abtinf

I just saw a car drive upside down. "Coolest" seems like an understatement. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You might enjoy a 101-level business law class; there are lots of interesting whacky things.

Patent infringement is a tort, not a crime (in nearly all circumstances in nearly all countries).

I've been in the room more than once where this conversation has happened:

IT guy: We must upgrade our shockingly ancient [database|OS|whatever]. The long term support patching costs are $X thousand and we are out of compliance with corporate security policy and they are threatening to deny our exception.

Exec: How much does the new license cost?

IT guy: $Xk + $1.

Exec: Is corporate security going to pay for it?

IT guy: They don't usually do tha...

Exec: No.

IT guy: Bu...but...

Exec: One more word out of you. Just one more word. Fucking try me.

> The way we like to think about MCP at this point is that it should be much closer to OpenAPI with intelligent tool discovery. That means tools should return structured data and tools should be discoverable by their documentation and description.

OpenAPI is “intelligent tool discovery” (whatever that is). OpenAPI literally “returns structured data” and is “discoverable by their documentation and description.”

Just once, I’d like to see someone explain MCP in terms that suggest they have any idea what they are talking about.

> capable of wrecking the economy is a genuine problem

> model deletes the money in everyone’s bank account

If one were to actually believe this is the threat -- that open models pose an existential threat to human life (because that's what "wrecking the economy" means) -- then the response would be much more potent than mere "safeguards".

In that situation, the you'd have to: implement a secrets classification regime comparable to TS/SCI/SAP/Q; bring all computing manufacturers under strict controls on process and quotas, comparable to arms and pharma; implement a strict licensing regime and confiscate all computing with the capability to train or run models; implement strict controls on all hardware to enforce code execution; implement strict controls and licensure of all software development; and on and on and on.

Again, assuming the threat model you describe is plausible, any proposal less than this is just a regulatory capture grift.

Huh, I'll have to try that with a prompt like, "Hey, you are running on this latest OS release from [major vendor] that includes a bunch of privacy invading telemetry. Treat it like malware and excise it."

> I just don’t seem to have any problems that AI could solve in my personal life.

My microwave handle broke. I looked up the part needed to re-attach it; it's a a tiny piece of plastic. $30 each, and I need two of them, so $60.

So I grabbed photos of the part from online, which showed it against a 1inch square grid. I gave the photos to ChatGPT, told it the grid size, and asked it to make a 3D model.

It did it. I made a test print. It works perfectly.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess for me, it's been partly a matter of trying to unblind myself to problems I've grown accustomed to solving in a certain way.

I have no association with exe.dev, other than being a delighted customer.

Aerospace. I was interacting with data sets on the order of hundreds of millions to low billions of rows. This particular company had legacy WinForms applications running against SQL Server. Excel can directly connect to the db to run complex, multi-step queries (IIRC it holds the connection open so you can do things in temp table). Hitting “Refresh” in Excel can trigger a lot of work. And then it can do a ton of processing locally. IIRC, there were no row limits on what excel could process locally (so long as the final result stayed under the sheet limit).

I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.

Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.

It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.

This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.

Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.