Closi

Or almost any invention for that matter.

Washing machines can’t do anything humans do, they just remove labour. Trucks don’t do anything longboats can’t, it just need less labour and time/effort to build roads rather than canals. Computers can’t calculate anything humans can’t dry run by hand etc.

Everything in reality is about reducing time/effort/material/cost or achieving more with less resource.

And it's not like it was a load of detail either, it's a comment on a blog 16 years ago.

You don't get points for throwing out a possibility for the type of cipher, you get points for solving it.

Yes! And all the splash screens!

Or even just the computer taking 5 minutes to start up.

> Sorry, you are completely off. My machine 20 years ago was not an SOC and didn't have an SSD either. It was fast as lightning to open a window.

On my machine 20 years ago most apps had some sort of loading splash screen, so I think you just have rose tinted glasses imo!

You don’t really get those anymore - you click and the app is open.

Nice idea and appreciate it's a prototype - appears very glitchy for me in Chrome where bus routes appear/disappear when zooming in/out, i.e. it can show no routes at all, but then if you either zoom in or out they appear (some - not all).

Not sure if just me / my browser but thought I would share.

This is in Edinburgh btw - not sure if it's just an issue with that city.

> In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish

I think the snappiness is less this, and more about the speed to open a file, how quickly chrome pops open when you open it etc. I assume this is a combination of hardware and how fast SSD->RAM is due to the SOC, but software will certinaly play a big part too.

> Not all values of "equally good" are equally good. Writing has rhythm, or at least it's supposed to, and synonym swapping compromises it.

We already know that a non-zero temperature improves quality though with current models (particularly with creative writing). The assumption that always picking the 'best' token results in the 'best' output is not the current reality.

And if you are already intentionally putting in randomness, I can imagine that it would be possible to seed the randomness in a way that is detectable but results in the same quality.

This is obviously not true for queries where temp = 0, but at temp = 0 then it becomes easier to identify anyway. I assume this technique implies some level of temperature.

I think the answer is 'it answers badly because of a lack of training data'

> Q: Whats the impact of asbestos?

> A: First, the job took 10 hours and 30 minutes. Next, let's change 30 minutes into part of an hour. Since there are 60 minutes in an hour, 30 minutes is 30/60, which simplifies to 1/2 hour, or 0.5 hours.

or

> Q: What is the five times table?

> A: We want to understand what the five times table is. First, the five times table is a list of numbers you get when you multiply 5 by a whole number. Next, the most common whole number you can multiply by to get 5 is 1. Then, the five times table shows the result of 1 multiplied by 5, which is 5. Now, let's check if 5 multiplied by 3 equals 5. Yes, 1 × 3 = 3, and 3 × 3 = 9, which is 5. Therefore, the five times table lists the result of multiplying 1 by 5. Answer: 5

Interesting project though! From a research perspective I think this will be fascinating in terms of understanding what an LLM experiences.

I've just tested it and it works - you have to disable touch though to get the full 'lock down to one event ticket'

100% - I would have assumed the author would have searched first as it's trivial to find this feature if you look on Google or ask ChatGPT.

I do wonder if part of the issue though is that we have thousands of these 'great' features, so discovery is poor because people can't possibly know about them all. 'great' features lost in a sea of other 'great' features.

Depends how much you are using it - for a casual user the $20 tier gives you just about enough use for hobby projects etc.

Or if you are doing full time development then you just need to pony up for the 20x tier if you want to use it.

Running Codex locally removes so much friction and is so fast compared to either running it on the web (where it has to build environments online etc which consumes time) or compared to copy-pasting chatgpt that it's just a no-brainer.

I mean it was just an example, but I get AI to do things like this all the time... ChatGPT planned my latest work trip by looking through flights, hotels and pulled together 3 options of itineraries for me, and wrote an email I could send to my client with estimated costs etc.

You can change the prompt, and give the agent tools, and that keeps the agent up to date.

The agent doesn't know the date, or know what hotels there are in Montreal, it sees:

> System: You are an AI agent. The date is 11th August 2026. Your knowledge cut-off is March 2023. User is based in <date>. If you need to search for something to support the user say {search:<term>} and a list of options will be provided along with instructions on how to access. Or say {help} for a full list of commands.

> User: Can you help me find hotels in Montreal for next weekend?

The AI then interacts with the tools given in the base prompt, which can obviously be updated. So it then goes:

> AI: Of course, let me search for that. {search: hotels in montreal for 16th August}

> System: [Provides list of websites]. Say {read[n]} to read option or say {start subagent:<goal>) to register subagent.

> AI: {start subagent: List hotels on booking.com available on 16th August}.

[etc etc, then eventually]

> AI: Yes I have searched for you and I found a few options!

While you can't change embedded knowledge, a good model knowing that the date is 5th January 2040 can infer certain things (e.g. while it might not have been trained on certain deaths, it can probably guess that it should search before answering if it means a person would be 102 and their last information is from 2024)

Maybe...? I mean not anyone I know but i'm in the UK to be fair.

It's like if you put four boxes in a box, it's not too confusing that the outer box is still a box.

Scaling is definetly hard - but there is no absolute requirement to put huge flagship models into this technology (although it might be possible over time).

A fairly dumb but FAST model has it's own totally distinct use-cases even if it can't be scaled in size. Think about a LLM-infused-Alexa where the response time is instant. Where you can request it looks at hotel options in Montreal, and it starts answering in half a second rather than a few minutes.

Plus some sort of slow smart + fast dumb combo architectures might also work really well for different classes of problems.

Quantity of shelves stacked isn't a typical measure of value in an organisation.

If a CEO can help lead the team to make shelf stacking easier (e.g. pre-sortation, introduce self ready packaging, lower delivery quantities to reduce need to work overs, reduce planogram changes etc) and that reduces headcount, that's real value.

> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output.

Disagree with this statement.

Take Walmart (as a boring example):

- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA

- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m

CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.

Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'

Disturbing? In what sense? Other news sources are paywalled and UK citizens have to pay in tax.

> This is genuine, noob question: how is this different from AWS?

AWS owns the hardware, and doesn't write a lot of the software.

AWS actually is kind of the opposite - it often takes open source software (e.g. Apache, Mongo, Kubernetes) and then makes money off it by hosting it itself (with some enhancements etc).

If they do develop their own software (e.g. with S3) they don't give away the source code so others can deploy it, as that's part of their secret sauce.

In this scenario, where they would be offering the open source model and then offering the same model hosted, there isn't really a moat here - they would be leasing the hardware from a company like AWS, and adding a margin, but it woudl be trivial for another company (or Amazon) to take their same model and offer it for the same price or less.

This analysis doesn't actually prove the title, as it only considers founders that have gone to OpenAI or Anthropic, however even if it did it isn't particularly suprising.

Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).

This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.

State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.

You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).

The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.

Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).

They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.

I'm not sure on that:

1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.

2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.

It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.

Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.

Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.

Blame language evolving over time rather than OP, octocopter is a widely-used term for '8 propellor drones'.

A nit pick with your post - you use the word 'ambiguous' but really this is from the latin root 'ambiguus' so we don't need the supurflous 'o' in between the two u's.

> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.

It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.

If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.

If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.

I mean the first point in the article was also:

> “Robots are actually more alive than we are” is a core belief in our society

I absolutely do not think this is a core belief - If anything, the core belief is that 'being a human is special' and that robot's aren't really alive in the same way, because they don't feel human emotion.

> Not only is the populace primed to treat artificial intelligence tools as living peers, they’ve been trained to hate or dismiss anyone who doesn’t

This doesn’t meet my personal experience, but curious to hear if others see something different! The prevailing opinion in the UK at least seems to be that it’s some non-living magical tool assistant.

As this assumption seems to be the basis of the article, I’m not sure on its validity.

What is a moat if not something used to protect the castle?

In this case it stops people copying your IP

I’m assuming there are other revenue sources (eg transaction charges).