Buttons840

I have several thoughts about this, which I'll just iterate:

1) US export bans have made it so that Chinese companies have to compete using less-than-state-of-the-art hardware. This has forced Chinese companies to build more cost efficient models. Whereas, US companies have moreso tried to be state of the art by spending more money than anyone else on state-of-the-art hardware.

2) Xi Jinping has called for more open AI models (not to be confused with the closed models of OpenAI), and I'm happy to see a powerful world leader advocating for open-weight AI models. Whereas, the US seems likely to just ban models.

3) My impression is that, if China surpasses the US in AI development, there will basically be nothing that the US does better than the rest of the world--except for military spending--we spend a lot, but we don't necessarily spend well (something something Iran). I mean, if the US is no longer a tech leader in the world, like... what are we a leader at? Manufacturing? Healthcare? LOL. Are we a leader in any industry or by any metric? I wonder if China is attempting to remove the last jewel in the USA's crown with these AI releases.

4) It must be refreshing for companies to have access to a new model that isn't going to get pulled because the government bans it 2 days after release. And it's open-weight so it wont go away--amazing--what a shift in the market.

5) If it becomes clear that open-weight models are the future of AI, will that pop a huge bubble in the US economy? Maybe. But, on the other hand, these companies aren't just training AIs, they are also building data centers which will remain valuable no matter what happens.

We have other signals now.

Before we would find an intriguing post on the internet from years ago, and you have to verify it with additional research--it's easy to skip that additional research.

With a LLM when you're skeptical you can interogate it. One thing we know for sure is LLMs are quick to admit mistakes were made when interrogated, comically so. A LLM might not always recognize its own mistake, but at least it is available for easy interogation, unlike the forum posts of old.

Manual research from reputable sources remains an option.

Yeah, I guess. Now it appears to be a project run by Anthropic and I'm sure the real focus is on making money--which is still slightly different than having the focus be on making the best tool.

I've always felt [0] the people who created Bun had, as their first and foremost goal, a desire to use Zig--and that's great, I like Zig, I like when people build things their own way.

However, I've been skeptical of using Bun, because I want a project whose first and foremost goal is to build good tools that achieve the objectives of the project.

It reminds me of asking game developers: Do you want to build a game, or do you want to build a game engine? Building a game engine is fine, but if you're goal is to make a game, then building an engine is a poor way of achieving your goals.

Likewise, I've wondered if the creators of Bun wanted to build better JavaScript tools, or if they wanted to use Zig.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970044

Again, I really think this is a viewpoint we've talked ourselves into to help us feel better about how cumbersome creating the cards are.

I'm willing to grant that there is some value in choosing what to put in the cards, but most of the awkwardness around making cards is UI related. Nobody creates cards on their phone, or while they're walking (AI could do both of these) - people create cards sitting at their computer (like cavemen!) usually clicking through a clunky UI and managing thousands of cards with thousands of clicks. That sucks, and people probably wont realize it sucks until something better comes along.

I would add that somewhere in there should be a spaced repetition algorithm.

Spaced repetition is very effective, but it's really really clunky to use. My unpopular opinion is that we all have Stockholm syndrome when it comes to creating "cards", and people talk about how valuable creating cards is; but I think it stucks, it takes a lot of time.

If AI is already teaching me math (let's say), it would be nice to tell the AI/app "quiz me on this periodically", and then the AI makes up a fresh polynomial to factor (or whatever) and presents that to you according to a spaced repetition algorithm.

Behind the scenes, the AI should have access to what has happened the last several times a specific topic has been quized, so the AI can watch to see that certain mistakes are resolved, and the AI might also know better how to correct the user if it has context about previous quizzes of that topic.

You spend billions

The you being taxpayers, right?

I disagree. People would still buy that.

There's a dangerous path where the companies are required to describe these transactions as "rentals", but that wont actually solve anything. If we require clearer advertising, we're going to end up with a world where everything is very clearly a rental, and there simply is no option to purchase. People will still buy the $40 "rentals" because it's their favorite movie and they want to watch it multiple times, and it's Friday night and they want to watch it right now.

I think people understand the situation when they "purchase" digital media. They know it might not last forever. They do it anyway. They don't like it though. They would prefer genuine ownership, but it's not an option.

We either need to outlaw these long term rentals, or break up monopolies until companies that are actually offering genuine purchases arise. Or we could do both.

We need to regulate more than just the wording on the "purchase" page. This isn't just a problem of wording.

Yep. That's the argument.

People don't like that though. We should change the laws so that is illegal. We can just make laws we want--we're allowed to do that.

The GP comment mentioned Minecraft servers. The full story is that California politicians were discussing Stop Killing Games and and that gamers were willing and capable of running their own servers, and ESA argued against that by saying private servers are illegal, basically.

Politicians are taking about it. Anyone who purchases media cares about it. Support for copyright reform is only going to grow, so hopefully we'll see some.

We will own the games we purchase digitally if we change the laws to say that we own them. We've reached the point where politicians are talking about this issue, and I suppose support for copyright reform will only continue to grow.

Fucking Broadcom?

The only time I've ever seen that name before is when trying to solve driver issues, on both Linux and Windows.

Are they especially stingy with their IP related to drivers or something?

To prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts.

In this case, either (1) the peon was lying about reported hours, the boss didn't notice, and then the peon reported himself... or (2) everything happened just like you said.

Aren't there bounties for reporting things like this? At the very least winning should include reimbursement for legal expenses.

I fully expect anonymity to disappear, but also certain causes will still be supported by massive amounts of bot accounts.

How does a lowly pharmacy transform a drug that is not for eye injection into one that is?

Probably every single person in the region is a descendant of the Jewish people who "lived in that region first".

And if we go back further: If Abraham existed, then like 99.9% of all living humans are descendants of Abraham. Do they all have claim to Israel's land then?

It doesn't make sense to look back that far.

Local AI servers are different because they don't have to form a single system. If one AI server goes down, just use the other one.

This is unlike customer facing systems where, if your database server goes down, you probably can't just use the other one--the whole system is down.

I think companies will eventually just buy a local AI server.

Using local hardware is expensive when it's running a complicated software stack that can break in 10,000 different ways.

These eventual local AI servers will just talk some protocol for AI and sit in the corner and nobody will think about them.

I guess they still might need access to various systems, so idk. Eventually I think someone will offer "AI in a box" though, running the latest open model or whatever.

How do they determine the cause of failure in a things like this?

One possibility is once AI becomes profitable and wildly successful, and we all lose our jobs, we vote to nationalize the AI companies, and send some good vibes (but no money) to the VCs who paid for it, and remember that the AI was only built by breaking copyright law at an industrial scale and so it's fair to nationalize it.

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself. I've used Jira to almost a malicious extent at times, and it's a great tool to cover your ass. If you ever get in trouble for something you just point out "this was all made clear in the hundreds of Jira updates I've written, you've been reading those, right?". What are they going to do? Ask you to use Jira less?

We have AI now. Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.

Yep, widespread security holes are literally a national security issue, but making things convenient for companies is more important.

We need to make companies financially liable for data leaks.

Since we're all so trusting of AI, maybe we can use AI to score how "excessively wordy" communications are, and pressure people to stop.

An easy way to host your own and fallback to a PaaS would eat the industry.

If someone wanted to be a martyr and just uploaded all their personal documents so they could be accessed by everyone, I wonder if an interesting court case might follow.

I could imagine it ending with a court ruling that people are responsible to protect their own personal documents which... yeah, that would muddy the waters in a world where every website expects to see your ID.

If the knowledge work of Seniors is fully automated, wont pretty much all knowledge work be fully automated?

Furthermore, if the source of your value and wealth is that you have an app, what does it mean when anyone can easily build an app?

One day we might see a UI toolkit (so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck; my hot take) with deep AI integration and then apps will just be some microservices on the backend and the AI UI on the front that responds to natural speech and can adjust its display however the user requests.

Can't you just give it the time in each prompt? Would that work?

I've seen this mentioned a few times though, so I think maybe it's more complicated than this?

I clean shit for free often.

I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.

So is this a law based specifically on religion or ethnicity or skin color, or all the above?

I've always felt laws should be applied equally to all people without regard to those things.