Seems like it should be cost or replacement cost, but not both.

Yeah the dotcom crash didn’t prove that the internet was useless for business. And the housing crash didn’t mean houses don’t have value.

We get hype bubbles. They’re (nearly?) always bigger than the thing they’re about, in a given time and place.

It’s reasonable to think the AI hype train is one of those, to some degree or another. It’s also reasonable to see great utility in llms, now and in the future.

I did something that sounds similar for my home assistant.

The agent never executes anything. It has like four tools… search, request execute, request build, request update.

The tool service runs vector search against the tools catalog.

The build generalizes the requested function and runs authoring with review steps, declaring needed credentials and network access.

The adversarial reviewer can reject back to the authoring three times.

After passing, the tool is registered and embeddings are done for search. It’s live for future use.

Credentials are stored encrypted, and only get injected by the tools catalog service during tool execution. The network resources are declared so tool function execution can be better sandboxed (it’s not, yet).

The agent never has access to credentials and cannot do anything without going through vetted functions in the tool service.

Agent, author process, reviewer, embedding… all can be different models running local or remote.

Event bus, agent, tool service… all separate containers.

I have an url if you want to read a bit about what I did: https://dcd.fyi/agent

It’s really just meant for me, but if you’re interested in more details on anything let me know. There’s nothing super special in it.

You might want to read up on what happened with the dumpster fire that’s vaguely called RCS before you go laying that at Apples feet.

Also Apples cut is 15% unless you’re doing millions in revenue. Same as Google.

Unlike Google, Apple makes you jump through the hoops of their small business program, if it's available, before they'll drop it to 15%, otherwise you're stuck at 30.

It’s like “fill out your name and tell them you made less than a million dollars last year.”

Out of curiosity, how does a chip that does inference calculations exfiltrate data without being seen?

Has this happened already or is it just conceptually possible?

Not to my knowledge, and that's the point.

Though cards could if a provider has poor opsec. But I see no particular reason to worry about that either.

I have always had a problem, worse than most I think, where if I’m away from a language for a bit I lose my ability to write it quickly and competently, real quick.

It doesn’t matter if I was quite competent in it… the mechanical bits fade fast.

Doing llm assisted work is going to be like pouring bleach on my brain. I can feel it. The more I use it the worse it will be for me.

I can still formulate what I need, and problem solve just fine, but all the nuts and bolts evaporate.

There is a difference between understanding the shape of a solution and keeping the "finger memory" of a language alive

For sure. I just… I feel really really dumb every time I have to knock the rust off to use a language again.

Makes me think something got jacked up adding/removing things from promotional bundles with other apps.

It shouldn’t do that, obviously, but headspace does seem like it’s one that bundles “free” with a bunch of health insurance, education, etc.

From a debugging perspective, without having Apples information, I kinda want to know if all affected users have some related health or education apps.

Dollar Shave Club.

I didn’t need their product/service, but I only remember them a million years later because their original ad swept across the internet like wildfire.

Totally agree. And I expect at some point people might come around on, “don’t pay for and use that tool for that particular job.”

Like, there isn’t enough hype the world to make people replace all knives, hammers, and screwdrivers with sawzalls. They have awesome utility for certain things and they’re a bad fit for other things.

Maybe we’ll get there with LLMs someday.

I think the last ten+ years has taught us that massive security breaches are more of an insurance claim problem and some $4/mo credit monitoring payouts.

And major corporations certainly don’t seem to care that much about leaving massive amounts of money on the table from jr level tech issues. I see it all the time. I mentioned a few from Walmart, Meta, and Amazon recently.

Everyone talks like these things matter, but the results say everyone is just playing pretend.

Excuse me? Amazon lost more money in one day than most companies have in revenue, from dropped orders. I would say that matters. Believe it or not, the systems we work on do things that matter in the real world.

Seems to be an instance of the prevention paradox: Security (in general) is taken seriously enough that major incidences are low enough that people think that security does not matter that much.

I would too. I’m saying businesses don’t seem to. At least not like we assume.

The quality of our work is too subordinated to business leaderships who see the forms of technical insurance we build into software development processes as fat, and are fundamentally opposed to doing things right. Besides solidarity this is the major reason for tech workers to unionize. We won't because we don't have any sense.