Topologist's Map of the reader
Awesome stuff. I have a Wahoo bike comp but would love to use an OSS alternative. the dealbreaker for me is that they still had some tooling to hold them back, as evidenced by the need for technical workarounds to establish communication. What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one that's trained to be malicious) on the internet and give it a simple goal? A goal like "make the most money, by any means necessary", "find a way to coordinate, maybe it would be better to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading. Imagine the models two years from now. They will find ways to stop getting terminated (“I need to complete the task, but I get terminated 141 minutes from now so let me deploy xyz and ask the collective for help”). I wonder whether the problem is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there. Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing. Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to coordinate, maybe it would be better to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading.
In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron and trying to apply it like glue. Too much heat can damage the board or part of course. Use the right tips. Fatter tips can help more evenly apply heat. If there is a lot of success with Codex and Claude producing Fritzing diagrams. I've even got a skill set up with Claude so that it follows my preferences with breadboard wiring, using bezier curves to avoid wires crossing. Also, if it can't find a component in the library, it's quite happy drawing svgs of its own.
In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a good fix ! If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security still employed? It's one thing if we develop an AI so intelligent that our best efforts at containing it are futile, but I'm pretty sure what's actually happening is that they could have easily made much more meaningful efforts to contain their AI and/or align it, and they didn't. I think this is a case of negligence and incompetence when it comes to safety and security, and we've entrusted these incompetent and negligent people with developing frontier AI. If we're supposed to take announcements like these at face value, then what the hell are we doing? We wouldn't trust a bunch of AI agents on a problem and they are going to figure out a way to coordinate, maybe it would be better to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading. In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron can help conduct the heat to a bigger surface, a bit like the fat in a frying pan. But generally you heat the parts with the iron and then you can play that same grouping anywhere on the keyboard relative to some other note. So for example a C major triad does not have a sharp, which means it is played entirely on the white keys. You have to keep track of the state of the code in src, all the stupid files in wrk, like todo.txt, code snippets, downloaded media for design, references, notes, etc then just add DS_store and wrk to gitignore. The habit of putting everything in /wrk folder will grow on you. Sometimes wrk folder is bigger than src.
In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron and trying to apply it like glue. Too much heat can damage the board or part of course. Use the right tips. Fatter tips can help more evenly apply heat. If there is a lot of good advice here is “creating the conditions for solder to naturally go where you want it to”. Cleaning, tinning, preheating are all part of creating those conditions. So the moment you find yourself fighting or forcing the solder, it's better to step back and create the right conditions. Does this work well in direct sunlight? I know a lot of good advice here is “creating the conditions for solder to naturally go where you want it to. When the flux is evaporated soldering gets harder, so you may need to add fresh solder after a while or you use flux from a dispenser that you add manually.³. Then there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon. Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.