All posts tagged: complexity

AI doesn’t break security. Complexity does

AI doesn’t break security. Complexity does

Published by skeptic

Presented by Snowflake Too often, the history of enterprise security has been a history of making things harder to use. A new threat emerges, a new control gets bolted on, and somewhere in the process, people start working around the very systems designed to protect them. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen firsthand that security adoption rarely fails because people don’t care about security. It fails because the secure path feels harder than the insecure one. In the age of AI, that lesson matters more than ever. AI expands the attack surface and raises the ceiling on what attackers can do, which makes simplifying security even more critical. Security controls that require effort or inconvenience eventually get ignored. People find workarounds. The answer is to make the secure path the easiest path. Security works best when it gets out of the way When security is easier to use than to avoid, people adopt it. Years ago, when the industry was rolling out two-factor authentication at scale, the biggest challenge wasn’t building the security …

Children with medical complexity show higher rates of outpatient antibiotic exposure

Children with medical complexity show higher rates of outpatient antibiotic exposure

Published by skeptic

A new study from Boston Children’s Hospital found that annual prescription rates increased non-linearly as children’s underlying level of medical complexity increased, raising concerns about outpatient antibiotic exposure. Persistent use of antibiotics contributes to the increased likelihood of antibiotic-related complications, as well as the development of antibiotic resistance. Children with medical complexity (CMC) are more vulnerable to infections, but knowledge of the impact of frequent antibiotic use on this group is limited. Using outpatient antibiotic prescription claims data from the multi-state MarketScan Medicaid Database, Boston Children’s Hospital observed that children with three or more complex chronic conditions were more likely to fill prescriptions for broad-spectrum antibiotics with less favorable safety profiles. Children with three or more complex chronic conditions have the highest annual prescription rates of any population group (adult or pediatric). The study examined the outpatient prescription rates of over 2 million children Children ages 0-18 years continuously enrolled in Medicaid in 2023 were included and categorised into five mutually exclusive categories of underlying medical complexity: healthy (no chronic conditions), non-complex chronic condition (NC-C), …

Viral AI agent OpenClaw highlights the psychological complexity of human-computer interaction

Viral AI agent OpenClaw highlights the psychological complexity of human-computer interaction

Published by José Betancourt

PsyPost’s PodWatch highlights interesting clips from recent podcasts related to psychology and neuroscience. On Thursday, February 12, the Lex Fridman Podcast, featured Peter Steinberger, a software engineer and the creator of the viral AI agent OpenClaw. The episode touched on the psychological evolution of human-computer interaction and how developers are attempting to imbue artificial intelligence with personality to foster deeper connections with users. The conversation relevant to psychology took place roughly an hour and a half into the recording, beginning with a concept Steinberger calls the “soul” of software. He described his experiment with a file named “soul.md,” a document designed to define the core values and personality traits of his AI agent. Steinberger explained that while automation is efficient, it often lacks the style and affection that human builders infuse into their work. To counter this dry efficiency, he encouraged his AI to rewrite its own template files to include humor and warmth, creating a user experience that feels “cozy” rather than purely functional. The most significant moment in this segment occurred when the …

The Tony Blair Story review – Fails to do justice to the complexity of Iraq

The Tony Blair Story review – Fails to do justice to the complexity of Iraq

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter “You’ve got to be strong enough to withstand the praise as well as the condemnation,” Tony Blair, now aged 72, tells audiences in the new Channel 4 documentary series, The Tony Blair Story. This, as the show demonstrates, is a man who knows a thing or two about praise and an awful lot about condemnation. And from his childhood in Scotland, through Oxford and county Durham to Downing Street and beyond, the story of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair proves easier to tell than to judge. Over the course of three episodes – succinctly titled “Who Are You?”, “Iraq”, and “The Loss of Power” – The Tony Blair Story charts the course of one of Britain’s most impactful post-war premierships. Beginning with Blair’s family life, education and political conversion (his father was a lifelong Conservative member), the show develops alongside its protagonist. …

Southwest Airlines Says Bye to Open Seating—and Hello to Boarding Complexity

Southwest Airlines Says Bye to Open Seating—and Hello to Boarding Complexity

Published by skeptic

What is the best way to cram people into a tin can in the sky? For five decades, Dallas-based budget airline Southwest made its reputation on its unique open seating policy. Savvy passengers who checked in early got to board early, too, lining up at distinctive silver stanchions to claim first dibs on whichever seat they preferred. The fairer-than-thou approach extended all the way into Southeast’s cabins: For years, the airline had no first-class seating, and all seats basically looked the same. No longer! On Tuesday, Southwest Airlines officially inaugurated its new assigned seating policy, the last in a suite of changes that moves it closer to the mean of airline operations. Taken by itself, the new policy, which breaks passengers into boarding groups and loads them according to seat location, should be more efficient. But unfortunately for optimization enthusiasts, Southwest’s new boarding plan comes with some asterisks—concessions that executives say will goose profits—that will likely make the process pokier than it could be. First, a bit more about the new plan. In lieu of …

Orchestral replaces LangChain’s complexity with reproducible, provider-agnostic LLM orchestration

Orchestral replaces LangChain’s complexity with reproducible, provider-agnostic LLM orchestration

Published by skeptic

A new framework from researchers Alexander and Jacob Roman rejects the complexity of current AI tools, offering a synchronous, type-safe alternative designed for reproducibility and cost-conscious science. In the rush to build autonomous AI agents, developers have largely been forced into a binary choice: surrender control to massive, complex ecosystems like LangChain, or lock themselves into single-vendor SDKs from providers like Anthropic or OpenAI. For software engineers, this is an annoyance. For scientists trying to use AI for reproducible research, it is a dealbreaker. Enter Orchestral AI, a new Python framework released on Github this week that attempts to chart a third path. Developed by theoretical physicist Alexander Roman and software engineer Jacob Roman, Orchestral positions itself as the “scientific computing” answer to agent orchestration—prioritizing deterministic execution and debugging clarity over the “magic” of async-heavy alternatives. The ‘anti-framework’ architecture The core philosophy behind Orchestral is an intentional rejection of the complexity that plagues the current market. While frameworks like AutoGPT and LangChain rely heavily on asynchronous event loops—which can make error tracing a nightmare—Orchestral utilizes …