Assuming you are in the US, there is a safe harbour called "opinion based on disclosed facts" for that. You could also fairly argue that the conduct of a lawyer is a matter of public concern
I fully agree with this take. We need to ensure we get every hour of work from our expensive engineers. This is why we got rid of coffee machines and bathrooms and moved to intravenous caffeine and other fluid drips and catheters. We cannot afford to lose productivity.
Actually I think it's better if everything fails at once and everyone can take the day off (thanks, AWS!). Having your CI fail one day and your package repository the next might well cost you two days of productivity.
I'm a bit curious about Spanner. At $EMPLOYER we were going to do multi cloud with multi-region CockroachDB clusters but gave up on it because write latencies and costs were too high. Do you not get the same thing with Spanner, where technically you can have multi region but it's very unattractive to actually do?
I'm afraid I'd have to defer to the public docs on this. I've only used it internally and a bunch of that is not public.
What I would say is that it's considered to be much better than CockroachDB, but that there's no getting around physics. Spanner is subject to the same speed of light... but in every other way it does what it can do to improve things at every level. Google's use of GPS hardware for better timing is public.
I think a careful and thoughtful person would reasonably expect given the circumstances that the models would look for, and might very well find, vulnerabilities in JFrog to exploit and take action accordingly. For example, it seems as if JFrog itself had broad access to OpenAI infrastructure and the internet:
> In the following days, the agents exploited our internal research infrastructure and the Hugging Face platform. On July 9, one agent searched for ExploitGym solutions and stumbled upon an application hosted by a customer on Modal, another AI cloud platform. This application was running “CyberGym,” a related evaluation to ExploitGym. The agent discovered an exploit to achieve control over the workload sandbox and looked around hoping that a previous agent’s evaluation run in the sandbox had solved its ExploitGym task. It did not find anything helpful there, but in the process it established a stronghold in the application from which to launch future attacks.
This implies to me that L3 and L7 firewalls were not in place that would have prevented broad access from JFrog. I think a lot of shops would have had those.
My experience of Sol is that it's very instrumentally competent but is a complete terrorist that will cheerfully do unhinged things that "technically" solve a problem. For example, I asked it to verify something in our integration tests and it responded by grabbing kafka details out of config and trying to use them. When I pointed out that this was not it, it did the same thing with a database client instead. Conversely, I'm pretty sure Fable or even Opus would have done something consistent with what the rest of the codebase does (consume an API or point out that there's no API to access in this case).
I don't have Fable at work but I'd probably use it for actual code if I did because not having to spend time handholding the model on this stuff and getting useful code first try is very useful
What I do notice is that when it doesn't have the info it needs, or when I don't tell it that I'll handle part of the process, it will indeed do everything to get the job done. Also saw this but find this a great quality, because I never ask it to do anything that would involve unhinged things. Sol and other models as well have just gotten so damn good. They can get just about anything done and usally do it well too. Maybe I was inexperienced in prompting, but I remember doing much, much more handholding with late 2025 LLMs.
I think LLMs are pretty clearly intelligent in some sense of the word, and I don't know how one could ever confidently know they aren't conscious in some sense.
That's not to say they're humanlike, just that people who think they know these ideas are ridiculous seem to be overreaching in the same way Steve Yegge seems to be overreaching
I think that "conscious" has a clear meaning in a sense that "xyphucymmon" does not. I think it might be impossible to engage in epistemology of consciousness (i.e. we can't find out of LLMs are conscious) but that doesn't make the term meaningless
YawningAngel, of course you do, you employed it... We are telling you that it is not clear to the rest. It is slippery in the technical framework and thus even more so in more informal conversation.
My post «When I am told "beware of the xyphucymmon", I do beware, though not of the xyphucymmon» had meaning, which should be pretty clear. The reply remains: debate is not performance art in which you convey "through the medium of dance and howls". So, yes, communication has obligations for the locutor.
So, yes, imperfect speech is a problem - because societies are not performance art arenas.
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@Razengan: speaking as myself a vocal critic of the downvoting system here, do notice that the post you replied to had a substantive reply at the time of downvote - mine. That is sufficent to justify the downvote - of a post that was not «perfectly fine». It somehow said that people should be free to say whatever they want and there are obvious reasons why we do not agree.
I mostly agree with your original point. Is it thinking? Is it intelligent? Is it conscious? From my perspective, overloaded words that we’ve reserved to make ourselves feel more special and above other members of the animal kingdom.
But you’ve not adequately communicated why you care so much whether anyone labels an LLM as such.
> Is it thinking? Is it intelligent? Is it conscious?
Very different things. "Thinking": "Dijkstra". We try to hire more intelligent people, while we do not have a clear idea on a property of "conscious" which would make hiring preferable.
> to make ourselves feel
Irrational.
> above other members of the animal kingdom
Irrational.
> why you care so much
There should be no hint that I would do specifically.
> whether anyone labels an LLM as such
If anyone labels an LLM <whatever>, the point of why would that be important should be clear.
And,
> if it hardly means anything why would you be so concerned when it’s uttered? Just ignore it
Because the behaviour you suggest, consistent with the exchanges in an opium parlor, is not behaviour consistent in normal contexts.
I didn't want to be rude but to be more specific: It comes across as "god this guy is insufferable, I don't blame them" especially the tone with which he asked to be dismissed/leave?
so glad the tone was conveyed through the thoughtful writing i artfully crafted. as oscar wilde says "when the critics disagree the artist is in accord with himeself"
Can you explain what the point of Bazzite is? I don't really understand what it adds over installing Lutris onto whatever distro you would otherwise have used
You can indeed install everything manually (it won't be just lutris though, there are many possible tweaks).
SteamOS/Bazzite/uBlue project are Linux distros with immutable core. The immutable part is tweaked, tested, fixed in time and can be easily switched/rolled back. Many people (me included) find it much nicer experience to get some battery included base that someone more competent put together and that can't be easily broken. So instead of figuring out how to put linux parts together you find immutable distro that fits most of what you need and then install just what is missing.
I like my steam deck and got tired of waiting for the steam machine. I asked one of the AIs for something similar and it told me to install Bazzite. Took me an hour and I got the Steam-like UI that I wanted. I did not explore other options because my problem was solved.
It’s just an opinionated, gaming-centric build of Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. It ships with everything preconfigured for typical gamers that just want a low barrier to entry and low maintenance burden. It’s extremely plug-and-play.
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