tpdly

There's another even more abstract liability on the balance sheet here for "deprecated LOC" or something, where the thing they built gets scrapped because no one wants to untangle the rat nest, or the "documentation" was so incoherent that it all had to be rewritten and reviewed.

These are private websites accessible over the public internet, to be clear. Also, there are known relationships between the intelligence community and the big platforms, lets not pretend they have free reign.

Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations? If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security", what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?

I agree that its better to find solutions that involve protections instead of restrictions though. I think it means forced decoupling of indices/curation from advertising. This would make advertising funded addiction feeds compete with paid feed applications.

Not true. Speech and reach are obviously different.

It is entirely conceivable that Americans wake up to the absurd power and manipulation behind algorithmic feeds, and decide to intervene in the hypno-addictive horror-show.

Also, I've been thinking about how curation at the scale of the modern internet is much more analogous to speech than it ever was before. Whatever you want to say, just find someone else who's said it-- or just astroturf via 3rd party and beam it into the skinner boxes. In this frame, freedom of speech actually demands open access to indeces and content. Is it acceptable that network-effect-fueled cartels are the only ones that get to speak through algorithms?

Right. Five years ago the idea was you needed the capitalism to fund compute/training. Now, its clear that open weight models could be a public good. If my PC takes my job I'm still empowered and can still capture that value, so if Anthropic were pursing that end it wouldn't seem so hypocritical.

Yeah, even though I like 'craftsmanship' here, stakeholders don't. I think "durability" is pretty good. 'Engineering standards' perhaps. I think we'll start to see the groundwork laid for software engineering as a proper engineering field, where specific performance characteristics are required for certain stakes.

Code can be like "heavy machinery", maybe needs license to operate. If an app has sensitive data in it, it becomes like a residential structure subject to building codes and inspections. I shudder to think of how this would play out it our oligarchic, anti-competitive environment though.

I mean, not that I'm a huge fan of IP laws, but yes?

Like I said, if you provide an alternative to all these blogs and forums (because you trained on them or because you scrape them for RAG) then you are stealing their traffic. Search engines were/are already doing that, but the foundation training

That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?

If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.

Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.

Not foreseeably. As others have mentioned, DMA requires AI integrations to accommodate competition. To my mind, Apple's Webkit-only playbook is the prototype here. Waaaay too much money to be made as a GEO broker. Namely by selling position/advantages in the harness, or just use it to maintain ecosystem lock in.

As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.

Apple would have to allow USERS the possibility of giving any virtual assistant direct access to their own private data.

Is that accurate?

I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of continuous reading

I actually think the "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet" does a lot to characterize the capabilities and effects to a lot of people. Obviously coders are more in tune with how well agents can work, but that's also due more to the RL breakthroughs than foundation modeling.

I like to think someone can come along with Jobs-like charisma and redefine the public's intuition for personal computing again. Foundation models with maximally deterministic harnesses, voice assistants with honest, tasteful amounts of roboticism, maybe data tenancy that doesn't make you feel like a surveilled ecosystem prisoner.

NVIDIA local AI builds are moving in that direction, but are wildly expensive. I think a lot of the current AI backlash (esp data-centers) comes from the public's accurate intuition that the current centralized, monopolistic, cloud-centric solution disempowers them, and eats any gains this magical technology would've brought them. Plugging a sliver box into the wall and your router, with no recurring fees; that would make people feel different about "taking our jobs" because they would be the unquestionable beneficiary.

Average density in an urban core (North America) is like 90 residents per acre, vs like 5 res/acre in suburbs. Not a very big exaggeration

I think it does have some network effects. When people are sending you 800 line markdown "planning documents" and "specs", drowning you in slop, it induces demand for LLMs to re-deflate that content into something manageable.

I know it sounds extreme to dismiss that workflow, but I don't think people are talking enough about the subtle psychological consequences of LLM writing for this kind of thing.

In the same way that googling for an SEO article's superficial answer ends up meaning you never really bother to memorize it, "ask chat" seems to lead to never really bothering to think hard about it.

Of course I google things, but maybe I should be trying to learn in a way that minimizes the need. Maybe its important to learn how to learn in way that minimizes exposure to sycophantic average-blog-speak.

Yeah, same. I like the silo idea, I'll have to explore that.

I'm relieved to hear this because the LLM hype in this thread is seriously disorienting. Deeply convinced that coding "by hand" is just as defensible in the LLM age as handwriting was in the TTY age. My dopamine system is quite unconvinced though, killing me.

Hey I understand you've gotten something out of it. You hired a robot to 3d-print a mug that fits your hand. There's a place for that. You understand that it might poison you a little bit? You understand that this doesn't make ceramics irrelevant?

Hobby-project vibe coding is pretty cool (if I'm being honest, its fucking miraculous; this tech is wild) but isn't it clear that there's a problem with the linkedincels, the investors, the management that are all convinced this will remove say 50% of programming jobs? I understand these things have legitimate uses, but I'm at my wits end hearing about how deep understanding, craftsmanship, patience and hard work aren't "results oriented".

There's definitely zealotry developing against AI, but I suspect it is a proportional (if unhelpful) response to the hype machine. Is it really zealotry to insist on the value of your mind and your competence? These people saying you should never "hand write" your code-- how the fuck did the discourse move so much that this isn't a laughably stupid thing to say? "I'm a CEO, and if you aren't using consultants to make your decisions you've already lost"

You're fooling yourself.

People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.

Also trying to speak dispassionately: If your enemy presents as the most vulnerable as the most vulnerable of a population, shouldn't that be an indication that you're colonizing? That you're squeezing so hard, oppressing so vehemently that an entire people become your enemy? Or the entire people were your enemy the whole time.

I think these are reasons that Mastodon and Nostr aren't ever going to have a critical mass of users, remaining a niche thing for people who care about the hypotheticals (which is fine). Imho, BlueSky is the only distributed social media project that has a chance of meeting users where there are with usable search, realtime discoverability, and other consequences of centralizing event-busses.

People wine about BlueSky being too centralized, but the fact is that this type of infrastructure isn't self-hostable. You can do social-media over email a la Mastodon (which admittedly is pretty great), but most people will trade that for a walled garden.

The big problem is that all this AT infra is pretty much charity, which doesn't feel sustainable. I wish it could be funded more like public libraries than ad tech.

Lovely visualization. I like the very concrete depiction of middle layers "recognizing features", that make the whole machine feel more plausible. I'm also a fan of visualizing things, but I think its important to appreciate that some things (like 10,000 dimension vector as the input, or even a 100 dimension vector as an output) can't be concretely visualized, and you have to develop intuitions in more roundabout ways.

I hope make more of these, I'd love to see a transformer presented more clearly.

True, but Bluesky really does solve pains that closed platforms can’t/won’t. Having a choice over your algorithm is like getting lead out of your pipes, or getting a bidet or something.

I've found it somewhat valuable in two ways and unhelpful/misleading in another: 1. Making small notes is so intuitive and low-pressure. I was already essentially doing before but in the form of various lists of "ideas" or "thoughts on _blank_". You can't reliably decide where you would've put something, it becomes a mess. The fact its a single directory of .md's with a phrasal titles is a great organizing constraint. 2. Being able to find old thoughts/ideas easily and link them together lead to the clarification of a lot of my more unique ideas because of the ad hoc link-language that emerged. The big problems are the rabbit hole of manic articles promising too much, and the fact that after a while you simply have too many half-baked two-year-old notes that the whole thing becomes limiting and your declare note bankruptcy.

Just because LLMs are a technological innovation for "going to the gym" does not make cable machines a good metaphor. Maybe cable machines with cables made of highly variable grade hemp are comparable to LLMs-- they'll break randomly, and cause unexpected friction here and there. A cable machine still involves a human doing a thing. A forklift at the gym does the work instead.

All this fluff about targeting specific muscles etc is simply not analogous to LLMS. Maybe old-school barbells are paper files and fax machines, and cable machines are Slack, Asana, and Excel?

Bad analogy. More like, "Professional painter says he doesn't employ low wage contractors to paint for him"

If your rebuttal is "Michelangelo would've only painted the broad strokes and the faces" you're still missing the point that he still /did some painting/.

Woah, yeah just tried tfd.com and got 10 CF redirects, still not loading.

I've always been surprised by how rarely one encounters Pirandello, having read that he was one of the top Italian writers, but the story about his open support of Mussolini explained it pretty quick.

In 1924 a leading socialist was stabbed to death with a file by Mussolini "deputies", and in the ensuing public outrage Pirandello wrote an open letter to Mussolini: 'I will consider it the greatest honor to become one of your humblest and most obedient followers'.

Not a huge fan of the way these 'literary critique' pieces are written, but it was interesting nevertheless. The author alludes to some topicality of the 20th century fascist's mind, but doesn't provide anything specific.

I just looked up some numbers for UCLA as an example. <45k students (undergrad and grad) and >5k faculty (and another 30k on staff)— so thats a pessimistic ratio of 1 to 9.

If you imagine students take 4 classes per semester and faculty teach 4 per semester… it seems stunningly feasible.

This is a very good argument. We would also learn what features of an App Store add marketable value, and what features are trivial. I imagine the front end isn't very important, but some kind of build certification/verification is. That requires branding, infrastructure and labor. Maybe its easier than I imagine to verify that apps aren't lying about what they do, but as far as I can tell that could well account for some 5% at cost.

On the other hand you trust your bank, for example, so you follow the link on their website and install the App, and the trust came from their own brand.

And people like you will continue to have access to this curated experience. But developers who decide that access to you is not worth the platform fees will be able to pursue an alternative. Why wouldn't your bank remain on the App Store? Does the app store really lack that many dark patterns? (Billions spent gambling every year) Again: There is nothing to stop the walled gardens from being build, but they should be built within a competitive market!