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My late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it".

"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."

Whether or not training one giant LLM with socially enormous stakes on the output of another commercially-controlled LLM is an interesting question.

My stronger opinion is that the people who can do this stuff via having a crawled corpus of the Internet need to keep in mind that it's all our "user-generated content" that they've freely appropriated to build their models, and so whatever the technical copyright rules are (or become): you don't ethically own something that's closely imitating stuff we all wrote over the years.

For me at least, existing completely without GMail / Google SSO is unrealistic, and the million email corpus that is attached to it would be painful to part with as well.

But I've been trying to slowly de-tangle myself, and for it's faults ProtonMail has been working out pretty OK for me as a compromise between usability and true digital freedom.

The "Best Google" busts up Microsoft monopolies via going big on open software and open standards.

The "Worst Google" copies the business model they just un-fucked.

I'd say in 2023, we really need the "Best Google".

Any company can take a turn for the worse, and any time you've got SaaS deep in your stack there's risk there.

I can only say that I worry about TailScale growing up to be evil the least of basically every SaaS company I've ever used. They seem extremely serious about making the interaction a "win/win" and keeping it that way as they grow.

There is nothing wrong with being the category-defining early-stage investment company, and doing it as a for-profit business that's optimized for good financial outcomes.

I think what some of the insiders (like the OP) and semi-adjacent outsiders (like me) might be feeling a little queasy about is that YC began with a pretty clearly stated goal (in addition to making money) around disrupting the unproductive importance of high-status networks and signaling like elite university educations and to a lot of us (even people who didn't apply like me) that was really inspiring. And to at least some degree, YC is now a high-status network that signals well.

There's nothing uniquely bad about it, it's kind of the default throughout human history, and they are completely transparent about being a for-profit company, but it's also ok to be a little sad that it's not quite as idealistic as it used to be.

There seems to be a lot of truth in that, but I think it's also maybe a little harsh as well.

Google hasn't needed to generate another monster revenue stream outside of ad sales, so it's possible that they never really tried all that hard (they've certainly killed it on the things that protect it, notably Android and Chrome). An utterly dominant position in how people access information that lasts for decades is probably "a hell of a drug".

For example, GCP is technically a really, really good cloud offering, maybe even the best for a lot of use cases (if you haven't looked at it lately, Cloud BigTable looks friggin amazing, I wish I'd had that database for the last ten years). They've obviously failed to parley that technical achievement into dominant market share, but maybe with the pressure on around search they get serious about whatever combination of pricing and marketing and customer support that gets them some serious market share.

YouTube has been quietly building their TikTok competitor into something I'm actually starting to waste some time on, they people who work on that are clearly really good at their jobs even if they started a little slow.

And on the LLM space, honestly I'm rooting for them: MSFT/OpenAI/ChatGPT need at least some competition and they are probably the best positioned to do so. Facebook/Meta is also doing this stuff in a more "open" way and that's keeping the pressure on around some competition too.

In general this LLM stuff is going to be a great thing long-term, but letting one company dominate both mindshare and marketshare is going to make that a much rougher road for society than if it's avoided.

A very funny phrasing of some legitimately confusing news.

I keep thinking that there's no way that Brain/DeepMind are just getting stomped, lapped, generation-gapped by e.g. `ChatGPT`: they must have had an internal demo of this sort of thing like 2 years ago, right? At some point the Empire strikes back?

But the rollout and product integration has been so well done, so coordinated and cohesive that it's now just obvious that it was way too soon to count MSFT out of the game. It's all through search and Office 365 and GitHub/CoPilot/etc. and the whole stack in such a legitimately compelling way that you can almost forget that the DNA is Win32.

It's a bad thing to let Microsoft get a stranglehold on developer and user mindshare network effects: the 90s were rough. But with how cool it all is it's very tempting...

I'm aware that I'm in the minority here, but I find that investing heavily in being able to type fast and handle the tools well actually changes what code I write and not just how quickly.

The faster I've gotten at moving code around, the more subconsciously willing I've been to try something with a modest probability of working out, and more importantly the easier it's gotten to throw away a draft that isn't working out and try again.

LLMs haven't made it into my coding workflow yet, but I can see how they could be useful and the trend seems to be that they'll be in most high-octane workflows at some point.

You are correct. Thank you for straightening me out, and for linking to a good resource.

A minor note (many others here know Boyer personally and have more to add): there is a lot more to that CV than Boyer-Moore. Counting, all kinds of stuff. A true legend. May he RIP.