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Oh man, a non-web version of this would be an insta-buy from me

Their engineers are still trying to figure out how to make backlit keys. Just give them another two decades, I'm sure they'll crack it.

The $0.03 LED, $0.04 diffuser panel and the extra 3 cents for manufacturing keys with transparency will eat into their 93% profit margin. Can't have that. The children will just have to use a desk light.

Oh no! Anyway

It's lunchtime

Sure, but local AI is still a black box. They can be influenced by training data selection, poisoning, hidden system prompts, etc. That recent Wordpress supply chain hack goes to show that the rug can still be pulled even if the software is FOSS.

Sure, but unless you're training them yourself they can still be compromised with poisoning or bias. They're still black boxes even if you're running them locally.

Obviously, and that is no different than remote models. You do not and should not ever trust an LLM, but with proper handling they can still be super useful.

You give LLMs a dedicated OS to work in, let them do research or debugging and commit to branches, review and clean up those branches as you like from a trusted OS, then sign the commits and mark a PR as ready for review.


You're absolutely right!


It has always baffled me how quickly, and how voraciously, people started to rely on privately owned AI systems.

AI is not something discovered by scientists and plucked out of the ether. It's engineered and controlled, for profit, by corporations which have demographics and KPIs. These companies don't owe you anything, and they make no promises.

If you're running a business that deeply relies on AI, you might as well add Sam Altman to your board of directors--because he has just as much control over your company as you do. If they have a bad quarter and need to increase rates by 1000%, your choices are to pay up or shut down.

This Mythos situation is just the beginning. Not only do they have everyone hooked, but they've actively stalled the personal skill growth of millions of people who fell into vibe-coding rather than genuinely learning. And now they have that choice: Pay up, or shut down.


The same corporations that insist upon private Maven repositories to control all code dependencies are nevertheless fine with establishing a massive dependency on a privately-held corporation in order to write software that hardly anyone in the organization understands. When I really think about this and how it plays out in the long run, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.


I can't run my business without electricity. Yet we don't fear of its access being revoked. Sam makes the comparison of intelligence to electricity a lot. So we are on the path to these systems becoming utilities.


Electricity is heavily regulated. Is there any evidence that LLMs will be the same?


Was electricity regulated in the first decade of its existence?


I don't know but likely not. Factories were powered by steam then, and had a "power plant" on site. So they didn't convert to electricity until it was reliable and guaranteed.


Was anything regulated in those times? You could legally buy humans at that time.

But that doesn't mean we live with same standards. Lack of regulations in electricity led to a lot of deaths and disaster which is why it was regulated.

But we dont live in the start of 20th century, we live in 2026 and we must learn from the past instead of helbent on repeating it.


I would bet any amount that when the time comes to turn AI into a utility, they will fight it tooth and nail.


Comparing AI to electricity focusing on just one particular aspect (hey its like fuel guys!!) while completely ignoring all the structural difference between actual energy industries and big tech is really stupid.


They use private AI because it's hard work and expensive to provide. But you are not that locked in as xAI/OpenAI/Anthropic etc. seem pretty interchangeable for most purposes.


your choices are to pay up or shut down.

Another choice is to switch to a different model, perhaps open source this time.


Package manager incidents (like leftpad) have shown that just because it's open source doesn't mean it can't do damage to your project.


Another choice is to write code and learn. Especially if you are 16 and have all day.


We are talking about running a business. In business world no one ever cared where code is coming from, the only concern is how much the code costs.


And while we're at it, stop with the popups and notifications.

I don't care about the new features in a browser update. Ideally, nothing at all has changed.

I don't want a "tour" of the software I just installed. I, presumably, installed it to do something, and I just want to do that thing.

I don't want to have to select a preference for how a specific action is performed in your software. If it's not what I expected, I will learn it.

And for the love of GOD, nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter.


I actually might want to subscribe to your newsletter, provided I read & enjoy your article. So why does the pop-up always interrupt me before the page has even finished loading?

If you inset an unobtrusive newsletter button 60% of the way through the article, perhaps I'll actually click it (or, more realistically, follow your RSS feed).


I work in a creative field, and we've started to get a lot of clients using AI to generate initial concepts for us to build upon. The problem is, they're not actually thinking about these concepts, they're just generating until they see something they like.

Then, we have meetings where we will ask a basic but specific question about what they want us to make, and we're just met with blank stares. They have no answers, because they've never actually thought about it.

And then everyone else needs to do the thinking for them.


This reminds me of what's happened back in the early days of Google Translate. Lots of folks would bring very low quality automatic translations "for correction" only. For many it was a way to get a lower price since in their minds it was cheaper to correct something that is "largely done" rather than do the work from scratch. Oh how wrong they were, haha.


They're staring at you because you they're paying you to figure it out and youre asking them again


Precisely. I'm not an artist but have worked with some, and I do so with the basic assumption that the artist knows their shit and knows better than me. This client basically made a draft (or think they did) and asked you to fill the gaps, then went blank wondering how is it you're such a noob you can't even do your job. I'd honestly tell them to piss off and find better people to work with/for.


Going ahead without asking is a sure recipe for having the client tell you "Sorry, that's not at all what I want" and then having to start over again. Your creatives ask questions for a reason. What is it that made you pick this specific draft out of the slop pile as a good match for your brand? The color scheme? The composition? The atmosphere? The line art style? If you expect your creatives to just magically guess, and then get frustrated when the output is not what you had in mind, then it's hardly your creatives' fault.


Yup, people aren't mind-readers. And it can be very hard to predict what bits the client cares about and what they don't, so it's worth biasing towards asking (though I think it's worth emphasizing that 'I don't care, you choose' is a valid response). The worst clients are the ones who can't express what they want in the first place and then reject output without explaining what it is they did or didn't like about the result.

That said, it can be very hard to be a good client. Writing requirements (whether for art or engineering) is something that on average, people are very bad at. And often you will only find out you cared about something after you see it (oh god I am so bad at this, especially because it's often delayed, so I will go 'looks good, no notes', then like a day later go 'oh wait, actually...'), which is why having a healthy dialogue and rapid feedback loop is so valuable to any project.


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