danaris

It sounds like you're positioning the LLM as "a computer that can speak human language (and also computer language because it's a computer)". If so, that's anthropomorphizing them to a concerning degree.

Even given the significant advances in coding models, everything I've seen described and experienced myself with them tells me that non-coders simply aren't going to be able to build and maintain nontrivial projects with them unless they get still better at it. By a lot.

And in the realm of medicine, the kinds of mistakes they absolutely will make, and defend, confidently, will get people killed.

Because if we did, we'd each get about 1000 bucks.

You do understand how individual slices decrease in size as you divide the pie more ways, right...?

We're already making huge advances toward curing cancer.

They're not coming from LLMs. They're coming from mRNA-based treatments and applying standard science to their basic principles.

And just to reinforce what djierardi said, you can't make successful new drugs and treatments for diseases just by thinking about it really hard. Practical tests are an absolute, unavoidable necessity—and not even just the final clinical tests; you have to be able to see how the molecules you're synthesizing interact with living tissue of various types, among other things, before you can even hope to test on humans.

Delegate that entirely to an LLM, and you'll end up giving clinical test subjects something that will melt their flesh, or coagulate their blood, or give them turbo-cancer. Because there is no comprehensive dataset that they can use to figure that stuff out purely by computation. We, as a civilization, simply do not yet understand biology and chemistry well enough to model it at that level.

So stop trying to figure out just how OpenAI and Anthropic are playing 12D chess and actually this situation is fantastic and will result in them saving the world. They're just greedy, selfish companies trying desperately not to be left standing when the music stops and all the chairs have disappeared.

> Does anyone actually want these kinds of devices I wonder?

When considering questions like these, you can't look at what you want or even what the people you know want. You have to look at the overall statistics.

And given that when the Duo was announced, preorders nearly instantly slipped out by months, I think it's a fair take to say that people want these kinds of devices.

I haven't yet seen one in person, but from what I've seen online, I think it unlikely that I will want one...but I can see what's appealing about them to those who do.

I always saw it as the other way around: his family relationships had frayed because he had dedicated his life so completely to Starfleet.

"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I’d rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and allows us to cherish every moment...because they’ll never come again."

~ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Generations

This is absolutely correct.

And, moreover, inequality breaks democracy.

Their ability to spend effectively infinite amounts of money makes them nearly immune to prosecution, and even moreso to litigation. They also spend it on lobbying, which in many cases amounts to buying the loyalty of Congresspeople.

But when the owners of oil companies collude to deceive the public about the dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuels; when the refuse to start working on a transition to green energy when it is absolutely 100% certain that one is needed; when they spend billions of dollars lobbying the government both to ensure they retain their massive subsidies, and to stifle efforts to decarbonize...

Yeah, you can totally blame them, hold them accountable, and it will help fix emissions problems.

It's possible you don't live in the US...?

Generally, in the US, unemployment lasts a few months tops. Regardless of how long you worked, or how long you will be without work.

Whether the user is meaningfully "to blame" isn't my point. My point is that there's nothing Apple could realistically have done to stop it.

And how many of those were because the phone was insecure, and how many were because the user was not practicing good security...?

For instance, the much-touted "iCloud hack" of several years back was not made possible by iCloud being insecure; it was made possible because the users whose accounts were accessed had their passwords stolen in, IIRC, spearphishing attacks.

Wages will only rise if labor power rises relative to corporate power.

If that doesn't happen, then companies will just continue to make excuses for why they need to lay off 20,000 workers after having their best quarter ever.

Well, let's examine this a bit.

Let's assume for the moment that such a thing can exist. Why does it not exist?

What do we know about free (as in speech) software?

- It tends to be written by people on their own time, or funded by companies that want to make sure it continues to exist (though generally, AFAIK, such companies only support existing projects; they don't fund people to create new open-source projects that wouldn't be under their control).

- Largely because of this and the Unix philosophy, it tends to be created as individual projects each made to do one job well, which can then be glued together to do larger jobs.

- It tends to be much less user-friendly than commercial software.

Putting all this together, it is not too hard to see why there aren't widely-adopted free-as-in-speech phone OSes. A phone OS is a large project, which needs to bring a lot of smaller components together within it in a consistent and predictable way; it is a very significant undertaking, requiring a high number of person-hours of work to make usable; and vitally, in order to be commercially viable, it needs to be user-friendly.

So it is very likely that such a project could, theoretically exist, but in practice never will, unless some very wealthy person or group decides to fund its creation without hope of commercial ROI.

> most people are probably better off with a dumb phone or no phone either over the current options, IMO.

...if you're primarily concerned with security.

Most people are not. They're primarily concerned with convenience, staying connected to people in their lives, and entertaining themselves.

And guess what? The iPhone does a pretty good job at this, while also being very good (not perfect) at security.

In general, if you start thinking of anything in the mode of "most people would be better off doing X the way I do it, but they don't", you need to start thinking about a) in what way they would be better off (because in 99% of cases, it's not going to be "universally, with no tradeoffs"), and b) what differences in understanding and priorities "most people" might have from you that would cause them to make those choices.

From what I've seen—personally and from a variety of online sources—there's intermittent availability of basically everything, which means you might be able to access the app, or you might be able to pay by card, but that's going to change potentially from minute to minute, with an average of somewhere around 10% uptime. (Which, of course, means that you, personally, might just be in the 90% of downtime all the time until it's resolved.)

Take with appropriate seasoning, given its anecdotal nature.