It's fine to make mistakes, that's how you learn. The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.
It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.
The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.
> The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I might be okay forgiving skirting the disclosure rules BUT only if they tried to be model tenants and, if there was any damage, took steps to proactively make things right. If you're breaking the rules, even if there was no damage, you should definitely be cleaning up and putting things back in place.
This was my thought. I can understand not wanting to go to the hassle of trying to explain that you're testing an experimental prototype robot to a confused Airbnb owner.
What I find inexcusable is not owning up to the damage and paying to fix it when your prototype goes on a rampage of destruction.
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
Even if it is fixable, there are costs involved for the fixing. A broken hotel lamp will sit in a landfill for all eternity.
"Moving fast and breaking things" could be acceptable in cases where there is an ulterior objective whose potential value could be >> these costs, but in general it should be evaluated more carefully.
In a rental unit you should not have things that can’t be replaced. People who rent it will break things, either by accident or purpose (there are always idiots around).
The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.
Well Bezos did actually state that he wants to turn Earth into a natural park.
But yeah, the robot armies don't need grain so why hike up the price of bread? Lack of grain makes those people resentful which means you need to deal with their anger. Sure, it can be dealt with but it's just cheaper to give the humans grain so they are docile. This is basic governance 101 that goes back to the romans (and further).
They also didn't slaughter all horses immediately. You can't eat that much horse meat anyways. It happened piece by piece.
The only good reason for an abrupt mass culling of the 99% (for a coldly calculating rich person with no empathy) would be game theory, i.e. them not being a contender for power any more. If there are no humans, there is nobody who can question the control of the 1%. It would be thus less about economics and more about power.
I am really rooting for the bottom 99%, myself being a part of it, but I really don't know what will happen to us.
If you give it $290 of input tokens for $10 of output tokens, you are doing something wrong. I.e. you paste the whole CI output into the prompt instead of giving it a link to the file, and then the AI greps its way through it (using a fraction of the tokens).
Sometimes AI overdoes things and it re-runs the whole testsuite because the tail command didn't have enough lines, but the other way round messes up the context so much so that in the end all that context is useless.
There is build.rs, proc macros are unsandboxed, and lastly you install the binary so that you can run it. Even if the build and install were fully sandboxed, the binary could still do malicious stuff if ran.
Even without post-install script, a malicious payload could be hiding in some function and just wait until the developer invokes `cargo run`. Not that many people audit the crates they pull into their projects.
Yeah no shit, if you download malicious code from the internet and run it on your computer you will get pwned. No matter if it’s from a package manager a zip file or a submodule.
However the current npm vulns used a post install script.
I maintain that NPM malware use postinstall scripts just because they exist and are convenient. Had NPM not had postinstall scripts, the malware would have used a different mechanism and been almost exactly as effective.
Re vendor lock in point: this is a harness issue really. Sure, CC is restricted to Anthropic models, but it's not the only harness out there. So if one vendor has an outage or botches the quality of their models due to compute shortage, you can switch to another vendor. LLMs are the easiest to switch. Of course, if hardware costs go up, so will all AI vendors. The only way out for the employer would be to directly buy the hardware (or do a fixed price deal with a cloud provider).
Re the understanding code point: you can still use LLMs to understand code. If you write the spec without knowing anything about the code, of course the architecture might suck. Maybe there is already a subsystem that you can modify and extend instead of adding a completely new one for the new feature you are adding, etc.
I use LLMs for my daily workflows and they do understand code perfectly and much more quickly than if I read it.
CC isn’t even limited to Anthropic models, there’s a post on the front page right now to use it with Deepseek V4 since Deepseek provides an Anthropic compatible API and CC reads API URLs from env variables so you can override them.
I’ve build a configuration transpiler to Claude code and codex and found I can switch pretty quickly between both and run both at once. At the moment codex performs better. Prior CC did. There is no vendor lockin and this is an old canard in technology that LLMs in fact themselves make irrelevant. Once you’ve got an implementation that uses X converting it to Y is almost trivial with an LLM because the spec is canonical in the reference.
It’s buried in my dotfiles and not easily extracted. But the idea isn’t a hard one to implement, except the coding engineers are woefully unaware of themselves. Codex is easier because it’s open source. Claude you kind of have to futz with it for a while. Once you have the intermediate form working and outputting config for the two I’m sure you can coerce it to any other agent that comes along with similar constructs (marketplaces, etc). Theres some nuance for some MCPs particular those that download binaries like rust MCPs but its very complex I found and probably better to avoid unless you really need it.
This is a general fear for me whenever I take a taxi or something like it: i always remind the driver of my luggage in the back when we arrive and ask them whether they can help me get it.
It's unpleasant for me at normal speed settings, but on fast mode it works really well: the AI does changes quickly enough for me to stay focused.
Of course this requires being fortunate enough that you have one of those AI positive employers where you can spend lots of money on clankers.
I don't review every move it makes, I rather have a workflow where I first ask it questions about the code, and it looks around and explores various design choices. then i nudge it towards the design choice I think is best, etc. That asking around about the code also loads up the context in the appropriate manner so that the AI knows how to do the change well.
It's a me in the loop workflow but that prevents a lot of bugs, makes me aware of the design choices, and thanks to fast mode, it is more pleasant and much faster than me manually doing it.
So that article can in theory be used to conscript any man, citizen or not, living in Germany or not.
The Wehrpflichtgesetz, which is a simple law and requires just the 50% Bundestag majority to have it changed, refines this very wide constitutional power in article 1, to require men who hold German citizenship above 18.
Article 3 refines it even further to folks below 45 or 60, depending on the severity of the situation.
But yes, in theory it can be changed to include any non-German citizen man, people aged 80, living inside of Germany since a while or never having been to Germany ever, or just random men who happen to change flights at FRA.
This one might last longer. The AI race is on, and the US tries its best to make it as expensive for China as possible to participate in it. Every dollar China spends on GPUs they get at markup is one not spent on building navy ships.
If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US, but it is going to take time, those fabs won't have capacity for the whole world, and they still heavily depend on Taiwan based engineers if something goes wrong etc.
Just like with COVID you don't know how long this shortage will last.
It will incredibly hard for China to conquer Taiwan. One hundred kilometers across the straits introduces a brutal geographic hurdle. If anything, the fabs will probably be severely damaged in the war. Plus most senior execs and elite engineers would be moved to US offices in Arizona.
We are going to have that now in a couple of months regardless. So it won't matter if Taiwan's manufacturing base gets disrupted, the hardware will have already effectively stopped.
Wow, I wasn't aware Samsung, Intel, SMSC were unable to produce "modern technology." Not everything needs to be on a 3nm TSMC process, believe it or not.
TSMC makes a lot of stuff besides the EUV-scale parts that all the YouTube videos talk about.
Almost everything you own that runs on electricity has some parts from Taiwan in it. TSMC alone makes MEMS components, CMOS image sensors, NVRAM, and mixed-signal/RF/analog parts to name a few.
Also, people seem to assume that TSMC is an autonomous entity that receives sand at one loading dock and ships wafers out at another. That's not how fabs work. Their processes depend on a continuous supply of exotic materials and proprietary maintenance support from other countries, many of them US-aligned. There is no need to booby-trap any equipment at TSMC; it will grind to an unrecoverable halt soon after the first Chinese soldier fires a rifle or launches a missile.
Hopefully Xi understands that. But some say it's a personal beef/legacy thing with him, and that he doesn't even care about TSMC.
Russia weren't able to take Ukraine even when they were able to just drive their tanks right up to Kiyv. Modern warfare tech just favors the defender too much. China has ninety km of sea to cross before they even get to Taiwan. Missiles and drones have already taken out the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea. China will be losing a lot in the same way if they ever attempt the crossing.
It's a loss leader but this is normal. Same has happened with Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, etc. Using VC money to buy marketshare and once you have it, you can milk it.
The question is more around the moats that these companies have and it seems to me while their models are amazing technology, they don't really have a moat. The open/chinese models still continuously catch up to the american ones.
And what possible moat. It isn't hard to foresee that in just a couple of years, models outpacing the latest frontier tech we have today will run on consumer hardware. With open source workflows anyone can pull in to run, providers won't see a penny.
Another scenario is that dense models get replaced entirely, in which case the likelyhood of OpenAI and co pioneering the concept is pretty slim. They will be left with billions worth of infrastructure which cost them 10 times that 2 years earlier, faced with the reality touched by the article: liquidate.
So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.
It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.
The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.
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