay and cost for the state with maximum efficiency.
with 98% of convictions coming from guilty pleas (https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...) which are largely driven by not being able to afford the cost of legal services the number of criminal defendants electing to go to full jury trial could easily explode 10-20X or more very quickly.
> “I have never been more confident in our research roadmap,” he wrote. “We are making an unprecedented bet on compute, but I love that we are doing it and I'm confident we will make good use of it. Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does, and I'm confident we can fix the problems.”
tldr. knife fights in the hallways over the remaining life boats.
The biggest problem OAI has is that they don't own a data source. Meta, Google, and X all have existing platforms for sourcing real time data at global scale. OAI has ChatGPT, which gives them some unique data, but it is tiny and very limited compared to what their competitors have.
LLMs trained on open data will regress because there is too much LLM generated slop polluting the corpus now. In order for models to improve and adapt to current events they need fresh human created data, which requires a mechanism to separate human from AI content, which requires owning a platform where content is created, so that you can deploy surveillance tools to correctly identify human created content.
In a few more years there will probably be virtually no human users of web sites and apps. Everything will be through an AI agent mediation layer. Building better CAPTCHAs is interesting technically, but it is doubling down on a failed solution that nobody actually wants. What is needed is an authentication layer that allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage. CAPTCHA has always been an economic bar only, since they are easy to farm out to human solvers, and it is a very low bar. Having an agent API with usage charges is a much better solution because it compensates operators instead of wasting the cost of solving CAPTCHAs. Maybe this will finally be the era of micro payments?
> allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage
There's a huge economy out there based on wasting human time. They explicitly do not want agents acting on behalf of humans, because it means human time is no longer being wasted.
They also don't want to get paid in money, because the money would go to a different profit center. The only payment they accept (because they use that as a metric to justify their salary) is "engagement" aka proof of wasted human time.
Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").
Certainly. An authentication layer, and everything else customizable by the user.
The web, HTML that is, is a grammar, an app is a grammar, the buttons of my car are a grammar, I want each grammar served, transformed to my grammar however I like it, probably org-mode file grammar.
I don't want each website's colors, or clickable elements to be determined by any other person than the user. There are themes, I want to select exactly what theme I am browsing the internet today. I also want my fridge to be connected to the internet, accessed using an authentication layer on top of IPv6, and using it's functionality with a grammar.
In other words, the web, browsers, apps and physical buttons will go down the drain soon and they will be replaced by something which can open and manipulate org filetypes.
The web was/is a huge financial bubble anyway, and it will burst quickly when that happens.
I agree that better authentication methods for AI agents are needed. But right now bots and malicious agents are a real problem for anyone running sites with significant traffic. In the long run I don’t think human traffic will go to zero even if its relative proportion is reduced.
we have had GUIs and CLIs for the same functionality for many decades. i doubt the branded website/app layer will go away. AI agents will become the predominant use case, but you still need a human accessible manual control interface. websites and apps are also the on-ramp for acquiring users from advertising, and that is not likely to go away. consumer interest in using AR products is limited and it may take generational timelines to see broad adoption of AR tech (if ever) so physical display advertising will likely remain a thing for a long time.
> something unique and different about software engineering
how much does the strength/weight ratio of building materials improve every year? how much does the price/quality ratio of building materials fall every year?
software engineering is working with technology where compute capacity was doubling and price/performance was halving every two years for decades. this rate of change has slowed, but in a world where the price of everything else inflates, software is a rare field that works with a continually deflating capital base.
the uniqueness of software development is real and based on underlying physical/economic factors that exist in very few industries.
software developers are not unique. they are still human. but the profession is unique and the financial incentives are unique.
consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time wins on average, but because the incentives are large, many people will take the risk to get exceptional rewards.
i approach software development like a professional athlete. i work on optimizing every aspect of my performance (physical, mental, social, technical) to be the very best i can be. anyone who applies this level of dedication in any field will be highly successful, but it requires dedication, sacrifice, and risk, which many people are not willing to accept.
the world is full of exceptional software and algorithms designed by unique individuals who developed things nobody else could or would. there is a reason why mathematical discoveries are named after the people who discovered them.
building software for large corporations necessarily revolves around median-level teams, because mean-reversion always happens at scale, but that is also why a great deal of technical innovation takes place outside of large corporations.
this is crucial. from my own productivity I know that I can function at 1X or 10X depending on my focus.
being a great engineer requires practice most of all, and the consistency of focus during that practice will impact its value.
in my experience, engineering is all about efficiency, and as i have developed over time the scope of factors i take into account when calculating the efficiency of something has increased. in the beginning i only looked at the technical details of the implementation, and then over time that expanded to considering maintainability, team co-ordination, business objectives, etc.
the potential scope here is unlimited. when you start, just making something compile takes all of your focus, but over time as programming becomes reflexive you are able to expand the factors you take into account far beyond the immediate code, and it seems trivial by comparison.
Engineering is all about effectiveness. Not efficiency.
Focus is great for slamming out a bunch of code that everybody else hates and has to tiptoe around you about because focus also made you so goddamned proud of your monster. Slow down and check the signposts before following your good intentions all the way to the end.
effectiveness, professionally, is creating value for your clients and employers. the ratio of value to cost is how efficient you are as an engineer. it is all efficiency.
I think you need to pay more attention to the contexts in which your coworkers and bosses use the word efficiency. You’ve got a good definition there but you’re not often in good company.
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