Artificial Intelligence
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Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs – Geoffrey Litt
Geoffrey Litt writes that, rather than conversational AI agents that talk to you and grab your attention, we should create improved interfaces that enhance existing abilities. This resonates with the “bicycle for the mind” idea of computing.
I like the idea of enhancing existing abilities because I think that natural language has its limitations and is a pretty high bandwidth interface. There are much better ways to interact that convey much more information more quickly than text in most situations.
As an example of a “copilot” interface that should be avoided, the post makes the unfortunate choice of an agent that helps avoid collisions by alerting the pilot with something like “collision, go right and down!”. This is a pretty poor example, because this describes the existing TCAS/ACAS mid-air collision avoidance systems that are actually very helpful for critical safety situations in a complex environment. These HUDs also have their limits due to the complexity and time-sensitivity of that environment. I think the answer for this situation is to have both a copilot and an improved interface.
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Good context leads to good code: How we built an AI-Native Eng Culture – StockApp
This post has some interesting ideas about how to best make use of AI in your engineering culture. It echos the idea of writing more documentation, specifications, and design docs directly in your repository and maintaining them in a mono-repo. This was touched on in the AI Engineer World’s Fair talk The New Code by Sean Grove at OpenAI that I mentioned in a previous weekly reading.
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No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive – Colton Voege
This is a really down-to-earth post about AI that really resonates with me. There just seems to be a lot of echo-chamber-like hype around AI written by people whose motivations are to sell AI products or services, or to expand their social media profile. This post links the supposed AI productivity gains to the “10x engineer” myth. AI may help you be more productive, but it’s likely more of a 1.05x-1.15x increase, not a 10x increase.
To be fair, providing a 1.15x productivity increase to customers would still be a huge deal. It’s likely worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, but it’s not the crazy disruptive change folks have been expecting it to be.
Security
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HTTP/1.1 Must Die – James Kettle
HTTP/1.1 has had issues with HTTP request smuggling attacks for a while but James Kettle argues that the protocol is inherently insecure and should be deprecated. He released more novel attacks for HTTP/1.1 this week in the white paper HTTP/1.1 must die: the desync endgame.
I’m not sure I agree that it’s totally unfixable, but I do think these kind of attacks should be taken more seriously.
If HTTP/1.1 really isn’t worth it to keep around, then I think it’s a sad day for the web. HTTP/2 does offer a lot of advantages, but it’s much more complicated and harder to implement correctly. That said, these attacks can only be prevented on HTTP/1.1 by implementing the protocol in a consistent way across all servers and clients, which is a really tall order.
Life Advice
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40 Harsh Truths I Wish I Knew In My 20s – Daniel Pink
I’m not in my 20s but I still found this video to be helpful. Most of the 40 “truths” are short pithy statements, but are still worth thinking about how to apply them to your own life. I found myself nodding along and agreeing with most of them but had some thoughts about others. I think it’s just a good seed to get you thinking about your strengths and weaknesses and how to improve yourself.