...or convincing operators that jobs sent to their machines are legal, legitimate, and non-nefarious.
I could not find disclosure on their site about the guard-railing or safety-systems at the point the prompt is gathered from users which would intercept, log & prevent bad actors from inadvertently involving me in something illegal or immoral as an operator. Perhaps that disclosure exists and I just need to be linked to it; that would be welcome.
Amazing how analogous this is to the early Internet when people started running web servers out of their basement and then eventually graduated up to being their own dial-in ISP…
Admirable idea and execution…but it does apply opposing evolutionary/economic pressure for AI-slop to become less detectable over time. AI will learn and adapt.
Metaphorically speaking, it’s the Borg we’re dealing with, not the Klingons. All Janeway did was slow the Borg’s progress.
It’s a truly remarkable app you and team have built. I’m going to use the term _simple_ but please understand that that’s high praise.
To me, obsidian is a thought-taking app, not a notetaking app. Thoughts are amorphous and incomplete no matter how much you embellish them. They don’t belong in only one place with only one label or pinned to only one date. They reach out to each other. Merge and split. They sit inside each other sometimes.
Obsidian gets that. It offers _just enough_ structure and automation and operating system (of a kind) to force the binary file system on some silicon to work like our brains do...and not the other way around.
Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.
He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.
His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.
On the same week that an AI's PR was rejected and it turned around and published a hit-piece in order to pressure an open-source community to accept it's change [1]...on the same week...we are watching a human publish a hit-piece (more or less) in order to pressure a closed-sourced project to accept their change.
Someone needs to help me with the ethics here; is it okay to post hit-pieces or...?
This is roughly my defense against anxieties about “missing the boat” on this stuff. If my life was complex enough to justify quote-simplifying-unquote it with a tool like this, I’d be quite excited about experimenting with it…but it’s not. And I don’t relish artificially adding that complexity.
The key to productivity is doing the _right_ things, not doing everything. Tools that make more possible frequently miss the point entirely.
It’s admirable to have standard morals and pursue objective truth. However, the real world is a messy confusing place riddled in fog which limits one foresight of the consequences & confluences of one’s actions. I read this section of Anthropic’s Constitution as “do your moral best in this complex world of ours” and that’s reasonable for us all to follow not just AI.
It’s more like the definition of “alien” broadened.
It started out in the 1960’s meaning “humans with pointy ears and no emotions”, then in the 1980’s it was “squat humanoids with glowing fingers and a penchant for phoning home”, then in the 1990-2000 it was “infectious microbes that turn humans into zombies”. We pretty much all realized that the “life” part of “alien life” spans the entire breadth of what biology can produce. (The 2020’s even reduced it further to “RNA sequence which connects the entire human race except 13 folks into a vast hive mind”)
Widen the concept enough and lots more scientists will go “yeah something like thst that probably exists elsewhere, sure”
We do not have a freedom to movement _by motor vehicle_ in the US.
It is a privilege licensed by the State and regularly revoked through due process or expiry.
While your concern about mobility and privacy are valid, I would contend that public safety is what it’s to be weighed against. Some people really are better riders than drivers.
I live in one of the areas they are actively testing/training in. Their cars consistently behave better and more safely than most human drivers that I’m forced to share the road with.
As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
…I read the whole article at OP’s link, many comments off this thread…I even clicked into the college course material in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44468452 …and not once did it occur to me why it was called “wet mode”…not once…
…until your comment. Here! Take my “lived through the 80’s and 90’s” card.
I don’t think they missed a mark exactly. Perhaps they hesitated to shoot when others took the shot.
Marksmanship is about hitting the target, not firing first. I would not want a deeply embedded personal assistant that’s always on and learning from me only to get things wrong and frustrate me. Apple’s users are grandparents and newbies who will have even higher standards for Siri than experienced developers who might be more lenient.
Internally, product leadership at the time had a quandary when it came to IPv6: there was lots of expressed demand for it due to IPv4 depletion looming and “World IPv6 Day/Launch” only about a year or two prior…
…but then, upon delivery, there was nothing. No customer appeared to adopt it even in its rudimentary form. Radio silence. The horsetrading of IPv4 addresses continued and we heard nothing about attempts at adoption for a very very long time.
It got filed away as a feature delivered to calm nerves about lacking that feature…not one that actually provided any forward value. How many other features did we ship that’s soul reason for existing was because lacking it caused discomfort, not because it genuinely helped?
I would call markdown an “85% solution”. Not disparaging it at all by calling it that either.
The ease of use it brings is incredibly valuable and, if it gets you rapidly through 85% of what you need done (and leaves you in a good spot to take on the remaining 15%) then it’s the right tool to have used in that moment.
Off the shelf seasoning mixes are another great example. 85% of the solution (a tasty meal) in a bottle that leaves you to focus on the remaining 15% (cooking the rest of the meal)
I could not find disclosure on their site about the guard-railing or safety-systems at the point the prompt is gathered from users which would intercept, log & prevent bad actors from inadvertently involving me in something illegal or immoral as an operator. Perhaps that disclosure exists and I just need to be linked to it; that would be welcome.