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rockzom

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This reminds me of when I constantly got a gender symbol identifier after certain emojis sent from iPhones to Android. I thought it was some new kind of feminist trend, but it was just my phone not parsing it correctly

What do we do? The penny is the smallest bit of USD we have, and hyper-fractional parts that incrementally make up an unimaginably large whole are now the world we live in. It's difficult to imagine a world where you receive 175 billion royalty transactions of 1/1,000,000,000th of a $0.01 in a given year, but maybe that's a reasonable scenario to think about when it comes to the couple of bucks an average teen or adult should get from their presumed default contributions to large language models.

Remember trying to hit that minimum threshold payment for Google Adsense with your Blogspot, then finally getting your check after 15 years? If nothing else, we shouldn't blithely tolerate that again, because we didn't sign up for this. (We signed up for stuff even worse than this, technically, but in those cases at least we clicked "I Agree.")

Some part of me views this moment in history as such a force multiplier that it seems myopic to squabble about the nickels and dimes we'd get for our bird sounds and cave paintings. I wish I was smarter and already caught up enough to take advantage of all of this.

I tried resisting the urge to stop myself from even posting this comment, but I'm willing to make an ass of myself so that somebody who knows more about this than me can try to steel-man this for me.

What do we do? The penny is the smallest bit of USD we have, and hyper-fractional parts that incrementally make up an unimaginably large whole are now the world we live in. It's difficult to imagine a world where you receive 175 billion royalty transactions of 1/1,000,000,000th of a $0.01 in a given year, but maybe that's a reasonable scenario to think about when it comes to the couple of bucks an average teen or adult should get from their presumed default contributions to large language models.

Remember trying to hit that minimum threshold payment for Google Adsense with your Blogspot, then finally getting your check after 15 years? If nothing else, we shouldn't blithely tolerate that again, because we didn't sign up for this. (We signed up for stuff even worse than this, technically, but in those cases at least we clicked "I Agree.")

The lack of archival is the biggest problem I have with any of this.

Imagine if Wikipedia were taken offline in 2048, with one month notice.

To be clear, I don't have a deep understanding of Linux. But let's keep going with your train of thought regarding abstraction.

When I know it's "January" for whatever reason, and not "First Month", without knowing HOW and WHY this is the convention, it sucks. But then you see what Janus looks like - which, in this case, makes it even better for some reason than "First Month." In the case of programming languages and systems, many of these mythological figures are still alive and we can ask them questions.

So, with Linus, I'm approaching it from the individual differences angle. Some people will call IT if "Smooth edges of screen fonts" is turned off. "Why is this like this?? I can't work like this!"

Whereas I don't think Linus would notice, and if he did I doubt he would care. There's something about understanding where a creator of any given thing falls on that continuum that I find really helpful in overcoming friction with the "why is bad thing that could be good, by my likely ignorant definition, so bad!!" when it comes to new languages or systems.

Tangential, but I want to go back in time and ask some ancient Danes why #70 and #90 in Danish simply had to be absolutely ridiculous, given any possible alternatives. It still wouldn't be my preference, but something about understanding their perspective would be helpful.

So much of coding requires sitting inside the mind of some mid-20th century dude with a very different model of the world than we have.

Some of you probably work within SAP, and it's the same kind of problem - you have to audition for the part of some random German business logic nerd until you maybe get it. And it's still effortful every time.

It's worth mentioning that standing on the shoulders of giants is strange when so many of those giants are still alive and working on their monoliths. The whole experience is as much a cultural and historical and borderline religious pilgrimage as it is a syntactical exercise.

A bit like getting a vague answer to an Old Testament God prayer, I understand C++, Python, etc. on a deeper level not by programming, but watching the creators talk about their languages. If you hate C++, go watch Bjarne get interviewed. The language will look like his handwriting the next time you open your IDE. It's so weird.

If you struggle with Linux, go watch YouTube videos where Linus Torvalds talks for a couple hours. I swear the next time you open a command line or work within a slipshod hideous UI that I guess just works, or something, you'll somehow feel this uncanny relief because you know Linus.

I'll be all over the place with this so bear with me.

GPT4 is more impressive. But Google...felt better.

Using Google for the first time felt like you were a wizard casting a spell at the library of the world, and then a stack of books showed up in front of you.

GPT4 is so uncanny and difficult to trust it almost feels evil, in comparison. It feels more like early file-sharing services that you knew were going to nuke your computer, eventually.

In those early days of Google, you knew the information you were finding was almost always generated from a passion project being curated by one or more actual human beings without ulterior motives.

GPT4 feels like a solar-powered iPad on the tombstone of the Dead Internet. We've unleashed a probabilistic zombie information demon, and we can't put this back in the ground.

Google was the good friend who always introduced you to people you needed to know, and it's a tragedy that it will never be the same.