Simon Willison’s Weblog

I rewrote it [the Oracle of Bacon] in Rust in January 2023 when I switched over to TMDB as a data source. The new data source was a deep change, and I didn’t want the headache of building it in the original 1990s-era C codebase.

— Patrick Reynolds # 18th May 2024, 1:56 am

I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars.

— Kelsey Piper # 17th May 2024, 7:11 pm

[...] by default Heroku will spin up multiple dynos in different availability zones. It also has multiple routers in different zones so if one zone should go completely offline, having a second dyno will mean that your app can still serve traffic.

— Richard Schneeman # 16th May 2024, 5:44 am

But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

— Casey Newton # 15th May 2024, 10:23 pm

If we want LLMs to be less hype and more of a building block for creating useful everyday tools for people, AI companies’ shift away from scaling and AGI dreams to acting like regular product companies that focus on cost and customer value proposition is a welcome development.

— Arvind Narayanan # 15th May 2024, 4:25 pm

But unlike the phone system, we can’t separate an LLM’s data from its commands. One of the enormously powerful features of an LLM is that the data affects the code. We want the system to modify its operation when it gets new training data. We want it to change the way it works based on the commands we give it. The fact that LLMs self-modify based on their input data is a feature, not a bug. And it’s the very thing that enables prompt injection.

— Bruce Schneier # 15th May 2024, 1:34 pm

The MacBook Airs are Apple’s best-selling laptops; the iPad Pros are Apple’s least-selling iPads. I think it’s as simple as this: the current MacBook Airs have the M3, not the M4, because there isn’t yet sufficient supply of M4 chips to satisfy demand for MacBook Airs.

— John Gruber # 15th May 2024, 3:26 am

I’m no developer, but I got the AI part working in about an hour.

What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting up the templating, routes and data architecture.

It reminded me that, in order to capitalise on the potential of AI technologies, we need to really invest in the other stuff too, especially data infrastructure.

It would be ironic, and a huge shame, if AI hype sucked all the investment out of those things.

— Tim Paul # 13th May 2024, 2:35 pm

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

— Nathaniel Borenstein # 8th May 2024, 8:24 pm

Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content

— @deepfates # 7th May 2024, 3:59 pm

Migrations are not something you can do rarely, or put off, or avoid; not if you are a growing company. Migrations are an ordinary fact of life.

Doing them swiftly, efficiently, and -- most of all -- *completely* is one of the most critical skills you can develop as a team.

— Charity Majors # 6th May 2024, 1:52 pm

I believe these things:
1. If you use generative tools to produce or modify your images, you have abandoned photointegrity.
2. That’s not always wrong. Sometimes you need an image of a space battle or a Triceratops family or whatever.
3. What is always wrong is using this stuff without disclosing it.

— Tim Bray # 4th May 2024, 4:26 pm

I used to have this singular focus on students writing code that they submit, and then I run test cases on the code to determine what their grade is. This is such a narrow view of what it means to be a software engineer, and I just felt that with generative AI, I’ve managed to overcome that restrictive view.

It’s an opportunity for me to assess their learning process of the whole software development [life cycle]—not just code. And I feel like my courses have opened up more and they’re much broader than they used to be. I can make students work on larger and more advanced projects.

— Daniel Zingaro # 3rd May 2024, 6:17 pm

AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human. [...]

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology? [...]

Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

— Zach Seward # 2nd May 2024, 7:44 pm

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

— Tom Eastman # 2nd May 2024, 2:40 am