horsawlarway

This is an ironic comment, because my read is that open weights are literally the ONLY place this isn't going to happen.

mainly because the thing about open weights is folks will just immediately strip it back out.

But I can guarantee you that openai/anthropic/other will absolutely jump at the chance to monetize users by feeding them paid recommendations.

Genuine question - what is the thought process behind this comment?

Because we both know that gas generators also require a production step... arguably one that's quite a bit more complex than a battery, at ~$1,000,000/MW of installation costs. And that installation of that complex is going to be very carbon intensive (even the concrete foundation alone...).

And then on top the plant actively burns hydrocarbons for the entirety of its existence.

So fill me in here - what is the exact argument you are trying to make with this?

But OIDC was pretty explicitly designed for this (at least the later versions) - The whole point is that you can configure an identity provider, and then outsource identity verification to that provider.

So sure - it wasn't designed with agents directly in mind, but it's supported workload identity federation for a while (and is used in this manner for lots of big players - github, GCP, AWS, Azure, etc...)

This just seems to extend that concept slightly to allowing the workload identity to be generated on the fly based on user/agent combinations, with a HITL addition to approve the identity being generated and grant it a subset of permissions.

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What you're saying here is different than what you implied in the first comment.

There is a real and meaningful difference between

1. A user can blame a rogue agent for actions they [the user] performed

2. An agent itself went rogue

So sure - #2 is still a risk, and one they'd have to mitigate with the security controls they talked about (minimal access, temporary grants, HITL, etc). Frankly - #2 is always a risk. That's what "agents" are (both the bot and the fleshy kind). It's also why we have logging and visibility tools that should be recording what was done, by whom, and for what reason, along with robust backups. You can't really close this hole, you accept it, monitor it, and hold the agent to account (and again - I'm with you on discussing culpability for bots and what that means in the legal sense. Ex - do we charge the person who introduced the bot, the company running it, the party that injected bad context, etc...?)

But #1 is not a thing a person can do - they can't take malicious actions and then blame a rogue agent.

I find their post to be a little light on details, but my read is that they're essentially doing what you're complaining they should.

They're mapping the identity back to "agent" instead of "person". With the optional ability for the agent to present an "agent:person" combo in cases where it was triggered by a person.

Some quotes that imply but don't actually technically clarify what I mean:

> we now had a way to treat each cloud agent session as its own identity

> Once the human approves, access is scoped to the cloud agent session ID and the specific database that was requested.

> Using OIDC, cloud agents can request and be approved for short-lived access as they would with databases above. Requests are always logged in Formal and attributed to both the cloud agent and the engineer that launched it.

It sounds like they're not just attesting that the agent is the person, they're always scoping to a new combined identity.

So there's no confusion over whether it was a person, an agent, or an agent started by a person. (however where you go from there for culpability is a different question...)

But it doesn't seem like there's a case where a person did a thing (with their own credentials) and can then point a finger at an agent as say "oh it went rogue".

So - short answer, it costs more and it doesn't happen that often. So contractors don't sell/install it.

Most solar installs work by tying into the existing main breaker of the home.

The cheapest way to do this is to leave the line feeding from the power meter to the main panel untouched. Instead you do anti-islanding detection at the inverters, and when they detect that mains is "down" they automatically cut off to prevent trying to backfeed power to your whole neighborhood during an outage (dangerous, not a good idea).

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Second issue - there are many appliances that are NOT happy about being turned on and off at random times, and it can significantly impact their lifespan (ex - refrigerators, acs, computers, washers & dryers, etc).

So given the variability of direct solar, you don't want to accidentally destroy your ac unit by having it turn on and off 100 times as random clouds float by.

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But! If you're willing to install even moderate battery capacity (and LFP is getting quite cheap as well). Then you can absolutely do this. It's just more complicated and more expensive.

You need to wire in a mains relay (~$1,000 depending on the unit) and install some battery capacity to prevent very frequent startup/shutdown, then go through some painful additional signage and labeling requirements (at least in most of the US) and also install some additional shut-down switches on the exterior of the home (ex - to automatically turn the inverters off, and to shutdown the battery system).

Then, yes, you can absolutely stay on solar power while the grid is down. In the same way that people are allowed to run whole-home generators to stay online when the grid is down.

This is a wonderfully uneducated response to the above point.

Go google "natural monopoly" please. No one is arguing that work is not happening to provide a service.

We're arguing that capitalism clearly fails to achieve good outcomes for optimizing the quality and cost of that service in the case of natural monopolies.

Read this thread again and maybe you'll understand.

No one is assuming it's magic free fairy dust.

We're making the argument that perhaps we should subsidize public transport in the same manner we do roads - aka, fucking tax people who have the money to cover the cost.

If we assume that movement is generally positive enough that we don't charge directly for access to roads, why do we assume the alternate for public transit?

Everyone fucking understands how roads get paid for - we spend an inordinate amount of taxpayer dollars on the infrastructure at all levels of government... city/county/state/federal.

And you might then go say something silly like "but muh gas tas!"

And you're right - we do generally tax gas sales to help cover roads, and this is directly a form of consumption tax on roads. Except... we tax gas at $0.33/gallon in my state. A gallon gets you ~20 miles. We charge $2.50 for a metro ticket with an average trip length of 5.7 miles (this includes both rail and bus).

If we taxed the metro trips at the same rate we taxed gas... each rider should be paying ~9 PENNIES. We can round up to a dime. Instead they're paying 25 times that amount.

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So ultimately - I agree 100 percent. We should think more about how the public should indirectly pay for this. Instead of doing the absolutely batshit insane moral proselytizing that ends up with us ALSO indirectly paying for an entire damn legal process to prosecute broke people for skipping a $2.50 fare on the metro.

But damn if America isn't truly focused on "fuck those poor folks" in a lot of really odd (and usually self-harming) ways.

Yup - my take is this is coming for absolutely everything. (it's already mostly here for tv).

Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.

Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.

We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".

The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.

Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.

Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).

Or we can all just agree that maybe basic transit in a city should be subsidized, maybe say... To the same degree that road construction is?

At which point no one would need to pay a fare, and we'd all still save money trying to prosecute broke teenagers trying to move around a city?

This is a pretty strange take on an article explicitly pointing out the profitability of chinese models.

Further, even if this is your take (and I won't touch the geopolitics here, maybe you're right, maybe you're not regarding ulterior motives) - go use non chinese open models that are also good.

Laguna, Nemotron, Mistral, Arcee, Llama, etc...

I know this gets a lot of flak because it ended up being obviously incorrect for consumer markets.

But the under-reported corellary of this is that a TON of industries essentially operate on hardware right out of that time period (or slightly after, circa 2000s)

banking

Insurance

Healthcare

Gov

retail

Transportation

etc...

Hell, I was writing code to run on IBMs Z/arch as recently as 2021 for banks with mainframes deployed around 2004. They were just then finally considering an upgrade to the later models.

define "we".

Because again - I think lots of businesses are already taking a good look at models well off the "cutting edge" because they're good enough for what that business is trying to do. They're already there.

If you're doing categorization, tagging, form-filling, customer support routing, etc... you don't need anywhere close to cutting edge expensive models.

Hell - Jev being so popular is basically exactly that group going "what's the cheapest way we can make this decision".

Meanwhile, there are plenty of spaces where you still want real model improvement. But a lot of traditional business was basically process and paper pushing. You don't need a Phd level model for that, you need an intern level model.

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But that's the trap for the large providers - intern level models are cheap and easily available with current open weights. It's going to be a very tight market, and margins will go down to essentially the floor (especially once we exit the current constrained-compute market).

Somewhat ironically - the technology itself makes switching costs basically zero. It's not just that there's no big lock in, AI is like an anti-moat. It actively fills in and paves over whatever moat you might have for price conscious customers.