HN user
No relation to the film.
Whether or not this is really true or just US propaganda, the majority of technology transfer has occurred through the open process of requiring US companies to form partnerships and disclose know-how to access the chinese market. This stuff about espionage is really sour grapes from losers.
It makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
This is kind of a strange take.
Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
Books are generally far higher quality texts too. The really good articles get republished as books, think about that.
That's true, but I still benefit from the games being played. It also weakens the oligarchs slightly by reducing their margins. It's also worth remembering that the laws were written by the oligarchs.
We have the laws, but I don't have to feel outraged when regular people undercut the oligarchs and those people's interests align with my own.
Generally speaking, companies retaining a competitive advantage with each other is good for their investors but bad for the public. It's usually to the public's benefit for employees to share knowledge, it makes goods and services cheaper and more available.
Worth noting that it is the Europeans and Americans that have been colonial. Asian peoples have, with the prominent exception of the Mongols and Japanese Empire, pretty much not done that. In particular, China shut down its exploration program.
This is a settler-colonial mindset that reflects all the bad things we did onto everyone else. Notably, it's a current US ally that is most guilty of this.
This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.
Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.
Thank you, that's very helpful to know!
I played a little bit around with LISP but I was astounded when I saw that you run programs using the live REPL. I thought, how can you reliably deploy a finished program if it can get messed with at any time? Why isn't there a way to compile to a binary?
Drones fly over Gaza all the time, scaring the shit out of people and sometimes murdering them senselessly. They have done this over many countries.
I don't really understand how any of this contributes to "defense". Sounds like "offense" to me. Just patrolling the skies over non-white countries and launching missiles at weddings. The reason the Pentagon invests so heavily in this kind of technology is our wars are so indefensible, they can't convince Americans to sacrifice blood in any quantity for other people's natural resources.
That's confusing. The rich make their money and hold their assets in economically productive (or extractive) enterprises. Land, factories, services, arms, etc are the real storehouses of wealth. If you take that from the rich, they have nothing.
His statement at the end was pretty interesting:
"If we do want to change our relationship to technology, I think we’d have to do it intentionally. My basic thoughts are roughly:
We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved!
We should try to reduce the burden of building software. At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals. I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult."
"Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang"
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Persp...
Robert Maxwell, Ghislane Maxwell's father, was a big player in turning the industry towards profit seeking (though I agree with the sibling comment that it's capitalism's fault ultimately).
nothing wrong with nationalizing
No information on how significant the reduction in energy per token is. No information on amortized price per request. Increasingly its clear OpenAI must demonstrate order of magnitude reductions in cost to not die, this is investor story time without that information.
Popper talks about sociology as though it were physics. Unfortunately, competitive games and the subjective belief of people can influence the course of history if the right material conditions are in place. Sometimes you try different things and get different results in different contexts.
The fighting these companies had with the government was very nominal.
This is completely backwards read Marx. Superstructure (culture, politics) flows from the economic base (there are some important exceptions, but that’s the dominant arrow).
This is like the plot of the movie Elysium
Can you say more about that? I haven't kept up.
Sure in some out even most cases growth starts in this nice way. There’s two problems though. In order to sustain that growth number, usually ever greater interventions become necessary. Second, there’s the marxist critique that while it’s true that owners add management decisions, it’s their employees that actually do most of the valuable work and are then underpaid relative to their contribution. If they were fully remunerated then there would be no profits. Third, while it is good to incentivize building things people want, it doesn’t make sense to reward people with class status that crushes everyone under them. It should get exponentially harder to make money like levels in a video game at best.
how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones?
Reputation. LLM libraries can also be high quality in theory. It's the level of effort, duration of use, stability, and test coverage. People will need to resist using LLMs to make huge transformations of their libraries all the time to avoid erasing their reputations unless they have convincing safeguards like comprehensive tests or formal proofs that are not touched.
Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code
Those copies are not reliable like a callsite. Maybe there is less advertising... but it is still better to use the library. I have to hope that at some point AI psychosis will end and engineering, which has not changed, will remain. You have to have reliable inputs to your processes. To do otherwise is insanity.
getting copyleft contributions back to it
This is a hard question. That said, for my own libraries, I get very few contributions but people use the libraries! The more "hardcore" the library is, the higher the ratio of users to contributors because they're just not expert enough to contribute meaningfully (until your stuff becomes so valuable companies sponsor teams of contributors as in Linux).
That said, my libraries seem to have made it into the weights, so when I talk to LLMs about my problem space they shockingly frequently recommend my own libraries to me (which is kind of ego stroking not gonna lie).
I think there's a lot of reasons to feel demotivated right now, but my perhaps privileged attitude (since I don't have bosses forcing me to use AI for everything) is to use AI where appropriate and apply engineering discipline and thinking in all cases. Retain your own human skills. If expertise really does become completely devalued, we're going to have bigger problems than you can solve on your own.
Not really, the impacts on education seem to be severe. People are actively getting dumber.
If I read that right, the "jailbreak" is to ask the model to fix the codebase and then it exposes the flaws? That sounds like a gap that is nearly impossible to fix while retaining high capability. Like you want it to be able to fix your codebase...
To respond to the ending of this piece, I think open source still matters because LLMs generate very specific code for a specific situation. Quality libraries mean solutions can be reliably shared between projects.
I think what is being lost is that despite Google having lost its morals at various points, and Don't Be Evil being burried, this man's resignation does signal yet another dark turning point in the future of the Google organization.
They are now openly partnering with war industries and the government to assist them in doing things like bombing a school full of girls, killing hundreds in an entirely indefensible war of aggression.* This is a very dark red line to cross and despite Googlers being wealthy and privilaged, it is nonetheless a significant protest that deserves to be heard on its own terms. Ideally, a protest would change policy at the company.
Google management: Stop cooperating with the immoral and illegally operating War Department!
* I don't have evidence Google directly participated in the Minab school bombing, but this is the side they are supporting.