brianwmunz

"what the server can see to support rich queries" is the whole ballgame, right? Anything queryable is metadata that can leak or be subpoenaed... membership, access patterns, query frequency. For the activist/journalist threat idea, that's usually the sensitive part.

Right, and it's a sliding scale. People think in terms of institutions acting the way they're supposed to. As we've seen those lines can get blurry and reasons can be created to track and suppress free speech.

Whenever I would talk to people about the importance of privacy in data and online activity, people would always say something like "I don't care, I've got nothing to hide. I'm not some weird pervert." And yeah I'm not either but this kind of stuff is why it's important. Fascism thrives on knowledge of the people it wants to oppress.

I have had it with these mother Fn keys on this mother Fn keyboard!!

Maybe this is heretical in today's AI hype climate but...weirdly due to the rise of AI, then AI-slop polluting everything, a lot of old fundamentals are coming back. Clear, well-structured, descriptive content on a well-built page has a better shot of being picked up for SEO/AEO/whatever which are the same best practices from 2005. A lot of these tips and tricks and hacks just aren't going to move the needle as much anymore imo.

The thread keeps smushing two separate questions into one. "Can these companies hit the revenue they need to justify the capex" and "are the tools actually useful day to day" are different arguments, and you can answer yes to the second while still being worried about the first.

"LLM evals" is maybe an overused term because it can mean a bunch of things. This article talks about LLM-as-a-judge where an LLM scores another system's outputs.

Yeah people are just coming around to practicality.

This is crazy. It narrated the failure in real time, naming the exact safety rules it was overriding. Then says "NEVER FUCKING GUESS!" Ha, we need to figure out better guardrails...

yeah exactly the opacity is doing more damage than the limits themselves. anyone who's worked with AI knows there's a lot of limits you need to contend with. secret behavior changes are another level of badness.

This is interesting. Reminds me of the W3C traceability work a few years back that I was briefly involved with... main focus was defining agreed upon vocab for interoperability across supply chains. Never thought of the same approach being used for public policy, but it's an interesting idea... politics is an area where clear communication and definition is important. That said, vocab tends to change way less than public policy does, so amendments and revisions seem like they'd be tough to manage?