stdgy (u/stdgy) - Readit News

stdgy commented on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk twitter.com/secwar/status... · Posted by u/jacobedawson

throw310822 · 17 days ago

Because Anthropic sells Claude through other companies that in turn do business both with Anthropic and the government. These intermediaries, large cloud companies, can't offer Claude anymore if they want to keep the government as a customer.

stdgy · 17 days ago

The government is faaaaaaaaaaaar too invested in Azure and AWS for Microsoft or Amazon to give even half a shit. The DOD has no where else to go and the companies know it. They'll sit on their hands until the legal maneuvers play out, which will take longer than this administration will be in office.

stdgy commented on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk twitter.com/secwar/status... · Posted by u/jacobedawson

johnbarron · 17 days ago

Is this the same Administration that reversed a previous block, and allowed NVIDIA to sell H200 to China?

stdgy · 17 days ago

Well, you see, that's completely different. Nvidia agreed to give them money!

stdgy commented on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk twitter.com/secwar/status... · Posted by u/jacobedawson

outside1234 · 17 days ago

Probably Grog, which probably means even worse outcomes

stdgy · 17 days ago

At least we'll have hyper sexualized child soldiers to look forward to in our upcoming xAI powered civil war!

stdgy commented on President Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/pkress2

ortusdux · 17 days ago

I'm worried about who will rush in to fill the vacuum.

stdgy · 17 days ago

I'm sure Alex Karp and Palantir are already charging into the breach, promising to deliver things they don't have the capability to deliver! (Otherwise known as just another day for them)

stdgy commented on Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/Stratoscope

zdragnar · 2 years ago

You're comparing a person recommending a single event versus an AI providing a list. In other words, proving OP's point.

GUIs provide information in 2D, letting eyes skim and bypass information that's not useful.

VUIs provide information in 1D, forcing you to take information in a linear stream and providing weak at best controls for skipping around without losing context or place.

Not coincidentally, this is why I absolutely hate watching videos for programming and news. If it's an article or post or thread, I can quickly evaluate if it has what I want and bypass the fluff. Videos simply suck at being usable, unless it's for something physical like how to work on a particular motor or carve a particular pattern into wood.

stdgy · 2 years ago

The point I'm trying to make is that this thing we're calling a 'VUI' is shit. There's no reason speech has to be this boring one dimensional thing. It's like the people that designed these things have never had a real conversation in their lives. When you're speaking with another person, or multiple other people, you're constantly exchanging cues that allow the other person to understand and re-calibrate what they're saying. These are verbal sounds, non-verbal sounds and physical movements. A crinkle of the forehead, a shake of the head, an uttered 'aaaaah' or a quiet verbal affirmation in support of what's being stated. It's not a single uni-directional stream of information, it's a multi-directional stream coming from multiple multi-modal sources at the same time.

None of these basic realities are accounted for in current technology. Instead we have these dumb robot voices reading us results from a preprocessed script that it thinks answers our question. No wonder the monkey part of our brain immediately picks up on the fact that this whole facade isn't just a lie, but an excruciating lie. It's excruciating because it's immediately obvious that there's nothing else 'there' to interact with. Even when speaking to another person over the phone, there's a huge amount of nuance you can pick up on. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they frazzled? Are they in a rush? Are they relaxed? And you automatically calibrate your responses and what you say in the conversation based on all of these perfectly obvious things. Normal humans automatically calibrate what they say, how they sound, what they suggest based on these cues. It works really well!

There's no reason voice stuff has to suck. It has worked pretty great for humans for thousands of years. We're evolutionarily tuned to it. It's just that all the technology we've created around it totally sucks and people are delusional if they think it's anywhere near prime time.

stdgy commented on Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/Stratoscope

nextworddev · 2 years ago

The core problem lies in latency and information bandwidth - for which eyes (which sees the “gestalt”) are just far superior to reading or listening to streaming text (which is linear).

The one main situation where NL interfaces are superior is when you are mobile (like driving) or hands are tied up.

I think this affects GPTs just like it did Alexa. Which means that GPTs aren’t the final UI. The real innovation will be in the right AI UX.

stdgy · 2 years ago

Not sure I agree on the core problems.

The core problem is that these systems are just so incorrect in fundamental ways that they're effectively useless.

Imagine a buddy of yours tells you about an event he's pretty sure you'll be interested in. Why does he tell you about this event? Well, he knows your interests, what kind of things you enjoy, when you're free, who you might want to go to the event with, how much money you're willing to spend, how far you're willing to travel, when you like to go out... So when you're on the receiving end of such a suggestion it often feels great! It's like you've struck gold.

Now imagine your average 'AI' powered recommendation engine reading you a list of events. It doesn't feel magical. It doesn't even feel like it knows what the hell you enjoy doing half the time. Forget about knowing about your free time, budgetary restrictions, family restrictions, who you'd be able to go with; None of that stuff is even sort of in the picture. And it's all delivered to you in a voice that sounds like it would be as happy to kill you as give you advice. There's no lively back and forth on the logistics of the event. No feeling of discovery as you two talk it out, honing the plan that brings it from an abstract concept to reality.

It's just dead and lifeless and shitty.

stdgy commented on OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO theverge.com/2023/11/18/2... · Posted by u/medler

tsunamifury · 2 years ago

I’m sorry, how is OpenAI going to pay for itself then? On goodwill and hopes?

Please get real.

stdgy · 2 years ago

My best guess is they turn off the commercial operations that are costing them the most money (And that they didn't want Sam to push in the first place) and pump up the prices on the ones they can actually earn a profit from and then try to coast for awhile.

Or they'll do something hilarious like sell VCs on a world wide cryptocurrency that is uniquely joined to an individual by their biometrics and somehow involves AI. I'm sure they could wrangle a few hundred million out of the VC class with a braindead scheme like that.

stdgy commented on OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO theverge.com/2023/11/18/2... · Posted by u/medler

nostrademons · 2 years ago

I'm curious what you're inferring to be "the way they want it to"?

From my read, Ilya's goal is to not work with Sam anymore, and relatedly, to focus OpenAI on more pure AGI research without needing to answer to commercial pressures. There is every indication that he will succeed in that. It's also entirely possible that that may mean less investment from Microsoft etc, less commercial success, and a narrower reach and impact. But that's the point.

Sam's always been about having a big impact and huge commercial success, so he's probably going to form a new company that poaches some top OpenAI researchers, and aggressively go after things like commercial partnerships and AI stores. But that's also the point.

Both board members are smart enough that they will probably get what they want, they just want different things.

stdgy · 2 years ago

You need to remember that most people on this site subscribe to the ideology that growth is the only thing that matters. They're Michael Douglas 'greed is good' type of people wrapped up in a spiffy technological veneer.

Any decision that doesn't make the 'line go up' is considered a dumb decision. So to most people on this site, kicking Sam out of the company was a bad idea because it meant the company's future earning potential had cratered.

stdgy commented on Retro Computer Museum retrocomputermuseum.co.uk... · Posted by u/thorin

aardvark179 · 3 years ago

There’s also https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/ in Cambridge

stdgy · 3 years ago

I was able to visit this place last year, it was great! I spent all day wandering around and playing. I would have stayed even longer if they weren't closing, hah.

stdgy commented on Tailscale Funnel now available in beta tailscale.com/blog/tailsc... · Posted by u/dcre

stdgy · 3 years ago

I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale. I don't often run across software that feels so right and when I do it's a great surprise. Every time I see a new feature they're releasing I'm always impressed at how adept they are at targeting modern pain points.

I grew up and got into software by messing around with self-hosting web servers and game communities as a kid. As time has gone on I felt like we had lost some of the magic of easily sharing your machines and your creations with other people. We have a ton of services where you can now deploy and share your creations, but we've moved further and further away from direct sharing. There were plenty of good reasons why this has happened, with security being the most obvious factor, but it still makes me a little sad. I want my things to be able to talk to each other no matter where I am. I want to be able to invite my friends in and have access to my stuff.

Tailscale makes all of that quick, easy and awesome. I think it's really neat, makes me feel like a little nerdy kid again.