flatline

It's not a store of value by these metrics. If your primary concern is being able to store assets that cannot be seized or frozen by, say, foreign adversaries, it suddenly becomes much more viable. Occasionally up or down 50% is a lot better than down a guaranteed 100%.

I'm really torn between these two perspectives. You are not wrong about monopolies. And yet, when Google and Apple struck that deal I thought, thank god I will not be forced into using whatever Apple has to offer up as a search product.

The tooling around LLMs is still nascent and, in my opinion, quite poor. You may be able to shotgun easily-falsifiable mathematical proofs with raw compute, but get into the messy world of real data, uncertainty quantification, and a host of other things that go into building real world models, and I think that an LLM plus tooling dedicated to the task plus a human in the loop will open up capabilities not available to an LLM in a chat or development centric software environment.

I had a conversation about a month ago with a friend who had gone through menopause and I realized I had no idea what the ovaries did when they stopped producing eggs. She didn’t either! I can see why it isn’t the most obvious target for research when the primary focus is fertility, but I do find it fascinating that women’s bodies stop the reproductive cycle and keep on kicking for decades. So much complexity, it’s quite the evolutionary trait.

MaM actually has one of the higher bars, but they have the most regular signups and the community to support it. That’s a good point of reference from 10 years ago, though.

Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.

I went the route of handling epub first (really, anything pandoc can convert to epub) on ebookaloud, and it took quite a few iterations to get consistent parsing across a wide corpus of test documents.

My experience is that gathering and testing with that corpus was about 30% of the overall effort. I have not yet gathered the motivation to tackle pdf: it’s more of a layout format than a text format. Not just tables but multi-column layouts and similar oddities leave a pile of imperfect heuristics in their wake.

Multi-lingual support is even worse. I was working with arabic script in pdf years ago and they don’t even capture the encoded text, just rendering instructions due to the high number of ligatures. I don’t know if things have improved since then.

I have no problem tipping for service. Tipping when I pay in advance and get no service beyond being handed my food — what exactly am I tipping for? I don’t think people are opposed to tipping in general, it’s just been applied to everything.

One time I was forced to pay a tip for self checkout at the Austin airport. I was in a rush for my flight, it prompted, and I could not find any way to opt out.

We're sitting on a year of more or less capable coding models and I have not exactly seen a revolution in new software being released. AI is likely a force multiplier for specific subsets of individuals and workflows. Coding is not a bottleneck for a lot of systems.

I suspect that SaaS is silently being eaten alive as an industry.

There are numerous problems with “alignment.” What are “human values” to begin with? He outlines some at the beginning of the post, implicitly: build bigger, better, more powerful things faster without adequate safeguards. We are literally pouring trillions of dollars of value into this enterprise, and I would say this is something that many humans also value in a qualitative sense. Then we have explicit values which in the West are largely rooted in Christian morality. Nietzsche circled this dichotomy two hundred years ago and I feel like what we have gotten since then is an increasingly detailed anatomy of power as the basis for what is normal vs deviant behavior. He who has the power, makes the rules, to be reductive.

I do think this carries some weight from this particular author due to the length of his tenure. I happen to agree with him in spirit, but this is still largely a post revolving around sentiment not substance. Does anyone think that the overriding incentives even leave room for something like this in practice?

Meta, ByteDance, ...

I don't think the discrepancy is in LLM capability improvements over the past year.

Correctness has never been a priority across an industry where rapid iteration and feature delivery drive sales. There's always some opportunity cost to doing things right, at the price of technical debt down the road. If AI is primarily used to produce fragile code, people will be wary of AI solutions. There's also ongoing public debate about AI safety and alignment. Deploying AI in safety critical applications feels riskier than ever in the current environment, even though it doesn't have to be.

SQLite FTS could have done this a decade ago. We've had good local search capabilities for two decades and they either been underused or abandoned (e.g. Google Desktop, Yahoo! Search). This may be a reasonable projection of where AI is headed. You can do a lot locally but there is too much incentive to centralize around cloud infrastructure, then the privacy concerns make that prohibitive and we end up with what feels like a false choice of cloud or bust.

Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?

I think that's a bit strong of an assertion. How many people use copilot daily under an enterprise agreement? I don't necessarily disagree in spirit, especially given the questionable data sanitization around the recent Navier-Stokes announcement, but most companies disclose huge amounts of data regularly to hopefully-trusted third parties. I think the internet -- and a good share of the world's commerce -- would grind to a halt if we suddenly stopped. Setting up, securing, and maintaining local models for even a small user base is non-trivial and there is way more demand than supply for that skillset right now.

Exactly. It’s still just software, which someone programmed and deployed to do specifically dangerous/malicious things. I feel like we already have legislation and case law surrounding this.