So in the case from the README, where you're trying to curate a sample of your data, the only thing that you're reading is the metadata, UNTIL you run `export_files` and that actually copies the binary data to your local machine?
Exactly! DataChain does lazy compute. It will read metadata/json while applying filtering and only download a sample of data files (jpg) based on the filter.
This way, you might end up downloading just 1% of your data, as defined by the metadata filter.
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I think there's a valid argument that traditional media is struggling to hold the attention of modern readers, and trust in news organizations is at all-time lows.
On the other hand, there has always been a solid separation between the editorial page and the newsroom of every major paper, just look at WSJ. WSJ has not endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, but it's no secret that their editorial board is robustly conservative. The Post is clearly a left of center publication and their editorial board has opinions that they should be free to share. In a world where Musk has turned Twitter into a pay-to-play MAGA playpen, I don't think there is anything wrong with a newspaper *opinion section* providing a clear, well-articulated endorsement of a candidate based on their merits.
Right. If this decision had been made and announced two years ago, no one cares. But according to published reports, the Editorial Board actually wrote up an endorsement and then the owner decided to spike it at the last minute- that's a big huge deal! This whole thing is just really poorly handled on Bezos part.
If the reports are true and 8% of their paid subscribers have canceled since Friday (1), Bezos really screwed up quite badly here. And you have the Editorial Page Editor David Shipley throwing Bezos directly under the bus in that same report (2) so he had to come out and offer this ham-handed justification, but it is just a sign of a dumb decision.
I just can't believe he decided that lying to a bunch of reporters was a good idea.
2: "As recently as last week, according to a person present, Shipley said he sought to talk Bezos out of his decision. Shipley added, 'I failed.'" Ibid.
Mr. Bezos has told others involved with The Post that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, according to a person familiar with the matter. He has appointed Mr. Lewis — a chief executive who previously worked at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal — and has informed Mr. Lewis that he wants more conservative writers on the opinion section, the person said. -- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/business/media/washington-post-presidential-endorsement.html
He is making a serious play to capture an audience from the other half of the country. There is no way to do that without losing a painful share of his current reach.
The false story of the frog in the pot applies here: if you want to make a change like that it has to be slow and steady, at an imperceptible pace. Doing something big and obvious destroys your pivot. You've lost trust with your existing customer base with out actually getting anything from your new, intended customer base.
Again, announce this two years ago and it's a nothing burger and you could be working on that stated process (speaking for myself I don't think it likely to work, but it's at least a plan). Doing it now, in this way- after the editorial was already written- it's a big deal.
> You've lost trust with your existing customer base with out actually getting anything from your new, intended customer base.
You may not be aware of the new profound respect Bezos is getting from Musk and friends on X. Deep testaments to Bezos' character are suddenly flying freely around. Those devotions are invisible to most people who aren't on the right. But they make an impression on the audience that Bezos says he is after.
That may be true for Bezos himself- but do you think that respect and affirmation will trickle down to the Washington Post and net them new subscribers? I'm extremely skeptical. This is not the first time someone has tried this pivot, e.g. the Post's old stablemate Newsweek, and it's not an easy thing to do.
Bezos wants diverse opinions in the Washington Post op-ed section. He wants more than just progressive liberal viewpoints always being there, right at the top of the front page. Which I think is correct.
I usually read the New York Times, but these past few weeks it's become almost unbearable with its preachiness toward why you, idiot reader, need to vote Kamala.
Fine, but at least provide some kind of counterpoint. Newspapers lose their prestige as "reporting the truth" when everything they report on represents one world view.
We don't question the New York Post or Daily Kos because they're supposed to be biased. The problem comes from a supposedly "unbiased" news org becoming more and more biased. This doesn't just show up in the opinion section, it's also what stories newspapers decide to cover.
Are you suggesting that a newspaper making an endorsement is "malicious election interference", or that there was "malicious election interference" involved in them deciding not to publish the endorsement?
You’re saying that Bezos telling the editorial board to not endorse is election interference?
I’m really struggling to see how not doing something could ever qualify as interference.
The whole concept of journalists endorsing a candidate feels a lot closer to interference. Feels a bit sad that the editorial board can’t see that without being told by someone like Bezos.
> I don't think there is anything wrong with a newspaper opinion section providing a clear, well-articulated endorsement of a candidate based on their merits.
Yes and no, but mostly no. The context is the problem. There's not a high enough wall between news and op-ed. When op-ed does what is supposed to be option and that simply reflects the "journalism" on the news side of the house, then both sides lose.
Put another way, before these entities dole out endorsements they need to work 100x harder to regain trust. What good is an enforcement if no one trusts you? FFS, the reviews on Amazon are more trustworthy than these self-proclaimed journalists.
It would have been OK to decide to forbid endorsements a year earlier or just after the elections.
The timing is extremely suspicious. Both Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA Times) pushed this decision through suddenly at almost the same time. I don't believe the reasons given for making the decision suddenly now.
Trump has promised revenge if he wins. They caved under pressure or pivoted. If Trump gets an AG that does exactly what he wants, he will go after his enemies in courts, and other means. Bezos and other billionaires cave in when they face bigger power. Mohammed bin Salman hacked his phone and then killed his employer. Bezos prevented the release of the Jamal Khashoggi document in Amazon Prime so as not to anger MBS.
Ostensibly, the LA Times owner's daughter claims that the decision not to endorse is tied to the Biden-Harris administrations stance on Gaza. Not sure whether to take that at face value or just a cop-out.
The same article notes that the newspaper itself and also the people who resigned from the paper over this say it has nothing to do with Gaza and his daughter was involved in none of the conversations about this.
My best guess is that she tried to use a brief spurt of interest in her family to get attention for a cause she was invested in, but since it was a lie no one else backed her up.
So the maintainers that got the boot were working for sanctioned Russian organizations (or at least, could not prove that their particular employers were not under the broad OFAC sanctions regime).
Totally reasonable for the Kernel maintainers who largely live in US/EU to do this, it's hard enough working on open source without worrying about ending up in jail.
This has existed for a long time, it's called "RPA" or Robotic Process Automation. The biggest incumbent in this space is UiPath, but there are a host of startups and large companies alike that are tackling it.
Most of the things that RPA is used for can be easily scripted, e.g. download a form from one website, open up Adobe. There are a lot of startups that are trying to build agentic versions of RPA, I'm glad to see Anthropic is investing in it now too.
It's almost always a framework around existing tools like Selenium that you constantly have to fight against to get good results from. I was always left with the feeling that I could build something better myself just handrolling the scripts rather than using their frameworks.
Getting Claude integrated into the space is going to be a game changer.
Most RPA work is in dealing with errors and exceptions, not the "happy path". I don't see how Claude's Screen Agent is going to work out there - what do you do when an error pops up and you need to implement specific business logic how to respond? How about consistency over many executions, and enterprise accounts. You want a centralized way to control agent behavior. Scripting based RPA is also much faster and cheaper to run, and more consistent.
Maybe Anthropic should focus on building a flexible RPA primitive we could use to make RPA workflows with, like for example extracting values from components that need scrolling, selecting values from long drop-down menus, or handling error messages under form fields.
100% this. I am using the open source Ui.vision to automate some business tasks. Works well, but only 10% of the work is for automating the main workflow, 90% of the work goes into error and edge case handling (e. g. Internet down, website (to scrape data from) down, some input data has typos or the wrong date format, etc).
A human can work around all these error cases once she encounters them. Current RPA tools like Uipath or ui.vision need explicit programming for every potential situation. And I see no indication that Claude is doing any better than this.
For starters, for visual automation to work reliably the OCR quality needs to improve further and be 100% reliable. Even in that very basic "AI" area, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini are good, but not good enough yet.
The big thing I expect at the next level is in using Claude to first generate UI-based automation based on an end user's instructions, then automatically defining a suite of end-to-end tests, confirming with the user "is this how it should work?", and then finally using this suite to reimplement the flow from first principles.
I know we're still a bit far from there, but I don't see a particular hurdle that strikes me as requiring novel research.
But does it do any better at soliciting the surprise requirements from the user, who after confirming that everything works, two months later reports a production bug because the software isn't correctly performing the different reqirements on the first Tuesday of each quarter that you never knew about.
I once had an executive ask to start an incident because he was showing a client the app and a feature that he wanted that had never been spec’d didn’t exist.
I was going to comment about this. Worked at a place that had a “Robotics Department”, wow I thought. Only to find out it was automating arcane software.
UI is now much more accessible as API. I hope we don’t start seeing captcha like behaviour in desktop or web software.
Wow, that's a grim potential future. I can already see software producers saying that e.g. the default license only allows operation of our CAD designer software by a human operator. If you want to make your bot use it in an automated way you must by the bot license which costs 10x more.
I've been wondering the same and started exploring building a startup around this idea. My analysis led me to the conclusion that if AI gets even just 2 orders of magnitude better over the next two years, this will be "easy" and considered table stakes. Like connecting to the internet, syncing with cloud or using printer drivers
I don't think there will be a very big place for standalone next gen RPA pure plays. it makes sense that companies that are trying to deliver value would implement capabilities this. Over time, I expect some conventions/specs will emerge. Either Apple/Google or Anthropic/OpenAI are likely to come up with an implementation that everyone aligns on
yes, thanks for pointing out the assumption here. I'm not sure how to quantify AI improvements and tbh not really up to speed on quantifiable rate of improvement from 4 to 4o to o1
100 times better seems to me in line with the bet that's justifying $250B per annum in Cap Ex (just among hyperscalers) but curious how you might project a few years out?
Having said that, my use of 100x better here applies to 100x more effective at navigating use cases not in training set, for example, as opposed to doing things that are 100x more awesome or doing them 100x more efficiently (though seemingly costs, context window and token per unit of electricity seem to continue to improve quickly)
UiPath can't figure out how to make a profitable business since 2005 and we are nearing the end of this hype cycle. I am not so sure this will lead anywhere. I am a former investor in UiPath.
Attempts at commercialization in technology seem to often happen twice. First we get the much-hyped failure, and only later we get the actual thing that was promised.
So many examples come to mind… RealVideo -> YouTube, Myspace -> Facebook, Laserdisc -> DVD, MP3 players -> iPod…
UiPath may end up being the burned pancake, but the underlying problem they’re trying to address is immensely lucrative and possibly solvable (hey if we got the Turing test solved so quickly, I’m willing to believe anything is possible).
It didn’t help that UIPath forced a subscription model and “cloud orchestrator” on all users and many of which needed neither. They got greedy. We ditched it.
My impression is that actually solving this classic RPA problem with AI is exactly the raison d'etre of AI21Labs with their task specific models[1]. They don't have the biggest or best general purpose LLM, but they have an excellent model that's been pre-trained on specific types of business data and also made available for developers using simple APIs & "RPA-style" interfaces.
I’ve implemented quite a few RPA apps and the struggle is the request/response turn around time for realtime transactions. For batch data extract or input, RPA is great since there’s no expectation of process duration. However, when a client requests data in realtime that can only be retrieved from an app using RPA, the response time is abysmal. Just picture it - Start the app, log into the app if it requires authentication (hope that the authentication's MFA is email based rather than token based, and then access the mailbox using an in-place configuration with MS Graph/Google Workspace/etc), navigate to the app’s view that has the data or worse, bring up a search interface since the exact data isn’t known and try and find the requested data. So brittle...
Out of curiosity, how are high risk liability enviroments like yours coming to terms with the non-deterministic nature of models like these? Eg. the non-zero chance that it might click a button it *really* shouldn't as demonstrated in the failure demo.
Technical director at another company here: We have humans double-check everything, because we're required by law to. We use automation to make response times faster, or to do the bulk of the work and then just have humans double-check the AI. To do otherwise would be classed as "a software medical device", which needs documentation out the wazoo, and for good reason. I'm not sure you could even have a medical device where most of your design doc is "well I just hope it does the right thing, I guess?".
Sometimes, the AI is more accurate or safer than humans, but it still reads better to say "we always have humans in the loop". In those cases, we reap the benefits of both: Use the AI for safety, but still have a human fallback.
I'm curious, what does your human verification process look like? Does it involve a separate interface or a generated report of some kind? I'm currently working on an tool for personal use, that records actions and triggers them at later stage on when specified event occurs. For verification, generating a CSV report after the process is complete and backing it up with screen recordings.
It's a separate interface where the output of the LLM is rated for safety, and anything unsafe opens a ticket to be acted upon by the medical professionals.
I've done a ton of various RPAs over the years, using all the normal techniques, and they're always brittle and sensitive to minor updates.
For this, I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. I want to see and test how well it performs in the real world before I deploy it, and wait for it to come out of beta so Anthropic will sign a BAA.
The demo is impressive enough that I want to give the tech a chance to mature before my team and I invest a ton of time into a more traditional RPA.
At a minimum, if we do end up using it, we'll have solid guard rails in place - it'll run on an isolated VM, all of its user access will be restricted to "read only" for external systems, and any content that comes from it will go through review by our nurses.
Healthcare has the extra complication of HIPAA / equivalent local laws, and institutions being extremely unwilling to process patient data on devices they don't directly control.
I don't think this is going to work in that industry until local models get good enough to do it, and small enoguh to be affordable to hospitals.
Based on Tog's paradox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41913437) the moment this becomes easy, it will become hard again with extra regulation and oversight and documentation etc.
Similarly I expect that once processing/searching laws/legal records becomes easy through LLMs, we'll compensate by having orders of magnitude more laws, perhaps themselves generated in part by LLMs.
We’ll see. Having worked in this space in the past, the technical challenges are able to overcome today with no new technology: its a business sales and regulation challenge more than a tech one.
In my case I have a bunch of nurses that waste a huge amount of time dealing with clerical work and tech hoops, rather than operating at the top of their license.
Traditional RPAs are tough when you're dealing with VPNs, 2fa, remote desktop (in multiple ways), a variety of EHRs and scraping clinical documentation from poorly structured clinical notes or PDFs.
This technology looks like it could be a game changer for our organization.
True, 2FA and all these little details that exist now have made this automation quite insanely complicated. It is of course necessary that we have 2FA etc, but there is huge potential in solving this I believe.
From a security standpoint, what's considered the "proper" way of assigning a bot access based on a person's 2FA? Would that be some sort of limited scope expiring token like GitHub's fine-grained personal access tokens?
Security isn't the only issue here. There are more and less "proper" ways of giving bots access to a system. But the whole field of RPA exists in large part because the vendors don't want you to access the system this way. They aren't going to give you a "proper" way of assigning bot access in a secure way, because they explicitly don't want you to do it in the first place.
I don't know, I feel like it has to be some sort of near field identity proof. E.g. as long as you are wearing a piece of equipment to a physical computer near you can run all those automations for you, or similar. I haven't fully thought what the best solution could be or whether someone is already working on it, but I feel like there has to be something like that, which would allow you better UX in terms of access, but security at the same time.
So maybe like an automated ubikey that you can opt in to a nearby computer to have all the access. Especially if working from home, you can set it at a state where if you are in 15m radius of your laptop it is able to sign all access.
Because right now, considering amount of tools and everything I use and with single sign on, VPN, Okta, etc, and how slow they seem to be, it's extremely frustrating process constantly logging in to everywhere, and it's almost like it makes me procrastinate my work, because I can't be bothered. Everything about those weird little things is absolutely terrible experience, including things like cookie banners as well.
And it is ridiculous, because I'm working from home, but frustratingly high amount of time is spent on this bs.
A bluetooth wearable or similar to prove that I'm nearby essentially, to me that seems like it could alleviate a lot of safety concerns, while providing amazing dev/ux.
The main attack vector would then probably be some man-in-the-middle intercepting the signal from your wearable, which leads me to wonder whether you could protect yourself by having the responses valid for only an extremely short duration, e.g. ~1ms, such that there's no way for an attacker to do anything with the token unless they gain control over compute inside your house.
Maybe we could build an authenticator as part of the RPA tool or bot client itself. This way, the bot could generate time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs).
I agree that at the business contract level, it's more about sales and regulations than tech. But in my experience working close to minimum wage white-collar jobs, about 1 in 4 of my coworkers had automated most of their job with some unholy combination of VBScript, Excel wizardry, AutoHotKey, Selenium, and just a bit of basic Python sprinkled in; IT, security, and privacy concerns notwithstanding. Some were even dedicated enough to pay small amounts out-of-pocket for certain tools.
I'd bet that until we get the risks whittled down enough for larger organizations to adopt this on a wide scale, the biggest user group for AI automation tools will be at the level of individual workers who are eager to streamline their own tasks and aren't paid enough to care about those same risks.
The lawsuit was bound to happen, the alternative being to accept the narrative without fighting back.
The Chinese National Security Laws allow the CCP to compel Chinese citizens and corporations anywhere they may be to perform work on behalf of their intelligence services. Even if you don’t think DJI is actively a threat, a government agency would be foolish to use anything of theirs.
Hopefully PagerGate made it clear to officials what the consequences can be of having an enemy actor infiltrate your physical supply chains.
I’m much happier with the TSA having those scans than airlines and services like CLEAR. At least there are rules the government is held to about how the data is stored and privacy/deletion requirements.
Just used digital id today and it let me skip a massive line. Also really nice not having to show anything. They already got my biometrics from my passport and global entry, might as well get some benefit out of it.
I love Starlink, and it is a great way for many people who live outside of where it is profitable to run broadband to have a high-speed Internet connection.
What is concerning is how much direct control Elon wields over the service. I wouldn't be surprised if he disabled access to BlueSky, or other forms of censorship.
It's a ridiculous, retracted claim that's very very suspicious. Especially given that the US didn't allow it's weapons to be used in the area. And there's many tools the government has to make companies comply. Starting with money, which they refused to pay.
