If crypto was a bunch of autodidacts speed running the history of finance, then AI is speed running the history of religion. This whole "permanent underclass" thing seems like it's just the Rapture in secular clothing.
It's interesting watching each new generation relate to the rat race, but this current framing seems toxic. The economy is not a zero sum game. I worry about the amount people coming into the work force now thinking that unless they acquire generational wealth by 30 then they've wasted their life. That's a recipe for unhappiness.
I've long held the current agent permission model is like playing a game of "Papers, Please" and most permission models engineers implement in their own AI products is more a measure of how trusting the user is with AI than an actual permission check.
I'm of the view that future controls should be more about approving plans and rewinding durable workflows as models get better at avoiding egregious mistakes.
the models will never avoid egregious behavior. think of it like every "good intentions" morality tale. theres almost always some geniune context where that behavior is wanted.
instead, the coding harness or determinative tool, will need hardcoded security features.
in opencode, almost all the power comes from bash and all other permissions are just chrades. its powerful and insecure because of it.
you can sand box them but then you fight the sandbox to pipe in your assets. the sandbox becomes porous because elsewise its useless.
MCPs dont address much either.
want we are looking for is a portal or protocol that has the model and harness and the actions tunneled, like ssh, to some fixed scoped and limited shell along side the assets.
then, the user and LLM can the negotiate assets and actions as needed via the protocol.
but alas, as your comment suggests, people thing theres some perfect context thatll prevent bad things from happening. the libertarian paradise without regulation.
> we are looking for is a portal or protocol that has the model and harness and the actions tunneled, like ssh, to some fixed scoped and limited shell along side the assets then, the user and LLM can the negotiate assets and actions as needed via the protocol.
It's an agent permissioning platform that isolates your service connections and puts a granular permissioning layer on it. So rather than your agent getting full access to a service, they get a Clawband key that can be used to request actions then Clawband checks the parameters to see if it is allowed.
The classical example I have made is allowing your agent access to privacy.com. You may want it to be able to list your cards but not create one or you may want to allow creating cards but only a certain limit.
The plan is to make it open-source and allow self-hosting because security / sanity of users but still have a SaaS offering as a demo / ease of use.
I think you're choosing to ignore what I said about the implication of durable workflows, because you seem to be inventing some stories about my comment.
I find that well documented plans do pretty well at aligning AI to what I want it to do, and if it does go astray, as you rightly point out it can still do, it would be sufficient if I can undo it with little pain. We do this kind of thing all the time in CI/CD pipelines.
Even humans can take down production. We have all kinds of guards in place to empower while also defending against the intern accidentally dropping the DB.
The way I see it. The saxophone player is annoying other people but he is showing his skills to the public. I can tolerate that and let it slip. On the other hand, the boombox jerk is playing music that anyone can privately play. The park is a public space and you should use headphones for that.
When I first moved to NYC I was enchanted and delighted by the various people singing or playing music on the subway but over time it became an annoyance - if I want to listen to music I’ll play it myself.
Please don’t force me to attend your concert by performing in the subway car. I don’t want to be your captive audience. Even more so for people who don’t use headphones.
The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
It's funny how underappreciated it is how the five day work week is powered by norms...at least in the US. People assume there are laws about it.
The only laws dictate compensation past certain thresholds, and in the case of well paid knowledge workers those don't even tend to apply. If you ever read HR material referring to your role as "exempt" now you know what you're exempt from.
> but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work. Thus we all do it and thus we all lose.
A four-day-a-week worker here.
I don't know what you exactly mean, but my personal experience is exactly the opposite. I worked for a startup as a founding engineer, just 4d/w (the CTO was crazily open-minded), and I was never so productive. Doesn't matter that the others were working 5 days, pushing more; it was my responsibility to keep up, and it worked pretty well.
Same now, working for a company with the same arrangement.
Out of curiosity, how many hours per day did you work? Was it the same overall time as a 5-day week, just distributed over 4 days, or did you work a whole day less than others?
I went through a big back and forth with a small startup where I initially negotiated in at 3 days a week.
Eventually they said "we really need you the full 5 days" and I explained that I'm gonna do the same amount of work regardless and they could pay me 40% less by agreeing to 3 days.
they still wanted me 5 days, so I took the job and just coasted those 2 days from home, they were still very happy with my performance, I ended up quitting in 6 months because I wanted my hours in the day back.
You could likely get some funding for a PAC based around this. You just have to get Altman, Musk, and the other to realize that it’s a good marketing move.
“Our AI is so awesome and boosts productivity so much that no one has to work another 5 day week, ever again.”
Musk supported the pretense of free speech online when he bought the bird website. Again, it's just letting them see the marketing benefit, not convincing them to actually care (assuming that's impossible)
You have my vote. Work to live, don’t live to work.
~90% of Iceland is on a 35-36 hours work week, seems to work fine.
Remote work was also skeptically thought of up until a global pandemic forced it, and while there has been some retreat, 20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still. Just need a catalyst to challenge norms and rigid mental models.
>20% of Americans work remotely in some capacity still
That's a pretty abysmal number considering the number who do want remote work and its productivity improvements and its overall lower waste. I'm surprised it's so low.
My thinking tends to be that our standard work week is an equilibrium among a few different forces. We’re motivated by social norms, capital markets, and biological needs and wants. In places like the U.S. the market forces have been powerful enough to really shift social norms. In tandem they’re probably slowly altering our biology too.
Amusingly, there is literally not even a 7 day work week ban for companies in the US. You can require employees work every day. Employers are just required to pay employees overtime under various conditions beyond 40 hours / five days a week, which is why you don't see it.
And what's more, software engineers are exempt from these rules because of their pay grades. If you're a SWE making a salary the odds are your employer could require you work on Saturdays without running afowl of labor laws.
it's not powered by norms. In the US, if you want to employ someone more than 40 hours you have to give them extra overtime pay. It's called the Fair Labor Standards Act and it was passed in 1938
Unless you are exempt. Guess what profession tends to be considered exempt?
If you are a SWE, you don't get paid overtime for working that incident on the weekend or going over 40 hours in a week. The only reason you work five days a week is tradition.
"Yeah, hello, Peter. What's happening? Listen, um, I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday. So, if you could be here around 9, that would be great. Mmhkay? Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too."
In finance this is the norm. The people who work the most make the most and there are no rules. I’ve seen people get fired for not working weekends. And overtime is not a thing, its just end of year bonuses.
Yes, it's quite sad that when big tech leadership talks positively about China they really like the exploitive labor practices that the country exhibits.
And this is true… employees who work and produce more, better things often get promoted. Spending more time doing things leads to producing more and better things
My wife effectively works 3-4 days a week. For mums with young kids its pretty common here in western Europe to have 60% deal, most I know have 80% deal. It means 3-4 days a week just to be sure, not say 6 work hour days.
Made up self-pressure is among the worst things smart folks can do in their lives.
This is true, and there is usually a tradeoff you make for it. To your point, it's a negotiation. You usually give something up to get something or be so good you simply cannot be replaced. Such people do not represent the bulk of the workforce, and we're talking about norms here.
Because to that CEO you're talking about, you have to convince them your demands are better than the next candidate who doesn't mind working more hours.
I feel these vibes whilst living in Munich (or Bavaria, for that matter). Most stores / shops are forbidden to operate on Sundays or past 8pm, that is enshrined in an ancient law. If you want to open a new store and you are willing to operate Sundays, or perhaps until 10pm, and your employees are also willing to work then...nope, can't do it. Would get ahead of the competition. Not fair, blablabla.
> The four day work week is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone did it, then we'd all get a payoff, but if someone defects to a longer work week they tend to get ahead at work.
If that is the case, then the same would apply to those who work overtime and on weekends.
This is a great question and I encourage you to learn the history of it, because it's fascinating. It’s rooted in labor movements and industrialization.
Yes, it's just norms. 15 years ago, I worked for a small startup. For a good 8 or 9 months, we were working 6 and sometimes 7 days a week. We weren't contractually required to, but everyone "wanted" to. I use scare quotes there, but I think a lot of people (myself included, for part of it), really did want to.
But ultimately the unsaid thing was: you either work 6/7 days a week, or you get marginalized or fired. And it's not like we weren't putting in the hours on the weekdays; most of us were working 12-hour days, or more. (And wow, we got to drop down to 8-10 on the weekends! So generous!)
Dumb. I'll never do something like that again. Not worth it, and certainly not for someone else's company.
This is why labor laws and unions exist. It's unfortunate that in the US both have diminished under a withering assault from the ruling class over the past several decades.
Interestingly, software engineers are usually considered exempt in the US, meaning they can be required to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay if employers choose to.
Unless you're imagining congress do something. I want to shoot fireballs from my fingers, but unfortunately we don't live in a world of magic.
Influencing Congress is wildly easier than shooting fireballs from your fingers. This is supposed to be a site with optimistic people that do things. Imagine what you could do politically with the help of LLMs.
If you think it's so doable, I welcome you to do it. I will be happy to say I am wrong if you pull it off. However, if congress has not even banned a seven day work week I don't see how they will reduce it to four because, of all job segments, tech workers want it.
Meanwhile I did some googling and I can buy a wrist-mounted flamethrower for $175, which is close enough to my fingers to make no difference.
You can lobby Congress to do things, even better you can volunteer at campaigns and try to elect people to Congress that want to do these things.
Acting like we are helpless and the future is determined is straight up loser talk while also not being historically accurate in the slightest.
You should go read about people starting wildcat strikes while working in literal company towns. There is tremendous power when we organize together, a power so great the elites have spent almost a 100 years trying to destroy the fruits of their success.
You, too, can do these things. I welcome you to. I will be happy to say I am wrong. Unions have real potential for creating change. I personally have no interest in joining a union for other reasons, but I am not opposed to them either.
But we weren't talking about unions. We were talking about congress. I think you will find that tech workers are not the only job segment, and far from the most sympathetic due to their wages. Lobbying for an extra day off will not get you far in the face of many more pressing issues, and the party most likely to stand up for workers is more interested in stopping data centers at the moment. Unless you're talking about a time horizon past which I don't think I'll be around to notice.
If only. The only way to delegate enforcement is to give them a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Unfortunately all such potential organizations are run by human beings, who, when given violence as a tool, will use that violence as a tool.
Because, as the OP said, working hours are powered by norms. There are salaried positions and companies and teams that certainly will make you work 6 days a week, or make you feel like a bad worker if you don't do anything on a Saturday. But the vast majority of companies (and employees within those companies) would consider the expectation of working a 6th day to be completely unacceptable.
It's difficult to put my finger on it, but there is something about Google's AI UX that I deeply dislike. It has nothing to do with the quality of the response, which seems fine, but...
The header and input bars are too big. The max width of the response is too narrow. The font is too large. The way it renders onto the page feels weirdly clunky. There is a whole sidebar in addition to the top bar just for two buttons. In the + button under user input, they hide everything under there like model selection even though there's a ton of real estate to the right of it. Everything feels unnecessarily cramped on the page in spite of ridiculous amounts of whitespace.
Yet my ultimate dislike feels like something more than the sum of the parts. It feels like the Yahoo of AI. Anyone not relying on distribution advantages would know they need to do better.
It really speaks to Google's perennial weakness: they can never seem to make an incredible UX.
I guess that's because they hardly ever build a product that's really theirs. Google Cloud came in response to Amazon (who built AWS because they needed it themselves), Gemini came in response to ChatGPT, etc. and it always shows
This really doesn't capture the core element of early 2000s LAN parties. You spent hours debugging basic networking issues. There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives. Passing around CDs to install games and the crack for it, since no game was ever owned by all.
Fun fact: you could make a Starcraft license key on the fly by randomly entering numbers and then altering the last digit until it worked. It wouldn't get you on Battle.net but it could get you to IPX.
Im going to sound like the ultimate hipster, but the best thing about LAN parties back in the day was that video games were still very much a "geek" thing, so it attracted a certain type of person, which was fun to be around. I learned so much from people LAN parties - basic networking, IRC, torrenting, modding Half Life, little bit of music production. Video games were made for people like that, and you could tell.
Nowdays, most video games are made for the lowest common denominator of people and targeted at consoles, so the mod scene is a fraction of what it used to be, you don't meet interesting people anymore in the gaming world. So no wonder Lan parties aren't a thing anymore.
I dunno, it always felt a bit mixed to me. Of course, us who were deeply into computing and LAN parties went to the parties to play video game, nerd out and everything else, but also "popular kids" were attending with their own spots, mostly to play CS1.6 and Battlefield 1942, but in the end our parties ended up quite a mix-match of people from different walks of life, from poor families and rich families, from nerdy kids to "future sports athlete cool people", everyone just wanted to game their favorite games with others, as most of us only had modems so online-play wasn't really a thing for us.
This was early 2000s sometime, and in a really small place, less than 1000 total population, maybe that's why, but attending larger events like Dreamhack back then also seemed to attract a wide-range of different folks.
Our biggest LAN was at our School’s gym (we had 2 or 3 smaller ones before that inside the normal building, and of course a few even smaller private ones) in 2004, I think we had ~80 people playing over 2 days, the more normal ones going home to sleep (or just being there for a single day), the full nerds having sleeping bags. It was more nerds, but we had all kinds of people (and even an oversized casemodding sponsor that probably didn’t make any money with their stand).
Fun times. But I don’t think I’d still survive a LAN like that, nowadays. Too little sleep, too much on-screen gaming, too much action, too many energy drinks. Later this year a few of the people from back then will rent a holiday house in Denmark for our modern, yet more relaxed version: A week of boardgaming ;)
> You spent hours debugging basic networking issues.
And that was FUN, as long as you were enjoying the tinkering and not stressing about missing a game.
> Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives.
I think this is an under-remembered aspect, or at least, under-told. LAN parties were filesharing parties too, sometimes that more than gaming. (Which caused no end of strife with the gaming folks, until we learned to segment the network to keep the filesharing congestion from lagging the gaming packets.)
The heyday of mp3 also coincided with the explosion of coffee-shop wifi, in the days before client isolation. Grab a latte, browse Network Neighborhood...
In college we had Mojo for downloading tracks out of other people's iTunes, for a precious little amount of time (maybe just a year or year and a half before they released an update that killed the actual filesharing). It was always fun finding hidden gems in people's libraries - learned about some of my favorite artists that way.
At a three person LAN party in 1998, I didn’t have an Ethernet card. The owner of the house had two phone lines. I connected my modem to one of his phone lines and dialed across the room to his dial-up server on his Win95 machine. We played Quake that way :-D A little laggy, but acceptable.
> There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine.
Our first LAN parties (early 2000s sometime) were organized without DHCP servers, just manually helping people setting up manually assigned IPs, explaining to them to not touch their network settings until they came home and wishing for the best, first day basically spent just setting up networking stuff and routing. 2-3 days post-LAN was spent helping people restore their modem/broadband connections once they were home again and we had ruined their network settings...
Was feasible until we hit ~100 people or so, then of course DHCP became a necessity.
First 100 then dhcp? I've been to 400 and 1000 people lanparties with ips on a clothspin (or whatever it's called in English). Works fine until someone misreads.
During COVID, I was working on an esports startup site that was a mix of social media karma + betting. The idea was you had more karma and your posts got more reach the more right you were.
We experimented with extending this to non-esports topics during the election, which led to a bunch of Trump-based predicting. Then Jan 6 happen and the whole site went to hell. I pivoted the product because I just didn't want to deal with running a site like that.
Seeing what is happening with these sites makes me feel good about my choices. If I were in charge of a product that enabled this I wouldn't sleep at night.
For better or worse, I think the future has to be showing warnings on images with no C2PA-like watermarking like we do for insecure web sites. Media can be signed by authors. If the Associated Press sign an image, I can feel more confidence in its authenticity than the next decade's InfoWars. Power users can still choose to ignore it, but standardizing UX around trust sources like we do TLS will save the less savvy among us.
I don't think we've even seen the full brutal force of disinformation that we are capable of yet.
It seems like the real sour grapes are over the fact they wouldn't let him run OpenAI. If he cared about a payday, ironically, he probably would have had more success because he would have brought this suit sooner.
It's interesting watching each new generation relate to the rat race, but this current framing seems toxic. The economy is not a zero sum game. I worry about the amount people coming into the work force now thinking that unless they acquire generational wealth by 30 then they've wasted their life. That's a recipe for unhappiness.
Save money. Skip the top hat.
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