And, my objection was that he clearly had no understanding of the supply-chain risk he was worsening by advocating widespread use of Obsidian for agentic engineering tasks.

Since his announcement, Obsidian has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risks, or at least study threat model. Hopefully, they will implement proper RBAC or something before someone else with his visibility announces an even more irresponsible half-baked idea.

If you don't, you could easily toast your RAM -- especially under BF16.

What if labor organizes around human work and consumers are willing to pay the premium?

At that point, it's an arms race against the SotA models in order to deepen the resolution and harden the security mechanisms for capturing the human-affirming signals produced during work. Also, lowering the friction around verification.

In that timeline, workers would have to wear devices to monitor their GSR and record themselves on video to track their PPG. Inconvenient, and ultimately probably doomed, but it could extend or renew the horizon for certain kinds of knowledge work.

Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed.

The models collect more information about us than we could ever imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far richer information about is than our actual vocabularies, topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dietrichstein/

Hi, I'm Dietrich. I'm building a product or two, but I'm also open to freelance opportunities. I like to build solutions using a little bit of everything. I also love a challenge.

Please see my X/Twitter feed this year if you're curious. I might have posted 20 screenshots of different tools and toys I've built recently:

https://x.com/pixelsort

With AI, I practice disciplined task decomposition, with strategy and plan documents for every phase. And, I deeply question each plan proposal and review every change manually when I'm not tackling something like a nasty segfault.

Examples:

- Lasgun: My fully self-hosting TypeScript (subset) compiler that emits x86-64 with ELF binaries, designed turing incomplete JSON-capable IR

- DeepMojo CLI: My personal fork of Gemini CLI that helps me transition between local and remote inference

- Dis: My isomorphic Redis-clone in TypeScript, taking this into production soon

Where you fall depends on where you work and what you work on.

You make a great points about the chain of accountability. But, in my opinion, working professionals are the only agents in the system with the potential to realize their own culpability and divert their actions.

Perhaps, it isn't fair to point to them and call them traitors. Still, they are the only ones with enough agency to potentially organize and collectively push for the kind of ethics that could save us all.

Those massively and widely available benefits will continue to deflate the value of human intelligence until even most of innovators currently working on them lose their seats at the table too.

I don't take issue with this, except that it's a false comfort when when you consider the demand will naturally ebb and individual workload will naturally escalate. In that light, I find it downright dishonest because the rewards for attaining deep knowledge will continue to evaporate; necessitating AI-assistance.

The reason is it different this time around is because the capabilities of LLMs have incentivized the professional class to betray the institutions that enabled their specializations. I am talking about the amazing minds at Adobe, Figma, and the FAANGS who are bridging agentic reasoners and diffusion models with domain-specific needs of their respective professional users.

Humans are class of beings, and the humans accelerating the advance of AI in creative tools are the reason that things are different this time. We have class traitors among us this time, and they're "just doing their jobs". For most, willful disbelief isn't even a factor. They think they're helping while each PR just brings them closer to unemployment.

I mean "permanence" in the same vague senses that I think the OP was hinting upon. A belief that regardless of change, the primitives remain. This is about having total confidence that abstractions haven't removed you the light-cone of comprehension.

Re: Appliance

I believe turing-completeness is over-powered, and the reason that AGI/ASI is a threat at all. My hypothesis is that we can build a machine that delivers most of the same experiences as existing software can. By constraint, some tasks would impossible and others just too hard to scale. By analogy, even a Swiss-army knife is like an appliance in that it only has a limited number of potential uses.

Re: Users

The machine I'm proposing is basically just eBPF for rich applications. It will have relevance for medical, aviation, and AI research. I don't suppose that end-users won't be looking for it until the bad times really start ramping up. But, I suppose we'll need to port Doom over to it before we can know for sure.

My goal is to make training (especially self-training) impossible; while making inference deterministic by design and highly interpretable.

The idea is to build a sanctuary substrate where humans are the only beneficiaries of all possible technical advancements.

It feels as though a window is closing upon the feeling that software can be a powerful voice for the true needs of humanity. Those of us who can sense the deepest problems and implications well in advance are already rare. We are no more immune to the atrophy of forgetting than anyone.

But there is a third option beyond embrace or self-extinguish. The author even uses the word, implying that consumers wanted computers to be nothing more than an appliance.

The third option is to follow in the steps of fiction, the Butlerians of Dune, to transform general computation into bounded execution. We can go back to the metal and create a new kind of computer; one that does have a kind of permanence.

From that foundation, we can build a new kind of software, one that forces users to treat the machine as appliance.

It has never been done. Maybe it won't even work. But, I need to know. It feels meaningful and it has me writing my first compiler after 39 years of software development. It feels like fighting back.

Predictably, dark web market operators adapted afterward. The state got lucky and they knew it, so that also factored in to their sentencing recommendations.

Glad he's getting out.