So who will buy their cursed campus when they collapse?

Maybe Oracle can acquire it back and put a few more giant hard-drive-inspired buildings there (it was orignally Sun Microsystems' campus).

in Chicago near Wrigley Field (the Cubs stadium), the closest train stop (Addison) was basically wall to wall (some on the floor too) DraftKings advertisements until recently because they have a physical sports betting bar adjacent to Wrigley Field. After the latest round of elections they're closing that location so the ads came down.

> I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.

yeah man good thing LLMs are structurally incapable of being incentivized to sell you a product or render referral links, this is surely future-proof

Or subtly misrepresent politically inconvenient facts, or gently steer you into opinions based on a synthesis of broker data and demographic info, or quietly flag you in some database column due to exhibiting dissident-adjacent ideas or behaviors, or...

Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.

I remember a few years ago memes were going around about how ChatGPT responded differently to "do Israelis deserve human rights?" ("Of course! Everyone deserves human rights...") and "do Palestinians deserve human rights?" ("While everyone deserves human rights, it's complicated... ")

Doesn’t classic search literally already do everything you fear LLM’s will?

Certainly, but with (what I consider to be) a key distinction: classic search, by definition, must serve information from many distinct sources outside the control of the search company.

A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.

LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.

I ask them for sources. It’s just a more efficient vector based search for most of my google search replacement use cases.

My thought here is that there are many. They have proven to be commodities in most use cases.

As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set.

Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that.

Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.

That used to be the situation with search engines, too...

oh i’ve definitely seen “we’re going to track the number of bugs created in jira per team” turn into “people just file things as tasks instead of bugs” or “only easy things are filed as bugs and completed right away”. It’s trivially gameable.

nice try, Claude

lol I actually wrote all that in my own voice, that’s sad

working in a large codebase I use Claude for code understanding and the code reviews from Macroscope have caught bugs for me a bunch of times. Usually if I use claude it’s for refactoring a and source to source transformations that would be too confusing for me to figure out how to do with e.g. ast-grep, but that I can prompt in a minute or two and then have claude work through it. It’s stuff I could do without LLMs but it’s less effort to use them. I don’t let it write new code, because it decays the process of programming as theory building.

the last time I went to Japan was I think 2015 and the exchange rate was about 120 yen to the dollar. I bought almost all of the clothing that I wore for the next year or two during a stretch of three days in Tokyo. The exchange rate right now is 155 yen to the dollar and prices on everything in the US have gone through the roof, so this doesn't seem all that ridiculous to me. I am more annoyed by the assumption that I live in SF than the idea that I might go from SF to Tokyo on a vintage shopping trip.

tech peaked at the PS Vita and I am not joking

As much as I love my Vita having access to Chinese handhelds with decent screens that can emulate almost everything under the sun (including PC, Switch and some Vita!) is pretty damn awesome!

ideally european/asian users would hit european/asian servers, so potentially not surprising

Reads like it’s not copying the parent, it’s manually constructing the env dictionary to be passed to execve explicitly. I do this in one of my tools at work because developers were exfiltrating secrets and hand jamming them into .env files.

Yeah, so, it's not injecting? To inject something into X, X needs to exist. X does not exist yet when execve is set up.

I'm not being pedantic. I just want to read about injection when I'm promised injection :-) because that'd be technically interesting for me. Plainly calling execve isn't so much, I have the manpage here already :-)

You're not alone. I was hoping for the same.

Something tells me that if I look, I'll see a .env being used in the actual tool