I was pretty vocal here about covering losses for depositors at Silicon Valley Bank because they were mostly small businesses who have more important things to do than manage the risk of their bank deposits.

I won't make a similar argument here because about an AI bailout because the counterparties know the risks, but there are pensions with requirements to hold high-grade debt buying these bonds. An AI bubble burst doesn't just show up in the Nasdaq, it hits pensions.

For this particular case, it's probably worth it because a dermatologist visit is $200. If I were the NHS or Kaiser, I'd partner with other integrated insurance and service providers to collect as much training data as possible and fund classifier development.

This is the plan!

This is very wabi-sabi.

Not SaaS, but I had an idea for using a CPU emulator to run a compiled binary under Java, with libc implemented in Java so standard file IO works. I punted on the idea because it seemed pretty difficult and maybe take six months. I recently gave Claude a Java RISC V emulator and a partial bridge between Java and libc, and in under an hour, it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.

I have no idea how correct the code is or what I'd do with this, and I have no plans to publish it for those reasons.

For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.

It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.

Covid can come from a wet market and we can have a discussion about virus research. These two things aren't connected.

Can we really? Can we really have a discussion if suggesting that COVID-19 may have come from a lab leak at a top tier virology lab doing cutting edge GoF research gets one labeled a racist?

First of all I said we didn’t have to resolve whether or not COVID-19 came from a lab in order to have a discussion of whether or not we should have bioweapons and other viral research labs.

Second of all. No, you racist.

Haha, I get where you're coming from but I still disagree. It's a question of the baseline risk, if COVID occurred naturally then there's a much higher chance of similar pandemics happening again and risky research like GoF makes sense. But if it was a lab leak, then it's harder to justify. There are other parts to if of course, if you think that covert bioweapon research is common then it probably doesn't matter.

I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.

But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.

bingo. my mom logs into ChatGPT and uses it for basic stuff.

nothing like a dev getting whole APIs built, but she understands what the tool is and how it may impact office workers, even if on a superficial, sci-fi sort of way.

i don't think she could tell you anything about RNA vaccines or mitosis

No one wants to give up their grant money. That was a big part of the letters floating around during covid asking/begging to keep things quiet IIRC. No one wanted their money pulled.

Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers

It's possible to get billed for things not exposed in the UI. ~10 years ago, I had one of these. A Glacier upload chunk was stuck in a staging area for over a month. I couldn't complete or cancel the upload, or remove the chunk. Support was able to, and they refunded the money without much hassle. But I did have to reach out to support (as a <$100 per month customer) to ask. Glacier was new, so I chalk it up to it being a new product, not anything greedy or malicious.

You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.

Oh no, you can pretty obviously just keep pushing out slop that only half works. Your customers will grumble and eat it like the peons your C suite thinks they are.

For whatever reasons, customers just buy trash nowadays, put up with trash, ignore horrifying contract terms, buy more trash, grumble about the trash, and then invest more in the trash.

It will be the death of us.

I've used some engineering programs that were appalingly buggy for any application, never mind how much they cost - but once you managed to fight through the bugs, they did the thing they were supposed to reliably, and you could trust the results.

This is not true for vibecoded stuff.

The issues are they likely have seeds, might not travel or store as well, and are smaller than consumers are used to. There's also already a supply of table grapes you'd be competing with. To your experience, if they're ripe, they'll taste sweet and grapey. They're not that different.

They taste so different than the grapes in the grocery store they might as well be a different fruit entirely imo. So much better. Sweeter. Berry or stone fruit like. Almost floral. The vintners are seriously holding out on us. Yes there are seeds, but that is the price you pay for the finest grape you will ever feast upon. You go back to a store bought "red seedless" it taste like a sad old cantaloupe in comparison.

I mean that's the case with basically every fruit. The modern variants are larger, shelf-able for longer, while the older ones are smaller, but taste way better.

I'm being very mindful of Gell-Mann Amnesia and chatbots. They speak authoritatively and are right often enough, but I've had enough cases of them saying very incorrect things in areas I know well that I have to remind myself that those cases aren't unique.

This is why you read the code, not the documentation.