10 karma · joined October 1, 2021
It can obviously be bypassed by using a JS runner, but it seems to be enough of a hurdle that few spammers bother. "You don't have to outrun the bear", as it were.
The trivial interpretation is: every word written can be constructed by optimizing a prediction based on current state, what has been written so far, and a sufficiently complex model. This is true of anything computable: just make the method implicitly contain the program by assigning a high probability to any token that is consistent with running the computation one more step. It's also true of anything expressible: just brute force a solution that can be expressed in n words, then assign a high probability to the first word of these n words.
The profound but wrong interpretation is that intelligence is just statistical prediction according to some general-purpose algorithm, and that this algorithm is tractable. Consider something like solving a SAT problem. You're going to have a hard time using any tractable general-purpose algorithm to predict whether x_2 is true for the satisfying solution based on some long CNF statement plus "x_1 is false".
Now, what you _can_ do is augment your model so that if the previous tokens constitute a CNF-SAT instance plus a partial answer, then you cart these off to a SAT solver and output its next token. But the more you do this, the less force the "mere statistical prediction" part holds. The "next-token predictor" is just an interface to an assembly of different approaches; and often, these approaches (like the SAT solver) will output the whole solution all at once for free.
In short, worker-owned businesses are rare because individual workers are poor (relative to the capital that's needed) and they can't get external funding because the investors want control in return, which labor management can't provide.
That's why most large-scale worker-owned businesses are part of a federation supported by a bank - e.g. Mondragon's Caja Laboral. Institutional design indeed does matter.
That decentralized software aligns much easier with commons than with markets is something that I would consider a feature, not a bug.