Monday, 15th May 2023
According to interviews with former employees, publishing executives, and experts associated with the early days of AMP, while it was waxing poetic about the value and future of the open web, Google was privately urging publishers into handing over near-total control of how their articles worked and looked and monetized. And it was wielding the web’s most powerful real estate — the top of search results — to get its way.
— David Pierce # 9:55 pm
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future. Amelia Wattenberger makes a convincing argument for why chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. “Good tools make it clear how they should be used. And more importantly, how they should not be used.” # 8:54 pm
Real Multithreading is Coming to Python—Learn How You Can Use It Now (via) Martin Heinz provides a detailed tutorial on trying out the new Per-Interpreter GIL feature that’s landing in Python 3.12, which allows Python code to run concurrently in multiple threads by spawning separate sub-interpreters, each with their own dedicated GIL.
It’s not an easy feature to play with yet! First you need to compile Python yourself, and then use APIs that are generally only available to C code (but should hopefully become available to Python code itself in Python 3.13).
Martin’s workaround for this is ingenious: it turns out the Python test.support package provides utility functions to help write tests against interpreters, and Martin shows how to abuse this module to launch, run and cleanup interpreters using regular Python code.
He also demonstrates test.support.interpreters.create_channel(), which can be used to create channels with receiver and sender ends, somewhat similar to Go. # 7:42 pm
Indirect Prompt Injection via YouTube Transcripts (via) The first example I’ve seen in the wild of a prompt injection attack against a ChatGPT plugin—in this case, asking the VoxScript plugin to summarize the YouTube video with ID OBOYqiG3dAc is vulnerable to a prompt injection attack deliberately tagged onto the end of that video’s transcript. # 7:11 pm