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I want claude code on my phone running in a cloud vm so I can give feedback out on a trail somewhere and continue my three hour hike or bike ride with my family.

Just enjoy the hike and bike ride and keep the coding at home (:

I am working on something for that at https://automa.app. Let me know if you are interested in trying it out.

I think you can already kind of do that with something like vibetunnel :)

https://vibetunnel.sh


Screen+SSH. 90s technology. An LLM probably could have told you this.

Have you had the realization that you could never go back to dealing with all the minutia again?

LLMs have changed me. I want to go outside while they are working and I am jealous of all the young engineers that won’t lose the years I did sitting in front of a screen for 12 hours a day while sometimes making no progress on connecting two black boxes.


Serious question: have you considered that dealing with all that minutiae and working through all that pain has made you capable to have the LLM write code?

Those young engineers, in 10 years, won't be able to fix what the LLM gave them,because they have not learned anything about programming.

They have all learned how to.micromanage an LLM instead.


> Those young engineers, in 10 years, won't be able to fix what the LLM gave them,because they have not learned anything about programming.

I have heard a version of this plenty of times, and it was never correct. In the early 90s it was the "electronics" people that were saying "I come from an electronics background, these young'uns will look at a computer and don't know what to do if it breaks". Well, bob, we did, the whole field moved to color coded anti-stupid design, and we figured it out.

Then I heard it about IDEs. Oh, you young people are so spoiled with your IDEs and whatnot, real men code in a text editor.

Then it was about frameworks. BBbbut what if your framework breaks, what do you do then, if you don't know the underlying whatever?

... same old, same old.


Have you also heard about calculators?

Every single finance person uses a calculator. How effective do you think a person in any aspect of finance would be if they had never learned what multiplication is? Would they perform their job adequately if they don't know that `X * Y` is `X repeated Y times`?

IOW, if you gave a finance person (accountant, asset manager, whatever) a non-deterministic calculator for multiplication, would you trust the person's output if they never learned what multiplication is?

This is the situation I am asking about; we aren't talking about whether deterministically automating something that the user already knows how to do is valuable, we're talking about whether non-deterministically generating something that the user is unable to do themselves, even if given all the time in the world, is valuable.

All those examples you give are examples of deterministic automation that the user could inspect for accuracy. I'm asking about a near-future where people managing your money have never learned multiplication because "Multiplication has been abstracted away to a tool that gets it right 90% of the time"


If I may play the devil's advocate, nothing is deterministic. A neutrino could cause a bit flip in your calculator. More commonly, the lower abstractions we build upon without knowing their innards can have bugs. Even the most popular compilers (say, g++) have bugs, for instance. I am personally incapable of fixing a bug within gcc, despite the tool being a vital requirement of my work.

IMO the dichotomy should not be deterministic/stochastic, but proved/unproved reliable. gcc has been shown reliable, for instance, so I don't need to know whether it was built by deterministic (clever engineers) or stochastic (typewriting monkeys) processes. I'm certain the former are more efficient, but this is ultimately not what makes the tool valuable.

As a bit of an artificial example, there's stochastic processes that can be proved to converge to a desired result (say, a stochastic gradient descent, or Monte-Carlo integration), in the same way that deterministic methods can (say a classic gradient descent or quadrature rules).

In practical cases, the only proof that matters is empirical. I write (deterministic) mathematical algorithms for a living, yet they very rarely come out correct on first iteration. The fact there is a mathematical proof that a certain algorithm yields certain results lets me arrive at a working program much faster than if I left it to typewriting monkeys, but it is ultimately not what guarantees a valid program. I could just as well, given enough time, let a random text file generator write the programs, and do the same testing I do currently, it would just be very inefficient (an understatement).


> Have you also heard about calculators?

Yup, my mom used to say "you need to be able to do it without a calculator, because in life you won't always have a calculator with you"... Well, guess what mom :)

But on a serious note, what I'm trying to say (perhaps poorly worded) is that this is a typical thing older generations say about younger ones. They'll be lost without x and y. They won't be able to do x because they haven't learned about y. They need to go through the tough stuff we went through, otherwise they'll be spoiled brats.

And that's always been wrong, on many levels. The younger generations always made it work. Just like we did. And just like the ones before us did.

There's this thing that parents often do, trying to prepare their children for the things they think will be relevant, from the parent's perspective. And that often backfires, because uhhh the times are achanging. Or something. You get what I'm trying to say. It's a fallacy to presuppose that you know what's coming, or that somehow an entire generation won't figure things out if they have a shortcut to x and y. They'll be fine. We're talking about millions / billions of people eventually. They'll figure it out.


You didn't even come close to addressing his points about non-deterministic outcomes? Aka the crux of the issue...

Junior engineers will be lost if they don't take the time to read the code generated by the LLM and really understand it. This is an objective truth. It has nothing to do with boomer takes.

Funny, that's what I said, as an experienced assembly hacker, when somebody first showed me a C compiler.

People who "take the time to really understand the code" will rapidly be outcompeted by people who don't. You don't like that, I don't like that, but guess what: nobody cares.

I suppose we'll get over it, eventually, just like last time.


LLMs are not compilers. They can't be deterministic. A better comparison is an autocorrect on steroids.

And I don't think there's anything to get over about them. They are useful but people elevate their significance too much over what they actually are.


An unhealthy attachment to determinism will turn out to be a career-limiting hangup, I suspect. You already lack insight into how 100% of the code in your project works, unless you only work on trivial projects. Did you think that state of affairs was going to get better with time? As usual, TDD covers a multitude of sins.

As for "autocorrect," let us know when your "autocorrect" takes gold at the International Math Olympiad, with or without steroids.


Talk is cheap. Give your LLM/agent your badge and let it turn in 100% of your job.

That'd be awesome. Not going to happen this week or this year, but it will.

Enjoy being unemployed then, I guess?

Yeah, there are qualitative differences.

I might offload multiplying some numbers to a calculator, but Kids These Days™ are trying to offload executive function, like "what should I do next" or "is there anything I've forgotten".


I see a version of this every day.

Developers throwing huge amounts of money (in cloud resources) at performance problems that would’ve been prevented if they had some understanding of how their tech stack actually worked.


> In the early 90s it was the "electronics" people that were saying "I come from an electronics background, these young'uns will look at a computer and don't know what to do if it breaks".

...and today, Nvidia ships self-immolating graphics cards because nobody wanted to figure out how to design a safe electric connector.

> Oh, you young people are so spoiled with your IDEs and whatnot, real men code in a text editor.

...and today, a lot of so-called programmers are trapped in AbstractHellFactorySingletonFactories that they cannot and never will understand, because generations of code monkeys have abused IDE assistance to dig themselves deeper into their hole.

And as a user, you'll know, because the software they write is garbage and never works reliably.

> Then it was about frameworks. BBbbut what if your framework breaks, what do you do then, if you don't know the underlying whatever?

Going by software like Teams, or Slack: They just ignore it, because consumers can't fight back against the the enshittification of increasingly useless software nobody understands.


Losing first principles will have some kind of an unexpected result.

Like, this is how we've always done it.

Finding a way to better learn first principles compared to sitting in front of a screen for 12 hours a days is important.


Depends on the use case. If boot requires a password, the computer can never lose power or be rebooted without human presence. That’s not always practical.


You can reboot your full-disk-encryption server while you sleep. Obligatory plug: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos>

Disclosure: I am a co-author of Mandos.


Has this solution been audited? In particular, is it safe to replay attacks by actors listening in to the network traffic?

Also from the diagram it looks like the secret key is stored unencrypted on the server, or do I read it wrong?


> Has this solution been audited?

Only insofar as everybody that I’ve asked over the years has failed to find anything wrong with it. But no formal verification has been done.

> In particular, is it safe to replay attacks by actors listening in to the network traffic?

Yes, it is safe, since we make sure to only use TLS with PFS.

> Also from the diagram it looks like the secret key is stored unencrypted on the server, or do I read it wrong?

No, the secret is stored encrypted on the server, encrypted with a key which only the client ever has.

For more information, see the introduction and FAQ: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos/man/intro.8mandos>


Thank you for this. I will almost certainly be deploying that.


That is what remote kvm are for and if you do that on commodity hardware you can start a tiny ssh server starting up from an initrd. Having said that an attacker with local access could change the initrd without your knowledge so that it logs the password you enter so it is not necessarily the most secure solution.


You’ve answered it yourself. Without TPM you have no idea if you can provide the secret to the system or if it’s compromised. Whether that secret comes from TPM or network is secondary.


Google: IPMI, BMC


That's a lot of overhead. Do you know how they are calculating the possible risk of these events? It feels like there are a million rabbit holes like this you could go down when modern infrastructure is so cloud connected.

Is the risk of your git repos higher than a chip shortage causing you to lose access to the infrastructure you need? So many factors to consider. A chip shortage doesn't seem that unlikely with geopolitics.

The list of scenarios you mitigate for seem like they could very easily be an arbitrary list of the of scenarios a single person came up with.


It's an astonishing amount of overhead that slows everything to a veritable crawl. It also creates downstream issues because you need to build in contingencies for your service consumers until you are able to fully abstract the dependency to a point where rehoming doesn't impact them.

The risk calculations are very primitive at the moment, I'm guessing they will be refined over time as industry feedback starts to resonate.


More cynical take: Trying to get acquired by nvidia


Person below says they (the whole team) already joined Nvidia.


To contrast this, Super Nintendo World initial investment was $351M to open just the first Japan location while this $110M is expected budget for first two Minecraft locations. Gives a concept of scope —- relatively low budget minimal project, which given the popularity of Minecraft this seems like a conservative experiment.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/8/18215682/super-nintendo-wor...


Dante Labs


I skimmed their website and it doesn't seem like they're promising any sort of confidentiality. Maybe there's something buried in their privacy policy, but you'd think that privacy would be a pretty big selling point?


I thought mechanical pencils used graphite not lead


No pencils use “lead”. It’s just called lead because the original material used looks similar to lead ore.

See manufacturing section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil


The words we use are funny.

I had a conversation with my wife yesterday explaining to her that "gas" (gasoline) wasn't a gas. (it can become one, but that's not where the name comes from)


Well, but in this case they're just homonyms, like how the word "bank" can refer to the edge of a river or a financial institution. The gas in your car is short for "gasoline"; you wouldn't call oxygen a type of gasoline, it's a gas.


Actually, "bank" isn't just homonyms; both senses derive from circa-Proto-Germanic benc/bank: a bench or other raised area (either a bank counter or the raised ground adjacent to a riverbed). (And yes, this etymology is also shared with "bench".)


I think the original financial institutions were actually on the rivers to handle the business around river-transported cargo.


And if you push the gas pedal, it does not mean more gasoline comes in, but more air (which then makes more gasoline comes in).

And people fear, that soon too many of the undividable atoms will be divided.


I was watching a YouTube video the other day that called the accelerator the "gas pedal" - which makes sense, except it was a video about an EV.

I wonder if that term will one day become disconnected from the original meaning, like "hang up" or the floppy save icon.


Most of the other terms are global ones (hang up, save icon, etc), but gas pedal is pretty specific to the US as far as I know, so it’s much less likely to hang around like that.

Here in Australia it’s the accelerator, or accelerator pedal.


Estonian word is “gaasipedaal”, which pretty much means “gas pedal”. Gasoline is “bensiin”, no relation to that. The word for pedal comes from accelerator regulating gas-mixture valve (throttle) in carburettor. “Gas-mixture” here is air mixed with atomised fuel.


It's also literally "gas pedal" in Russian, although more often people just say "gas". To accelerate is to "give gas".

The fuel itself is also "benzin" though. As I understand it's because benzene was the original anti-knocking additive.


Funny, in german it is "Gaspedal" and "Benzin". (And gas means gas/air in german, but I never made the connection. With cars, "gas" means "speed")


At least in german I saw EV cars described having a "strom pedal" (electricity/power pedal). More correct I guess, but also a bit odd. We will see, whether it will stick.


In Greek we call it "γκάζι", which means "natural gas", so it's already wrong. I'm fine with that persisting in EVs


Unless it’s diesel, because there the accelerator causes more fuel to squirt in rather than opening the throttle body.

But can do you call diesel gas?


Likewise anything new. The idea that it allows more air in that then allows more fuel is true for carbureted based engines. But they don’t actually exist outside of lawnmowers/chainsaws anymore. Everything from the timing to fuel injection and air intake is computer controlled.


Fuel injected engines doesn't necessarily have electronically controlled throttle. And even when they do, injection amount isn't derived directly from pedal position. What's important is amount of air sucked into the cylinder, which is calculated from manifold air pressure or mass air flow sensor readings.


Really? My new-ish car (2019) just has the pedal connected to the throttle body with a cable. I’d assume that other changes to fuel injection would happen because it sensed more air coming in


They are confidentially incorrect, the best kind of incorrect, even cars with servo controlled throttle bodies (like mine) the pedal (largely) controls the position of the throttle plate. The ECU will then control the timing of the fuel injectors to achieve optimal combustion and cylinder pressures based on expected air intake.

The ECU will also take inputs directly from the pedal, but only because that provides instaneous information, rather then waiting for sensors in the intake manifold, and eventually the exhaust manifold, to catch up.

It always comes down to pedal controls air, air controls fuel.

Edit, I'm a dirty liar: It doesn't ALWAYS come down to pedal -> Air -> Fuel. On engines with turbochargers it's possible for the ECU to delay fuel injection reducing the amount of power in the cylinder and increasing the temperature/pressure of the exhaust. This causes more power to be generated by the turbine which then accelerates. This then results in the linked compressor accelerating increasing pressure in the intake manifold which means the engine can burn even more fuel generating more power.

All without the throttle plate changing position or the engine RPMs increasing.

This trick isn't used in any meaningful way in production cars to the best of my knowledge, it is used in race cars to keep the turbo spoiled up at its optimal point prior to the start of the race.

Also if your engine happens to be a turbojet instead of a reciprocating piston engine (all turbocharger, no cylinder), it's the only way you can control power.


We do in Spain (“voy a echar gasolina” is both used for diesel and gasoline)…


In the US it’s context dependent.

If you’re running low on diesel you’d say “I need to get some gas” and you’d get it from a gas station

But if you’re talking about tractors saying that something has a “gas engine” specifically means it is not diesel


Graphite is pretty conductive too.


The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.


I wouldn’t be surprised if this was parallel reconstruction. They might have used this approach to mask a honeypot they have or a much simpler tracing scheme because this approach is time consuming and complicated dealing with a warrant to multiple companies in sequence.


It’s super easy actually. You can just send the warrant (via a pdf) to apples security portal. That’s it, they verify and then email back the info encrypted. They then email a decryption key a few days later.

This process is used all the time. Facebook/ Meta has an easy law enforcement portal that does the same thing (same for Snapchat, etc).

If anything they would use parallel construction and setup pretend documentation on old school investigation… they would want to hide that all these crimes are essentially solved via easy to access phone data.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/gle-inforequest.pdf

https://www.facebook.com/records/login/?wtsid=rdr_0brcIrz9z5...


Why would you assume that? It is routine to issue warrants to multiple companies, and issuing a warrant to companies like Apple, Google, or Verizon is nothing like the others. They have entire divisions whose only job is to validate them service LEO requests. Ive heard the cell providers have APIs for them.

I can see this being hard and time consuming the first time around, but I’m sure now it’s just routine.


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