ep103

I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

Honestly, this is how all AI should be used, in most non-trivial scenearios

Trump released Iran's frozen assets, in return for them opening the straight and thereby dropping oil prices before the midterm elections.

Reminder, the reason Trump hated the Obama deal was because he construed it as paying Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Obama was paying Iran with the money from Iran's frozen assets. Trump's deal gives them that money, and has no nuclear agreement.

According to the NY times, its a 60 day ceasefire on all fronts, and a return to pre-war status on issues like the (blockade, tolls, nuclear program, sanctions) starting this coming Friday. Also on Friday, a new round of negotiations will begin to discuss these issues.

So basically, both sides agreed to go back to the pre-war status quo for 60 days while negotiations continue.

Except one thing so far, apparently Trump has agreed to unfreeze Iranian financial assets.

Remember: the reason Trump said Obama's nuclear agreement was terrible was because Obama was "paying the Iranians to not develop nuclear weapons". What Obama did, was pay them out of these frozen assets. Which trump just gave them back for free, and without a nuclear deal.

There are ways to dodge it.

A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.

Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court

yeah, and this has the advantage of both being deterministic, and only updating things that are actually linked as opposed to also accidentally updating naming collisions

Some one should let Douglas Adams know the calculation could have been so much faster if the machine just lied.

I see this sentiment repeated so often, and its so surprising to me that people have this train of thought.

If our society was organized around the needs of workers, and existed to help workers compete at their crafts (somehow), then this would make sense.

But it isn't. Every one of our jobs exists as a contract that was initially offered by an owner of capital, and created in order to make that person more money.

As such, ownership is literally the _only_ job that will never be replaced, because it is the atom from which all the rest of the market's building blocks have been built.

AI could replace every job in the market, and company-owner would be the only job left untouched, because every other job in existence, ultimately, has been created to serve that person, not the other way around.

Counter-point, developers that get used to not caring about function implementation, are going to culturally also not care as much about test implementation, making this proposed ideal impossible.

I have literally never seen a correct google summary. Maybe y'all are searching for different things than i am, but at this point I've started taking the viewpoint that if I don't know why the ai summary is wrong, then i also don't know enough about the topic to trust its summary enough to determine whether the summary is useful.

Maybe.

And then win the contracts to do this and have sufficient bankroll that they can be successfully sued and recover damages if they screw up?

No.

Someone like accenture might eat their lunch though

This is the first thing that occurred to me. The people above suggesting a cobol to python or go update confuse the heck out of me. Why not just convert to vanilla jacascript at that point? Bizarre

Yeah, I've been saying for years that LLMs are a technology that basically unlock three major new technologies:

1. Automatic shaping of online community discussions (social media, bots, etc)

2. Automatic datamining, manipulating and reacting to all digitally communicated conversations (think dropping calls or MITM manipulation of conversations between organizers of a rival poltical party in swing districts proir to an election, etc. CointelPro as a service)

3. Giving users a new UI (speech) with which they can communicate with computer applications

save it from the ai bubble collapse?

MacOs is extraordinarily opinionated about how everything should work and frequently attempt to predict your workflow.

Linux/Windows (historically) were straightforawrd, each tool did exactly what it said it would do, and it was up to you to learn how to use the tools available.

On linux/windows, if a button was "capture image", it would just capture the image on the screen. On a mac a "capture image" button could do anything from displaying the image on the screen, to saving it in a photos folder, to saving and syncing it to an iCloud account. Whatever the apple PM decided the most common use case was, and god help you if you want to do something different.

If you've been in the mac ecosystem for a while, you've grown used to this and don't notice any longer. You may even occasionally express happiness when a function does something unexpected and helpful!

If you're coming from anywhere else, its unbelievably painful.

Ai hype is predicated on the popular idea that it can easily automate someone else's job, because that job they know nothing about is easy, but my job is safe from ai because it is so nuanced.

Your calculator doesn't charge per use

For example, in a situation where you can strongly benefit from the Napoleon technique, and all the potential negative outcomes are minor and unlikely to occur, you will almost always want to implement this technique. Conversely, in a situation where there is even a moderate likelihood that this technique will lead to serious negative outcomes, you will likely want to avoid using it, even if it has some potential positive outcomes.

I swear, AI is decreasing everyone's reading and writing abilities.

Well written language conveys maximum information (or emotional impact, or etc) with minimum verbosity. AI is incentivized to do the exact opposite, and results in slop like the above.

The quoted paragraph above takes 71 words to say "You should do this technique if the positive potential outcomes outweigh the negative ones," which is such a banal thought as to have been a waste of the reader's time, the writer's time, and the electricity it took to run an AI to generate those sentences.

It is everywhere, but SF really brings it to another level. Its wild.

You and I see the tiktok slop. But as that functionality improves, its going to make its way into the toolchain of every digital image and video editing software in existence, the same way that its finding its way into programming IDEs. And that type of feature build is worth $. It might be a matter of time until we get to the point where we start seeing major Hollywood movies (for example) doing things that were unthinkable the same way that CGI revolutionized cinema in the 80s. Even if it doesn't, from my layman perception, it seems that Hollywood has spent the last ~20 years differentiating itself from the rest of global cinema largely based on a moat built on IP ownership and capital intensive production value (largely around name brand actors and expensive CGI). AI already threatens to remove one of those pillars, which I have to think in turn makes it very valuable.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think you're right, and I think the reason for it is because Google has historically had an extremely effective astroturf marketing team for Chrome

I have always been in favor of changing the definition if incorporation to ensure that over time ownership transfers slowly but increasingly to the employees of the corporate entity. How that would work, though, would require detailed thought by experts more knowledgeable than i :)

Its so nice to see this echo'd somewhere. This has been what I've been calling them for a while, but it doesn't seem to be the dominant view. Which is a shame, because it is a seriously accurate one.

This is my wife starting up a 20 minute conversation the moment the first actor shows up on the screen xD

Don't worry, I love her anyway. But yes, we're restarting the movie because no, I don't have any idea what happened either, you were talking. ahahaha

The benefit of cloud has always been that it allows the company to trade capex for opex. From an engineering perspective, it trades scalability for complexity, but this is a secondary effect compared to the former tradeoff.

How are you guys spinning up vms, specifically windows vms, so quickly? I used to use virtual box back in the day, but that was a pain and required a manual windows OS install.

I'm a few years out of the loop, and would love a quick point in the right direction : )

Because it markets and presents itself as deterministic and honest. That's the whole issue. AI is unethically marketed and presented to the public.

Yesterday I used ChatGPT to transform a csv file. Move around a couple of columns, add a few new ones. Very large file.

It got them all right. Except when I really looked through the data, for 3 of the excel cells, it clearly just made up new numbers. I found the first one by accident, the remaining two took longer than it would have taken to modify the file from scratch myself.

Watching my coworkers blindly trust output like this is concerning.

It wouldn't be a difficult situation if these guys were ethical shops from the get-go, but they aren't, they're trying to staple minimally required ethics on afterwards, and it shows.