CptFribble

I agree, but considering the age of AI was ushered in with the largest and most complete theft of IP in human history, from inside the good 'ol USA, we shouldn't trust any LLM provider with critical information of any kind, and instead push even harder for better local models.

even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim

> all the data on how you have interacted with their models

1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic

2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.

while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.

and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.

> so was invading Ukraine

the difference is that Putin's hand was forced by age, (possibly) illness, and the last several decades of how he chose to run his country. Putin's power base is a relatively small group of elites and oligarchs who would happily snuff out the man who pushes them out of windows if they get too uppity, if they were given the chance. He needed the cover of war to maintain the fiction of his type of strongman "only I can save us" leadership.

Xi's power base is the simple fact that his leadership has transformed China into the #2, and now because of Trump possibly soon the #1 world superpower. He has also acted aggressively in the last decade to find and remove corruption and prevent individuals from accumulating the kind of wealth and influence that could threaten his power from outside official Party channels. Of course, as I'm not Chinese myself, I have no clue what the internals of Party politics actually look like. But as an outside observer it seems clear that Xi et. al. do not actually need Taiwan for anything other than national pride. They know the US would go to the mat to protect it as TSMC is extremely vital to US military power. And since China cannot compete in that arena and has too much to lose, they instead have focused on weakening the US from within, quite successfully of late.

By the time China finally takes Taiwan it will be with little fanfare and little consequence - they won't touch it until the US either has lost its military capabilities, or the US has its own internal chip industry. Anything else is an existential risk for the coastal cities that are China's entire economic advantage.

its science journalism tbh, the realities of climate change's impact is so spread out and complicated that it's difficult to communicate to a largely scientifically-illiterate audience. see the perennial confusion over cold heavy snow winters being an artifact of global warming due to increased energy in the weather systems causing more volatility instead of just a simple "everything is warmer now."

so journalists focus on Number, because Number is simple and understandable. even when Number is mostly or completely bogus.

my money is on: eventually frontier model dev and training becomes basic research funded by governments, and LLM operators become essentially private utilities a la ISPs, competing mostly on data center operational costs and occasionally new chip tech to run models cheaper

and governments will keep running massive data centers with classified frontier models for intelligence and propaganda purposes

This assumes that all areas of research are bottlenecked on human understanding, which is very often not the case.

Imagine a field where experiments take days to complete, and reviewing the results and doing deep thought work to figure out the next experiment takes maybe an hour or two for an expert.

An LLM would not be able to do 24/7 work in this case, and would only save a few hours per day at most. Scaling up to many experiments in parallel may not always be possible, if you don't know what to do with additional experiments until you finish the previous one, or if experiments incur significant cost.

So an AGI/expert LLM may be a huge boon for e.g. drug discovery, which already makes heavy use of massively parallel experiments and simulations, but may not be so useful for biological research (perfect simulation down to the genetic level of even a fruit fly likely costs more compute than the human race can provide presently), or research that involves time-consuming physical processes to complete, like climate science or astronomy, that both need to wait periodically to gather data from satellites and telescopes.

Ah, I see - thank you for the context! If you don't mind one more question - do you have to leave a substantial amount of cash in the Steam account in case of very late refunds? Or does Steam just send you an invoice or something?

why are refunds so commonly counted against sales in this way? Wouldn't a refund cost essentially nothing?

digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.

this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.

the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).

a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.

the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.

Megacorps being naturally risk-averse, and the lion's share of the rest of the capital being held by that banquet room, it's going to take one or a few scrappy startups hitting it big while also committing to WFH/etc to get the banquet to loosen the purse strings a bit and kick off a new wave of investment a la Web 2.0 post-dotcom-crash (which was coincidentally also post-oh-noes-outsourcing-1.0)

That plus a few years of new successes might get the megacorps to start hiring en masse and possibly see the value in WFH again, but it'll take a lot of these stars aligning to produce several new unicorns that can eat a few lunches to get there, which will probably take the rest of the 2020s and possibly part of the 2030s (based on the last time this happened, going from 1999 crash to the 2010/2011 renaissance)

If I was a betting man, I'd guess the first wave of new startups will be unifying a huge dataset of local info with AI into like the AirBNB-of-local-whatever personal concierge sort of thing, like OpenTable on steroids. but I'm frequently wrong, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> R voters claim the economy is bad under a D president and immediately switch to claiming it's good under an R president.

adding on to this, typically it takes 1-3 years for the effects of an administration to really bear fruit in the economy, either good or ill. So a common tactic from the R side the last several presidential cycles is to claim ownership of the economy handed to them by the outgoing D president, then when their policies cause some kind of problem, blame the incoming D president 4 years later.

See also: who the R's blame the deficit on vs. which party's presidents actually increased the deficit the most over the last 20-25 years.

> why isn't he in jail

In 2020, a Pennsylvania white man illegally voted via mail-in ballot on behalf of two deceased parents.

Also in 2020, a black woman in Memphis voted while ineligible due to a felony conviction without being informed she wasn't allowed, and was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in jail.

As for how this applies to why Trump is not in jail for his convictions, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

until it hallucinates a config and rings up a $10,000 AWS while you're asleep

> group chat

hmm having a sort of mini-forum-like experience tied to particular pages in a book seems like a fascinating idea! being able to discuss plot twists and such only once you've already gotten to that point?

wow this seems like an amazing idea actually! any names yet? I'd love to check it out once it's done!