Notepad++ is not registered with the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office). Searches around will turn up nothing in the U.S. database. The name is trademarked in France (via INPI, the French patent office), which is why the maintainer has been able to send cease-and-desist notices in recent cases (e.g., the unauthorized “Notepad++ for Mac” site).
In the U.S. its only covered by common-law trademark rights from long use, as there’s no federal registration.
What's amazing is that they even can fairly reliably appear to count characters. I mean we're talking about systems that infer sequences not character counters or calculators. They are amazing in unrelated ways and we need to accept this so we can use them effectively.
I suspect character counting - counting small numbers in general in fact - is something that multimodal models will gradually learn through their visual capabilities. We have generative systems that are capable of generating an image of the word ‘strawberry’, and of counting how many strawberries are visible in an image; seems likely it’s possible for an LLM to ‘imagine’ what the word strawberry looks like and count the ‘Rs’ it can ‘see’.
I think the key question is “when”? In a highly competitive business environment, companies are going to naturally be attracted to the most capable model if it leads to a competitive advantage and the switching costs are low. This suggests that “open” (giving away inference despite ever-higher training costs) may not win for a very long time, if ever.
When frontier models plateau and efficiency increases sufficiently that it becomes a commodity like other cloud compute.
One driver of open models might be foreign actors. With the entire US economy being held up by AI, it's a crucial vulnerability for a capable foreign actor (guess who) to exploit if they wanted to.
Yes but much less efficiently. Having LLMs handle automation is like using a steam engine to heat your bath water. It will work most of the time but it's super inefficient and not really designed for that use and it can go horribly wrong from time to time.
Correct. But the llm can also program you the exact automation you want! Much more efficiently than gui madness with N8N. And if you want observability just program that too!
If anything a CLU, a Command Line Utility would be the best thing to call the small programs that both van be run as one offs from the command line and have their output piped to other Command Line Utilities... I don't know why the term isn't being used more. CLU keep it simple. CLIs are a catch all from every single CLU up to MidnightCommander, Zork, Mosh, and OpenCode.
Once you get big enough… there comes a point where you need to run some code and learn what happens when 100 million people hitting it at once looks like. At that scale, “1 in a million class bugs/race conditions” literally happen every day. You can’t do that on every PR, so you ship it and prepare to roll back if anything even starts to look fishy. Maybe even just roll it out gradually.
At least, that’s how it worked at literally every big company I worked at so far. The only reason to hold it back is during testing/review. Once enough humans look at it, you release and watch metrics like a hawk.
And yeah, many features were released this way, often gated behind feature flags to control roll out. When I refactored our email system that sent over a billion notifications a month, it was nerve wracking. You can’t unsend an email and it would likely be hundreds of millions sent before we noticed a problem at scale.
However this is a different situation as we’re talking about running arbitrarily found third-party scripts. I can’t imagine that was ever intended to be done in production.
Fun story, when I worked at Facebook in the earlier days someone accidentally made a change that effectively set the release flags for every single feature to be live on production. That was a day… we had to completely wipe out memcached to stop the broken features and then the database was hammered to all hell.
I would say you can get to this point far below 100 million people, especially on web. Some people are truly special and have some kind of setup you just can't easily reproduce. But I agree, you do really have to be confident in your ability to control rollout / blast radius, monitor and revert if needed.
It's sucrose to being a good sweet article. Really though it should be used as a draft for something that wasn't just vibed. Eg fix the mice and loose the sparks from cutting wood.
A harness is a collection of stubs and drivers configured to assist with automation or testing. It's a standard term often used in QA as they've been automating things for ages before Gen Ai came on to the scene.
In the U.S. its only covered by common-law trademark rights from long use, as there’s no federal registration.
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