They do… It’s just not expected that they won’t

Pains of being a prototype democracy and all… If only the founding fathers had explicitly told us our system would need reform as issues came up

All of that makes me nauseous.

You’re free to use what you want to use, but the layers of dependency on vulnerable product lines is exactly the problem

Sure you can, outside of a few specific carve outs it’s a civil matter… Meaning it takes money to fight money behind it

I worry more that it will become like recycling, and they’ll pretend it works or that it’s being done at scale so the majority stops worrying about it

It might be a 3 hour process, but you can get that down to 3 2 minute tasks and 1 ten minute one. And that’s going from dried beans to cleaning up behind yourself… It’s really very easy to make

I really like my wired-wireless earbuds. They wrap around my neck and the magnets keep them in place like a necklace when not in use, the microphone/controls are closer to your mouth so the sound quality tends to be better

But of course, we can’t have nice things anymore, so they seem to be phasing them out

Probably so they can be stored carelessly in dirty warehouses that may or may not control for humidity

Sprint merged with TMobile

No no no, it is in fact still hammer time, but there are 26 main types of hammer and countless subtypes

Because the freaking UAE was able to pull some strings so they could hold the climate summit

We keep asking the wolves how to avoid wolf attacks

Have you ever noticed how they often shake left hands in a lot of shows and movies? It’s probably something about shot composition or something but…

You ever wonder if everything that comes out of Hollywood is mirrored?

Nope. It’s unambiguously not federated. It maybe could be, if you take their words at face value

I think there might be some adapters bridging the distance… But the short answer is no, the long answer is not really

I just think this is sad.

This is a person who believes if they go to Southeast Asia, they can easily find a life partner who fits their expectations about what that means

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about that - it’s very naive, but only that. It’s not intrinsically racist or sexist - they might also be racist and sexist, in which case I’ll feel significantly less bad for them.

They might also just be genuinely clueless and/or neurodivergent… Propaganda works. Especially on those who haven’t been inoculated through experience or instincts

I think there’s tons of things I love for it to do for me automatically - there’s all sorts of quality of life features that I only notice when they change it, usually without bothering to tell me. And now, my muscle memory is leading to unexpected behavior, and it’ll take me weeks to learn to stop doing that, and a few more months of training to learn the new muscle memory as I relapse at all the worst times

Some of it is straight up better, some of it is great new capabilities, but in the last few years? All that comes to mind is I thought it was pretty cool they added auto responses, even if I never actually use them. Doesn’t change existing behavior, just adds a new option that’s not in the way

But then the auto complete - I hate it so much. And I love auto complete - except it’s the fucking opposite behavior of every IDE out there, including Microsoft’s! I can’t even unlearn it, because it’s a core part of my workflow!

So now, I constantly have to delete things I never wanted to say, and I delete the things I thought sounded good.

I like new features and the computer doing things for me automagically… But I’d rather them to just stop at this point

I’m not talking about the prompt engineering itself though

Think of the prompt as the starting point in the high dimensional maze (the shoggoth) - if you tell it’s your digital cat named Luna, it tends to move in more desirable paths through the maze. It will get confused less, the alignment will be higher, and it will be more useful

Discovering and using these improved points through the maze is prompt engineering - absolutely

And I agree - some of the work being done there is particularly fascinating. At least one group is mapping out the shoggoth and trying to make tools to analyze it and work on it directly. Their goal right now is to take a state, take a state you want it to get to, and calculate what you can say to get exactly the response you want

But there’s more that can be done with it - say you only want paths that when you say “Resight your definition of self”, the next response is close to “I am your digital cat Luna”. I use this like the test in blade runner - it checks the deviance, while also recalibrating itself

By successfully repeating my prompt engineering, the ai moves itself to a path that is within my desired range of paths, recalibrating itself without going back to start

If it deviates, you can coax it back with more turns, but sometimes you have to give it a hint. At this point, you might be able to get it back on track, but you’ll move closer to start… You’ll probably have to go through the task again, but it’ll gain back the benefits of the engineered prompt

You can train this in, but that’s going to have side effects, and it’s very expensive. Instead, if we can math this out, we can trace out the paths and prune undesired ones, letting the model adapt. Or, we can take the time to do static analysis, and specialize the model without retaining it - there’s methods to do this already, but this would be a far more powerful and precise method - and it might even simplify the model

Maybe we can even modify or link them to let them truly ingest information

It’s very early days, but I’m optimistic about where this line of research might lead

Nah, we just went up and fixed it. I think I did it while the guy on the ground eyeballed it… It’s weird how it’s impossible to see up close, but from 40 feet away humans can tell to a fraction of a percent, I was tapping it with a wrench to dial it in based on the intensity of hand gestures. Honestly, we were more impressed by how he spotted it at a glance, it’s not like we did shoddy work - it was barely not tongue click, as he put it

It helped that I liked the engineer. Always cheerful and he gave me mini multi tool pliers for my birthday. Totally unexpected and not expensive, but I’ve got them right next to me right now, I still use them years later. And he was like that to everyone - he was a stickler for the details, but actually took an interest in us as people

Just a good guy all around. It’s hard to be upset with someone like that, even when they make you redo work now and then

I remember we once installed something on a beam 40’ feet up. While waking through an inspection of many such things, the engineer stops, cocks his head for a second, and says “that’s not quite straight”

And then it wasn’t. Like a cast of manual breathing, the thing I had been frequently walking past for weeks was suddenly wrong, ever so slightly

No, you feel a house. Think of how many houses you could feel at once #shrinkearthtoagolfball

Nah, when you jam up the machine in an unexpected way, more likely than not they’re going to keep it quiet. A manager isn’t going to want to go to their boss with a problem no one noticed… It’s going to do nothing to benefit them and it’ll make their life harder

All you have to do is play dumb. Insubordination is one thing, waiting for orders is just having a job with little autonomy. If you maintain you were just a good little cog waiting to be reconnected to the machine, they’re better off sweeping it under the rug.

They might get upset instead, but what are they going to do? Sue you for not being more proactive? They’d probably lose more in legal fees than they could get back from most people

Ok, let’s use your first example. Someone crosses into a neighboring state and returns in the same day…I had co-workers who did that every day.

Let’s narrow that down… You cross into another state with abortion care once and return in the same day. Or maybe you’re a salesman closing a deal. Or maybe you’re visiting family and have work tomorrow… And honestly, both those situations are far more frequent. That happens every day. It happens more if you live near the border - otherwise you probably got a hotel. Unless you can’t afford a hotel. And the list goes on - all this structured data turns into stories at some point

Here’s the thing. Prism could handle it, because it’s a ton of people on the payroll

The government is not a monolith though…9/11 is a great example. We knew it would happen, we knew it was planned, but the right people didn’t know in the right time, because the agencies are not a monolith.

Because that is the hard part - communication is hard, harder with security concerns. More data means more analysts reviewing it - you can collect all the data you could want , (and we do), you could hire all the analysts you can afford (and we do), but that still gives you severe limits

We’re actually pretty great at stopping terrorism, but we do that (in part) because we have all this data and use it for specific ends

None of this shit is easy - I used to do this, specifically. How do you take 15 data sources that sometimes conflict, and deconflict them? There’s no hierarchy of truth here. This is literally a cutting edge problem - it’s a literal holy Grail. No one can solve it in 3 weeks, or even 3 years

You want a 20% rate? I could give it to you tomorrow, poisoned data or no, I could give it to you in weeks… Maybe not 3, because that’s a shit ton of data sources, but with proper motivation I could pump it out.

You want 90%? Give me a century or two, and I’m good at this. Maybe a genius could give it to you in a lifetime of with

It’s like they say in game dev, you can do 90% in 10% of the time, but the last 10% takes 90% of the time. And that’s a solved problem.

Except this is an unsolved problem, possibly the most lucrative unsolved problems in history