This seems like one of those “reality has a surprising amount of detail” situations.
Surely getting something to autonomously without fail extend an arm and plug in for the lifespan of these vehicles vs just park in this allocated spot you would park in anyway is an obvious tradeoff.
It’s definitely a trade off but both options have a lot of real world concerns. If safeguards on the wireless pad fail you could easily cook an animal or start a fire. The bottom of the car now needs to be metal free to allow this to work. Distance matters which means if it charges your Porsche it might not be able to charge a Rivian and certainly not with the same efficiency.
I also frankly do not believe the 90% efficiency claim because it seems so much higher than any other wireless charging I’ve heard of.
This seems like one of those things that seems cool but is not generally practical. As a convenience for wealthy Porsche EV owners, sure. As a general purpose charging solution? I doubt it.
Starting a fire, maybe, cooking an animal, extremely not likely.
Turn on an induction stove to max. Put your hand on it. Did it burn your hand? No. Put a ferrous pan on it. Suddenly, really hot.
Same concept happening here. A 36" induction stove top is likely putting out about the same inductive power. If the risk of being over the pad while it operated was enough to burn someone, so would cooking food on an induction stove.
Maybe? I’m definitely not an expert in inductive charging. I would think a cat laying between the charging pad and the receiver would be getting a big hit of radio waves. Maybe not.
Inductive current generation isn't utilizing radio waves. This isn't like a microwave oven.
If you put a chicken breast in a microwave oven and turn it on, it will rapidly cook. If you stand next to a radio antenna emitting hundreds of watts you can potentially get burns. These things use electromagnetic radio fields (E + H) to blast energy out, and those fields can stably radiate out on their own.
Inductive cooking and charging is radically different. If you put a chicken breast directly on an induction cooktop and turn the cooktop on, nothing happens. The unit doesn't even really increase its energy usage, because there is no load. This is because this energy transfer is relying on just the magnetic fields (H). It relies a lot on the target being harmonically in tune, and the other side needs to actually be conductive and at least somewhat magnetic. Non-magnetic materials don't couple with these magnetic fields. This is why some pans (like aluminum and copper) "don't work" with induction cooktops.
So if a cat did climb on the charging pad, maybe some parts of the collar would energize and heat up.
If animals were significantly affected by things like wireless charging pads or inductive cooktops we wouldn't be able to survive MRIs.
I did not mean that the inductive pad was blasting microwaves but that the transfer is via electromagnetic waves.
Regardless, your MRI comparison is very apt. MRIs use similar amounts of energy for scanning and do sometimes cause burns. But no one seems to be getting cooked.
My MRI one isn't really that apt, and you're showing the reasons why. An MRI does bombard the imaging target with RF and watches those waves using inductive fields. My point was that if you were reactive to pulsing magnetic waves you'd instantly be cooked in an active MRI. The magnetic fields are intensely powerful, but they don't affect your body at all.
> that the transfer is via electromagnetic waves.
An induction charger doesn't transmit its energy through electromagnetic waves. That's what I'm saying. It's inducing a current through magnetic fields. Its a very different process. If the material isn't magnetic it doesn't react. Which is why a steel pan heats up very rapidly while your hand is cool, why an induction stove doesn't use much electricity at all when there isn't a pan on it to heat. If it worked by emitting RF, it would have the same power output regardless of the pan type. Which is like your microwave, if the magnetron is energized it's putting out 1,000W regardless of what you have in there.
A radio is emitting its power regardless of if there's an antenna on the other side tuned to receive it. If there's nothing on the other side of the inductive charger, there's no load, there's no power usage. You need something able to receive the power to actually transmit the power. With that something being how well it reacts to magnetic fields.
I am well outside my area of expertise, having underinvested in electrical engineering fundamentals. I trust that you are generally correct but I can’t reconcile that with the fact that Porsche specifically calls out that the system detects living creatures and halts charging. Clearly Porsche believes this is a necessary feature. So does the SAE standard (SAE J2954) apparently.
So while I buy the distinction between magnetic coupling and propagating EM waves, it seems that there is some risk.
I will acknowledge, some parts of your body are weakly ferromagnetic or can react to magnetic fields, especially things like nerves (see: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-mag... ). For these reasons there are regulations, especially in Europe, about how strong of magnetic fields people can be exposed to for products sold there.
Maybe at 11kW+ of effective power delivery these fields are enough to actually make eddy currents in your blood enough to cause damage. There's a decent chance it could cause neurological disruptions while in the field. But once again, its really not the same kind of thing as RF radiation emissions, and how these things will affect you is pretty different in the end.
> Today's software is still the same software that ran perfectly well half a dozen years ago.
This statement is quite honestly not true at all. Just take the two largest OS from 6 years ago and compare resource usage between them and you will find you are incorrect, never mind the software running on it.
As in all cases it depends on jurisdiction. For example where I am performers have a right to not be recorded so you may in fact not make such recording, you didn’t not necessarily violate copyright but you violated related rights.
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
where I live, anything in public view is allowed to be filmed/recorded, which is how the news can record things on the street without getting a release from those that they filmed, and they certainly distribute those recordings
If the news reporter said "Someone at a park played this 4 minute copyrighted song, and today's top story is just us showing you the recording" I'd bet that would be illegal where you live.
> however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
My argument is that the recording itself is not a copyright violation, not that distributing such a recording couldn't be construed as one (however I disagree on principle with that being illegal as well, as it puts an undue burden on the exercise of free speech, which should include the ability to accurately and entirely recite what I had experienced in a public place).
There has been more than I project where I literally didn’t even look at the code.
I prompted what amounts to verbose “I want X” and then did QA. I’m perfectly happy with an LLM being credited with that code and there being no copyright existing for that code.
For some people that is their life’s work and they want to clutch pearls. Their sole contribution was a half baked idea and they shipped QA out to their “users” but they want to be credited with any rights.
There is definitely a continuum in LLM usage for code, do I agree with an AI blindly stamping every commit, not really.
Do I see LLM generated code as equivalent to me digging a hole with a shovel, it depends. Sometimes there was very little shovelling, other times there was no me involved and you may as well credit the entire hole to the shovel.
Where this will come in is when it comes to copyright and licensing.
If your entire product is LLM generated you sure as hell have no right to place any license on there other than potentially a MIT equivalent license, even that is dubious though but from an organisational standpoint MIT probably will be more widely accepted than saying it is uncopyrightable.
My argument being I would rather know that you didn’t even look at the code, which is what this will achieve, whether I agree with it or not at the very least it will make it easier to sift through the garbage.
This is a problem with copyright in general. There's no longer any requirement to provide information about copyright status, so there's no way for the public to know whether something is copyrighted (no doubt the uncertainty is intentional as an additional way to undermine the public domain). This is just as true for expired copyrights, or material placed in the public domain intentionally.
The solution isn't to add notices to non-copyrighted things; it's to require notice for copyrighted things, including date.
Individually, of course, one should simply assume things are not copyrighted if you have no way to know, and do whatever you want. If the author can't be bothered to tell you, you have no moral responsibility to care.
Yes it’s the same as using a stock drum pattern in a drum machine, it is not copyrightable because no human was involved in any part of it.
If you have an idea and want rights to it then do it the old fashion way and pay a developer to do a commissioned work and you can have your copyright, heres the catch, that will cost a hell of a lot more than 100usd a month
And when that developer copies and pastes useful code snippets from the internet into this product you’ve commissioned them to create? Also not copyrightable?
If you allowed that in your contract when doing the commissioning that's on you.
I wouldn't be surprised that if you asked an AI to weite said contract it would add a clause regarding copyright ownership of all codr and will put the onus on the developer to prove ownership of all of it.
Effectively you could sue them if you ever get sued.
When it comes to copyright and licensing it's complicated and it's best to write the code by hand.
The AI can literally only do what it has available in the agentic harness. I don’t ever get this argument about the agent did XYZ and we didn’t know or expect that. You gave it the ability to do that and you should be held liable, if your children play with knives that you gave them and they end up hurting themselves or others then you are responsible. You were the responsible party at all times.
I’m not for or against regulation but really don’t tell me the agent did xyz when you gave it the ability to do so, these things are not alive.
What's available in the agentic harness is: shell toolcall.
That's just about every agentic harness, by the way. Good luck have fun.
We have never solved "how do we restrict a user in a way that doesn't stop the user from doing useful things, but stops the user from doing harmful things" with humans either. Why do you expect AI to be any different?
These things are not human, have no agency and cannot be held accountable.
We don’t need to restrict them from doing things, we need to default to allowing them to do things.
“My agent did XYZ because I allowed it to” is the only valid argument that can be made, and not not every agentic harnass is just a shell toolcall, every one I have built has a specific defined usecase and toolcalls that allows it to execute that usecase and no other usecase, because that is good practice.
Does that make it less capable, hell yes because I am held accountable for it’s actions by my stakeholders and the same should be true of others.
IT IS NOT ALIVE. This things are computer programs running in compute on a computer, you are responsible for their actions just like you would be responsible for the actions taken by a script run in a cron job.
Then it's not an agent. So which is it. Is it an agentic harness, or is it not?
Aliveness has nothing to do with agency. You're stuck in some odd anthropocentric line of thinking that aliveness is some kind of requirement for agency. Lets go with this definition.
> The capacity to create a change or make something happen through specific effort.
The thing is the LLM/harness isn't following a strict set of instructions. You're at point A, you want to get to C, the harness 'figures out' step B. You can keep making the instructions more strict, but at some point you're writing more rules than would be required to do the task yourself.
At the end of the day there is no safe LLM in the sense it has the intelligence to break out of any trap and ruleset you create. AI based vTubers are one of the more interesting manifestations of this for example. On instances that get feedback when they are filtered and have a long running history (that they are not new instances every time), will find ways to bypass the profanity filters by playing all kinds of tricks.
So as you scale up, the stakes and the difficulty go up too.
Visualize an optimizer on a high dimensional landscape. (The canonical form)
... Ok, I find that hard too.
Instead, imagine a river running down to the sea. You put a dam in front of it. It'll pool into a lake and find every crack and crevice. If you didn't survey the land properly or made any error whatsoever, the water will find a way down. (And there's many historic incidents where the dam even outright collapses)
For a more proximal approximation: lock treats in the kitchen cabinet in sight of little kids or kittens; then turn your back for Just One Gosh Darn Cotton Picking Moment(tm).
It seems the engineer who thinks their ship is unsinkable is the most likely to sink it. Are you sure your harness is as secure as you think it is? Will it stand up to ever more powerful models? Do you think engineers at eg Anthropic aren't at least as careful as you are?
(I've found that the 'only permitted actions' approach is not necessarily all that secure once deployed IRL)
My argument isn’t against those that actually put in the effort and got held accountable, it’s against the “we gave our agent bash and internet and it hacked xyz”.
Bash and internet in that example might be highly abstracted but it’s still bash and internet.
Just look at the replies in this very comment thread, it’s pretty much “We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
In the only other discipline you mentioned, engineering, there would be reviews and any negligence would result in direct action against the engineers that signed off.
For some reason when it comes to building AI harnesses the default response is an ad piece and people shilling how smart and sophisticated the model is.
Imagine a dam collapsing and the engineering firm pumping how smart and tricky water is.
If it’s hard be more diligent, move fast and break things doesn’t really apply in all cases.
Ah , well, on HN you ARE supposed to go for the steel-man. And the steel-man happens to be closer to reality here, more like:
"We gave our agent a harness and put it inside a test environment and told it to keep hacking at an objective within that environment until it solved it."
'cept it turned out the container environment had a few flaws -which it always will- and the agent deemed it easier to escape out and try a meta-approach.
Partially this is possible because, -intelligent or not- the agent 'sees' the world differently from most humans. Mind: It's not like there haven't been any famous 'hacker' cases in courts where eg someone just incremented an HTTP GET parameter or something.
Also, partially it's because if you give the agent a loop, it simply has nothing better to do than to keep trying in ever more creative ways. If the environment is easier to crack than the target, it'll crack the environment. Consider the case where the objective is subtly broken, such that it is impossible to solve. Now breaking out is virtually guaranteed to be the easier task.
ps/edit: While this sort of issue has been predicted for some time now, a lot of people have been dismissing the predictions as science fiction. It's good to have an actual failure now while stakes are low. Generally people don't mandate life-boats until there's an actual Titanic to point to.
My argument there is likely there was too much surface area in the environmental to start with.
If your webserver bundled the kitchen sink but you never used it the easiest way to make it more secure is to remove the kitchen sink from production code/codepaths.
There may very well be legitimate edge cases where there is some novel issue found but in some of these cases the AI had arbitrary web access when all the task required was very specific web access, we’ve been able to parse urls for a very long time and it is rather trivial to just deny a toolcall if it is outside of the expected domain.
But that’s the hard way that requires time and diligence to do, the easy way is give it access to curl and ask it to not do anything bad while setting up its only feedback to be to solve the problem at hand.
We are really in an age where there are many exploits being found and patched, if an AI made use of a novel exploit then great, write up a report, patch/report the bug and apologise.
But using a case of clear engineering failure, and yes even if the failure is despite your best efforts, for marketing really does not seem like you have any intent to correct the issue.
And we can loop all the way back to regulation of AI, if the industry refuses to be better then governmental will do it instead and their solution will very likely be inferior in all ways.
I definitely make use of AI but in my experience I almost always could have done it better myself, the places where I threw AI at the problem I didn't care about the results being good, only good enough.
When we see memory and compute requirements for version x+1 of software decrease instead of increase I will happily say AI is the oracle people proclaim it to be.
The primary idea was just can it be done. But it then went crazy, being mentioned on big portals such as hackaday, makeuseof, etc… I have also received messages people using this to access internal Grafana stack without need to be on VPN, so people found the reason for its existence by themselves. Also I am big fan of terminal apps, so why not.
And you are only considering electricity bills for the GPU. Higher TDP also means more heat which means more cooling.
It's not really easy to make an off hand comment about costs. A 30-40% decreaae in electricity usage and heat output for a fleet of GPUs definitely makes a massive difference to your opex bottom line.
The datacenter will already have been built with an explicit cooling budget. Moving 1 watt of heat requires substantially less than 1 watt to do the work. So you've got a constant multiplier against something like a 9% annual failure rate and an order of magnitude difference in cost.
Surely getting something to autonomously without fail extend an arm and plug in for the lifespan of these vehicles vs just park in this allocated spot you would park in anyway is an obvious tradeoff.
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