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There's no such thing as "OpenAI agents" attacked RubyGems. It's someone used agents to attack RubyGems. If they work at OpenAI then it's someone at OpenAI. And if they did it unintentionally, they still did it.

Analogy: if a someone's involved when a person dies, it's manslaughter or murder based on intent. They're different, but they're both crimes.


“KGB agents are spying on me” is the same thing as “KGB is spying on me”, is it not?

An agent is an entity acting on someone’s behalf.


KGB's agents are human, OpenAI's agents are not. It's an important distinction because humans are responsible for their behaviour, while AI agents are not.

You cannot try an AI agent in a court of law, despite the anthropomorphising work the word "agent" is doing.


Exactly. It’s still just software, which someone programmed and deployed to do specifically dangerous/malicious things. I feel like we already have legislation and case law surrounding this.

Yes, those 2 are the same. But our KGB is saying “the microphone in your house is spying on you, it’s not us, the microphone broke containment”.

This distinction is silly.

We say "Google's web crawlers scape web pages." We don't insist you say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages."

We describe software as having agency all the time. It's typical usage and it's efficient and it's well understood.

And we don't get angry when they're used interchangeably.


In this case, who holds the agency is exactly the point. Anthropic and OAI are claiming we need protection from AI itself, but the statement supported by putting agency in the right place is that we need protection from them.

I think those companies are referring to other companies - say Chinese AI companies - who we also need protection from.

"We" need protection from, or "OpenAI and Anthroptic's dreams of profits" need protection from?

I think that AI is dangerous and could be used as a weapon.

So yes, I would like to be protected from all parties. I don't think that's nuts.


IMO anyone sane wants some protection right now. The Q is whether we should seek protection through post-hoc accountability, or preemptive bans/certification on certain tech. Both methods will have a hard time stopping foreign actors, but preemptive bans have the added harm of locking in winners and paradoxically making us slower to develop more reliable and aligned systems. If regulation sets a standard for sufficient alignment, what further motivation is there to go beyond?

I would agree with you generally, but in this particular case, the distinction seems important because a significant percentage of the world population believes that agents can be self-aware, a-là Terminator etc.

Why can't agents be self aware?

Also, why is self awareness needed in a chain of agentic madness that escapes human control?


I hate to spoil your mood - but it is currently unclear whether agents can be self-aware. And it's very likely something that can never be known.

How would one define self-awareness?

Well - yes - there is no agreed upon definition. Which makes the issue even harder to clearly determine.

Please explain how it is "unclear" that agents "can be self-aware"? As Wikipedia would say, citation needed. Just because an agent can write convincing enough to convince you that it's "self-aware" doesn't mean it really is, in fact, self-aware.

Well - it's not hard to find. But ok:

Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM"

Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness, (2025) — "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".

Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness, (2023) — "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".

Let me know if you need more.


I very much say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages." and if something breaks, or some data is stolen, everyone else is going to be saying that Google has to take responsibility.

Those are two different issues. One is about typical speech patterns and one is about liability.

I agree with you on the liability issue, but I don't think there much question about this issue outside the anti-AI conspiracy campaigns.

And I disagree with your typical usage claim. I myself tend to use the phrase that has the fewest words in all cases. It's like the rule against using passive tense when writing.


oh we do! At least they google is quite good at adhering to robots.txt.

Google's web crawlers are automated and that's part of their business practice.

The attack here is neither of those things.


That distinction doesn't matter to my point.

The real issue here is there's a part 2 (linked at the end of the article) where they get the io_uring implementation to be twice as fast as mmap. So it's a clickbait title for a part 1, which gets resolved in part 2.

So they crunched out 2 articles, one of which is just ragebait. And they both seem LLM written. Maybe they have some cool advice, maybe not... but it's not a format I enjoy reading.


I find a lot of LLM articles to be hard to read, but since this one was pretty "straight to the point", I found it to be okay and got the important information across.

The title "The Linux reality check" made me groan, though. LLMs (Claude?) seem to love this phrase.


The problem is not the LLM writing. The problem is the ragebait title which is unsubstantiated, because of part 2. And they know that because they published it in two parts.

This is basically how you write fake news. And you only publish like this for extra clicks.


I wouldn't call it ragebait. Trying to optimize things only to end up with worse performance seems to be a rather common outcome. Understanding why that happened is key to overcoming it.

I agree that it should have been a single article though.


The real issue is local business know about google maps and are often happy to update schedules themselves. The effort for them to know/care about OSM is too high and the payoff low (most clients are on google maps).

> subsidized by the carrier

You misspelled “you’re overcharged for your mobile subscription and get a phone”.


Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.

The industry can just push and promote people it picked itself and then bind them some other way. How would this work with open software, which is not public domain and often sees the original creator step away down the line?

Quit Sibelius


~ A D V A N C E D ~


> But most people aren’t willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs.

Keyboard shortcuts should be an _optional_ way to interact for accessibility and power users! They should never be required!

This is what TUIs get wrong, they make it the required way to navigate and often don’t even let you use the mouse.


Most TUIs give you keyboard but mouse is a second class citizen, most GUIs give you mouse but keyboard is a second class citizen. To that extent, I’ll take the mouse only any day. I really want to learn over time the 5-15 shortcuts that speed up my day, not be forced to learn all of them day 0. And I say this as a power user, a casual user will use 2-3 shortcuts per app at most.


Nano always shows most important (all?) hotkeys on the screen. (works really well for its usecase)


Is there a path forward to writing a guide for how users can contribute back to OSM if they wish? A "thank you for your contribution, if you wish to learn more about OSM and how our maps are built click here" => go to a blog post which describes the relationship with OSM, why Book Corners can't be liable for contributing data back to OSM, and how a user could do that if they wanted.


It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.


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