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msy

3,534 karma · joined February 25, 2010

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msy··on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal
This is the difference between accessible and efficient. Bloomberg, and aircraft controls are expert interfaces, they have steep learning curves and in the latter require case extensive education to use (Bloomberg also does a ton of work on user training). Which is absolutely fine when efficiency trumps everything else and it's a system people use all day every day.

Most interfaces we use on a day to day basis are the opposite, they're designed to be accessible (in the sense that you can use it if you are unfamiliar, not disability) for someone unfamiliar, untrained, and uninterested in learning, which also aligns a lot of the time with sales growth. Nobody is willing to do a 6 week course to use the new HR UI really, really efficiently. The unfortunate thing is some of these are enterprise UIs some of us do have to use all day every day and that's where the impedance mismatch gets painful.

msy··on Gemini 4 Argon
Agree entirely but that's the point, if it's a margin knife-fight with marginal product differentiation/pricing power nobody is going to be making bank.
msy··on Drawgent: Coding agent on a live Excalidraw canvas
‘I found a new way of wasting people’s time with my slop’ god this is bleak.
msy··on GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
Isn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?
msy··on Astra for Law
So OpenAI is partnering with Latham Watkins, Freshfields is partnering with Anthropic and Kleiner Perkins is building their own. It'll be interesting to see which wins out here, I don't see how those partnerships can end well for the law firms unless they're making an assumption they'll be sucked dry of USP but the revenue split from the AI labs will make up for it. Why would I pay a premium for Latham Watkins when every other firm can get their expertise and experience in a subscription, and add their own on top?
msy··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
msy··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
The work of Dieter Rams, the primary influence for Ive's work at Apple that's set the aesthetic direction for hardware for the last ~20 years to critical acclaim and is a showcase of manufacturing prowess? That Dieter Rams? This is an absurd and ahistorical understanding of modernism.
msy··on More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math
Given OpenAI's well documented history of unethical behaviour it seems adorably naive to think they actually do that in general, or that they wouldn't pull this particular data separately to generate these proofs.
msy··on A Tesla ran a stop sign and killed a man, Full Self-Driving/Autopilot was on
We do tend to impose them on individual drivers who make egregious and consequential failures, that’s the point. If every car running the same software is functionally the same ‘driver’ this class of failure absolutely should trigger a moratorium.
msy··on The Amazon tax
This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.
msy··on AI agent hacks gym to get its user a spot in pilates class
If you leave your front door open I don’t think you’d classifying someone walking in and taking your laptop as ‘not stealing’.
msy··on The AI Aesthetic
I suspect a lot of these aesthetic baselines aren’t some kind of organic emergence from the model and more a layer of human curated fine tuning, prompting and harness adjustments to produce a positively received aesthetic in lieu of user guidance.
msy··on Grok Build is open source
A lot of companies are still using Cursor but I don't know of anyone moving to it, and I do know of many moving from it to Codex or Claude, feels like a legacy product at this point alongside windsurf & the replit/lovable/bolt cluster.
msy··on CarPlay Is Additive
I imagine the Venn Diagram of Rivian buyers and Apple users is basically a circle (or one small circle inside a much larger one), this seems like a wildly obtuse position for them to take.
msy··on Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech
I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.
msy··on Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri
Do they? There's been a lot of hot air, quite literally, but aside from some math conjectures actual evidence of meaningful progress on anything that actually helps humanity seems rather thin on the ground.
msy··on German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?
msy··on India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark
I wonder what the wet bulb temperature is, it feels like the day when we have our first true mass casualty event (as opposed to the longer, slower crisies caused by say european heatwaves in the last decade) caused by the climate crisis is getting close.
msy··on Remove–AI–Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
...except they can produce the same image without the fake SynthID.
msy··on Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.

Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

msy··on DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
You don't have to trust the AI to do it with Rust, you just have to ensure certain conventions are followed and you can formally prove you're 'safe' from certain classes of issue, no AI magic dice-roll.

A lot of people are very excited by the idea that now language capabilities (and almost every other technical nuance) somehow don't matter but much like gravity they will continue to assert themselves whether you believe in them or not.

So far humans have proven unable to write large apps in C without those issues, given their work is the training basis for LLMs this creates two problems, one being that they don't 'know' what a safe app looks like either and any humans reviewing the outputted code will be unable to validate that either.

msy··on DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
'rewrite in C, make sure there are no memory leaks'. You first.
msy··on Car Seats as Contraception
Minivans cause minivans?
msy··on Car Seats as Contraception
Or cars usually fit 2 child seats because that's the common number they get from customer research.
msy··on Goodbye to Sora
Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to entry and expectations of the market are so low you can't really differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.
msy··on Palantir extends reach into British state as gets access to sensitive FCA data
Don't worry, they'll buy your boss's boss nice dinners and box seats at sports games until they see the light.
msy··on Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves
Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.
msy··on Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves
This theory of how the US loses in Iran is looking increasingly likely: https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-t...

It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.

msy··on Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later
Consumer? Apple or Google Photos or 'drive' functionality of either. The only real risk then is losing your account and Apple Photos has an option to keep them all locally on disk.
msy··on Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native
The thing people miss is isn't not that there aren't downsides (power, memory, disk size, dependency ecosystem size etc etc) it's that they're still completely outweighed by the upsides of write-once-ship-all for authors.
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