> Claude really likes Firefox. It will use other browsers if it absolutely has to, but will behave so much better if you just install Firefox and let it go to its happy place.
There might be a reason. I played around with Playwright before and once you run chromium for few times, it will get blocked and you start seeing captcha.
Not without precedent, OCaml also uses this extension for executable on all platforms. Probably boils down to taste, but I think this name is clear and concise, my favorite qualities in a name.
.app is my text editor that struggles to run on a workstation; it just auto-updated, but turns out it was funded by a VC and it's now begging for me to subscribe for £12 a month.
Regardless, not once in my life have I ever thought "man it's way too time consuming and onerous for me to spend my money. I wish there was a way for me to spend my money faster and with less oversight."
I suppose it's not for you, then. That's a thought I've had often. Sometimes there's too much friction between me and the opportunity to spend some money.
Like, right now, I want to buy an e-bike under $500, any Chinese brand will do. And I want it to look at Reddit and stuff to see what people have said etc. etc.
But I'm not going to do it because it takes too long. If machine can do it, fine by me.
Claud go find Christmas gifts for my family. Look through our group chat for ideas. List them here and if I approve find and order them to delivery to my house. Total budget is 400 dollars.
Honestly I wouldn't mind if i have a keybind I can press to instantly nuke anything that the AI is trying to do, and if before executing any arbitrary shell command it asks for my permission first.
this is such a hilariously bad idea, its like knowingly installing malware on your computer - malware that has access to your bank account. please god, any sane person reading this do not install this, you've been warned.
On a desktop? Where I live all banks require a mobile app (which in turn requires 2FA for login and also for any transaction) or else separate authentication hardware.
I can't think of a single bank app/site that requires 2FA on every login; most have a "trusted device" option and that cookie becomes your "something you have" second factor for future logins.
The PSD2 directive mandates the 2nd factor to be able provide you with an independent means of displaying the transaction you are performing. This essentially means the 2nd factor must be an device.
Yikes! Requiring a smart phone (or other extra hardware) is pretty exclusionary for a service that all people need like banking. First time I've heard about practices like that. I hope it doesn't spread.
In the US "people with smart phone" is larger than "people with a computer." The real people being left behind are "people without email". I have a neighbor in this state and we occasionally have to make a temp email to qualify for various discounts or the like. It would only muddy the waters if we anyone thought he actually has an email.
There are usually alternatives that you can get, like a little calculator-looking thing that generates one time codes. What really surprises me is that despite needing 2FA to make any transactions, some companies like Amazon still have the ability to magically get money from my account using only the info on card.
Where I live banks generally require you to do some form of in app verification for purchases online TBF.
This is regardless of it being from a trusted machine or merchant from which you’ve purchased before.
There are probably some cases where this is not true (thinking people without a banking app) but I get the 3D verify for every transaction I make regardless of payment method or vendor.
As example, people use spyware willingly. Safari has feature that 'it can prevent trackers' - if you want. Safari can't do it automatically for everyone, because spyware is normal software now. Every spyware now has: "We value your privacy" and people are ok with that.
This would be a valid concern if it were fast enough to do anything dangerous before you could stop it. Per the project readme, it acts at a snail pace, so you would have to be very irresponsible to suffer damage from use of this app.
That said, if there isn't already, perhaps there should be a !!!BIG WARNING!!! around leaving it to its own devices... or rather, your devices.
He's joking, in the report of Claude Computer Use it was reported that Claude stopped doing a task and started searching images of the Yellowstone National Park.
It's also a lazy convention for lazy replies, the sort HN discourages. As you say, it's doing sarcasm, but badly: the writer can blurt out the first quip that comes to mind, regardless of it being related, and hides behind the prestige that sarcasm has, while often only virtue signalling.
If you want to be sure you’re clearly understood, don’t use sarcasm (it’s a massively overrated and really cheap form of humor anyway). If you want to be funny, take the risk that you’ll be misunderstood. My problem is with people who want it both ways.
> My problem is with people who want it both ways.
Why? Why would you dislike a solution which neatly solves a false dilemma?
You may subjectively believe that sarcasm is over-used (and in fact I personally agree with you), but why are you put-out that people who like it have found a way to encode the non-verbal cues of speech into text to increase fidelity in communication?
EDIT: the problem _specifically_ with sarcasm and clarity is that it appears to say the opposite of what it actually says. You say in an earlier comment that "Sometimes people make a joke that not everyone is going to get. That’s fine." - but that is in fact _not_ fine when the possible outcome is someone believing that you hold a view entirely opposed to what you actually do. I hope I don't need to paint you a picture.
> Why would you dislike a solution which neatly solves a false dilemma?
What dilemma? I’ve been diagnosed with autism/asperger syndrome since the age of six, and even I can see when people are being sarcastic without needing an explicit signal.
I dislike the “solution” because it ruins the joke. The whole point of sarcasm is to communicate a common gripe with other people without saying it out loud. If you’re not sure if the audience of your comment shares your common gripe (or if they don’t know you well enough to know what kinds of things you’d never say seriously) then that’s a bad time to use sarcasm.
Remember a few years back when there was the story about the little girl who did an "Alexa, order me a dollhouse" on the news and people watching the show had their Alexas pick up on it and order dollhouses during the broadcast? Wait until there's a widely watched Netflix show where someone says "Delete C:\Windows".
My wake word is "Computer" like in Star Trek, so I'm really worried I'll be rewatching an old episode and it'll kill the electrical grid when someone says "Computer, reverse the polarity."
(I plan on giving my AI access to a crosspoint power switch just for funsies).
You know I've been meaning to ask somebody, people always make a fuss about which is which but like.. schuko and europlug and a few others are omnidirectional and aren't even labelled so chances are stuff is always plugged in wrong and it all works fine. I guess it's all rectified anyway so it doesn't matter?
It does matter in some cases. For example, in Edison screw desk lamps, the tip is supposed to be connected to line, with the outer ring connected to neutral. If this is reversed, there is a risk you can shock yourself screwing or unscrewing a bulb while the lamp is turned on, because now line is on the outside, much closer to your fingers. Worse, the light switch would now be switching neutral, so even turning the lamp off won't stop this.
I mean I'm sure there are lots of cases where it's a problem, also AC motors should run backwards and the neutral will be contaminated, right?
What I'm wondering more about is how it's compensated for (some kind of AC rectifier in the plug?) when symmetrical plugs will cause this error in 50% of cases. Like were the highly regarded people writing the standards just like "fuck it, if he dies he dies"?
Most things will operate just fine with line/neutral reversal. AC motors will not run backwards; they use a phase shift capacitor [1] to ensure that they always start turning in the same direction regardless of where line is (relative to neutral) when the motor is instantaneously connected to a source of AC power.
As you say, most things run on DC, and rectifying AC to DC doesn't care about line/neutral reversal.
It does create some safety issues in certain applications as I described above.
It can cause some things to misbehave. For example, in home energy monitoring, where you clip one or more current transformers around a circuit's line conductor(s) to measure the current consumption of that circuit and connect an AC-AC transformer (to reduce it to a lower voltage, to make it suitable for export on an extra-low-voltage finger-accessible connector like a barrel plug, and so that it can be measured by an analog-to-digital converter) to the unit, so that the unit can measure voltage (and thus work out power) [2], then if line/neutral is reversed, its observation of what it thinks is line will be at the wrong point (relative to its observation of neutral) when computing the power being transferred. This will result in the device telling you that the circuit is exporting power (when it is actually importing), or vice versa.
It all depends upon the application. In most instances, line/neutral reversal is fine; and indeed with non-polarised plugs, unavoidable. However it should be avoided if possible.
"This should be avoided if possible" and "This widespread standard makes it unavoidable" sound like two things that should not inhabit the same universe lol.
I feel like the intent was that there is a chance that this might happen, and they wanted manufacturers to make sure it's always handled properly... so there's no better way to force them to do that by making it happen constantly everywhere. Given that people don't really die from this on a daily basis I presume it must've somehow worked.
The US is starting to come around in this regard (which is elaborated in the video I linked). Polarised NEMA 1-15 and 5-15 sockets are now the norm in new construction; with the neutral slot being slightly taller than line in both. It is therefore not possible to insert a polarised NEMA plug in the other way around.
The only difference between the two is that NEMA 1-15 has no ground while NEMA 5-15 does; a NEMA 1-15 plug will go into a NEMA 5-15 socket (but not the other way around). NEMA 1-15 sockets will still be common in situations that don't require a ground connection, such as sockets intended for class 2 equipment in bathrooms (like mains-powered shavers), but are now polarised, preventing line-neutral reversal when used in combination with a polarised plug.
However, there will be a significant lag time. Lots of devices are still sold with non-polarised plugs, for compatibility with both types of socket. Until non-polarised sockets go away, and electrical inspections enforce that all polarised sockets are wired correctly, and then devices are only sold with polarised plugs, appliance line/neutral reversal will still be a daily occurrence. This will take at least a couple more decades to be rid of.
There was an effort to standardise a polarised socket and plug specification for all of mainland Europe (IEC 60906-1), but this was shelved in the 1990s and abandoned in 2017 due to cost and waste concerns. IEC 60906-1 sockets appear to be unpolarised at first glance (for plugs lacking an earth pin); however, line and neutral are required to have shutters on them that only open with the insertion of a longer earth pin (just like UK BS1363 sockets), and thus you cannot insert a 2-pin plug into it in either orientation.
A lot of the rest of the world has only polarised plugs and sockets. This includes the UK, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Israel, China, and South Africa, which collectively make up just under 40% of the world's population. That list isn't exhaustive, but I can't be bothered looking up the socket standard in use by every country in the world and reading the specification for those standards to see if they permit unpolarised plugs :)
Polarized receptacles were mandated in the US by the National Electric Code in 1962. I feel like during the 1990s every electronic device you bought had a polarized plug, but then with the advent of smartphones circa 2007-2008 and then the flood of aftermarket chargers a few years later, we suddenly went backwards to non-polarized plugs.
Such garbage is only possible because there has been a strong deviation between ethics, philosophy & technology.
The business bros are to immoral to know that this is unethical as thier eyes are focused on making money. Not being ethical.
The ethical activists & philosophers like Richard Stallman & Jaron Lanier offer un-realistic solutions that normal people cannot adopt.
- I can't turn off JavaScript because 80% of my websites won't work,
- I can't ditch Apple because GNU wants me to use a 15 year old computer with completely "libre" software impractical for work
- I need a cellphone to communicate. I can move without a cellphone like RMS.
We need to start teaching people in technology not just "code" but also ethics/philosophy like they do in medicine & law.
Also we need people with better moral standards. I would really like it if someone like Snowden, RMS to Jaron built business products (not just non-profit gimmicks) that satisfied real consumer needs.
Likely tied to how quickly we produce novel things in general, making the dangerous subset sufficiently large. That’s a root of a common argument you’ll see around regulation stifling innovation.
One thing this could be safely used is for generally is read only situations. Like monitor Brokered CD > 5% are released by refreshing the page or during the pandemic when Amazon Shopping window opened up at an arbitrary time and ring an alarm. Hopefully it is not too slow and can do this.
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals...
How long until it can quickly without you noticing add a daemon running on your system. This is the equivalent of how we used to worry about Soviet spies getting access to US secrets, and now we just post them online for everyone to see.
There's no antivirus or firewall today that can protect your files from the ability this could have to wreck havoc on your network, let alone your computer.
We treat it as what it is - another user. Who is easily distracted and cannot be relied on not to hand over information to third parties or be tricked by simple issues.
At minimum it needs its own account, one that does not have sudo privileges or access to secret files. At best it needs its own VM.
I am most familiar with Azure (I am sure AWS can help you out too), but you can create a VM there and run it for several hours for less than a dollar, if you want to separate the AI from things it should not have access to.
"not hand over information to third parties" is the hard part though, as that often looks no different from "get useful data from third parties". Particularly when it can be smuggled into GET params, a la `www.usefulfeature.com/?q=weather_today_injected_phone_8675309`.
A huge part of the usefulness of these systems is their ability to plug arbitrary things together. Which also means arbitrary holes. Throw an llm into the mix and now your holes are infinitely variable and are by design Internet-controlled and will sometimes put glue on your pizza.
You don't only need a VM. You also need network isolation from the rest of your network (unless you already expose your whole network as routable on the Internet).
On the one hand very true, but on the other hand if you're a dev any python or nodejs package you install and run could do the same thing and the world mostly continues working.
Those packages presumably have eyeballs on the source, deterministic output, and versions to control updates. That's pretty good compared to an automaton with slightly unknowable behavior patterns that is subject to unpredictable outside influences.
> How long until it can quickly without you noticing add a daemon running on your system.
A (production) system like this is already such a daemon. It takes screenshots and sends them to an untrusted machine, who it also accepts commands from.
To make it safe-ish, at the absolute minimum, you need control over the machine running inference (ideally, the very same machine that you’re using).
You just have to wait for Windows to update, it'll come built-in. No need to download some functional and possibly privacy-protecting thing from the internet.
I wonder if it's expecting a default resolution (like for a Mac Book pro?). I'm seeing the same issue of the coordinates not working on Win11 for a 3840x2160 display.
Agree. My immediate thought on having this was moving to two computers. One for this kind of AI integration and another that, if not with an air gap, certainly with stricter security.
Jokes on you, business owners love this shit. "my employees screw up all the time, now i can have 100 more employees for the same price. Shut up i wont bother doing the math on how many more mistakes per hour that is"
For those who don't know: there's an old movie titled "Terminator", and in this movie a military AI (Artificial Intelligence) takes over the world and wages a war against humanity. The name of this AI in the movie is "SkyNet", so this is what the parent comment is referring to :D
It's fascinating/spooky how different LLMs are slowly developing their own "personalities," so to speak. And they seem to be emerging as we're giving them access to more tools and modalities which are harder to do broad RLHF on.
With computer use, we first learned that Claude sometimes takes breaks to browse pictures of Yosemite, and now this:
> Claude really likes Firefox. It will use other browsers if it absolutely has to, but will behave so much better if you just install Firefox and let it go to its happy place.
"Even while recording these demos, we encountered some amusing moments. In one, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording, causing all footage to be lost.
Later, Claude took a break from our coding demo and began to peruse photos of Yellowstone National Park."
>> > Claude really likes Firefox. It will use other browsers if it absolutely has to, but will behave so much better if you just install Firefox and let it go to its happy place.
It's hard to ignore the glimpse into the future of engineering that we're seeing here. Deterministic processes are out the door, no specs, no tolerances, no design. When did undefined behaviour become a cute thing that we're bragging about and compensating for, something to work around rather than something to understand and to fix?
It's not a big deal until you realize that software always gets stacked on software, and the only thing that ever made that complexity manageable was the fundamental assumption that it was all pretty deterministic. Of course users will sacrifice the strategic (good engineering) for the tactical (mere convenience) all day long, but the fact that so many engineers are all-in on the same short-sighted POV has been surprising to me.
243 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadGood boy!
Never happened when I tried Firefox
/s I have no idea if it's true, but mosdef possible
/s
Regardless, not once in my life have I ever thought "man it's way too time consuming and onerous for me to spend my money. I wish there was a way for me to spend my money faster and with less oversight."
Like, right now, I want to buy an e-bike under $500, any Chinese brand will do. And I want it to look at Reddit and stuff to see what people have said etc. etc.
But I'm not going to do it because it takes too long. If machine can do it, fine by me.
Also probably a bad idea for 99+% of people
Given time I suspect that strange actions made by AI agents will become the new “ducking” autocorrect.
Finishing up a feature on a side project at 1am.
Think “oh I know, I’ll have Computer Use run some regression tests on it.”
Run computer Use and walk away to get a drink.
While you’re gone Computer Use opens a browser and goes to Facebook. Then Likes a photo that your ex took at the beach… at 1am…
I can't think of a single bank app/site that requires 2FA on every login; most have a "trusted device" option and that cookie becomes your "something you have" second factor for future logins.
This is regardless of it being from a trusted machine or merchant from which you’ve purchased before.
There are probably some cases where this is not true (thinking people without a banking app) but I get the 3D verify for every transaction I make regardless of payment method or vendor.
It is going to be same with malware.
That said, if there isn't already, perhaps there should be a !!!BIG WARNING!!! around leaving it to its own devices... or rather, your devices.
I only access mine from a VM that does just that and I still have to log on every single time.
Sometimes people make a joke that not everyone is going to get. That’s fine. But if you add the /s, it ruins the joke for the people who did get it.
Why? Why would you dislike a solution which neatly solves a false dilemma?
You may subjectively believe that sarcasm is over-used (and in fact I personally agree with you), but why are you put-out that people who like it have found a way to encode the non-verbal cues of speech into text to increase fidelity in communication?
EDIT: the problem _specifically_ with sarcasm and clarity is that it appears to say the opposite of what it actually says. You say in an earlier comment that "Sometimes people make a joke that not everyone is going to get. That’s fine." - but that is in fact _not_ fine when the possible outcome is someone believing that you hold a view entirely opposed to what you actually do. I hope I don't need to paint you a picture.
What dilemma? I’ve been diagnosed with autism/asperger syndrome since the age of six, and even I can see when people are being sarcastic without needing an explicit signal.
I dislike the “solution” because it ruins the joke. The whole point of sarcasm is to communicate a common gripe with other people without saying it out loud. If you’re not sure if the audience of your comment shares your common gripe (or if they don’t know you well enough to know what kinds of things you’d never say seriously) then that’s a bad time to use sarcasm.
(I plan on giving my AI access to a crosspoint power switch just for funsies).
EDIT: Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q5wYV3flKI
What I'm wondering more about is how it's compensated for (some kind of AC rectifier in the plug?) when symmetrical plugs will cause this error in 50% of cases. Like were the highly regarded people writing the standards just like "fuck it, if he dies he dies"?
As you say, most things run on DC, and rectifying AC to DC doesn't care about line/neutral reversal.
It does create some safety issues in certain applications as I described above.
It can cause some things to misbehave. For example, in home energy monitoring, where you clip one or more current transformers around a circuit's line conductor(s) to measure the current consumption of that circuit and connect an AC-AC transformer (to reduce it to a lower voltage, to make it suitable for export on an extra-low-voltage finger-accessible connector like a barrel plug, and so that it can be measured by an analog-to-digital converter) to the unit, so that the unit can measure voltage (and thus work out power) [2], then if line/neutral is reversed, its observation of what it thinks is line will be at the wrong point (relative to its observation of neutral) when computing the power being transferred. This will result in the device telling you that the circuit is exporting power (when it is actually importing), or vice versa.
It all depends upon the application. In most instances, line/neutral reversal is fine; and indeed with non-polarised plugs, unavoidable. However it should be avoided if possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_capacitor
[2] https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/emontx3/install.html
I feel like the intent was that there is a chance that this might happen, and they wanted manufacturers to make sure it's always handled properly... so there's no better way to force them to do that by making it happen constantly everywhere. Given that people don't really die from this on a daily basis I presume it must've somehow worked.
The US is starting to come around in this regard (which is elaborated in the video I linked). Polarised NEMA 1-15 and 5-15 sockets are now the norm in new construction; with the neutral slot being slightly taller than line in both. It is therefore not possible to insert a polarised NEMA plug in the other way around.
The only difference between the two is that NEMA 1-15 has no ground while NEMA 5-15 does; a NEMA 1-15 plug will go into a NEMA 5-15 socket (but not the other way around). NEMA 1-15 sockets will still be common in situations that don't require a ground connection, such as sockets intended for class 2 equipment in bathrooms (like mains-powered shavers), but are now polarised, preventing line-neutral reversal when used in combination with a polarised plug.
However, there will be a significant lag time. Lots of devices are still sold with non-polarised plugs, for compatibility with both types of socket. Until non-polarised sockets go away, and electrical inspections enforce that all polarised sockets are wired correctly, and then devices are only sold with polarised plugs, appliance line/neutral reversal will still be a daily occurrence. This will take at least a couple more decades to be rid of.
There was an effort to standardise a polarised socket and plug specification for all of mainland Europe (IEC 60906-1), but this was shelved in the 1990s and abandoned in 2017 due to cost and waste concerns. IEC 60906-1 sockets appear to be unpolarised at first glance (for plugs lacking an earth pin); however, line and neutral are required to have shutters on them that only open with the insertion of a longer earth pin (just like UK BS1363 sockets), and thus you cannot insert a 2-pin plug into it in either orientation.
A lot of the rest of the world has only polarised plugs and sockets. This includes the UK, India, Malaysia, Brazil, Israel, China, and South Africa, which collectively make up just under 40% of the world's population. That list isn't exhaustive, but I can't be bothered looking up the socket standard in use by every country in the world and reading the specification for those standards to see if they permit unpolarised plugs :)
…ok not really but that would be funny.
The business bros are to immoral to know that this is unethical as thier eyes are focused on making money. Not being ethical.
The ethical activists & philosophers like Richard Stallman & Jaron Lanier offer un-realistic solutions that normal people cannot adopt.
- I can't turn off JavaScript because 80% of my websites won't work,
- I can't ditch Apple because GNU wants me to use a 15 year old computer with completely "libre" software impractical for work
- I need a cellphone to communicate. I can move without a cellphone like RMS.
We need to start teaching people in technology not just "code" but also ethics/philosophy like they do in medicine & law.
Also we need people with better moral standards. I would really like it if someone like Snowden, RMS to Jaron built business products (not just non-profit gimmicks) that satisfied real consumer needs.
Otherwise we are doomed.
Otherwise, your best option is to boycott.
Fifty years later, after much meddling from the industry.
"Now, prove vaping/PFOA is dangerous!"
We invent novel dangerous things faster than we can deal with novel dangerous things.
Ted Kaczynski enters the chat
There's no antivirus or firewall today that can protect your files from the ability this could have to wreck havoc on your network, let alone your computer.
This scene comes to mind: https://makeagif.com/i/BA7Yt3
We treat it as what it is - another user. Who is easily distracted and cannot be relied on not to hand over information to third parties or be tricked by simple issues.
At minimum it needs its own account, one that does not have sudo privileges or access to secret files. At best it needs its own VM.
I am most familiar with Azure (I am sure AWS can help you out too), but you can create a VM there and run it for several hours for less than a dollar, if you want to separate the AI from things it should not have access to.
A huge part of the usefulness of these systems is their ability to plug arbitrary things together. Which also means arbitrary holes. Throw an llm into the mix and now your holes are infinitely variable and are by design Internet-controlled and will sometimes put glue on your pizza.
A (production) system like this is already such a daemon. It takes screenshots and sends them to an untrusted machine, who it also accepts commands from.
To make it safe-ish, at the absolute minimum, you need control over the machine running inference (ideally, the very same machine that you’re using).
> - Lets an AI completely take over your computer
:)
But there’s an insurgent class of developers who insist on letting the AI rewrite its own code, which is terrible news in the grand scheme of things.
For those who don't know: there's an old movie titled "Terminator", and in this movie a military AI (Artificial Intelligence) takes over the world and wages a war against humanity. The name of this AI in the movie is "SkyNet", so this is what the parent comment is referring to :D
With computer use, we first learned that Claude sometimes takes breaks to browse pictures of Yosemite, and now this:
> Claude really likes Firefox. It will use other browsers if it absolutely has to, but will behave so much better if you just install Firefox and let it go to its happy place.
I don't mind being reigned over by AI overlords that'll choose FOSS over proprietary.
We learned what now?
From the Anthropic tweet (X post?):
"Even while recording these demos, we encountered some amusing moments. In one, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording, causing all footage to be lost.
Later, Claude took a break from our coding demo and began to peruse photos of Yellowstone National Park."
If it had stopped the coding task to browse hackernews, I would have to start to march for AI rights.
It's hard to ignore the glimpse into the future of engineering that we're seeing here. Deterministic processes are out the door, no specs, no tolerances, no design. When did undefined behaviour become a cute thing that we're bragging about and compensating for, something to work around rather than something to understand and to fix?
It's not a big deal until you realize that software always gets stacked on software, and the only thing that ever made that complexity manageable was the fundamental assumption that it was all pretty deterministic. Of course users will sacrifice the strategic (good engineering) for the tactical (mere convenience) all day long, but the fact that so many engineers are all-in on the same short-sighted POV has been surprising to me.
> This is a simple Electron app
ಠ_ಠ