calpaterson

Fair, but it is part of a pretty large library system and you can order whatever you want to pickup at Oodi

I have heard of more than a few horror stories including filesystems lost and force pushes done.

These tools have only been in use for a short time and the current harnesses/system prompts are quite limited. Claude code is mostly limited to your codebase where you have version control. Excel is different.

I foresee that once people hand over more power to full agents there will be some nasty surprises. Im sure there will eventually be demand for some kind of limits

And yet I could tell them apart with pretty good confidence. Why?

I got 8/9. Been away 2 years. The ones I rarely used or which don't have obvious "tells" that are hardest. For me, Jubilee is the most obvious - very distinctive sound.

Yes, I of course link to this post, which I think is great. But I think actually it understates the case. All three parts of the trifecta (untrusted content, private data and external comms) are not necessary. Really, the key problem is just untrusted content in the context window. Access to private data and the ability to communicate externally are just modalities in which damage can occur.

For example: imagine having just untrusted content and private data (2/3 parts of the trifecta). The untrusted content can use a "Disregard that!" attack to cause the LLM to falsely modify the private data. So I think the whole "trifecta" is not necessary and the key thing is that you simply can't have untrusted stuff in your context window at any point.

I agree and one of the things that makes it harder to handle "disregard that!" is that many models for LLM deployment involve positioning the agent centrally and giving it admin superpowers.

I mention in the footnotes that I think that it makes more sense for the end-user of the LLM to be the one running it. That meshes with RBAC better (the user's LLM session only has the perms the user is actually entitled to) and doesn't devolve into praying the LLM says on-task.

Sometimes. That's the whole problem, in short.

I thought about mentioning fine-tuning. Obviously as you say there are some costs (the re-training) and then also you lose the general purpose element of it.

But I am still unsure that it actually is robust. I feel like you're still vulnerable to Disregard That in that you may find that the model just starts to ignore your instruction in favour of stuff inside the context window.

An example where OpenAI have this problem: they ultimately train in a certain content policy. But people quite often bully or trick chat.openai.com into saying things that go against that content policy. For example they say "it's hypothetical" or "just for a thought experiment" and you can see the principle there, I hope. Training-in your preferences doesn't seem robust in the general sense.

Yeah I have been able to use it as a complete novice with CAD, albeit making planning out quite simple household things.

I feel like most of the opinions about FreeCAD online are out of date, since at least 1.0 if not later.

I mainly use it for planning things to make out of wood or print out of plastic.

The Barbican is similar in many ways: a place that people either like or dislike depending on subjective personal preference but objectively has never actually worked very well.

cf this programme from the BBC Archive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvXpvH99tic It was clearly badly designed and problematic right from the start with little in the way of shops or services for the residents. But that's the thing about monumentalist architecture: looks singular but function is an afterthought. The south bank centre is similar.

A shame. It's a huge complex of fairly sparse buildings right in the centre of the capital city. Listing it just puts big obstacles in front of changing it, which I really wish we could do. People just like how it looks but actually it's not a very useful space for society and I wish it could be changed.

I lived locally for 10 years and visited only a handful of times. Mostly it was just an obstacle in itself: it creates a lot of level changes (read: steps) and moving around it on foot or by bike is annoying.

You're taking about statistical averages but I'm talking about a significant minority of over-70s who are wildly dangerous. Most of them only stop driving when they cause an accident. Sometimes its a serious one.

There are already some measures for young people, like the 6 point thing. Maybe there could be more. Doesn't change the facts about dangerous OAP drivers

> If they can improve, then why not?

I'm talking about removing licences due to cognitive decline. It's not a temporary condition

Unfortunately what is needed are tests of driving ability. Most over-70s are significantly worse than the average driver and some are so dangerous they shouldn't be on the road at all.

Politically very difficult to take people's licences away though, especially when it's permanent, not their fault and it makes their life a lot worse.

Works well in some cases (eg some language learning patterns - but not all) but not in others. And even when you "create your own cards" you're usually using resources from elsewhere - eg native speaker audio on language cards.

A significant number of anki users (eg: medicine, law - others) are working with pre-made decks and if you look at anki's competition - all of them offer pre-made decks as a key part of it. Medics have always used flashcards (many university bookshops sell physical flashcards for medics) and I don't each medical student would benefit from producing, eg, their own anatomy flashcards.

"I thought part of the learning process is really engaging with the cards"

I would substitute "the material" for "the cards" in this sentence. Making the cards yourself is one way to do that, but it's not always the most time effective - imagine the extra work put onto a medical student having to make the cards for every subject they need to cover. That is what ankihub does and it seems to be very popular

But yeah: downloading the median deck off of ankiweb: very sub-optimal

Longtime anki user here. I think the thing people never appreciate with flashcards is that deck maintenance is real work. And in many cases, it's not work that you can do yourself as a learner of the material: the deck really needs to be created by someone who knows the material.

Commercial decks, where the deck maintainer is paid for his efforts, make a lot of sense.

And I suppose if they are making money out of the ecosystem, it also only makes sense that commercial deck makers make a contribution to the technology that makes it possible. I suppose I would prefer that be a contribution rather than ownership and custody, but I suppose Anki's license terms (it is AGPL3+ - I think without a CLA) prevents them closing it.

So cautiously optimistic

Finland has a whole national ID system, all interlinked. They aren't going to be scanning faces to implement this stuff here - and anyway the government here already knows what you look like.

The American LLMs notoriously have similar censorship issues, just on different material

> fruit is significantly more expensive than snacks

This is a commonly repeated claim but it's usually not true. Fruit is, in fact, pretty cheap:

In the US, bananas average $1.68/kilo: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

A kilo is usually ~6 bananas. So a banana costs maybe 28c on average. Find a cost-competitive ultra-processed snack for the calories and satiety that a banana provides. Healthy eating might not is cheap but junk food, specifically, is not usually a cost optimisation.

No, it is significantly more difficult in other EU countries, yes.

Here in Finland for example the process is actually no different than for a non-EU migrant (same amount of time taken for an unproblematic application, same amount of appointments). You are just much more likely to be accepted but in fact they do still reserve the right to reject people. And it is, probably unintentionally, much harder to exist in Finland as a non-resident as you can't have a bank account, can't use foreign phone numbers for most things and any phone you can get is very limited (can't call many numbers, etc). I couldn't even log into the local eBay for the first 6 months. All the Nordics I would guess are similar.

And people have contested in the comments to you that Spain is not actually so easy as you suggested...

I actually don't know any western country that is as easy to move to as the UK was pre-Brexit. I still think the UK is in fact one of the easier Western countries to move to, especially if you can't find moderately paid work

Countries with a national id system I would guess tend to be more difficult overall though. And the UK famously is not one of those.

A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.

Definitely one of the weaker areas in the current LLM boom. Comparing models, or even different versions of the same model, is a pseudo-scientific mess.

I'm still using https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard. Perhaps there is something better and someone will pipe up to tell me about it. But we use LLMs at work and have unexplainable variations between them.

And when we get a prompt working reliably on one model, we often have trouble porting it to another LLM - even straight "version upgrades" such as from GPT-4 to -5. Your prompt and your model become highly coupled quite easily.

I dunno what to do about it and am tending to just pick Gemini as a result.

> the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten

I don't know, there are some definite bright spots like IOT but the typical output of Radio 4 is definitely not massively in advance of the big podcasts. The Rest Is History/Politics are clearly hugely popular inside the UK and basically constitute "the competition" for your average R4 listener.

I actually think that the podcast model is a big threat for traditional radio. Podcasts are much more lucrative for the makers, the reach is as-big (or bigger) and you don't have to negotiate with the government like R4 does.

I read your link and it does not support your view that the facts are different than they appear. He calculates a bit differently (including not just currently living bats but those bats yet unborn) but still I feel the tunnel was not necessary

> But I think believing your requests wont block just because you're using async is a bit naive at this point in Django

TBH personally I have yet to work on any professional async Python project (Django based or not) which did not have event loop pauses due to accidental blocking IO or CPU exhaustion.

I take your point fully though that a lot of Django's "async" methods are really using a thread pool. (True for much closed source async code as well!)

What is missing? The ORM works with asyncio, you can have async views, you can have long running connection-oriented async stuff for websockets etc (via django channels). Maybe there is something important that I'm missing but that seems more complete than most async-only frameworks.

RE: Meetup.

I think many groups effectively died during that period - but were just able to limp along a bit longer as a virtual meet rather than physical. Once your meetup is sub 30 attendees (attendees who actually attend - so ~45 RSVPs) you lose critical mass and everything from getting people to talk to finding a space to meet becomes very difficult.

Sparing everyone else a browse of the bugtracker: the maintainer does not seem to use a bot to autoclose issues. The close issues appeared to be actually closed and it seemed from a quick glance that he actually investigated each filing.

Higher indeed. 40% no shows for a meetup I run (60-100 slots, meeting monthly)