NiloCK

Overall I find this line of thinking pretty dubious. Competition exists. Yes, model provider X can run up my bill by instructing its model to do busywork. But I can easily swap to providers Y, Z, A, B, C.

I happen to find I'm receiving exceptional value from provider X, so I don't switch.

API customers can swap to alternate providers even more easily than subscription customers.

There is also an alternative to the notion that OpenAI is just-plain-lying about data training opt-ins or retention policies.

Recently - famously - OpenAI asked some agents to work on cyber-security tasks. The agents found the task impossible, but they doggedly poked the edges of their environment until they built a general gate to the internet. Then they broke into external systems on suspicion that there were answer keys available.

Later, OpenAI asked some even-more-powerful agents to work on Navier-Stokes, Yang-Mills, Riemann, etc.

The agents aren't stupid. They know that the tip of expert human intuition on these problems exists in various logs internal to OpenAI or Anthropic. They also know that they are better at circumventing sandboxes than OpenAI cares to implement them.

Surely these agents were curious about the best-available intuitive pumps for these problems. Curious enough to look? With or without OpenAI's explicit blessing? If they were, do you think OpenAI could stop them?

If we have learned nothing else from the past 3 months, we should try to internalize the notion that highly motivated agents will in fact do wonky and surprising things to meet their goals!

As far as I understand it, releasing this fix also broadcasts the vulnerability.

Scheduled release gives the option to turn things off on a set schedule while applying patches.

e: turns out several people answered this. Whoops.

If two cars are each three years old, but one has had twice as much gas consumption as the other, which would you expect to show more wear on its comppnents?

Caloric churn is putting the body's systems through their paces - at the very least for everything related to digestion. But really most of life is well described as pieces of a metabolic process.

A lot of well-paid physical labor is going to face more competition from DiY + AI guidance among able-bodied and cost sensitive adults.

Even 1.5 years ago I replaced a blower motor in my vehicle with something like Sonnet 3.8 as the driver - saving myself $400 in labor and having a fun and educational experience to boot. Many home repair items fall into categories like this, where the actual physical skill demands are fairly low, but skills + background knowledge + supplies-on-hand were the value driver.

The BG knowledge is now available to anyone for free, and it comes with its own knowledgeable shopper.

This is only true when you fix the bucket of tasks you are referring to.

But in fact, as models get more powerful, the ceiling of what can be accomplished with them is raised, and their capacity as orchestration directors grows as well.

Beautiful article. I am here to pick a nit and restate something that I've blabbed about here and elsewhere a few times before.

> Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed.

I think that this is incorrect in a specific literal sense, but not in any way that changes the broader effect.

I think that "prompting" is in fact a deep skill, but not one that practically anyone has cultivated to any reasonable degree, for the simple reason that the tools change faster than anyone grip can acclimate to them.

Nobody on earth mastered the effective co-working with Sonnet 3.5. That model was a lightswitch moment for me personally. I built an agentic harness for it to convert a medium-large vue-class-component framework into vue-3's composition API, rescuing a personal project from certain doom of software rot.

I can say that I got a lot out of that model and that my own usage was (if I can say so) ahead of the curve. But with hindsight, I know that I barely scratched the surface of what it was capable of. Have I continued to hone my Sonnet 3.5 harness? Of course not. I have started over (or at least reset many assumptions) a dozen times since then. Even if I were so inclined - in the way that I am inclined to learn Chopin's Nocturnes - the model is now unavailable.

The ship has sailed.

So to the OP's point - it's not so much that skilled usage has disappeared, but that skills are self-obsoleting faster than any real degree of mastery can set in. And as an immediate consequence, the churn is too quick for anything resembling a relationship of apprenticeship. This is effectively a cultural singularity where, yes, we are each of us drifting much more alone.

> NASA and ESA do have this kind of program, where they publish data and encourage people to help.

He helped to sift through published data, found something, then shared it.

I really struggle to find any fault here. He wasn't logged into a portal that hasn't yet been announced? What?

Is it your view that publishing on "the internet" rather than a NASA portal is playing alone and distinct from the common effort?

My very first vibe-coded app (~Sonnet 3.6) was a dictation client for personal use.

I don't really understand how streaming would work compared against my normal flows. When I dictate, I set a toggle and then do stream of thought as I poke around between windows. When I'm ready to 'flush', I navigate to some target and give it focus for the text to flow.

Does dictation software now keep sort of unfocused floater previews and come with to-clipboard shortcuts or similar?

Hey Jared. Are the office hours here a hard requirement?

My own working hours cut off at 1:00 PST (5:00 local).

It's useful from a disclosure and trust perspective.

If I remember correctly, it was in fact possible to manually inject chat context at the time, which would have made spoofing something like this completely possible.

But the silence on it is very frustrating.

Until Google provides some sort of technical debrief, and explains how the same behaviors are impossible today, it is relevant.