bparsons

This is the sort of thing that occurs when the interests of the public become subordinate to the interests of a lawless aristocracy. Financial, social and public safety considerations are costs that can be transferred to the public to preserve the wealth of a few individuals.

For this brief moment in time, crime is legal.

The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.

There was a very large CME ten days ago. The NOAA scale had predicted a high likelihood of disruptions, and had specifically suggested that spacecraft and high altitude aircraft could be impacted.

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/noaa-scales-explanation

https://kauai.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/CMEscoreboard/prediction/de...

Volume has been on a steady downward trend since 2018. https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&r=week&t=b

There is a growing body of evidence that this is the most significant class of drugs since the introduction of statins. Whatever it is doing, it is delivering tens of millions of quality adjusted life years.

I think the question is whether people are willing to pay for an LLM when there are equivalent or good-enough free competitors available.

One could argue that LLMs will change the world, but that doesn't guarantee that LLM companies will capture any of that value.

The additional rub is that the paying power users are arguably costing these companies more money than the free users.

It truly is the sewer of the internet.

This is the big reason other countries have free or cheap childcare. People who have kids want to continue earning money, and people who earn money want to have kids. It can be easily justified using only an economic productivity argument.

Browser fingerprinting has been a thing since at least 2008. Kissmetrics was the first company I heard of that was doing this.

Incredible things happening in America these days.

This video answers a lot of the questions around why shipbuilding is concentrated in east Asia now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo&t

The TLDR is:

- Unique, state backed financial instruments that remove a lot of the risk for purchasers. The state needs a large amount of foreign reserves to do this;

- A concentration of industrial and labour capacity. You need to achieve a certain scale in order for the economics to work.

They also look at the case of Germany, who don't produce a lot of finished ships, but export the most profitable, complex components to east Asia. They are at least pursuing a rational strategy, even if they don't have the ability to crank out thousands of ships a year.

Good news. The US can implement universal public healthcare and free university without fear of being socialist.

All economies are mixed, save for North Korea, which is command economy communism.

On the sliding scale of welfare state socialism, Finland and Norway have the greatest degree of public investment. Angola would be on the other side of that spectrum, with almost no public services or redistributive programs offered.

There are a lot of functioning socialist states. You don't have to imagine them. They are happier, healthier and have better infrastructure than the United States.

His argument of GDP gains being distributed somewhat equitably relies on the assumption that healthy democracies continue to exist, and that those democracies are structured in such a way that would allow for the distribution of those GDP gains.

Aside from the ability to cast a ballot, the only other power that normal people have in our political economy is the ability to withdraw their labour. If AI replaces all labour, that already vanishing power completely disappears.

I could see countries like Norway having strong enough institutions to ensure that the benefits get shared in a reasonable way.

In places like the US or Russia, I have a difficult time imagining anything other than the creation of a dozen trillionaires. The US can't even agree on basic universal healthcare. Do you think that President Vance or Newsom are going to divert profits from Google and OpenAI to give to normal people?

A far more likely scenario would be the growth of a permanent underclass. Silicon valley would rather see 150 million people living in tents than agree to a higher rate of taxation.

Which law are you referring to? If you are referring to Presidential statements, they have to be followed by an actual regulation or else they are just a press release.

One thing that makes me pessimistic about the short term utility of LLMs has been their inability to produce basic media monitoring documents. This is an intern type entry level task that it simply cannot complete with any reliability or consistency. It doesn't matter if I use the expensive paid services or spend dozens of prompts trying to configure, it simply wont produce a document that is of any use to me.

If that is the case with a task so simple, why would we rely on these tools for high risk applications like medical diagnosis or analyzing financial data?

Is this just chromium with an LLM snooping on everything I do?

Higher enforcement demands probably lead to more stuff slipping through.

The UK law is stupid, but they have every right to regulate content in their own country. Just because a business operates in another country does not release it from obligations in other countries where they operate.

4chan, like any company is free to withdraw their business if they do not agree with the laws there.

This is how every law works in every country for every type of business.

It would be cool to see this project re-done with modern tools and a new generation of engineering talent.

As others have pointed out, the idea is really cool, but the implementation was never there.

This Bill has been withdrawn and is being reintroduced without the controversial provisions.

You didn't have to pay duty on them?

They knew you could sell stuff on the internet. The payment processors were just clunky. It was fairly obvious at the time how it would all work.

I think the surprise was the degree to which ad revenue would eat the world. Maybe it will be the same this time.

Has anyone articulated a theory for what the profit model might actually look like for the big LLMs? In the .com era, the valuations were crazy, but people generally understood how you could eventually make money on all of this stuff.

If models are requiring larger and larger infrastructure buildouts, does anyone have a clear sense of what users will have to pay in order to make the businesses profitable?

I am always confounded when I get off a flight at a vacation destination and see people dragging these 80L roller bags around. What are you putting in there?

Pack the absolute minimum. If you really need something, you can almost always buy it wherever you are going. Even trekking in the deep Himalayas, there was always a spot to buy an extra t-shirt or socks every day or so.

This is a problem that is not unique to software engineering, and predates LLMs.

Large organizations are increasingly made up of technical specialists who are very good at their little corner of the operation. In the past, you had employees present at firms for 20+ years who not only understand the systems in a holistic way, but can recall why certain design or engineering decisions were made.

There is also a demographic driver. The boomer generation with all the institutional memory have left. Gen-X was a smaller cohort, and was not able to fully absorb that knowledge transfer. What is left are a lot of organizations run by people under the age of 45 working on systems where they may not fully understand the plumbing or context.

EAs customer base has been pretty negative on the state of the product for the last several years. I can't imagine this move will do anything but accelerate the trends driving brand dissatisfaction.

Customers feel like they are being treated like ATM machines, while the tens of billions of revenue are clearly not going into new, exciting creative endeavors. I suppose all of this makes sense when you consider that EA is a 45 year old company.

The thing with medical services is that there is never enough.

If you are rich and care about your health (especially as move past age 40), you probably have use for a physiotherapist, a nutritionist, therapist, regular blood analysis, comprehensive cardio screening, comprehensive cancer screening etc. Arguably, there is no limit to the amount of medical services that people could use if they were cheap and accessible enough.

Even if AI tools add 1-2% on the diagnostic side every year, it will take a very, very long time to catch up to demand.