belZaah

Sure, but, in absence of money, where are the open models going to come from? They take a lot of effort and resources to train. The current ones have been made in hope the growth will lead to a payoff one way or another. With the two main giants struggling and the market cooling, that payoff becomes quite uncertain.

But do you really see a change in the technology sector? I don’t. If you plot operating profit per employee for Apple and Alphabet, it’ll show a trend up but since COVID. If you do the same for MS, it’ll show a steady trend since Nadella became the CEO. Amazon is flat, so is Tesla. Can’t really see a change caused by AI.

There’s usually a very good reason for that. It’s called complementary products. You don’t use something because it needs something else to be useful. That something else is not being made, because there’s no use for it, because nobody uses the original something. Communities can be like that: a product doesn’t fly, because there is no community and there’s no community because there are no users.

This is why Apple Vision pro did not become popular. Without software make use of its capabilities, it’s just an inconvenient and expensive extra monitor. But nobody would revamp their UX for a product nobody has.

Have published on this exact issue: Kütt, Andres. "Technology diffusion in ecosystems: a new model." Procedia Computer Science 268 (2025): 34-42.

Yup, there’s righteous dub involved in orbital adventures

Ukraine, for whatever reason, was denied access to the DARPA innovation pipeline early on. Thus, they had to make their own to survive. Now, not only is there something moving much faster, than that flow of innovation but also there’s a hunch of adversaries, who have picked up on it. That’s what you get for the lack of strategic thinking. Your decisions are not terminal, your moves are not the finishing ones. Others get to make theirs as well. And you might not at all like where these moves will take you.

15+ years of Estonian public sector IT experience, former chief architect of the country here. AMA.

This source code being open is great, but it’s not the wole story. E-voting is deliberately designed to fit into the context of voting in general and into the societal context. Your paper vote always overrides your electronic vote and there’s provisions in the law allowing cancellation of electronic voting and immediately falling back to paper. In the societal context, electronic identity and signatures are ubiquitous, voting is the least it’s used for.

Thus, the question is not if the system the code implements is secure but if the whole thing is. Of course, if you find a security issue in the code, get in touch and your contribution will be welcomed. But please do not claim e-voting to be inherently insecure without an understanding of how it works on the ground and what happens around it. Happy to explain.

The societal context is different. In Estonia, everyone uses the id-card for everything and has for 10+ years. Everyone understands, that handing your card and pin-codes over has severe consequences. Also, the e-voting does not function in isolation. If a person has voted electronically, whatever paper vote they cast will override their electronic vote.

Oh my sweet summer child. During the paper voting, only the act of casting the vote happens on paper, the rest (tallying, allocation, voter lists etc) is all electronic. Both in Estonia and elsewhere.

That doubt usually turns out to be politically motivated rubbish. People publish nice blog posts and videos before their articles get published. People scolding there being an open wifi hotspot during vote counting. People being explicitly funded by the political parties not liking the electronic voting.

But the rest is very useful. During last elections, one of the opposition parties I’m not a fan of finally got their act together and put actual pressure on the electoral committee rather than ludicrous nonsense: procedural issues, hygiene etc. That’s great! Very much appreciated. When the op sais we don’t have doubts he probably means we don’t have doubts about there being sufficient process to keep this thing getting better

There’s a reason all ballots are destroyed after the contesting period ends. Someone in the future might find a way to compromise that anonymous key and there’s no reason to take that risk.

True. Nothing can be fully trusted. That’s true for everything, though, including paper voting. Clear schemes exist to cheat there and there’s computers involved in tallying the votes anyway. So what’s the reason to trust that stuff? The goal of e-voting is not to become absolutely secure, they need to be secure enough not to make the elections as a whole less secure when used in them. That’s a big difference.

There’s also the bear mechanism. In the forest, you don’t have to run faster than a bear, you need to run faster, than the person you are with. Let’s say there’s an issue with id-cards or electronic signatures in general. The attackers could wait several years and attack voting risking, that all electronic votes are annulled as their attacks are uncovered. Or they could just wreak complete havoc on the entire society right now. The electronic signatures are so ubiquitous here you can literally do anything. Sign a document as the President, take out loans on behalf of everyone, get everyone divorced (or married), take all their money etc. why would you wait?

They are in a vicious circle there’s no good way out of. Building and operating their services is not operationally profitable. Therefore they need more funding. The only way to get more funding is to get a wider adoption and show new features. The only way to do that is to keep spending money.

Not being profitable in itself is not a problem or has not been historically. With software, there’s a bunch of investment into making the service but the variable cost of providing it is negligible. It’s ok not to be profitable because the growth of userbase will pay you back. Capex isn’t a thing, you can just rent somebody else’s from the cloud. This is how the world used to work pretty much for a quarter century, ever since the dot-com bubble. But OpenAI is not like it. Their variable cost is huge as is the capex to enable being able to even make that cost happen. It’s not that they are not profitable, it’s that their financial profile does not fit into anything this generation of decisionmakers is used to.

I’ve never drank. Half a glass of what I was told was a really good champagne at my wedding 27 years ago. That’s it. It was a conscious decision at first, based on alcohol problems of a family member, then a habit. I’m pretty sure my non-existent social life/skills are at least partly attributable to this. Without something to relax my continuously racing brain (never diagnosed, won’t bother now), I’m probably pretty tedious company and there’s a limited time in your life to build a social network. I don’t complain, as there’s a ton of time that’s freed up when you simply don’t go anywhere and I’ve made good use of it. But I do miss the long glorious conversations straddling both the intellectual and the profane between a group of smart relaxed individuals who, for the moment, have forgotten the world and it’s problems.

It’s a question, because a lot of money is riding on people developing a mental model of a llm being something else than a computer program.