Your last paragraph hit home with me. I also find it refreshing to be clear and direct, have the intent be directly understood, and have a pleasant, good faith, high signal conversation as a result. I hardly ever experience that with humans (I recognize that that’s not ‘everyone else’s fault’ of course).
Good point. The pager attack on Hezbollah was risky because it involved physically changing the pagers enough to put explosives in them. Quite a lot easier just to ship devices with some subtly insecure code.
I get your point, but I think that such high risk situations simply are not compatible with common sense, case by case decision making. As a consequence we need some extremely risk averse rules that everyone always follows, no matter how insanely risk averse they sometimes are and everyone in the situation probably knows it and agrees it’s insane.
Because the alternative is a nebulous fog of war where safety decisions are mood, situation, experience, and personality influenced when they shouldn’t be. And when accidents happen we only have difficult to interpret decisions to trace back to. The decisions have to be brainless and black and white.
Could the black and white rules be better? Maybe yes. Then let’s change them carefully.
But I do believe the rules should be black and white, and I personally in this light truly don’t mind I can’t name my Bluetooth device bomb, and I can’t say bomb or joke about having a bomb, no matter how obvious it is that I don’t have one, if that’s the current black and white rules.
Pilots are explicitly trained to deal with high risk situations and to think rationally. They have a Threat and Error Management(TEM)system. Additionally, the training includes unruly passengers and bomb on board response. Once a threat is determined they squeak 7700. Inform ATC using the words "bomb on board", begin immediate descent and divert to the nearest suitable airport.
Off-topic, but I found his diss track years after the fact and actually reallly respect he could put together and perform a pretty smooth, catchy, witty track in what must have been a stressful time.
I’ve been thinking about this, or a variant of it.
Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).
Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?
I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.
As of today, "minor expert" is the wrong way to phrase it. The flagship LLMs today are at best at an initiate or apprentice level in every field.[1] This is not meant as a derisive remark – having something at hand that is initiate level in every field is remarkable and useful. But it's nowhere near expertise anywhere.
You seriously think current LLM is just at apprentice level in programming? It can write stuff one shot that I’d expected even some experts to struggle to do even with ample more time allowed.
They will one shot with bunch of duplicated code, somehow they will just omit basic things, like security middleware. It will all kind of work. But then you make additional passes to do review and clean up, suddenly there is a lot more work to make it half decent.
It does remind me of “Nvidia reported record revenue of $81.6 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2026”. Not an apples to apples comparison, but I am inclined to read this through the ‘selling shovels is smart’ lens.
Copilot Cowork in the M365 ecosystem. It inherits all the permissions from my account, has access to exchange to send me emails, and OneDrive to save each day’s summary for posterity and future refinement.
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