Claude Obituary - when you’re ready to sever ties and move on

If you subscribe to the orthogonality and instrumental convergence theses, Obituary is a fitting model name for whenever AGI is achieved

Let's hope for Claude yAGnI.

Yea, I saw that during the WWDC keynote and physically cringed. As the article says, what could go wrong?

Nothing much different than e.g. Chrome suggesting a password and saving it?

This is not that. This is an agent autonomously navigating through the website to change your password. You don’t even need to be navigated to the site. The app gives you a list of sites with insecure passwords and you just hit a button labeled “Change” or something like that and it kicks off a process to change it. If there’s was a standard API for changing passwords, then sure. But this is far beyond just suggesting a strong password and offering to store it for you when you are navigating the site yourself. And given how often THAT simple functionality goes wrong, in my experience, I don’t have a lot of hope that this will work out well. To be clear, that’s not Apple’s fault. Some sites have garbage authentication and password change workflows.

>This is not that. This is an agent autonomously navigating through the website to change your password. You don’t even need to be navigated to the site.

I know. What I'm saying is, if you already trust Chrome/Safari/etc with your passwords, even trusting it to come up with one and store it securely and correctly, and it has access to the content you browse (since you're doing it through it), it's not that different from a privacy perspective.

What's gonna happen by automating the change too? It's gonna click the wrong button and delete your account?

Yes, among other things. I trust a limited, fixed algorithm much more than a stochastic process. A fixed algorithm either works or it doesn’t. It might have a bug, but it isn’t influenced by the content of the web page as that text enters its context and then it randomly decides to do whatever. In short, it could easily lock you out of your account. Depending on the site, that could be quite bad. We’ve all seen the stories of AIs deleting production databases. It’s reasonable to assume we’ll see similar things with this.

It's good to know Apples not immune from the insecure by design hype machine; just late to the game!

Cracks me up that a system “card” is 319 pages.

Yep, but now they’re jacking the pricing to the moon and everyone is starting to leave for other apps. I almost did it this year and probably will do it next year.

I left last month. $250 a year or something crazy like that. Obsidian has a free web clipper, I'm planning on using that since I was just bookmarking stuff.

Exactly. I’m trying out Obsidian this year. In Bending Spoon’s defense, they have been improving the app, particularly the sync, but I don’t care about many of the new features (e.g., AI stuff).

I’m totally triggered, but in the most ironic way. Or something like that.

I had a friend who was CEO of a startup tell me that he typically only “worked” an hour a day, not because he was lazy but just because there was so much nonsense in his schedule. He told me he was trying to get it to two hours per day.

How successful did he turn out to be? As a CEO your days should be jam packed with brutal "chewing glass and gazing into the abyss". Is he running a lifestyle type company?

Tangential, but all companies are lifestyle companies, in the sense that they serve their owner's lifestyle choices.

It's just that lots of owners want a company that pulls them away from all other areas of life.

Quite successful. Tech company.

This reads like compensation theatrics.

I’m curious when folks will tire of lighting money on fire. Companies are already starting to scale back a bit, but the AI companies are still nowhere near profitability.

Yea, that’s sad.

The buzzwords are strong in this one.

As an engineer, I have a lot of respect and admiration for the SpaceX and Blue Origin teams. All engineering is inherently difficult and even more so when you’re doing it on a big stage. On days when I made a mistake on a hardware design, I might have let some magic smoke out of one of the chips on the board. But it didn’t make the global news feed. Not only are these folks solving really hard problems, they are doing so in public, with lots of cameras watching.