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> the situation would have to be very particular

The situation is very particular. When the system makes an error, I make a bigger profit. If the system made fewer errors, it would approve more things that cost me money.

Why do you think I'm motivated to make fewer errors under that situation?


OpenID started its life as an attempt at a federated login standard.

From vague memory, the other stuff in OpenID Connect was layered over the original OpenID identity verification part.


There is nothing left from the OpenID 1.0 and 2.0 protocol in OpenID Connect, except for the core features (identity federation, identity information encoding and updates).

OpenID Connect is basically OpenID reimagined on top of OAuth 2.0, with using JWT for the identity data.

The core OpenID Connect spec is still purely a federated identity standard. There are many other standards pushed by the OpenID foundation, but OpenID Connect itself was never meant to be anything more. The main feature differentiator from the OG OpenID is that it's built on top of OAuth, so you can add other features supported by OAuth (like authorization) ad-hoc.


OpenID Connect is OAuth2 extended to cover a similar feature set as OpenID.

Yeah I’m so old, I remember when LiveJournal (probably when bradfitz was still involved) were among the first to support original OpenID.

I think the idea is that the stored procedures ARE an Application Programming Interface, as an alternative to a REST API.

(I agree with you that for some use cases, an API consisting of a set of stored procedures is just as good as an API layered on top of the database in another language.)


They are, but a REST API likely isn’t a good alternative because few RDBMSes speak REST. More likely they meant creating a database interface library in whatever programming language the application uses. And then have it talk to the DB through that library instead of scattering a fine mist of ad-hoc querying (or, shudder, active records) throughout your application.

The client of the REST API is not an RDBMS. The REST API serves application clients - may be browsers, may be other services. The REST API alone talks to the database.

An API that serves only backend applications could be implemented in stored procedures instead of REST or GRPC. It could also be implemented in SOAP, CORBA, DCOM and other fossils, but no one is doing that for new applications.


Yes, this!

The ancient wisdom which advocated for stored procedures, which modern developers find distasteful, were really advocating for microservices close to your data, which encapsulated security, business logic, and data persistence so that multiple consumers could share the same data without repeating the logic and code.

The fact that some people write those microservices in PL/SQL and some in JavaScript doesn't change the relevance of the encapsulation.


But PL/SQL is a horrifying language. You have barely any facilities for modularity, encapsulation or composition. Every procedure is just one name in a huge flat name space. Development tools are primitive. The language is absurdly verbose - it was state of the art in the 1970s when COBOL reigned supreme.

This is an implementation problem, you can introduce a JIT'd language plus some "container" with "versioned deployments" in modern DB clusters.

The result page has links to the source of each real photo.

While it's not exactly blackberry-alike, a hopefully soon-to-be-released option is the clicks communicator[0] phone. I just ordered their bluetooth keyboard attachment for androids/iphones with magsafe backs, but if it's any good, I may shell out for their phone as well.

I was also a backer for the Mecha Comet[1] earlier in the year, which I'm hopeful about, although that's a couple of steps away from a daily driver phone at this stage, I guess.

I never owned a blackberry, but for me, the ultimate winner would be for someone to copy or licence the layout and form of the dopod838pro[2] (a.k.a. HTC Hermes 100) and pop some newer internals in it... If I had 100 million dollars, that's what I'd be doing...

[0] https://www.clicks.tech/en

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-com...

[2] https://kaitech.hk/2006/10/dopod-838pro-htc-hermes/


It sounds like you might be aphantasic and were not aware of it for long time.

I remember when I first realised people had real pictures, in my 20s. I had a friend whose technique for studying involved putting notes on his wall. He claimed he had photographic memory, and could walk over to his wall in his mind and read any piece of paper on it.

We had a long conversation after that exploring each other's experiences. I cannot picture anything while awake (only sometimes when asleep or in deep meditation). He was aware that photographic memory was unusually good, but assumed that everyone had at least some visual memory/imagination.

I also remember the first time I "saw" the difference too. I was waking up from a dream, once of only 2 dreams I remembered strongly after waking up.

I was in a scene like in an action movie, running away from someone in a tall office building. I run up some stairs, burst into a room, and spot an open window across the room, with a big bunch of blue balloons outside tied together and floating up.

I dash across the room and jump out the window, grabbing onto the string under the balloons. As I float up, I start to swing around, bback towards the building. I see the shiny windows, but just before I turn far enough to see the balloons or myself in the reflection, I fade into awakeness. Up to this point everything had looked just like real life, but as soon as I woke up, I could not imagine the imaagery any more.

Since then, on a couple of occasions when I'm really tired, I'll catch myself transitioning to sleep, because after the lights are out, I'll start fading into picturing myself in a random location, but as soon as I notice it and try to interact with the world, I fade out to black again.

So I have had the experience of being able to "see" things in my head (maybe a dozen times in my life while sleeping, two of which I remember vividly, and once while doing an extended meditation session, and once during a hypnosis lesson on induction). And I can contrast those specific visual experiences with the blackness I get when I close my eyes any other time.

Have you tried this experiment yourself, or on others to see how much detail they visually imagine? [0] In my experience, most people report somewhere between a 2 or a 3. I tend to ask people to close their eyes and imagine this scene, then read out panel 4 verbatim. "A woman sits at a table. She is resting her chin upon her hands. Apples sit on the table to the right of her. A pineapple to her left.". I give them 30 seconds to notice their imagination then show them the 4 panels and ask which is closest to their imagination. The thing that's most interesting is not the number that they say, but that a significant proportion of people point out the differences from what they imagined, unprompted. Like "I saw her with shorter hair", or "I saw green apples", or "in my head, she was a brunette". Those are not things I would even think of if you read out that description to me.

[0] <https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1b4u0rt/what...>


Ditto! I tend to hear my internal voice beat-boxing music rather than humming it, though...

Because some people do.

Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.


If an agent planned a flight for me with an overnight layover, I'm unplugging it. I don't care whose dime it is lol.


“Find me a cheap ticket from Seattle to LA”

… 23 hours in Denver later…


Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you.

My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer.

Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.


I agree, but often corporate policy overrides most people's preferences, which is why such processes exist - to ensure that travel arrangements match corporate policy rather than individual preferences.


In my experience corporate policy is primarily built to control cost. It will not allow booking expensive flights when cheaper flights are available. But when prices are similar, it doesn’t really dictate much.

And in many cases having a corporate policy means just adding a few more constraints: it makes the problem more like a logical puzzle and this can nerd snipe people.


Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.


But, like, isn't that what Expedia does and has done for 20 years?


> What do you mean by bearing no real responsibility for its actions?

If you give an "intelligent agent" offered by one of these model providers a task of updating the content of your website, and it updates it with inappropriate adult content, who incurs the cost of the machine's error? The model provider generally does not.

It it makes a mistake and deletes your website from AWS, who is responsible?

If it targets another website because it decides that it is "part" of your website and attempts to break into it, who is responsible?


In all of these cases, it's you. It would be the same if you downloaded an open model, ran it locally, and it happened to make the same catastrophic mistakes. The consequence to the provider is that if they offer a product that does these things, people don't buy the product.

In general, the person whose job it is to provide the company with a working, non-adult website and not hack into other websites is the one who would receive consequences for failing to meet those expectations.


The problem I see here is that ultimately, you'll have capital wanting to replace workers like others have said, and have someone roughly equivalent to a manager or vice president driving teams of agents to achieve business outcomes.

These tools can push out more results than a human can hope to evaluate in a business-sensitive, or even realistic, amount of time. You have to take it at its word that it did things right, and there's no real fear of failure or consequence on the behalf of the agent.


Of course, but "capital" is no stranger to risk management. I'm sure we'll see some spectacular failures, but most will handle this just fine.


> If you give an "intelligent agent" offered by one of these model providers a task of updating the content of your website, and it updates it with inappropriate adult content, who incurs the cost of the machine's error? The model provider generally does not.

Something in your prompt led it to do that, is alex0015's point. The statistical odds of these frontier models screwing up to that extent are so impossibly low that it would almost have to be intentional or accidental negligence on the part of the prompt writer to accidentally have their agent write pornography to their website.

The burden of the mistake would have to fall on the person that gave the tool instructions, because it can't know that what it did was wrong. Wrong is subjective in this case. It only did what it did because you, figuratively speaking, encouraged it to.


Yes but I'd actually go even further than that. We've all had experiences where the model straight-up produces gibberish sometimes, right? It's happened to me with a badly configured harness on a local model, and even also on frontier models like when you used to ask them something innocuous about the seahorse emoji.

What I'm arguing is that yes, it's your fault if you misprompt the model and it does something catastrophic. It's also your fault if you prompt it correctly and it does something catastrophic anyway due to some other glitch beyond your control.

The whole discussion started with the point that OpenAI could be financially responsible for damages if their models cause problems for users. If my job is to design a system that works, and instead my system doesn't work, it's my fault regardless of whether I used no LLM, a local LLM, or OpenAI's LLM. Depending on whoever's in charge of doling out consequences, I might get away from it with zero, light, or heavy consequences. But at all levels, I can't reasonably expect to deflect blame onto the model itself.


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