A tool that pushes people into permissions fatigue is in fact the proper recipient of the blame. The tool in question here is the entire system though, including the OS with insufficient permission boundaries in userspace, not just the agent
I'm not saying wedging doorstops under the fire doors is a good thing, I'm just saying look at the situation that's making people put the doorstops there. Or something, it's not a great analogy. I'm just saying that shaming the user belongs with obscurity in the list of security mechanisms that don't work out in practice.
I just delegated to AI like 99% of the work in a task that was mostly grunt work: writing tests. It wrote the tests, ran them, and when they found bugs, I had it fix them. The authority might have been delegated, but “agent” is definitely the right word for the amount of initiative I let it have.
“Clanker” is a tad cutesy, but fitting regardless. It brings to mind an archaic and clumsy whirring automaton with no reasoning or awareness of its context, an apt metaphor for slop submissions entirely generated neither by or for humans.
Excessively verbose syntax to express concepts is something I can let an LLM paper over, but a language that does not even function properly without the ceremony is still a non-starter. I want to refactor chains of operations without having to check for errors myself after each step, and I want that with or without an LLM.
The state of Hawaii was the most recent to be expropriated from its natives at the behest of corporate landlords, so they're probably a bit raw about it.
The mac started out without using extensions at all, the type was embedded in the metadata. That's still possible now, but it's largely derived from extensions first. I believe Finder shows all extensions by default. It certainly does in details mode.
Gnutella's original sin was that it combined distributed search with distributed download. In a rational world, that would be smart and good but in a litigious world, that was too sophisticated for the Supreme Court and they ruled it as infringing on copyright through inducement of the user. Gnutella clients, like other P2P clients with search, got sued out of existence.
Bittorrent offloaded the distributed search onto websites which routinely got sued or shutdown. Funnily enough, one of my big improvements to Gnutella in the first year of LimeWire was to drive out the website users because they were overwhelming the network upload capabilities without adding to them. That improved the 90% download failures in 2001 but interesting to wonder what if we had gone another way.
For me the biggest problem is authenticity. On most of the decentralized P2P networks of that time is that you never know what you are getting. Look for some Disney movie, get porn. Very common back in the days. Of course you also had all the malware, scams, etc... More generally, it didn't do much to incentive good behavior (sharing).
Bittorrent, with its private trackers had some accountability, ratios, etc... The protocol itself favors peers that give the most in return.
LimeWire was huge .. 100s of millions of downloads in those days. It only went away because it was sued out of existence. Plus, by the end, it supported torrents as well.
Sure, but the attached chat rooms were pretty handy, I used to like to download bootlegged concerts back in the day, to find new ones you've never heard of.
Plus, always fun to get laughed for mistyping The Almond Brothers Band at 3am...
I don’t think that’s a hot take, BitTorrent learned from Gnutella and made a better protocol. Gnutella is important historically, but it had a lot of downsides as a protocol that BitTorrent improved on.
Gnutella developers created huge innovations and would have continued to do so if not sued out of existence. We solved scalability and had good download mesh + DHT solutions for sourcing. I'm sure we would have been at least as good as torrents (which we supported) if we had continued.
Because that’s how you get AI cyborg spider overlords.
reply