I’m not sure what is going on at Anthropic these days, but updates to Claude Desktop have stopped. Normally, I would get an update every few days; the last update was July 24th. Something might be going on. I wouldn’t mind if AI companies took a pause and started thinking about the consequences of putting their products in the hands of millions, you know, being conscious about what you do? Alas, that’s not going to happen.
Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide - Schneier on Security
But it’s precisely because I have spent years developing my own writing skills that I’m able to identify prose that sounds great but doesn’t actually make sense. My students don’t have that skill; they mistakenly view a confident, well-written essay as evidence of the quality of their ideas. They see the AI as cleaning those ideas up, getting them through that uncomfortable stretch of having to turn those ideas into prose. What the students miss is that their initial discomfort is a normal and healthy stage of writing, and not something to quickly get beyond. The very act of struggling with how to express what they think is an important part of the process. It’s how they test out their ideas, examine their hypotheses, and actually figure out what they think. Homework is not work; it’s the gym.
Learning can be hard, for many people at least. I like the feeling of being outside my comfort zone when working on something because I know that at some point, the journey is going to be the reward. We forget that in the age of AI.
The real AI risk is inside the labs -
I believe we should not consider AI safe. A critical event that may result in the extinction of Homo sapiens is possible, but the danger is not in open models, or China making faster progress than the US. The danger is that a few CEOs (everywhere in the world) without the required background and legitimacy are in the position of making hard choices for humanity at large. They were not selected to do so; it was just the randomness of events that created this setup. They can’t speak for everybody, given the stakes, just because they have GPUs and money. This is the first thing that should be fixed.
In light of recent security-related events, both at OpenAI and Anthropic, I also believe these companies must be held accountable for what they put out there. I believe we are entering dangerous times with AI, maybe we are even on the verge of being out of control with this. Add this to the AI bubble speculation. Scary.
Links to Claude Chats Were Indexed by Google and ‘Bing’, Whatever That Is — Pixel Envy
Search engines do not automatically discover new URLs as they are created. They are typically indexed by taking one of two actions: either the site owner submits URLs to search engines — by using a site map, for example, or by manually submitting the page for indexing — or by someone linking to the URL from a different already-indexed page. The critical thing left unreported in Varner’s article is whether these Claude links were being indexed thanks to Anthropic’s actions or those of users.
Following up on my previous blog post, I’m now confident my private chat sessions are “safe”.
Claude chats exposed in Google searches – another endorsement of Apple’s privacy approach — 9to5Mac
This is not at all what users would expect when they share a conversation, since Anthropic implicitly assures users that nobody can see the chat without knowing the URL.
WTF, Anthropic! Does this problem affect chat with a private link (instead of a public one)?
I follow technological news every day, and I’m starting to get nervous about the situation surrounding investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. This video is particularly revealing and convincing. There’s increasing talk of a tech bubble, much bigger than the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. What worries me, actually, is the impact of this crisis on my finances. I’ll be retiring in less than 7 years. A financial crisis of the magnitude being predicted would take years to recover from. I wonder if it’s time to reevaluate some of my investment strategies. 🤨
I played a little bit with Glaze today. In less than half an hour, I was able to build a “native” macOS app, a front end to my web-based task manager. It’s far from north stars like Things 3, but it is quite capable for the efforts I put into this experiment. Glaze offers a Glaze Store where app builders can share their work with others. A brand new account comes with 120 free credits. I’m currently at a bit less than a hundred credits left now after building this little Mac app. It’s currently in read-only mode and looks very dry but I plan to tweak it and see what I can come up with the remaining credits.
Today, I implemented a card view in my RSS flow web app. I don’t recall seeing this style of RSS feed display in the numerous RSS readers I’ve tried and used. It’s quite fun.
Today, for the first time, I used AI to write an email for me. It was a rather typical email: asking a colleague for his contribution on a large project so that he could validate potential technical issues that might become a risk in the project. I had a full picture of how I would ask his contribution and what I expect from it. AI came back with a perfectly structured request. I don’t expect this to become a trend but today, I saved precious minutes for other more high-value tasks.
Yeah, I know, very click-baty title. 🫣
Anthropic is unleashing Claude Cowork, which means artifacts can now be run in the cloud rather than on the machine where they were created. This means that if an artifact depends only on cloud resources and services, it can be executed in the cloud and accessed from anywhere, on any device. Until today, I was looking for a way to migrate my artifacts from my MacBook Air to my desktop Mac, but there were no easy solutions. So far, I have four artifacts that I use daily, and I plan to build more.