Unlike many of those approaches which concern themselves with delivery of human-designed static UI, this seems to be a tool designed to support generative UIs. I personally think that's a non-starter and much prefer the more incremental "let the agent call a tool that renders a specific pre-made UI" approach of MCP UI/Apps, OpenAI Apps SDK, etc for now.
that's not quite what parent was talking about, which is — don't just use one giant long conversation. resetting "memories" is a totally different thing (which still might be valuable to do occasionally, if they still let you)
Actually, it's kind of the same. LLMs don't have a "new memory" system. They're like the guy from Memento. Context memory and long term from the training data. Can't make new memories from the context though.
(Not addressed to parent comment, but the inevitable others: Yes, this is an analogy, I don't need to hear another halfwit lecture on how LLMs don't really think or have memories. Thank you.)
Context memory arguably is new memory, but because we abused the metaphor of “learning” rather than something more like shaping inborn instinct for trained model weights, we have no fitting metaphor what happens during the “lifetime” of the interaction with a model via its context window as formation of skills/memories.
i'm geniunely curious about how you made the jump from "here's a single regulation" all the way down the slippery slope to "can't regulate away ALL parenting". does this one regulation cross that threshold? how'd you get there?
in an ideal world, parents would also prevent their kids from smoking, but the fact that in many places minors aren't allowed to purchase tobacco sends a social signal and actually does seem to put a speed bump in place deterring casual use.
is it not _also_ ideal to have some of these regulations in place? does it not help parents make the case to their kids?
it does help. i think this is a good step in the right direction.
but there's still a lot of stuff that only parents can do. for example, screentime in the home. you can't really create a law that says no screens for anyone under the age of X because there will exceptions (movie night, homework, etc).
Screentime helps, but it doesn't really solve the problem. They still see the exact same content shared by friends at school, and 15 minutes a day is enough to do damage.
I think for enterprise it’s going to become part of the subscription you’re already paying for, not a new line item. And then prices will simply rise.
Optionality will kill adoption, and these things are absolutely things you HAVE to be able to play with to discover the value (because it’s a new and very weird kind of tool that doesn’t work like existing tools)
> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?
Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?
So I think you are scratching at something interesting here - as a (senior) engineer who values communication intensely, I also try to “read between the lines” and extract what someone meant and not just what they said.
And so in that sense, I agree with you - from the perspective of the engineer in this example, yes: try to figure out what they meant and don’t get lost in the details. It’s a good example of not trying to control things that are fundamentally out of your hands.
But the other side is: this blog post (and the linked one explaining the “kernel” idea more deeply) is written from the perspective of the CTO! And it’s framed as a strategy - “encourage your engineers to learn how to intuit what you mean, and not what you say” (paraphrasing, of course).
I think that’s where it rubs me the wrong way. It subtly puts the responsibility for effective communication the receiving end. If we are considering it from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s just far more efficient for the CTO to say what he means from the get-go.
I mean, honestly even with the example: how much harder would it have been for the CTO to say “is it possible to go faster with something off-the-shelf rather than build our own?”
Communication doesn't scale and there are many examples of that. It's not possible to convey complex topics to a large audience, well, at all times. The audience has to do some work too.
Not to look a gift horse too much in the mouth, but I find the multiple English translations overwhelming! But at the same time, the range of interpretation and the different colors a translator can inject are truly wild. There is no true translation, all are copies, all imperfect.
I was very delighted by Aqua v1, which felt like magic at first.
But I’ve noticed/learned that I can’t dictate written content. My brain just does not work that way at all — as I write I am constantly pausing to think, to revise, etc and it feels like a completely different part of my brain is engaged. Everything I dictated with Aqua I had to throw away and rewrite.
Has anyone had similar problems, and if so, had any success retraining themselves toward dictation? There are fleeting moments where it truly feels like it would be much faster.
I use my (work) computer entirely with my voice, and it takes a lot of effort to work out what to actually write and to not ramble. Like you I've found that it's better to throw out words in sort of half sentence chunks, to give your brain time to work out what the next chunk is.
It's very hard, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to.
(which is why I'm always perplexed by these apps which allow voice dictation or voice control, but not as a complete accessibility package. I wouldn't be using my voice if my hands worked!)
It's also critically important (and after 3-4 years of this I still regularly fail at this) to actually read what you've written, and edit it before send, because those chunks don't always line up into something that I'd consider acceptably coherent. Even for a one sentence slack message.
(also, I have a kiwi accent, and the dictation software I use is not always perfect at getting what I wanted to say on the page)
1. like you mentioned, the second I start talking about something, I totally forget where I'm going, have to pause, it's like my thoughts aren't coming to me. Probably some sort of mental feedback loop plus, like you mentioned, different method of thinking.
2. in the back of my mind, I'm always self-conscious that someone is listening, so it's a privacy / being judged / being overheard feeling which adds a layer of mental feedback.
There's also not great audio clues for handling on-the-fly editing. I've tried to say "parentheses word parentheses" and it just gets written out. I've tried to say "strike that" and it gets written out. These interfaces are very 'happy path' and don't do a lot of processing (on iOS, I can say "period" and get a '.' (or ?,!) but that's about the extent).
I have had some success with long-form recording sessions which are transcribed afterwards. After getting over the short initial hump, I can brain-dump to the recording, and then trust an app like Voice Notes or Superwhisper to transcribe, and then clean up after.
The main issue I run into there, though, is that I either forget to record something (ex. a conversation that I want to review later) or there is too much friction / I don't record often enough to launch it quickly or even remember to use that workflow.
I get the same feeling with smart home stuff - it was awesome for a while to turn lights on and off with voice, but lately there's the added overhead of "did it hear me? do I need to repeat myself? What's the least amount of words I can say? Why can't I just think something into existence instead? Or have a perfect contextual interface on a physical device?"
2. The interactions were often strained. Not every edit/change is easy to articulate with your voice.
If 1 had been our only problem, we might have had a hit. In reality, I think optimizing model errors allowed us to ignore some fundamental awkwardness in the experience. We've tried to rectify this with v2 by putting less emphasis on streaming for every interaction and less emphasis on commands, replacing it with context.
Imo it is a question of right tool for the right job, adjusted for differences between people. For me, the use case that made our product click was prompting Cursor while coding. Then I wanted to use it whenever I talked to chatgpt -- it's much faster to talk and then read, and repeat.
Voice is great for whenever the limiting factor to thought is speed of typing.
I'm exactly the same. Aqua is so incredible and I really tried to like it, but I just can't get my brain to think of what I want to say first, I have to pause to think constantly.
