troyvit

I didn't get to see any of his Shakespeare stuff, but I got to see him and Sir Ian Mckellen perform Waiting for Godot. I didn't know what to expect, but man those guys blew my mind.

You inspired a poem (with sincere apologies to Martin Niemöller):

First they came for the oligarchs, and I did not speak out -- because I was not an oligarch.

Then they came for the political cronies, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a political crony.

Then they came for the tech bros, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a tech bro.

Then they came for me -- and actually it was okay because now we live in a civil society, we were able to clear up the misunderstanding and everybody's doing fine.

:)

> Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.

All the counter-arguments I've read to this comment so far have been along the lines of, "well they started it."

And well they did. But if your response to the U.S.'s brand of dehumanization is more dehumanization then you've actually helped them achieve their goal. The people who run the U.S. want a world where respect for privacy (among so many other things) is thrown away because they believe they have the guns and resources to gain the most from that kind of world.

It's part of why I'm getting out of the USA. Key norms of decency we had are broken now, and in our social system you can bet that the next powers who come in will do little more than make a show of repairing them. They now see what's possible and they'll use it for their own ends. It's a spiral.

You're right. They were quiet for a long time and had promised new things "by the end of summer." They missed that window but have really been on a roll since they started up again.

I keep getting this feeling that we're in late-stage capitalism because of how all the oligarchs are maximizing extraction:

* Facebook with this and its new scraping rules for business accounts

* Turning Venezuela into a fiefdom

* Skydance merger

and on and on. But it's not late stage. It's just capitalism and we'll be reading about the same behavior 10 years from now.

I'm sure a lot has changed since cough 2004, but that was the state with the PowerPC G4 and G5. Machine learning Linux applications used the IBM Power architecture because of their vectorization features, and that hardware was ridiculously expensive. When Apple started using Motorola and IBM's cheaper PowerPC chips with Altivec this small market was pumped, but none of their groovy scientific applications worked on OSX.

This created a large enough market for Linux distros installed on Apple hardware to make it a sustainable business model the makers of Yellow Dog Linux to buy the hardware through a reseller channel, ship it to the building, install Linux on it, then ship the device to customers. I worked there and it was fun.

Lots has changed since then of course, one of which being that Apple controls the chip from top to bottom, and their near-indifference in 2004 now seems to have transformed into something more adversarial.

You hit on something that's been making me nervous for awhile, and I hope I'm wrong. The US's relationship with Ukraine reminds me of stories I've read about how people train fighting dogs. It has just that level of abuse, negligence and reward for violence that creates a creature that is good at just one thing. I really hope I'm wrong about all of my assumptions.

You don't need their consent, but they don't suffer if they block you. Now Meta is saying they would be breaking their TOS.

> This won’t last forever but as long as the frontier labs are subsidizing this heavily the open models won’t matter.

It's amazing how new we all perceive AI to be, and yet how old the tricks that the big players use. Their job is to just suck the oxygen out of the room as long as they have the money to do it.

> I think right now it should definitely be a race to profitability,

I haven't been listening too closely, but this is the first realistic mention I've seen that actually says what the "AI race" is or should be about.

Yeah that's a good point. The numbers are smaller and I was looking at it absolutely.

Speaking from an absolute perspective I do think they are doing more with their money than either Anthropic or OpenAI.

I'm a KDE guy through and through, don't get me wrong, but statements like this deserve attribution, otherwise it's just FUD.