josephg

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
22,330
Submissions
5,438
Member since
Sep 4
https://josephg.com/

Email [email protected]

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/josephg; my proof: https://keybase.io/josephg/sigs/F1nFs1IINV56Uq1naP2gxZ1lPnPFdZNvMA5ffdbXUAk ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 days ago
You also need to look at memory size (to store the model). And processing can still be the bottleneck.
Comment · 5 days ago
Yeah. It would require LLMs to sweep through other professions like they have in computing. I don't see strong evidence of that happening yet.
Comment · 5 days ago
I’ve spent more money on Claude this year than I’ve given to a lot of other tech companies, combined. Well, I bought a new phone too - but amortised over the phone’s lifetime it’s still much cheaper than I’ve spent on my claude subscription and what I’ve gotten my company to pay in api usage credits.

There are two questions. Will the value keep scaling? And how much of that value chain will anthropic hold on to? Right now software development is being eaten alive by LLMs. Will that happen to other industries too? And in the long run, what do the models we run look like? Are people going to end up self hosing opensource models themselves, or are we going to collectively hitch our wagons to frontier models provided by anthropic and their competitors?

If ai keeps getting better - which I think it will - and if anthropic can corner a large part of the market in an enduring way - which seems less likely to me - then yes. I can easily imagine them becoming a huge company.

Comment · 8 days ago
> unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads

I don't know if android has changed in the last 10 years, but my last android phone had constant popups in official google apps begging me to enable all sorts of information sharing right across google's ecosystem. The popups were constant. And it was full of dark patterns making it difficult to say no.

Google probably assumes you only see this stuff once. But if you say no, some features didn't work properly and it keeps bugging you.

I don't know how or why, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of gmail users unintentionally opted themselves in to this "choice" before the end of the year.

Comment · 9 days ago
> I think the idea that CAs are uniquely incompetent is probably incorrect.

The problem with the certificate authority system is that any CA can sign a cert for any domain name. It only takes 1 incompetent or malicious CA to break the whole system wide open. And there are so many CAs that inevitably some of them are incompetent, and use keys like 7. And some are definitely in bed with a government you don't like.

Moving certs into DNS means we only have to trust the registrars. Not the registrars AND the huge set of CAs.

Comment · 9 days ago
> until they comply so maliciously you'll need a new term for that.

The ruling is pretty clear that malicious compliance won't be accepted. There's a whole section on all the things apple isn't allowed to do to get around this ruling, starting with this:

> the first respondent must not (including by procuring any act of any related corporation) prohibit, prevent or take any action (including by imposing a fee or condition) which is likely to hinder users of iOS devices from discovering, obtaining and updating iOS apps, including alternative app stores, via Alternative Distribution Channels, or from using iOS apps obtained in that way on iOS devices, or prohibit, prevent or take any action (including by imposing a fee or condition) which is likely to hinder app developers from distributing and updating such iOS apps to such users via Alternative Distribution Channels, ...

Comment · 9 days ago
Read the ruling. It's clearly written with Apple's EU schenanagens in mind:

> 4. Subject to orders 12 and 13, the first respondent must not (including by procuring any act of any related corporation) prohibit, prevent or take any action (including by imposing a fee or condition) which is likely to hinder users of iOS devices from discovering, obtaining and updating iOS apps, including alternative app stores, via Alternative Distribution Channels, or from using iOS apps obtained in that way on iOS devices, or prohibit, prevent or take any action (including by imposing a fee or condition) which is likely to hinder app developers from distributing and updating such iOS apps to such users via Alternative Distribution Channels, including but not limited to: ..

Then it goes on to list all the ways Apple isn't allowed to quietly break 3rd party app stores - like, they can't make developers or users pay money to use them. They can't restrict which APIs are allowed to be used via 3rd party stores. They can't require that people who publish apps in the official store remove their apps from 3rd party stores. And so on.

Comment · 10 days ago
Better to trust 1 organisation than trust 100.
Comment · 10 days ago
> (Moving the PKI into DNS does not remove it, it just moves it around.)

Better in DNS though. You could have certs mirror the structure of DNS. Install a single root signing key for the top level DNS registry on client devices. Then you can query that to find out the signing keys for .com, .net, .au, etc. And continue from there.

One big problem with the CA system is that any CA - even the most incompetent - can sign certificates for any domain. If trust was moved to DNS, there would only be a single organisation that could forge certificates for any given domain. Using 7 as a private key? What a joke. The CAs aren't worthy of trust.

We already have to trust the domain name registrars anyway, since CAs query them to figure out if you own a domain before signing a certificate. In total, removing CAs would not only simplify the system. But it would allow scoped signatures. And we'd end up needing to trust far fewer actors to have a secure internet.

Comment · 10 days ago
A secure DNS is valuable whether or not we get rid of CAs, since CAs rely on DNS queries to verify domain ownership.

And if we have a secure DNS, then CAs are completely redundant. I'd much rather trust a handful of domain registrars than a handful of domain registrars, plus 100 random questionably competent organisations all over the world. Especially when any one of them can generate keys for every domain on the planet.

Comment · 10 days ago
He's right. DNSSEC is a mess, and we should fix that. We should fix that whether or not we delete CAs because CAs rely on DNS to verify that you own your domain. If DNS isn't secure, neither are CAs.

In the long run, fixing bugs is almost always better than working around them. DNSSEC is a bug. So are CAs. We can and should fix both.

Comment · 10 days ago
Make dns secure and put certs / public keys in dns. Control over dns already gives you the right to get tls certs. It should just be connected directly. We don’t need CAs.
Comment · 11 days ago
Unfortunately this isn’t possible. If we spent billions upgrading electricity infrastructure, sure. But it’s much cheaper overall to make smart use of solar panels and batteries that are already being installed in the grid. And that requires a smart grid, full of networked equipment.

For example, during peak sunlight times, many neighbourhoods now generate more solar than they use. Without a sink for that power, voltages would go haywire on power lines and damage equipment. So the grid uses control boxes to manage how much power each house is allowed to send back to the grid. And all that needs compute, live metering and so on.

Comment · 11 days ago
I’m not surprised! The amount of wasted memory and compute in modern software is astounding.

If you’re a developer, try promoting Claude to profile and optimise a piece of some piece of software. I routinely see 20-40x improvements with a single prompt and a few hours of opus credits.

Thanks for your work by the way. At a large scale, it is much more efficient for some software developers to do a bit of belt tightening in their code than ask millions of customers to invest in bigger computers. Globally the savings are enormous.

Comment · 11 days ago
What savings?

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