danielrhodes

Generational wealth is often squandered within a couple generations. The first generation can often times keep it together, but the generation after that and beyond have no connection to the origins. If Elizabeth Holmes’s parents were upset at their loss of wealth, it’s because they had no special abilities that would make them good capital allocators.

Nope this makes sense. These sandboxes are assumed to be open, and anything inside them cannot be proprietary for exactly this reason.

You’re managing risk and what you pay for is derisking yourself. You be the judge of what that is worth to you, but it’s not zero and it’s not always your attorney’s fee either.

False.

Open models are a good thing. OpenAI was open until it became obvious that being open was not going to pay for training costs and wouldn't help them get a competitive edge. I'd bet that if Meta gets to a place where their model is in a similar position, they will also become more closed. But right now, Meta is open because that is what weakens and creates the most contrast with the other AI labs.

It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.

I've tried this before and I think this constraint is something that has to be kept top of mind for a designer not just the engineer. Most designs these days assume a single page app and there are interaction patterns that make plain HTML not suitable. But if you incorporate this in from the start and stick with it, there's no reason you can't do this.

Once again there seems to be this deep misunderstanding by engineers that all lawyers do is draft docs like an engineer writes code. And if you can automate the doc creation process, you have automated the attorney.

But this not true. It greatly depends on what type if lawyer it is. They can operate very differently.

When it comes to docs, lawyers try not to reinvent the wheel on every doc. It’s very risky. They want to use language that has stood up to the test of time. So they have templates and old contracts and they will piece together a contract from that - it takes no time at all. AI writing new stuff every time using new language doesn’t save much time and puts a client at risk because nobody knows how that language holds up in court.

Many attorneys have paralegals who do the actual work. Those paralegals are much cheaper. Efficiency arguments don’t often take them into account. Most legal tech companies don’t think about paralegals. But they are often the real workhorse in a legal firm. But automating them doesn’t really speed anything up: they do a lot of varied things and are not just mindlessly following some process like a factory worker.

So what do lawyers do? They advise clients, they project manage, they research, they talk with other lawyers, sometimes they go to court, they review work, they work on getting new clients, and yes sometimes they write legal docs. Then at the high end of things, they come up with legal strategies and solutions that AI has never seen before.

In corporate law, legal is often budgeted in. It’s expensive but it is often ROI positive. Legal mistakes are incredibly costly.

Having said this, are lawyers pretty slow to adopt new tech? 100%. Word processors replacing typewriters was seen with a lot of suspicion. Email too. The cloud too. I think AI will have a big impact on law - but it won’t be as simplistic as a little doc generator an engineer cooks up one night in his bedroom having never even met a lawyer. The law is quite gray and so even if you have found something impactful, attorneys manage risk by looking to see what others are doing. If there is social proof, they are more likely to accept it.

The reason Facebook is where it is now is that when it was novel there was a lot of engagement. But as the novelty wore off, it became clear that your friends were not going to be able to produce the amount of interesting content you’d need to stay engaged. Most people probably don’t have enough friends on FB making the problem worse. In addition, Facebook’s privacy model requiring a double opt-in friendship makes it hard to add more friends.

So they started to loosen things: you can follow others, posts can be public, your feed becomes a mix of posts in your network and friends posts, etc. Now it is resembling Reddit. Numbers go up!

That is to say: these pure friend social networks start off with the right intentions. But with a similar product and incentives, you’ll end up right around where Facebook is now. If you want a different outcome, you must start from a different place.

I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.

Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.

Articles like this amount to a straw man.

People seem to think that just because it produces a bunch of code you therefore don’t need to read it or be responsible for the output. Sure you can do that, but then you are also justifying throwing away all the process and thinking that has gone into productive and safe software engineering over the last 50 years.

Have tests, do code reviews, get better at spec’ing so the agent doesn’t wing it, verify the output, actively curate your guardrails. Do this and your leverage will multiply.

It certainly looks like an Apple device. Ive's aesthetic is Apple's aesthetic, so if you hire Ive, that is what you are going to get.

I can see a car company who doesn't care about design stumbling into this outcome, but Ferrari doesn't seem like that kind of company. So the choice must have been intentional.

This is no surprise. We are all learning together here.

There are any number of ways to foot gun yourself with programming languages. SQL injection attacks used to be a common gotcha, for example. But nowadays, you see it way less.

It’s similar here: there are ways to mitigate this and as we learn about other vectors we will learn how to patch them better as well. Before you know it, it will just become built into the models and libraries we use.

In the mean time, enjoy being the guinea pig.

I think this is a genuine concern for prominent people. Like if you are Mark Zuckerberg, there is material interest in a bad actor installing malware on his laptop. But for a random person where you get low value data that may or may not let you better target some low value ads? That is much harder to justify. Would have to reevaluate as things change and the cost of compute goes down.

People seem to ignore the cost and accuracy aspects of a phone listening to you 24/7. At least with today’s constraints, it is highly unlikely to be happening.

First, the cost to transcribe audio is not free. It is computationally expensive. Any ad network or at scale service would not be able to afford it, especially in orgs where they are concerned about unit economics.

Secondly, the accuracy would be horrible. Most of the time, your phone is in your pocket and would pick up almost nothing. More over, it’s not like you are talking about anything of value to advertisers in most cases. Google is a money printing machine because people search with an intent to buy. The SNR of normal conversation is much much much lower. That makes the unit economics of doing this gets much worse.

Third, it would be pretty hard to not notice this was happening. Your phone would get hot, your battery would deplete very quickly, and you’d be using a lot of data. Moreover on iOS you could see the mic is being used and the OS would likely kill the app if it was using too many resources in the background.

So until we find an example of this actually happening, it’s not worth worrying about.

Maybe it’s because the movies aren’t good and the plot lines are stale. Just a thought.