LLMs will give responses based on data that already exists. There's plenty of data that allows an LLM to write working code - possibly even high-quality code! But there's not much data that says how to make a "great" app, I think because it's domain specific.
Consider:
What made Firefox great was the lived experience of people fed up with IE6. The Internet talked plenty about speed, tabs, and stability, but "speed, tabs, and stability" undersells much of what made Firefox stand out.
What made Ocarina of Time great was that it defined a genre. No one really knew yet whether the story, the graphics, the dungeon design, or the marketing was going to sell that game. You couldn't yet ask any other Miyamotos what had worked for a 3D adventure.
We still arguing over what made Tom Brady (the American football player) great, not being able to nail down if it was the length of his career, the number of times he won the Super Bowl, his individual game records, his coach, the rest of his team, or something else entirely.
I think, likewise, the criteria for a "great" app aren't known until the app is already great, and that gives an LLM no specific advantage.
Honestly, doing the same, I would love to know what the true count is.
I quickly looked over my access logs just now (eyeballs and grep, not goaccess) and see a couple of patterns...
One, there are indeed lots of bots - over a thousand hits from Claude. Some from search, some from users.
There are some bots I've never even heard of (mj12bot?).
There are some things which look like legitimate traffic coming from a common household Web browser, looking at blog posts and such, until suddenly they make a 404 request for a nonexistent API endpoint and go away.
And there are _so many_ requests for `.env` files, `swagger.json`, `backup.sql`, `phpinfo.php`, WordPress (always!)... Sorry folks, it's nginx in a container, serving a bunch of static content.
Unless you run full behaviour analysis, it's going to be hard to identify all bots from a normal access log. If you want more data, you can add JA4 hash to your logs that will surface huge amounts of things pretending to be the latest chrome.
At scale it’s vastly more resource intensive than scripts, so it does stop the very cheapest layer of spammers, but not anyone in any way resourced or determined.
I've thoroughly enjoyed it when someone sends me a "time capsule" - something I've intentionally created for myself, then entrusted to someone else to give back to me.
So far, this has taken exactly one form (albeit several times): a letter I wrote to myself, where someone sends it to me after one year has passed. That's about the edge of "reasonable". Holding on to something for many years, or holding onto something larger than a letter (or at a scale of more than maybe 30 of them - which might explain why teachers seem to do this), makes it more of a burden on the sender.
I differentiate this from a couple of other models I can think of:
1. Burying a time capsule indefinitely (I may forget about it past when I should open it).
2. Receiving something from my childhood (it wasn't my intent to send it to my future self).
3. Paying for a service which does this, like a safe deposit box (I have a constant reminder that it's there).
When I was a kid, I used a sharp knife to scrawl a note into the wood paneling of the back office at my parents' store. That back office has essentially been a junk drawer for the past 20 years. My parents never once noticed it (I'd have heard), and I don't even remember what it was about.
Last month, my parents sold the store, so I guess the new owners may one day find some bizarre (love letter | book quote | song lyrics) and wonder what on earth they're looking at...
This is desirable for some parts of a school curriculum. Take high school math: we ask students to solve arbitrary problems with a limited set of tools (geometry, algebra, calculus). We don't ask them to solve problems that require tools they don't have (matrix math, differential equations, set theory). The point of high school math is not to perform DSP (another tool) or invent theorems (a research project).
For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.
(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)
I'm wondering if the CVE in question is not mentioned because it was embargoed so they did not want to accidentally leak things while the kernel went through the (public?) QA workflow. Perhaps the Changelog will be amended at some point to have the CVE?
My read is that a lot of content - specifically of the infinite-scroll variety - is very intentionally not designed to be printed.
There are a number of Slack and Discord conversations I'd have liked to export off to PDF, for instance (where a solid 90% of my "prints" go). I'm reminded that one of Slack's boot messages used to be, "Consider the environment before printing this Slack."
I self-host e-mail, because I am stubborn - I have done it for 20 years. I would not recommend anyone do it if they aren't already, or if they well-and-truly want to be on call for their homelab.
In the last 20 years, I've also run into problems like:
* My brand-new ISP wouldn't allow TCP port 25 inbound, and wouldn't relent. I had to go back to the old ISP.
* SPF became mandatory at Gmail, but I didn't get the memo, and Google started bouncing my mail one random day.
* My residential IP ended up on a "policy blacklist", one it could never get off because it's blacklisted by virtue of being a residential IP, not that it did something bad.
I host my email, my isp blocked mail ports too, my simple and reliant solution is to use 2 quite cheap VPS on different zones as front email servers, with haproxy and postfix forwarding, took some time to setup but works great and not dependent on isp rules.
There was a point where a coworker came to my team, complaining that our policies had erased an entire week's worth of high-priority work on him.
We asked where this happened. He had done his work on an EC2 instance named `temp-worker-5`.
We asked where the files on that EC2 instance were; maybe we could cleverly get them back off the disk. They were in `/tmp`. We had it mounted on tmpfs (in memory), and we were running tmpreaper to clean out `/tmp` every Sunday.
When presented with the sheer absurdity of doing work on an instance called `temp`, out of a directory called `/tmp`, he backed down...
I fear that we wouldn't be so lenient (or rational) on my team had an AI agent done this - we'd have to enable the AI, after all.
I mean yeah but you can always go one step back for root cause.
Why did they pick that insane option? Why was it available to them?
One of my co-workers in security always seems to think that just saying "No." is the job. If someone is asking to do something stupid you say No, and then you talk to them to figure out what the goal is and the n you help them to get to that place.
Clearly they had other options here and working on tmp is fine as long as you know it is, well temporary.
It makes sense to use it. As long as you don't expect what you put there, stays there.
Indeed! If they'd reached out and said "I need 128GB of RAM to do this work" (which, for reasons I won't get into, was the case), we'd have figured out a more tenable solution.
Consider:
What made Firefox great was the lived experience of people fed up with IE6. The Internet talked plenty about speed, tabs, and stability, but "speed, tabs, and stability" undersells much of what made Firefox stand out.
What made Ocarina of Time great was that it defined a genre. No one really knew yet whether the story, the graphics, the dungeon design, or the marketing was going to sell that game. You couldn't yet ask any other Miyamotos what had worked for a 3D adventure.
We still arguing over what made Tom Brady (the American football player) great, not being able to nail down if it was the length of his career, the number of times he won the Super Bowl, his individual game records, his coach, the rest of his team, or something else entirely.
I think, likewise, the criteria for a "great" app aren't known until the app is already great, and that gives an LLM no specific advantage.
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