I don't work close to LLM APIs so not sure what exactly is the use case here? Is it something that could be adapted to work as a deep research feature on a custom product?
The use cases are (1) integrating AI automation into my app (2) automating workflows inside web browser (3) personal use. The value is in optimizing for low latency under user-defined constraints such as LLM cost budget or maximum browser memory usage.
The TikTok case in US might be a good playbook for the future. Require markets that US based companies have a near monopoly and require them to divest on EU and onshore operations. You solve tech hegemony and tax evasion in no time.
The Android assistant with Gemini is quite good nowadays, very close to parity of features with the previous one. It's not there yet but Google decided to develop it in the open, similar to the old "beta" products. Hard to see Apple doing the same.
The main issue to Apple is the different mindset that takes to deliver hardware vs. services. Delivering hardware you have one shot to "wow" your customers, and Apple keep nailing this process in a way that the whole industry can't keep up with anymore. On software, that doesn't work that well. You can totally be disrupted by a startup that delivers an MVP faster with 30% of your perfect product that would take 3 years to deliver. In this way, Google's assistant strategy in the short term was spot-on compared to Apple's. You take the hits of bad feedback in the short term in the hope that being in the game can create enough momentum to get you to a solid position of features and know-how in a couple of years.
As an Android user I have to disagree, at least if we're comparing apples to apples (could not resist the pun).
Google Assistant with Gemini (or whatever its name is this month) is really remarkable at helping with mundane tasks, and I would really miss it if it were gone. Circle to search, asking questions about my agenda, and setting up new events on my calendar based simply on taking photos of documents or posters is so convenient that I really buy the concept of having an AI personal assistant.
And because this is a very sticky feature when delivered properly, if Apple is not involved it gives a very strong competitive advantage to Android flagships.
It's not so much a question of disagreement. The fact that you have found value as a user is fine by me, of course! Maybe your use-cases should be captured by the Siri development team.
If Siri has been useless for more than a decade, that also means that many users are barely using it, if at all. I'm not the only user of a system containing such applications that has found zero concrete value in them.
- why a no side-effects function on a database can be used to get lateral access to the whole database instance
- why do you need to validate strings on the database itself and not on the client anyway, heck why are there no type safe way of doing it
- why would you want to execute shell commands from the database itself
- Even if there's a real use case for executing commands like that why is it enabled by default on a regular connection to the database without you specifying a THIS_IS_REALLY_DANGEROUS_BUT_I_PINKY_PROMISE_I_KNOW_WHAT_IM_DOING flag to the connection handshake.
It's not always PHP but there are some kirks that are shrugged off on PHP that makes me really concerned about the reliability of projects coded with it.
They mentioned PAM module so maybe the sql injection just allowed bypassing the authorization of a system that was using the PAM module. Like it’s in the realm of possibility that a PAM module that wanted to validate a user against credentials stored in a pg database might shell out to the psql command to do this. Though, the whole thing is very questionable.
What account were they authenticating with when attaching to psql?
If you have the connection string why does psql even matter, couldn’t you use any client? Or is this a case of your input being forwarded to a running, already authenticated, psql instance?
And finally, why do we need unicode support for schema? I assume it’s because the schema is itself data?
Your questions are programming language agnostic-- where did your PHP angst come in? And are there specific things in PHP that are problematic and avoidable by using a different Turing complete language?
PHP has grown up but in its wild youth was notorious for such gems as mysql_escape_string vs mysql_real_escape_string, rather than proper parameterization
It's not so much about Turing as it is libraries and patterns
After all, as I understand it this very issue was caused by escaping SQL rather than parameterizing it
They're not in the business of finding the best ethical fulfilling investment. Their goal is to find nascent niches that can be packed as a trendy future industry and 10x the bag down other investors down the road. Period. It has worked in the past with SaaS, it has worked (sort of) with crypto, it might as well work with AI. The only difference is that now they have to work hard and hope the Chinese don't steal the fire and ruin the long term vision of this revolution being US centred again.
If the company owns both frontier models and chip design and they see the future moat is in inference why would they offer much more than what you get on Google Cloud? Is not as if they're gonna start competing with Nvidia in hardware anyway, this is a very specific hardware design for a very specific problem.
As much as I like to dunk on how messy things can be at Google I don't think this is a really good example. Apart from small startups I would be scared if you served all of them from the same base host.
The many domains is a problem because it suggests a many-teams approach to product development, and the more cooks in the kitchen, the more likely a repeat of Gemini 1’s rollout, which was a mess [0].
Basically I’m looking to see that Google cares about the meta-level user experience of finding, understanding, and using its products, and scattering key usage details around the internet is not a good sign. It suggests deeper process problems if a simple issue like this either didn’t get noticed or can’t get fixed.
The main problem with chat is that there are too many angles to communication, making it impossible to fulfil all requirements with a single tool. Apple does IM, period, they don’t want any of the Slack-type team communications and that's fine for them. Even Facebook realised that having multiple chat apps is fine as long as they offer value on their own. Meanwhile, Google has gone through several iterations, with internal groups competing for the top spot in defining what a chat app should be, but ultimately falling short because there's no single chat app for all requirements. They aimed too close to the average and failed to deliver anything useful enough for any specific group.
If they're sure they can invade whenever they want, does it make sense to do it right now? What would they gain by sending all the good tech and researchers straight to the US? The longer they wait, the more advanced the tech they eventually steal might be.
It's the golden goose story, but with a strategic rationale of when to kill the goose.
It's not all about TSMC. The CCP has been very vocal about wanting to conquer Taiwan since long before TSMC even existed.
Also, the longer they wait, the more tech gets transferred to the US, so even if it were all about TSMC, they would still be incentivized to act as soon as possible.
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