ahnick

That is short hand. The problem exists of course, but it is improbable that it will actually occur in our lifetimes. An asteroid could slam into the earth or a gamma ray burst could sanitize the planet of all life. We could also experience nuclear war. These are problems that exist, yet we all just blissfully go on about our lives, b/c there is basically nothing that can be done to stop these things if they do happen and they likely won't. Basically we should only worry about these problems in so much as we as a species are able to actually do something about them.

This happens even today. If a knowledgeable person leaves a company and no KT (or more likely, poor KT) takes place, then there will be no one left to understand how certain systems work. This means the company will have to have a new developer go in and study the code and then deduce how it works. In our new LLM world, the developer could even have an LLM construct an overview for him/her to come up to speed more quickly.

Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food. If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve. This isn't a problem in practice though, because there are so many grocery stores and restaurants and supply chains source from multiple areas that the redundant and decentralized nature makes it not a problem. Thus it is the same with making your own food. Eventually if you have enough robots or food replicators around knowing how to make food becomes irrelevant, because you always will be able to find one even if yours is broken. (Note: we are not there yet)

Exactly. How many times have we seen politics adapt to the new realities of the day? Everything is really downstream of technology.

A few examples:

- The Printing Press

- The Steam Engine

- Factories

- The Internal Combustion Engine

- The Internet

- "Smart" Phones

- Social Networks

- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)

Literally cryptocurrencies are the single greatest alternative ever made. Opt out of the system where the government can just print money into thin air and old guys drawing dots on a plot set interest rates in closed meetings. If you want to hedge USD exposure just buy a Bitcoin ETF or if you really can't stomach cryptocurrencies b/c you don't want to be ostracized from the orange site, buy Gold. We are not going back to the way the world was and if you have all your money in USD realize you are on a leaking boat.

It is entirely possible to manage funds in crypto for growth and move some amount into more liquid USD denominated assets or MMFs when you need liquidity.

Chia farming.

There were laws requiring disclosure before GDPR and there were already tools to disable or prevent trackers built into browsers or adding on with plugins. (organic market developments) You also had alternatives to services that used the lack of tracking as a reason to choose a particular service offering over another. GDPR ended up just making these disclosures more in your face. Text like "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent" is so vague as to be useless, which is why there are so many disagreeing opinions are whether companies with their current implementations are complying or not. GDPR is a bad law and in general the EU hasn't learned it doesn't get to enforce its laws in countries outside of its jurisdiction.

> Yes, that is precisely the problem with GDPR, too. Enforcement is supposed to be carried out by national Data Protection Authorities but they just don't investigate. I've reported some clear cut violations and they never followed up on anything.

No, it's not the problem with GDPR. As explained earlier it has to do with jurisdictional overreach.

> It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the general enforcement issue. Most DPAs seem to be failing to enforce even the simplest of cases. Let's chat about the edge cases and jurisdiction when the clear cut cases are being taken care of reliably.

Edge cases and jurisdiction are at the heart of this issue and exactly why it is a bad law. This is exactly the baggage that bad laws create!

> It isn't that this can't be enforced, it just lagged because of the size and changes that this law brought.

How long have these laws been out and we are still dealing with these issues. They seem to have gotten worse, not better.

> How does it solve itself?

People build services that don't track others and people pay for those services. It's pretty simple.

> Due to website operators doing illegal things.

If it was so illegal it would be stopped, but apparently businesses are indeed complying with the law.

> Why would people care about something they don't know about?

It's well known that cookies track you across sites and some people choose not to use those sites. The sites are required to disclose this information, so users are definitely aware.

> The government has outlawed murder but your local law enforcement isn't investigating the murders. You're blaming the lawmakers for writing "bad laws" in this situation, why?

Investigating murders is enforceable. If law enforcement isn't doing their job then that is a different problem. By virtue of being on the Internet, tracking cookies span many legal jurisdictions (even ones outside of the EU that never agreed to GDPR) and therefore run into all sorts of different legal obstacles. Apples and oranges and all that.

> This is just a libertarian fairy-tale that is designed to sound sensible and rational while being malicious in practice. It exploits information asymmetry, human ignorance, network effects, and our general inability to accurately assess long-term consequences, in order to funnel profits into the hands of the most unscrupulous businesses.

No, it allows people to be adults and vote with their feet. We do this all the time in many other areas and it works. (Exactly what the free market is based on) This is not to say that there shouldn't be any privacy and anti-spam laws, but when it comes to allowing marketing/advertising the trade-off has been well understood for some time. We are all funneling a lot of profits into companies that provide software to serve up the cookie banner warnings now and the advertisers still end up getting lots of people's data. A poorly designed law is a bad law. Legally requiring consent upfront and the ramifications of that decision should have been thought through much more thoroughly.

If you can't enforce the law, then it is a bad law. Also, this is a problem that naturally solves itself over time, so no law was ever needed. The UX of the web degraded for everyone after GDPR was passed and that I think everyone can agree on.

If people care about privacy, then over time they will migrate to companies and services that respect their privacy. Government laws are broad based policies that always lack nuance. This is why it is better to let markets drive better outcomes organically.

curious what your process was for hardening your API for security? or is that still a pending step?

That's hilarious. It even has a "web-scraper-easter-egg" as the id of the div, so I think you may be correct about this.

Is this what Extropic (https://www.extropic.ai/) is aiming to commercialize and bring to market?

He became very unpopular for his no politics at work stance at the time, but it seems to have ultimately been the right call in the long run. The toxic individuals left and 37signals is stronger than ever.

How exactly is the bottom going to fall out? And are you really trying to present that you have practical experience building comparable tools to an LLM prior to the Transformer paper being written?

Now, there does appear to be some shenanigans going on with circular financing involving MSFT, NVIDIA, and SMCI (https://x.com/DarioCpx/status/1917757093811216627), but the usefulness of all the modern LLMs is undeniable. Given the state of the global economy and the above financial engineering issues I would not be surprised that at some point there isn't a contraction and the AI hype settles down a bit. With that said, LLMs could be made illegal and people would still continue running open source models indefinitely and organizations will build proprietary models in secret, b/c LLMs are that good.

Since we are throwing out predictions, I'll throw one out. Demand for LLMs to be more accurate will bring methods like formal verification to the forefront and I predict eventually model/agents will start to be able to formalize solved problems into proofs using formal verification techniques to guarantee correctness. At that point you will be able to trust the outputs for things the model "knows" (i.e. has proved) and use the probably correct answers the model spits out as we currently do today.

Probably something like the following flow:

1) Users enter prompts

2) Model answers questions and feeds those conversations to another model/program

3) Offline this other model uses formal verification techniques to try and reduce the answers to a formal proof.

4) The formal proofs are fed back into the first model's memory and then it uses those answers going forward.

5) Future questions that can be mapped to these formalized proofs can now be answered with almost no cost and are guaranteed to be correct.

Haha, gaslighting AI to do get it to comply. That would be hilarious if that actually works.

How does this compare to PGSync? (https://pgsync.com/)

Except you didn't offer any evidence for your position, provide any references, or provide any sort of logical argument. You offer your own platitude and then condemn other commenters for doing so, hypocrisy.

Tether was very likely insolvent at one point in its life, but seems to have been able to fill the hole over time given they basically just print profits from the interest on its USD holdings.

how much do one of those bad boys cost?

It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform.

Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.

> but trades off a key feature of the gantt format: your hands can only be doing one thing at a time. With the gantt format it’s very clear what you are supposed to be doing at any time and it preserves the order of operations.

In the cookingforengineers.com (COE) format, the order is to do each step in the first column and then move right to the next column and do those steps, etc.

It reads left to right, top to bottom. Ingredients are on the left and then each step boxes around the items involved in that step.

Using the mushroom soup recipe as an example:

(1) Melt the butter.

(2) Wash and dice the onions, celery, and leeks.

(3) Sweat the melted butter from step (1) and the diced onions, celery, and leeks from step (2) together for 6 minutes.

IMHO for mostly text data where you need a bit of custom formatting(e.g. cooking recipes) I would probably choose to go with AsciiDoc and then just adapt a rendering engine to make it look pretty. This way you get all the tooling and learnings that AsciiDoc has accumulated over the years and avoid having to spend time on a DSL and edge case detection that inventing a new standard will require.

Reminds me of the cookingforengineers.com format to some degree.

Here's an example. You'll need to scroll down to see the actual recipe format. https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/194/Cream-of-Mush...

And everything I've ever delved deep into how the studies were conducted, what were the real conclusions drawn, the type of content being shown, etc. never leads to what the news would have you conclude. It's basically a terrible game of telephone where parents just end up getting fear mongered into limiting device time to 2 hours a day because someone said so. Utter nonsense.

There's a lot of people making claims based on paid research with agendas to sell fear. If you think you have some real empirical evidence that will standup to scrutiny, by all means share.

Exactly. All of this screen time is bad for kids and the phone is the devil reincarnate is ludicrous. The type of content they are consuming is what parents should monitor. Allow kids to use the device appropriately. If they do something with the device that you deem as inappropriate, then talk to them and correct the behavior. It is through mistakes that kids (and adults) really learn. Sheltering and avoidance will do nothing to prepare them for the real world once they reach early adulthood.

Please provide links to the "plenty of evidence that smartphones are hurting kids".