This demo shows an Agent Development Kit (ADK) implementation that leverages the CaMeL framework for enhanced security and controlled data flow in LLM agents. CaMeL (Defeating Prompt Injections by Design) protects the model against prompt injection attacks by explicitly separating control and data flows in the query given to the agent. Additionally, CaMeL enables fine-grained access control; in other words, it is possible to define precise rules that are deterministically enforced over data flows between tool calls.
Am I the only one that thinks that being "agent wrangler" actually makes building things more fun?
To me, the interesting parts in building is taking a real problem, mapping it to a set of "things" that need to be built, decompose them into treatable chunks, and defining how they should interact. This is where intelligence comes in. if agents want to take the rest, please do! I can focus on making better products.
Sitting around, watching claude-code 'think', hitting y, hitting enter, adding a little prompt context, giving it hints, etc, day after day, hour after hour. So exciting.
You and literally everyone else. If ideas are "a dime a dozen", and the hard part (aka building the implementation) is trivially solved by LLMs then it won't be you competing against a handful of similar businesses, it'll be you against TEN THOUSAND.
The ultimate end result of lowering the barrier to entry down to zero is that making money on bespoke software will be about as commercially viable as making money writing music.
This was my thought too. The idea of wrangling AIs to make something is only lame or tragic if you dont like the thing youre making. For people who have ideas that they actually care about and just want to see exist, wrangling ai's sounds great, as long as their output is good
The law says that US cloud providers are fined if they continued to provide services to Bytedance.
As far as we know, Tiktok is operated on US servers by Oracle. While it might have been possible to find another cloud provider and move all US data there, I can see them not wanting to do that given that there was no point if the app isn't distributed in the US anymore.
There's currently no evidence pointing towards Oracle shutting down cloud service to them though. TikTok appears to have just preemptively shut down the app before they were obligated to, complete with dramatic messages telling users what to blame and who to thank.
Even without following the letter of the law it's entirely rational behaviour for a popular market leader to foment outrage by fully blacking out services. 150 million users (in the US alone) is a very powerful political influence. Politicians frequently fold for a few thousand vocal people complaining on the internet.
Of course it's rational behavior. Nico was the one claiming that they were just "following the law", that's what this subthread was about. If you agree that TikTok was making a political point by shutting down, then you agree with the person you're replying to.
Such compromises happen between companies as well when a particular app is popular. Facebook and Uber accessing private java apis which meant Google couldn't change the internals as these apps are popular.
I believe Tiktok shut down the app in India in the same way without being "obligated to" either before the order came into effect, albeit without the dramatic messaging.
(The latter part is probably because Tiktok's banning was not particulaly divisive within the population as it is in the US.)
I don't know exact figures, but when Tiktok was banned, Instagram was really popular - due to being pushed by Facebook, which was really really popular in India by then. None of my friends were on Tiktok, but all where there on Instagram. The reels thing was not popular but Facebook linked the account automatically and you just keep adding Facebook friends there as well.
Tiktok had a better algorithm (to get hooked) but Instagram eventually caught up (with algo)..
The dramatic messaging was entirely the point. India probably did not have an easily exploitable target for such a message, so there was no point in trying that there.
Oracle did shut them down last night, if Google and Apple have to drop their apps on the apps store, Oracle and other providers have to drop them too. Btw, the app won't function even if parts of the infra is down. Btw, business is risk averse, they don't want to give any excuses for government to fine them. Bytedance should definitely shutdown everything and blocked all US users unless they have explicit, written and legally bidding instructions from the Justice Department. Only an executive order is enough. They asked Biden to give that, but Biden just smirked
I’m not sure this is correct. I see where you’re coming from, but there was a clear date that the law was going to be enacted by, and tiktok simply followed that date. Pretty much everybody expected tiktok to be required to shut down. The law is clear that there are penalties for tiktok continuing to operate past that date, so it’s not really surprising.
They were telling users who to blame and who to thank because in this specific case, the blame and the thank are pretty clear. The Biden administration approved the ban, and the Trump administration reversed it. Blaming one and thanking the other is also hardly surprising.
Well, "the law" is a shorthand for "how the police behave" and there is a certain amount of realpolitik here. The basic argument here would be that the US Congress made a scary growling sound and TikTok folded immediately because the Congress is terrifying. But then Trump made more of a friendly sound and so they think they can operate a bit longer with some level of safety.
There is no question that TikTok is a politically sensitive app and the US/China are very nearly in the funnel to a major war so a lot of the usual niceties are questionable. Previously the US has attempted something that looked a lot like a black-bag kidnapping of a Chinese industrialist [0]. I'd imagine that the TikTok people are acutely sensitive towards how the law is actually going to be interpreted and enforced in practice.
This is basically the same tactic to the SOPA/PIPA protests [1]. I don't know why people are bending over backwards to pretend it was something other than a political stunt. Also, Trump's rhetoric has remained unchanged since well before this - a 90 day extension. They wanted to flex their muscle to show the US political establishment how many US users there were and how much sway they had to give them more leverage in their negotiations. That's about it.
Jan 17: Biden administration says it will leave TikTok ban enforcement for Trump [1]
Early Jan 18: Trump says he will 'most likely' give TikTok a 90-day extension to avoid a ban [2]
Late Jan 18: TikTok makes app unavailable for U.S. users ahead of ban [3]
Midday Jan 19: TikTok begins restoring service for U.S. users after Trump comments [4]
They already knew what was going to happen. They also changed the message shortly after disabling it from "We're working to restore service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned." to "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Stay tuned!" [5]
If your cloud provider tells you they are shutting you down on date X, you want to fight as hard as you can until X and then shutdown gracefully to have a chance to explain to your users why your system is going down. If you wait until you get shutdown, you have no way of pushing a graceful shutdown anymore.
Oracle has no interest in running afoul of the US government at all. Their internal culture in many ways views them like that of a quasi-government institute. So in thus case they probably are feeling responsible to actually be the ones enforcing the law.
I imagine shutting down ByteDance is not like flipping a switch. They have a mountain of infrastructure and “shutting down” could mean nuking the data or otherwise getting it out of their cloud entirely. If it has to be done by a certain date you’d need to start nuking things well in advance to be absolutely certain you’re in compliance by the deadline. I’m surprised the shutdown happened as late as it did if this wasn’t a completely staged crisis.
That’s a trivial problem to solve though. Just push an update to the app that shows the „we were banned“ message if a specific API endpoint isn’t reachable anymore (and general internet connectivity is still there of course). Then you can operate as normal until your servers are forcefully shut down.
That's not true, distributors of the app are fined. Meaning, very specifically, app stores.
From (2)(a)(1):
> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
>
> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
Possession of and providing non-distribution ( / maintenance / update) services to a "Foreign Adversary Controlled Application" are not in any way a part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Operative services are specifically and intentionally excluded from the list, to ease the burden of enforcement.
I don’t use TikTok but the “down” page mentioned you can still login to download data. What’s the cost and scope of providing that feature without US cloud providers?
I have been interested in Prolog since my time at the University, and I loved the idea of logic programming.
For "proper" Prolog, in 2024 it is a niche language alive in specific constraint solving applications, but not really used outside of that. I haven't seen anyone attempting at using prolog as a general purpose language since the 90'.
Datalog and logic-inspired languages tend to pop up here and there as domain-specific languages.
Rego is a recent incarnation which had good adoption for k8s and other "modern" systems. However, when trying to get people in my org to adopt it in practice, I saw engineers struggle with the paradigm when complexity grows to more than toy problems.
I find very appropriate that a Pope, who holds the modern title of "Pontifex Maximus", was the one that finally updated the calendar again after 1500 years.
No need to doubt his story. Very likely he took a boat, like many touring cyclist doing the Pan-American route do. It is a relatively established route.
If you really want to be self-reliant, the amazing Iohan Gueorguiev bike-raft it, but that's quite on the extreme side.
I got out of academia, but I'd love to keep reading the new hot and influential papers to keep up with the research trends in the research communities I am interested in. So I like this idea!
However, there are so many junk papers that the paper title itself is rarely useful. Too much context is lacking: where was it published? How strong is the conference / journal? When was it published? How many citations so far? What sub-sub-sub-field is it in?
Isn't RSU the middle ground already? You can part of your compensation in salary, part in ownership of the company. If you work and the company does well, you do better.
The % of comp in RSU raises as you get promoted to higher levels, where you (theoretically at least) actually have more impact on the success of the company.
If my contributions increase the value of a $100M company by 10%, there's no way my RSUs' value is going to increase by $10M (unless I own 100% of the company). In a realistic scenario of $100k/yr of RSUs, even this near-impossible mythical single-person contribution of 10% would only net me $10k/yr.
RSUs go a long way, but don't totally align the incentives.
The value proposition is that RSUs goes up more than your 10% contribution, so using MSFT's stock price, $100k at the start of 2021 is worth some $150k by the end of it. Still not $10mm but better than $10k. The change in value is +$70k if you were at TSLA. This only works while the stock is going up though. If you were at FB, you'd be underwater so that $100k of RSUs is now only worth $80k, but at least RSUs mean you can still get $80k out of them if you had to liquidate (unlike options which have a strike price and can even be worth negative dollars, depending on your tax situation).
At a company of, say, 100,000 employees, how much my individual contribution will makes the stock price go up is debatable, but getting more of those RSUs will materially boost my TC, where at upper levels the majority of TC is stock-based.
