An advantage how? Maybe you'll have one or two more 9s of uptime than your competitors; does that actually move the needle on your business?

The biggest expense in software is maintenance. Better software means cheaper maintenance. If you actually want to have a significant cost advantage, software is the way to go. Sadly most business is about sales and marketing and has little to do with the cost or quality of items being sold.

Why wouldn't it move the needle? Less time spent, less frustration, more performance, more resources focused on the business?

It will depend on each case and what makes the marketed solution inferior. If it's overly complex and you will save development time. If it's unstable you'll save debugging time. If it's bloated you will save on hardware costs. Etc...

matters less than we would like it to

after all startups/scaleups/bigtech companies that make a lot of money can run on Python for ages, or make infinite money with Perl scripts (coughaws)

and it matters even less in non-tech companies, because their competition is also 3 incompetent idiots on top of each other in a business suite!

sure, if you are starting a new project fight for good technical fundamentals

> Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience

Are you sure it isn't both? Learning how to bypass the school's internet filtering so that I could get to flash games and reddit probably taught me more than anything in the lessons.

Being compliant with the letter of the requirements at 1/3 of the cost is absolutely an idea that sells itself.

Like Anthropic notably refused to.

> The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.

> An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them.

Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.

It's more that in the past widespread surveillance required a lot of people, many of whom will have a conscience which will end up disrupting your surveillance.

The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.

Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.

Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.

> Isn't this what the free software movement wanted? Code available to all?

Available to all yes. Not available to the giant corpos while the lone hobbyist still fears getting sued to oblivion. In fact that's pretty much the opposite of what the free software movement wanted.

Also the other thing the free software movement wanted was to be able to fix bugs in the code they had to use, which AI is pulling us further and further away from.

What is the FUD? Which hobbyist is fearing being sued? Any credible citations?

Amazon had a clear business model. They had positive gross margin from, if not day 1, then pretty close to it.

I remain skeptical of Uber.

Sure, maybe OpenAI and Anthropic will make it work. It's not impossible. But it's far from guaranteed.

OpenAI and Anthropic have positive gross margins for inference.

Uber generates about $1b in profit yearly now.

> OpenAI and Anthropic have positive gross margins for inference.

Maybe, if you take their word for it, and treat the models as capital assets rather than part of the COGS for the inference product. That's pretty far off from where Amazon was at.

> it seems like you could use the current carriers to transport like a million disposable drones?

To what end? You can use them as an extremely expensive cargo ship, sure. But if you're talking about launching drones off of our carriers, you have the problem that whatever you are in drone range of is also in drone range of you.

"Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures, and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."

Lots of people try to make their code better by revising their procedures and don't even think about changing their data model, and generally fail. You might not be able to change your data model without changing your code, but they're different activities.

Or not using the data model properly, zero foreign keys in databases, no triggers checking column contents etc.

"We'll do it on the app level".

sigh

No, that part is just smart. Databases have terrible support for nontrivial datastructures, doing everything at the app level is the only reasonable response.

> If frontier models indeed are a step function in finding vulnerabilities, then they're also a step function in writing safer code. We've been able to write safety critical C code with comprehensive testing for a long time (with SQLite presenting a well known critique of the tradeoffs).

More like: a few people have been able to write C code where the vulnerabilities are obscure enough that we mostly don't discover them very often.

The result of the phenomenon described in the article is that the gap between 99.9% secure and 100% secure just got a whole lot wider. Using herculean amounts of testing and fuzzing to catch most of the holes in a language that lacks secure-by-construction qualities is going to be even less viable going forward.