macNchz

With a lot of PaaS type vendors you are effectively exposed to both the vendor themselves and the public cloud they run their stack on top of.

Broadly I think you're much more likely to be the victim of a platform-level breach involving an immature startup PaaS than a hyperscaler cloud, however I think for small teams the alternate risk you take on is that AWS/GCP/Azure are full of landmines and extremely easy to misconfigure in insecure ways if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you have AI telling you confidently wrong things.

Query expansion and reranking are both valuable and things that even small LLMs are pretty good at. People are broadly not great at writing search queries, so a system that takes a poorly phrased question, turns it into several different actual search queries and then merges and sorts the results by relevance can have a big impact. All the better if the AI can ask the user some clarifying questions.

Enforcement of tidy lawns is genuinely a thing in very many places in the US.

My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).

As others have mentioned there are lots of examples from history of businesses claiming their product is dangerous if not properly regulated, but I think what's interesting in this moment is there appear to be a cohort of true believers who genuinely believe we're headed for apocalyptic AI, and a cohort of win-at-all-costs businessmen who are happy to harness the earnest faith of the true believers in service of becoming (even more) unfathomably rich.

Many businesses are on Enterprise plans where usage is all billed per token, rather than having a flat rate seat with rate limits. You may find it interesting to look at your token usage and calculate what you'd be paying monthly if you paid API rates instead.

Yes, and I think it has improved some, but just this week 6 Astra lost the most key details of a project across a compaction and got confused about what we were actually trying to do. I would have preferred to stop at 85%, interactively develop a next-steps prompt and continue from there when ready, rather than seeing it compact and become 5x dumber from one turn to the next.

In the olden times, aka like two years ago, AI chats would just stop working or just start slicing off the oldest parts of the context to fit the model's window.

That said, compaction feels like an idea that should work reasonably well, but across all of the major providers and agent tools I've used has never actually produced compelling results, to where if I see I'm getting close to the token limit I prefer to start putting a bow on the project and readying it for a fresh start. Even when I provide a detailed compaction prompt it usually focuses on the wrong stuff.

I certainly don't have all of the answers here, but I do think the somewhat ineffable nature of this concept contributes to how at a business or societal scale we wind up optimizing for the wrong things–it's hard to describe, multi-factorial, hard to measure, so instead we optimize for things that deliver obvious measurable improvements. That line of thinking is how you wind up bulldozing a city center to run a highway through it: travel times fall 80%! The negative side effects are harder to measure.

The AC thing interests me as a topic–purely my opinion, but I do think that living in a very narrow temperature range changes your relationship with the outside world, and there's all sorts of good stuff to be done outside that's much harder to get motivated to do if the delta with what you're used to is too big.

As an anecdote: I mostly disliked hot weather in the past, but years ago when I got hooked on running, I found that I disliked the treadmill more than the heat, so I ran outside through a muggy NYC summer. It was miserable to get started but got a bit easier every year, and over time I've noticed, from the digital thermometer on my desk, that the temperature where I have to stop working and turn the AC on has slowly crept upwards. My running club puts on a 5k summer race series–if you'd asked me 10 years ago whether I'd want to run up a hill in the swampy Brooklyn heat every other Wednesday, I would have laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea–but today it is genuinely something I love, and has been a highlight of my year for several years now.

All that to say, your point about suffering for suffering's sake stands: I cannot sleep without AC above a certain temperature/humidity, and I don't see any reason to force myself to suffer through restless sweaty nights. On the flip-side, though... I have never had more visceral, euphoric appreciation for the comforts of modern life than after a cold and drizzly backpacking trip where we spent the entire time damp and never really, fully warmed up for multiple days. 20-something years later I have the most vivid memory of getting in a hot shower when we got home.

I've been interested in this for quite a while, and have read a fair bit about it as a phenomenon. I think that pursuing comfort and convenience to the point that it's actually harmful is sort of a big factor in a lot of societal change the last several decades in many developed/Western countries. As a European/American dual national I think it's a particularly strong current in American culture, personally.

An accessible intro is Michael Easter's book The Comfort Crisis, which, while a little pop-sciencey, explores the idea that making our lives more and more comfortable (across various axes) creates a feedback cycle that shrinks our comfort zones, making some of the more rewarding (but potentially challenging/uncomfortable) things in life seem unthinkable.

For me this was a bit of a "once you've seen it you can't unsee it" kind of thing. Letting convenience be your primary metric for success often produces totally unsatisfying results, anywhere from how you build cities to the way you eat a meal.

The arc of the original World of Warcraft (broader social impacts aside) is an interesting microcosm to explore: players continually asked for convenience features that would simplify the most tedious aspects of the game and reduce social friction (organizing groups, traveling etc), but as they made things more convenient over the years, many people found that the game actually began to lose something important. The response culminated in a very successful re-release of the original, inconvenient, game after 15 years.

It doesn't actually matter that the AI chooses which tools to use, because people give the tools to the AI! With no tools, the AI cannot do anything but generate text. "The AI figured out how to abuse the tools I gave it to achieve the goal I gave it" does not mean the AI went rogue, it means you, the human in control, let it happen.

> Go to codex or claude code or any harness right now

The harness is the whole thing here. AI generates text. Everything else is undertaken by harnesses and infrastructure humans provide, have control over, and therefore responsibility for.

Every action AI takes is fundamentally not independent, it requires an explicit choice to let the AI write code, have a physical machine to run it on, to have network access, etc. The concept that these things are "rogue" ignores the role humans play in giving them goals and tools to pursue those goals, and makes it seem like it’s a self-determined force, over which humans cannot exercise control at all.

Hyperbolic to be sure, but I think it’s fairly common for people to get into programming for fun as a teenager, turn that into a well-paid job, realize that programming jobs are often entirely different from programming as a hobby, then feel trapped because all the experience they have is in programming, and finding an alternative starts to look like competing with recent college grads for entry-level office jobs (ask a 22 year old how that’s looking these days), an expensive degree, or something menial for $15/hour or less.

First world problems, perhaps, but also a microcosm of our broader societal divergence, where a reasonably comfortable middle is increasingly being replaced by growing working and upper-income classes, with very different lifestyles.