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I do wonder if we haven't seen the effects of an MV3-only web yet. As in, once the vast majority of browsers lose MV2 support, will ad networks evolve to get around the limited MV3 capabilities? uBlock Origin Lite might be good enough for you now, but how about in a year or three?

Polonius Alpha accepts a superset of the programs that the old NLL one accepted, right?

Not the greatest for code maintenance, but it's hard to imagine this producing a "2-3x regression" (the worst case observed). And it's not something I"d recommend if it didn't sound like speed is the gating factor for releasing this.

(I doubt I'm the first to think of this, so there are probably Very Good Raisins behind the decision to not do this.)

but note line 111:

> This section describes what to do if you're in a Jujutsu (jj) repository. If the user is not using jj, good luck and try your best.

(The whole skill kind of assumes jj. I think you'd need to make a git version if you actually wanted to use it.)

Sure, I could load up my build machine with mac/windows/linux/android, with multiple versions of each. Emulating x86+x86_64+arm32+arm64+aarch64+... is also doable, sort of.

But considering that the real CI runs several thousand hours of tests total across all platforms, I think I won't.

Also, my Electron-based IDE needs those 10s of GB to edit text. How can you possibly edit a 1KB text file with less than 1GB of RAM?

Not to mention clangd that needs to do its ultra-important work Right Now so I can invalidate it all with my next edit. That's probably the biggest RAM hog of them all.

The space-filling curve approach strikes me as a decent way to get a starting point, not something to use unmodified. But I've no idea whether that's true -- does the structure of such a solution lend itself well to simple iterative improvements or not?

But Hilbert curves are complicated. If you have n dimensions, you can simply take the sequence of bits describing the position in each dimension and interleave them, forming a longer sequence of bits. It's not nearly as nice of a curve -- adjacent points along the line are not necessarily close in n-dimensional space the way they would be with a Hilbert curve -- but it's simple to calculate and proves that you can generalize this stuff to any number of dimensions.

This interleaving produces what is called a Z-curve or Morton curve. It's not continuous like the Hilbert curve, so mathematically you might not call it a space-filling curve but in CS-land, you probably would.

Because once you have that, you just need to sort simple integers, which you can do in linear time with a radix sort. (Again ignoring bit lengths.)

What am I missing?

    ai-grep -v "bad code"

I think there are tons of learnings to be shared about how to do this stuff, but it seems like it's all blocked behind arguments over whether AI is the best or worst thing ever, and penis-measuring contents about how to hold the tool. The net benefit is a very open question, and both the doom and gloom perspective and the AI booster perspective are valuable and have a lot of things right. But there's a dearth of information about what things work, what things don't, what happens in the process of using AI, how to adjust one's behavior and which of those adjustments is harmful even if effective.

But then, I'm part of the problem. I keep meaning to write up a series of experience reports, but it's a lot of work. More fun to vibe a new feature into existence, or to finally fix a UI wart...

I guess I'm debating, but it seemed clear enough to me? It proved that AI models and their harnesses are to the point where you can give them some work to do and leave them unattended for a long time, and they'll keep doing productive work for quite a while. This was a novel thing, and quite unclear, at the time the experiment was performed.

Obviously, the word "productive" is doing a lot of work there, but in my understanding the intention was nowhere near "commercially viable" or "practically useful", it was more like "not doing stupid shit like writing comments of the form 'This file contains the implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation implementation ...'".

Maybe somewhere in the vicinity of "either passing more tests or generating more valid tests"?

Multiple independent implementations are the only practical way to ensure a self-consistent and reasonable platform. Sure, it's not a disaster in an area where people can recompile all their code when something in the platform (eg the compiler) changes, but that's now how the web works.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/IY2am...

https://webrtchacks.com/is-everyone-switching-to-unified-pla...

Then they did it again with MediaStreamTrackProcessor and MediaStreamTrackGenerator.

Then they did it again with Insertable Streams, which is still an issue for interoperable E2EE (Firefox ships a standardized variant).

If you think of websites as running on a standardized platform, then the workarounds are for Chrome, not Firefox. They include, and default to, code that calls unspecified APIs and then the ones that care autodetect when that doesn't work and fall back to APIs with actual agreed-upon specs.

Describing this as "Firefox has had a lot of issues keeping up with the WebRTC standard evolution" is... inaccurate. My impression is that there have been, and continue to be, areas where this could be leveled as a fair complaint. But refusing to implement rejected proposals because they had too much uptake already? That's the only way to keep the web platform's foundation solid.

The effectiveness of AIs at coding is a direct result of the fact that they are less constrained than humans at deciding which approaches are "reasonable". They are absolute beasts, fearless beasts. They'll write thousands of lines of code to do things that often shouldn't be done, or should be done with a library, or should be done by simplifying the problem statement. They'll add debugging to every level of a stack, they'll rewrite core libraries, they'll reconfigure your machine and network if something is broken or disallowed. How are they supposed to distinguish broken vs disallowed, anyway? That would just use up processing power, and they work by maniacally focusing all of that power on their goal and not getting slowed down by other considerations.

If they write a quadratic algorithm that times out before finishing a test, is it cheating to rewrite it to be linear? How do you define "cheating", and how much intelligence is required to constantly evaluate whether or not something qualifies as such?

I'm actually in agreement that alignment is critically important, the more so the more powerful these things become. I just don't find cheating to be a very good example of something to be solved with alignment. It could be, but it would lobotomize the model enough to make it useless.

Updated tl;dr: "There are incentives for OpenAI to say that AI is powerful and dangerous, therefore fully unconstrained AIs should be available to everyone."

It's still more of a statement of belief than a logical argument.

Ok... and what?

Do you have any evidence for the claim being either true or false that you'd like to write an article about? I guess not. Without anything to add, this article reduces to "I has big brain and can see what you sheep cannot. Very big brain. Gullible sheep. Sucks to be you, sheep."

(For the record: I see the incentive. My guess is that it happened exactly as described. The main takeaways: (1) science fiction is now real, we should all be very afraid; and (2) OpenAI, which claims to have a God-given responsibility to get to AGI first to protect the world from danger, cannot be trusted with this foundational task even when it's in easy mode. The latter is true whether or not you believe in OpenAI's reasoning and purpose.)

I disagree with the defender side. It's not an unreasonable end state, but we're nowhere near there now. It would require holding company employees legally responsible for the security of their services, which means the risk of being employed as a (defensive) security professional is much higher, which means pay needs to be much higher and insurance needs to be available, etc. It's a very different world.

On the weekends, I'm coding up a list management app with a sync server. It's unreleased but exposed to the internet. (This is not hypothetical.) If that server ends up being used as part of an exploit chain, am I legally liable too?

Forget about age verification, now you want to associate every exposed port on the internet with a legally responsible human?

"Is a meter the same as a foot?"

"Yes, exactly, you have it now, except they're different distances."

Maybe it's because I ask it to quiz me, and it really doesn't like to tell me I'm wrong. I also got a fair amount of

Claude: Ok, I will test your understanding. Question A? Question B? Question C? Question D?

Me: A=10. B=2. C=121. D is not solvable.

Claude: You got most of them right! You're very astute in saying that A=10, but actually it's 7. B=2 is exactly right! C could be 121 if we were talking base 4, but we're actually in base 10 so it's 25. D is trivially solvable and is 0.

Me: ...isn't that like 1 out of 4? How is that "most of them right"?

Claude: You're absolutely right! ...blah blah blah

I started using "[leave-open" for those.

It lasted for a couple of years, until someone went through and "fixed" them all.

I mean, we do for some things, especially algorithms (Boyer-Moore). Probably for the same reason the mathematicians do -- there aren't readily available real-world analogies.

And I won't even mention the branded future, with its "Google HyperZipper String Search" and "OpenAI/Red Bull speedmaxx distributed consensus algorithm"...

Uh, the idea of democracy is not that voting reveals universal preferences or something. It is ok to disagree with whoever gets elected, and continue working towards an alternative you believe to be better. In fact, democracy depends on that; otherwise, why not have a single election with no term limits? There is supposed to be ongoing difference of opinion.

> I also find it difficult to reconcile not using AI for weapons.

You can't reduce "AI for autonomous lethal weapons" to "AI for weapons".

Your comment seems to be whataboutism. The article was not an essay trying to prove that he knows the secret to being maximally effective at politics, or whatever it seems you were expecting?

Then it's good that it allows both modification and using it to run a business?

> This “users are obligated ‘give back’ the moment they make money with the gift they were given” is nonsense

But they are under no such obligation! They can make all the money they want and give nothing back. They can even modify the software to better serve their business. The only restriction is that if they do so, they have to make their modifications available. Which means they're way ahead of where they were before being given the initial software; why do you feel a software developer who decides to give the world a gift should be restricted in what gift they're giving? "Thanks for the chocolate, but the bar was too small so I didn't have enough left over for my kid to try some. Why do you hate my kid?"

> A business making money using free software doesn’t take anything away from the releasing organization.

First, that is false. They could damage the market for the original software. (And if they don't modify the software, then there's no problem in the first place.)

Second, why are you so hung up on the "making money" part, when that is explicitly allowed by the AGPL? It's just kind of bizarre -- it's a license that says over and over that you can charge for everything related to it, and you're complaining about it being hostile to people who want to charge money for things.

Thinking about it, I'm wondering if this is genuine confusion and you don't know what the AGPL is? If so, maybe start by searching for "charge" in https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html . It has nothing against "using it to run [a] business". There is no "moment they make money with the gift" that changes anything: you are explicitly allowed to charge for anything you like -- distribution, usage of the service, support, whatever.

Those aren't public goods, they're private goods. The difference is already apparent, and will become more so over time. But yes, they are "goods"; they have a lot of value.

I'm less interested in punishing the past theft that enabled these goods, and more worried about the ongoing damage they are doing to the ecosystem that birthed them. Good artists copy, great artists steal, but if a community is wholly dominated by these "great artists" then it will not survive as a community and will cease to produce anything worth copying let alone stealing.

Aside from fair use, yes it is.

> If I draw The Simpsons on a piece of paper - whether or not I used AI to create it - it's not copyright infringement.

Only because of the fair use doctrine, which is limited. If it damages the market for the original, then a court could definitely declare it to be infringement.

> Copyright infringement is if I tried to sell that Simpsons work as my own, putting up for consumption and reaping the monetary benefits.

No. Copyright infringement requires neither sale nor misrepresenting a work as one's one. It also covers derivative works, not just perfect duplicates. Copyright covers reproduction and derivate works and distribution/performance -- you can get in trouble for just one of those. Taken strictly, that would be a horrible world, but fortunately the fair use doctrine weakens those quite a bit. On the flip side, if AI reproduction destroys the original markets -- as it is quite obviously doing right now -- then it's going to have a reckoning at some point, given how its legal status is completely based upon getting a free ride by claiming fair use.

I think Google's AI results are probably the prime example here. Those results are often quite good, and starve off the visits and hence revenue stream of the sites where the results are sourced from. Additionally, there's no way to robustly attribute that information anymore either; those links were already broken pre-AI by freeloading aggregators. So potential information producers can't afford to host their valuable information since they will pay proportionally to their information's value (as translated into bandwidth).

But it's tricky. If you charge AI companies proportional to the damage they do, then you need to assess that damage and you'll be caught in a no-win cat & mouse game where the AI companies outsource the damage and you try to track it back to them. They win if they bump their revenue, but they also win if they conceal the damage. (Just like companies can use shell companies, bankruptcy, and asset-only purchases to avoid Superfund responsibility.) If you charge proportional to revenue, then there aren't conflicting incentives; companies win by increasing revenue full stop. But I do agree that this shouldn't just apply to the big companies; distillation / model extraction (adversarial or not) should not be a way to avoid fees.

Though what really seemed off to me about the proposed solution was the use of the fees (to pay Americans, no less!) Perhaps upcoming essays will justify this more, but to me it seems like those fees should be applied directly to the health of the ecosystem. It should be used to fight pollution, in this case AI slop overtaking the Web. It should support the value creators, eg open source developers being overwhelmed by the AI tsunami. It should go towards serving and moderating online communities that create the very value that the LLMs are trained from. In theory, paying a whole bunch of Americans a trickle of blood money will end up going towards these purposes, but I'm very skeptical: first, the benefit will be very diluted. Second, it's more likely that the excess money will end up in Google or Amazon's pockets. The whole system is already set up to route any advantage to the big players. The payments are at least as likely to damage the ecosystem as they are to support it. They would just feed the capitalistic wolf and further reinforce the setup where monetizers win and value creators lose. If you could magically route the money to value creators, that'd be great. But you can't.

It'd be ok to pour money into a bucket if it had a small hole or two, but pouring it faster into the sieve we have now is not going to help anything.