Ozzie_osman

I call it Toddler Soccer Syndrome. Ball's over there? Let's all chase it. Oh, moved over here now? Everyone run the other way.

Yes but has it broken out of its sandbox and hacked anyone yet?

So does this help alleviate the dementia symptoms? Or do those remain but at least the patients get better sleep?

Build the technology and the platform. Let others figure out how to leverage. Pick and choose which of those verticals to do yourself.

Kind of like Amazon.

We've found that you can fine-tune confidence scores for your domain into existing models. I think the way this works is that you basically help the model understand what types of inputs it tends to get right and which ones it tends to get wrong. This seems like a reasonable thing you'd expect a model to be able to learn

"You will love this next piece of software. Completely hand-made. Each line of code, each piece of the visual design, was carefully and artisinally crafted by a real human, using techniques passed down for generations between craftsmen. Some of those techniques survive in books like Code Complete and such. They don't make 'em like this anymore. "

Excellent question. It seems likely because:

* The state of Israel does authorize spyware sales (eg NSO Group has to get a license from the Ministry of Defense, and Israel's Defense Export Control Agency states that its decisions take national security / foreign policy into account).

* In the case of Pegasus, NYT had reported that Netanyahu intervened to make an exception allowing sale of Pegasus to Saudi Arabia (as political leverage). NSO group execs used Israeli diplomatic passports when they traveled and stayed at the Israeli embassy.

* The government doesn't crack down on these industries, which it would do if it really considered them criminal.

* In this particular case, one of the main targets was Al Jazeera, which seems unlikely that a criminal company would want to target vs. a state actor.

So yea, the government seems to allow these companies to engage in what other countries would consider criminal activity. You can then kind of choose your spot on the spectrum of: "I think this is some broad conspiracy the government purposefully designed for large-scale espionage" or just "The Israeli government thinks it would be good to have great cybersecurity skills in the country so they bend the rules a little".

A good well-researched read is The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein.

I'm saying they shouldn't do that, because there is a decent chance those Israeli companies may do things at odds with their customers' best interests (because they cannot or would not say no to a government request).

Obviously not the first time an Israeli tech firm is responsible for these types of exploits, and at this point I'd go so far as saying that any Israeli-based tech company (especially cyber security ones, of which they have a strong industry) should be considered beholden to the government of Israel and hence, probably not trustworthy. How could you be sure whether they will act like a trustworthy independent entity, or compromise your data for the benefit of the state?

I loved how when I'd see the dentist, they'd have their assistant put together a "treatment plan", optimized over time to maximally milk my dental insurance.

You need to understand the system you're working on enough to make well-informed decisions about its current and future states.

In some cases you can get away with not reading the code. And maybe in the future that will be more common. But for now, I personally prefer to read (or skim) the code, and not abdicate to AI.

I mean, it's obvious in retrospect, and technically not too hard to implement... Combining the power of LLMs with the constrained nature of classifiers. But no one did it well, and they did it first, and it took off.