Do you see any path to doing this that doesn't go through working big tech? I'd love to finish a PhD and have at least a few ideas of what I'd do at this stage for it, but few companies are willing to sponsor this kind of thing, and many universities won't even allow you to work while in their program
This is a pretty typical example of the security posture of microsoft, and yet people continually buy their arguments that open-source and therefore auditable alternatives are inherently less secure than their "trust me bro"
The whole confusion expressed by this article is resolved by refusing the "arms race" framing. Chinese AI labs are acting really normal for researchers. Researchers in academia collaborate and share breakthroughs. This was until very recently the norm in American ML/AI research as well. The hawk-brained reasoning that this is some kind of "fate of the world" style arms race is as far as I can tell a narrative entirely pushed by American megacorps (and their cultural orbiters) who want to hold on to a business model of proprietary control of technology at all costs, and this is lapped up by political actors who clearly mostly just want to keep public perception in a cold war framing, which also seems mostly in the interest of consolidating power through the classic FUD method. If we think of this as normal research and development on a normal technology, it makes a lot more sense. I already see little reason to use proprietary models, but these companies insisting that they're in a war about which their supposed opponents have not seemingly gotten that memo makes me want to do so even less.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
Most protections you need for an agent are basic permissions capabilities of unix. Most risks of dependencies on cloud services are solved by not using cloud services, or using them only for things you can't in-house and choosing ones you trust a la carte. The paradigm of trusting some company with all your important stuff by default is naive and no one I know likes it, and it's more feasible than ever to run your own infra with tiny models smoothing out the wrinkles, and this is only becoming more accessible. I am working to make this true even for laypeople I know. Once broken trust is very hard to earn back, and many people's trust has been broken for years, they just felt like they had no alternative. As alternatives become easier and easier, I think people will defect
I can't help but notice that a climate of fear around being deemed non-essential or otherwise getting on an authority figure's bad side tends to create significant mismatches in priorities and breakdowns of trust that could be upstream of significant organizational inefficiency in a variety of situations. Perhaps solutions to meta-problems of this nature might be high-leverage, as the thought leaders like to say
Sure, documentation could always be better. My first attempt is usually tab-completion in the shell, then I'll try --help or something, then I usually go to either the archwiki or web search, which increasingly these days is equivalent to asking a chatbot, or asking an llm in a TUI. I find I'm generally not getting past the --help part of that more than 10% of the time, and the web or wiki search solves my problem with one query 99.99% of the rest of the time, but I'm willing to believe this is aided by experience.
No amount of experience using GUIs stops me from about 40% of the time I don't already know how to do something having to find a youtube video that explains what arcane path I need to take through a menu to find a setting, and if the menus have changed I might have to find the part of the video that explains what I'm looking for, watch it, realize it's changed, and hope I can find a more recent one. This goes for both native and web applications, for mobile and desktop, for every operating system I've ever touched. Sometimes there's a text explanation I can find, usually via a web search or llm. Sometimes I can guess at where something might be (Tools > Preferences? Wait maybe it's settings? Is this one a view setting? Hamburger menu? O wait no that one's in account settings. Ah, that one's under a different specific tab because the org that makes the software considers it an integration and also they A/B tested that it's more discoverable in this other place so they moved it since the youtube video I saw about it). On a web browser it's helpful to be able to dig into the page via debug consoles, sometimes I can search for some string I know is the name of the setting, or a value that's probably currently set. I can do all that, if necessary, but I'm certainly not comfortable claiming it's "easier"
I mean I think there's about as much convention and overlap as there seems to be for GUIs at least, and with much more discoverable clarification to boot
I used a macbook for work and the thing would constantly throw me popups, changing any setting was a nightmare, installing software required either a subscription or adding an aftermarket package manager, and the browser would inexplicably leave a frozen, uninteractable duplicate browser window anytime I fullscreened a google meet, which would persist regardless of trying to kill the process and sometimes even helpfully came back after a reboot (though rebooting did generally work)
This "just works" thing is propaganda. Computers never ever do that
Frankly I find terminal applications considerably easier than most GUIs for most purposes, but I agree that natural language is generally an easier interface layer than either, and that an interface layer to the functions of a computer in general seems to be LLMs' destiny as a technology
"Choice is bad because I might have opinions and then instead of the computer saying no I might switch to software that better suits my preferences. I just want a corporation to tell me what to want"
Seems interesting, I've been messing with a lot of continuous learning approaches lately and it's cool to see something that's built from the ground up for avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Worth a clone for sure
As do CEOs. My impression is that in the absence of significant selection pressure to weed it out, this strategy is quite effective for gaining power and influence, and that such pressure is at an all time low right now
It seems pretty silly to answer a question about military intervention by insisting that the major instance of military intervention by a world power that's happened in the last year shouldn't be counted
Apologies, the prior commenter in the thread mentioned it, and I think the overall claim that someone's being disingenuous is frustrating when the contradiction claimed is hypothetical. My objection here is less to the use of contractors to do things like manufacture the satellites, and more to do with allowing private companies to act the operator of a service that's somewhere between a utility and an emergency service. I think this about companies like comcast too
The reason the term "singularity" was used when that term was coined was in analogy to a black hole, which has a point on its radius called the event horizon where the gravitational pull is strong enough to stop light from escaping, thereby making it impossible to see beyond that horizon. "Technological singularity" itself here refers to the technological event which causes this, like a black hole is sometimes explained as a gravitational singularity
This is important to the framing of the idea: "the technological singularity" refers to a point in the future past which further developments can't be meaningfully foreseen or maybe even understood. This is often associated with particular paths people think will cause this, but not defined by those. As such, the prior comments are making the claim that you can get there not just by accelerating technological progress, but also by reducing the ability of everyone to comprehend what's happening, which I agree is unfortunately a plausible outcome in the current world
I stand corrected that all these contracts are no-bid, though some functions still are. I remain skeptical that paired contracts do much to help competition or efficiency in a market that tends toward consolidation, and am unsure why you add the unrelated point about corporate taxes, which isn't particularly revelatory: It's well-understood that a ton of companies operate in a mode that doesn't chase profitability, and indeed this seems to be disincentivised by the tax structure. People who are upset about how corporations operate financially should push for changing this on a policy level
I not only haven't mentioned Musk a single time, but have thought this for my entire adult life. Utilities should be public goods. Hell, this isn't even that unpopular an opinion. Not everything boils down to culture war or mindless gossip about particular famous rich people
Also frankly I would mind companies like SpaceX being contracted to build and sell satellites a lot less than them also continuing to control or operate them
All I'll say is that this is the place on the internet I have seen the largest percentage of people who have an opinion on OOP at all also have that opinion be positive
I would rather things like internet not be provided by entities that are incentivised by profits, controlled by one or a few individuals, none of whom are publicly accountable. I am actually willing to tolerate some inefficiency for the upsides of that tradeoff, but I think lots of governments manage to do utilities competently, too
Private here is meant to refer to the "private sector", as in using a company, not the existence of the contract being classified or something. I suppose SpaceX is publicly traded now, but that distinction also, in my opinion, is not the important one here. At any rate, if you think I'm wrong or mistaken, I'm happy to hear you out, but you're going to have to go into a little more detail if your intent is to convince me. Like I am not even sure what "paired" means in this context
Yea, and medical costs - including those paid for by medicare, often for people who aged into the program with worse health, which in turn is partially attributable to a tendency to avoid preventative care earlier in life due to higher costs - in the US are drastically more expensive than elsewhere, primarily because of this exact pump: Providers, insurance, equipment manufacturers, and various middleman orgs have arisen to deal with a system that is riddled with cost-inflating private-public partnerships and regulatory band-aids to mitigate small parts of the mess that end up having second-order effects that mostly also raise costs.
I believe some functions are simply best performed by non-profit-motivated government agencies. However, I would usually prefer an actual unregulated or black market over the corrupt frankenstein of private-public partnerships
Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of those as well). SpaceX itself is an example of the primary mechanism of this: Diverting funding to private, no-bid contracts that remove both market forces and democratic oversight from those services while also ballooning their costs
The disdainful pile of stereotypes you've generated merely based on seeing the word "weed" in an example game is not throwing off my impression that you're engaging in culture war nonsense
Aiding that impression is that you are using the language of marketing to imply that this open-source project is intended as a product and trying to attract a market to adopt it, but that somehow the mere oblique possibility of invocation of a subculture that you personally dislike but which is also quite large would harm rather than help them do that if this were their aim. Personally, I don't see the mere presence of such an example game as having much meaning at all, and this whole "you wouldn't want to attract the wrong sorts of people" style argument is so classic a pearl-clutcher line that I almost wanted to call Poe's Law on it, but instead I took you to be earnest and seem to have judged correctly
Rest assured, I strive for honesty above all else, read whole posts before replying to them, and do my best to reason through what I am saying, have done so here, and continue to hold the impression I stated
As a side note, writing comments that sound like some pearl-clutching culture warrior on a post about someone's open source software isn't really a good look. As the saying goes "birds of a feather flock together", and I think a lot of people will see that and think "okay, so that's the kind of person who comments on people's passion projects on hacker news"