After a minute near one of their offices I do. Macs are either randomized per session, which makes filtering on them pointless, or they are not and still broadcast making them non secure and easily spoofed. Relying on mac filtering is usually only an audit checkbox to check. There is a reason 3 letter agencies used to use them to track people as they are really easy to get and track (until they got randomized by phone manufacturers and OS's).
The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat!
He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.
It never occurred to me to see if there was a film!
Mind you even more amazing I was on youtube yesterday and a short film showing the first chapter of the brand new book (published really recently) that I was reading popped up.
Now I see that there is not only that film (in the DUST series) but also a miniseries someone has made...
Just a heads up, don't go in to Echopraxia expecting it to feel like Blindsight. When I first read it, I was actually pretty disappointed overall, and a few of my friends had similar reactions.
Over a couple of years a few re-reads, though, I've come to enjoy it perhaps even more that Blindsight, but in a completely different way. It fills out a lot of the posits opened in the first novel, without coming to specific conclusions, but it gives you a lot to think about.
It's the world builder, odd that it comes second but if it had come first then most people would have been put off! I liked that the main character was the least super empowered of any of the characters though.
“I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”
Echopraxia is great. I never understood those who thought it was disappointing. Blindsight is wonderful, but Echopraxia is possibly the more inventive one. It certainly pulls the narrative in a different direction.
I also really, really recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It's about the crew on an starship trying to stop the rogue (sort of) AI that runs everything, the twist being that the crew is constantly under surveillance and must periodically hibernate in shifts for months or years at a time. It's a novella plus a handful of short stories set before and after the novel (all available for free on Peter Watts' website). Be warned, it's one bleak, dark universe.
Also, don't miss out on "The Colonel" (also on his website), a standalone short story that also happens to be a direct sequel to Blindsight.
The Darren Shan novels also have a lot of interesting vampire world-building, with in parts a similar dillema of vampires losing their dominant position in the food chain due to humans advancing technology, and different sects in the vampire society having different approaches of how to tackle it.
zactly - this is scifi stories from the 1950's being replayed, the shocking thing is that there's so much open mouthed "oh wowing" going on. People who are surprised by this need to read a few novels.
i honestly dont think there's a simple y/n answer there - i think considerations include mostly like 'how costly it is to do so', 'how often do you think you'll need it', and so on.
traces are not as "ephemeral" as FT models - since you can use those to guide agent behaviour when a newer model is released (but still, not as evergreen as other assets - traces generated using say GPT4 would seem pale and outdated compared to ones created on the same dataset using Opus4.5 i reckon)
There's a loop between adoption of a technology and adaptation of a technology. For some domains that loop is fast, the adaptations prove to be easy and the feedback from adopters is easy to get. For other domains it's slow, especially towards the end of the process of going from something interesting to something useful. A good example of a slow loop is self driving, it's hard to get feedback about self driving in safety critical real world situations... another example is medicine.
The other issue is that the value is more or less all in the LLMs (at the minute). For example, I built a data engineering toolkit using LLMs, it created synthetic data from examples, it created ingestion pipelines given different source filed and a target, it created data test rules. I liked my little toolkit and some people were impressed, but the value was all in the models that underpinned it. The crust of clever bits that added value was thin, very thin. Ok, we used the llms to generate some python that then created the synthetic data and testing rules to reduce costs, we had three or four "agents" that worked together to create the pipelines. We decorated target code with open provenance code to create provanance... But just by saying these things or letting you use the toolkit and you seeing what it made - that's enough for any half competent person to relicate it (with AI assistance) in an afternoon, or maybe a couple of afternoons. Maybe.
So, to create a viable company is going to take significant effort (if you can think of a value add) because the value add still has to be real.
Surely this should all have been behind the firewall and accessible only from a corporate device associated mac address?
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