monodeldiablo

I work in this space. The load on private APIs -- and the management costs in general of reselling government data -- are utterly dwarfed by the upstream costs borne by the government.

The public __already__ pays for Google, The Weather Company, Apple, and really __everybody__ -- down to your local weather person and surf report -- to use weather data on a massive scale.

Government weather data underpins huge chunks of our modern, globalized economy. It should absolutely be better funded and even allowed to directly distribute data to the public and industry. NOAA and NASA et al could be given 10x their current allocation of tax money and you and I would still be getting a great deal.

You annihilated your own argument with the inclusion of radiology. The only successfully deployed "AI" in use by radiologists (that I'm aware of) are bespoke image analysis models, not LLMs. And that space is rapidly fragmenting as there's a frustrating and seemingly irresolvable tension between sensitivity, generalizability, and accuracy.

A few hundred billion in salary and benefits reductions equates to millions of layoffs. At minimum, we'd be looking at something about the same magnitude as the 2008 financial crisis. That scale of workforce reduction would have profound implications for the broader economy.

In a consumption-driven economy, businesses need consumers. Any gains from these layoffs would be short term at best.

Leaks from within OpenAI have made it pretty clear that they've been struggling to achieve significant improvements lately by simply scaling up parameter size. Experts like LeCunn have also been vocal that blindly scaling up is a dead end.

(Incidentally, the line of skill improvement isn't "exponential". It's been incremental in improvements per generation, but generations have been coming thick and fast of late, and have grown in parameter count exponentially since 2017.)

Speaking more broadly, LLMs don't have to "hit a wall" in scaling to become uneconomical. If incremental improvement continues to come at exponential cost, however, then the fundamental value argument falls apart.

Setting all that aside, even presuming that model performance scales linearly with dimensionality, there are just fundamental limits to the size of the training corpuses. Quality training data is not unbounded and infinite. Given the same size corpus of training data, there's a hard theoretical limit to how much meaning and inference a model can wring out of it.

And then there are other issues with the whole business model. For one thing, it's predicated on continual full scale retraining to achieve even modest gains in skill and relevancy. Topical and targeted learning requires a full retraining. Etc cetera.

I think that the next generation of AI will lean more heavily on RL to be useful beyond a few months. I also think that the energy requirements of a particular technology are a good proxy to whether it's got a realistic future.

I played a role in China's shift to renewables. It's been decades in the making.

I do run open models locally, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they're functionally competitive. I'm extremely skeptical of anybody claiming they've obviated a $22/hr job with an open model. Qwen is a big step down in capability. I can play with something like k2.5 for awhile, but if I want real work done I'm going back to a frontier model, which has significant runtime requirements for inference.

You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

It's not really even a question. It's an obvious boondoggle. The forecasted net new energy requirements for the AI buildout over the next couple of years are roughly equivalent to all of Western Europe's power demand today.

That's absurd. It's a physical impossibility to bring that much power online that quickly. And the cost to get even close would make AI more expensive than just hiring knowledge workers to do the same tasks.

And it's all predicated on a tower of wobbly or broken assumptions -- chief among them that increasing the size of these models yields better performance.

We're going to look back on this era and wonder why anybody took any of the outrageous claims of tech CEOs seriously.

$0.18/hr is the (massively) subsidized price of AI services. Once these companies are required to turn a profit for their investors, they'll raise the price. Then the math doesn't look so lopsided. We're already seeing this process unfold with token windows and ad rollout.

His word choice about semicolons is problematic for other reasons, so I won't quote it here, but Vonnegut made his views on punctuation and story structure very known. An internet search will provide it to you readily. And anybody who's read his works is familiar with his love of the em dash.

But more to his -- and my -- point: He also regularly encouraged people to flout rules and standards. His famous quote about semicolons, when read in its original context, is followed by a sentence with a semicolon!

He was a subversive author who abhorred mindless compliance and begged us to remain inquisitive. Subversion of accepted standards lies at the heart of all creativity. And as creative works enter the broader discourse, they themselves shape new standards. It's why our languages are always changing.

Your point about Citizen Kane and Independence Day 2 is nonsensical, and presumes we all have the same goals when consuming entertainment. I'm not going to engage in that argument.

You and Kurt Vonnegut seem to disagree here. He made liberal use of em dashes and hated semicolons.

And he was a giant of literature.

The problem with your definition of "good writing" is that it's entirely subjective. Just like Vonnegut's.

This is just repackaged cognitive or dialectical behavioral therapy, with cutesy names like "whisper" and "virtue garnish" to make it seem novel. But if it speaks to people, I see no harm in that.

If you're genuinely interested in changing your habits, I recommend investigating these therapies, as they're backed by decades of research and results.

And if you want to tune in to these "whispers" in the first place, there's really no substitute for meditation and mindfulness practice.

I don't know if you've tried Obsidian, but it's just a tool that sits atop your pile 'o Markdown files. No vendor lock-in or special databases. I use Syncthing to sync the files between devices and git to periodically back them up to a private repo.

I've had to be careful to steer clear of all the plugin nonsense that's tempting to dive into as a distraction from actually using the tool, but Obsidian is surprisingly awesome right out of the box.

I use the daily note template tool to generate a structured agenda for each day, which removes the friction that used to keep me from daily journaling and second brain stuff. Now I can't live without it. It's been life-changing for me, as a person previously crippled with ADHD and perpetually living in a state of intense anxiety.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to help out. I was also an Evernote (and Joplin, and...) user for years and was never satisfied until I made a list of my requirements and discovered that Obsidian ticks all the boxes. Haven't turned back since.

Reach out to the NWCDC (https://nwcdc.coop/) or NCBA (https://ncbaclusa.coop/) for resources on how to draft bylaws and structure a worker-owned business that meets your needs. In my experience, they're extremely passionate, knowledgeable and helpful.

I'm a little surprised that there are so many takes like yours in this thread. I don't mean to pick on you, but you seem awfully certain the briber is more ethically in the right here.

I wonder, would you feel the same if this was a meat packer or kindergarten or dairy or hospital who was bribing inspectors?

Building inspections are deadly serious, and when corrupt developers (who, in this case as in all cases, have the capacity to offer life-changing wealth to otherwise underpaid public bureaucrats) pay to cut corners, innocent people die.

It took two to tango, here. The rich asshole paying to circumvent safety regulations is at least as culpable as the motion bureaucrat who accepted the bribe.

No-till organic farms exist.

But it really doesn't. What it has is a lot of industry-funded "research" muddying the waters with ambiguous or misleading results.

When I worked at Monsanto, the mantra was that __the burden of proof was on those alleging harm__.

I don't know about you, but I expect a higher standard from the system that regulates the food I put in my body.

Broad spectrum pesticides are terribly complex to test and it should take years if not decades to properly prove them safe for agricultural use and human consumption.

They're not mutually exclusive. I can boycott products made by sociopaths and vote/protest/run for local office.

Only if you define "the maximum" as a 14 year old narcissist boy's fantasies.

He didn't really get to know the joys of adventure or a loving relationship. By all accounts, his life was actually pretty empty, a hole he tried to fill with material objects and anonymous sex.

Depositors will get their insured money back. Is there a commitment from the FDIC to make all depositors whole? If so, that's not typical.

Those numbers at the bottom of a cheque? Yeah, they include your account number.

There's no inherent information risk to giving out an account number that justifies an outdated paper-based system. Especially when one considers the accompanying fraud risk thereof.

The instant I moved to Europe, I realized just how far behind consumer banking is in the US. It's pitiful.

I've known way too many lawyers, doctors, tech bros, and finance bros to believe in these silly platitudes.

It might have once been the case that reward correlated closely to risk, but the economy has fundamentally changed faster than our attitudes.

We believe that the US is still the meritocracy it was when we were young, but loads of economic studies show the US has steadily declined in this regard. More than ever, money circulates among the well-connected and wealthy.

The real secret to getting rich today is to be born rich.

I stand corrected³!

So you get horrendous spellings if using Latin characters for the Slavic sounds, like you see in Polish.

I'm not sure where you get this from.

Several Slavic languages (Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, etc) use Latin-derived alphabets and managed to preserve their pronunciation with 100% fidelity. The Polish orthography is not the only solution to this, and I think it's a stretch to regard Croatian spellings as "horrendous". I am, of course, biased. But the number of characters in a word in Croatian maps 1:1 with its Cyrillic spelling, for example.

A small correction to your correction: The letter 'nj' is actually a single character in the Croatian/Slovenian and Latinized Serbian/Montenegrin/Bosnian alphabets (go ahead and select it with your cursor!), as are the letters 'lj' and 'dž'.

While they are certainly digraphs, they are regarded as a single letter and not a 2-character sequence. They have their own sound, sort order, Unicode designation, and written orthography. For example, on advertising where a word is written vertically, 'lj' will not be separated vertically, and a hyphen never separates the 'l' from the 'j'.

However, since the letters 'n' and 'j' already exist on a keyboard, it's easier in this electronic era for people to type the letters separately instead of hunting for the 'nj' key, so the presence that you see of two character sequences to represent those letters is a consequence of the compromise of modern electronics and expediency, not innate to the alphabet itself.

TL;DR: Each letter in Serbian Cyrillic maps 1:1 to a single letter in Gaj's Latin alphabet, as each alphabet was specifically designed such that each character represents exactly one phoneme.

I may be wrong today, but I took a peek awhile back and Solana's top N validators -- enough to exert outright control over the network -- were operated by companies from within the same 2-3 VC portfolios, which struck me as a shockingly poor standard of "decentralization" for a network which apparently prides itself on that metric.

From a certain angle, it could almost look as if said VCs were trying to add legitimacy to their portfolio investments by colluding to make Solana seem busier and safer than it really is...

How is that any different than old school banking and finance? Using layer 2 for performance requires essentially opening an account with a trusted party.

I don't understand what we've gained here.

One potential danger is that some of the more extreme therapies for gender transition are permanent and work best when used early. If a person's trans orientation is the result of a poorly formed sense of identity, as alleged by the article, there's a stronger chance they may change their mind later, after irreversible harm has been wrought.

In other words, there's a chance that some kids may not be "really" trans, but rather attention-seeking or mentally ill. And for those kids, transitioning would, in fact, be harmful in the long run.

Do we, as a society, have an obligation to prevent these children and young adults from harming themselves in this way?

I don't have a firm answer because it's a difficult and emotional subject, but I think it's extreme to pretend this is not an issue, and equally extreme to encourage kids for whom it might not be safe to transition.

Perhaps the informal controls we have in place prior to gender reassignment surgery are already adequate to filter out these vulnerable kids. Perhaps there are other interventions I'm not aware of that are already in use. But I don't see the harm in discussing and exploring whether there is a proportion of the trans population that is, in fact, suffering from social or mental illness and not actually a more innate form of gender dysphoria.

I find it very concerning that anyone would attempt to present puberty blockers as "non-permanent". Extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence.

I actually live in Croatia these days and have some experience with zadruge (Yugoslav cooperatives). Many of the agricultural cooperatives still survive, but the worker cooperatives were largely converted into joint stock corporations in the early 90s and then asset stripped by private equity and crooked politicians for a decade or two thereafter.

Several family members worked at zadruge and that's where I get most of my information from, so take this all with a grain of salt...

One of the key issues with zadruge was that, while nominally cooperatives, they were actually owned and managed by the state. Directors were appointed by the communist party and not elected by the workers. As a result, a culture of kleptocracy crept in, since party rank and connections were more beneficial than seniority or hard work, and resentment grew between labor and management.

This has tainted the idea of cooperatives in the former Yugoslavia, so few people are interested in reviving cooperatives today, even though the core issues that plagued zadruge have improved dramatically since 1991.

They were, however, an experiment in democracy in the workplace, albeit limited. And that was radical for its time. Most people I've spoken with say that, for all their failings, zadruge were enriching and empowering places to work and much preferred alternatives to today's jobs.

That makes sense. Externalities will be less. I would love to hear how anarcho-syndicalists think that any remaining externalities can be managed without a state. Like, if I'm in a co-op with 10 people, I can still see us all deciding to screw over society just a little bit for our own gain, and telling ourselves a nice story that that's not what's happening.

States are here to stay and are, in fact, necessary for the enforcement and arbitration of business law. They're a necessary ingredient to any regulatory regime.

I look askance at any solution that pretends to completely "solve" the issue of externalities. Humans are optimizing, externalizing creatures, and our organizations will reflect that fact.

Given all that, though, an ecosystem of cooperatives actually does do a better job of policing and creatively regulating externalities in a manner more beneficial to society than many forms of government regulation.

This is because governments are susceptible to regulatory capture by private capital, and the concentration of wealth into relatively fewer hands only exacerbates this problem. Cooperatives actively fight against the unfair concentration of wealth, and an ecosystem of cooperatives forms a network of reinforcing relationships that find opportunity in waste that private capital firms might otherwise externalize to the public to deal with.

A good example might be the worker-owned retirement homes in northern Italy. Staff earn higher wages -- and care is consistently rated as far better -- than at either for-profit or public facilities.

Don't both capital and entrepreneurship require asymmetric compensation for the unusual amount of risk of starting some ventures?

Sure, but that's not incompatible with cooperative ownership. There are forms of worker co-ops which give greater ownership stakes to workers who contribute more, take on early risk, or have seniority. It's not binary.

There are cooperatives that look indistinguishable from SV startups. The only major exception is that they grant voting stock to new hires instead of non-voting share options.

Even if the playing field was levelled, why would a founder or investor willingly opt-in to a corporate form that will massively reduce their upside in the 10% chance that they end up succeeding?

Because the odds of a cooperative succeeding are higher than with LLCs and joint stock companies (see upthread and numerous studies). In other words, many people would be more willing to accept a 50% smaller slice of the pie if the odds of success triple.

Another minor point here: Cooperative structures also have an advantage in sustainable longevity. VC-funded companies are exit-oriented and tend to struggle to settle into enriching, viable companies post-exit. Cooperatives offer a competitive advantage to the entrepreneur who is not looking to pump-and-dump their life's work, but instead build a sustainable business in the long term. All things being equal, workers will overwhelmingly prefer to work at a mature firm for ownership than simply for wages.

But what about the far more risky (both capital intensiveness and probability of success) ventures, e.g. starting a nuclear fusion company?

Interestingly, that's not too dissimilar from what Mondragón was at its inception -- a capital-intensive, high risk business. And there are actually lots of cooperatives that succeed at these margins around the world. They're just not easy to start in the US due to a blend of factors including culture, concentration of wealth, and hostile regulations.

But I'd like to point out that, even if the answer is "accept that co-ops can't service these particular high risk sectors properly due to a fundamentally inadequate incentives," nobody in the cooperative space is advocating the eradication of joint stock companies or other corporate forms. Cooperatives are not a one-size-fits-all solution. There will always be cases when LLCs, LLPs, JSCs, etc are a more appropriate form. We just want more choice.

I would strongly support a federal law defining a standard cooperative corporate form and giving worker cooperatives preferential treatment under the tax code. I think society could only benefit from such a change.

At worst, we'd see a bunch of new cooperatives pop up on the fringes, where they had previously been too onerous to start or operate. At best, we'd see a much more democratic economy across the board, with workers more invested in the success of their firms and firms more accountable to their workers.