Everyone has a smartphone lol - i can tell that living in a country with great digital services is a lot less stressful than in country with no digitization and old school paperwork i have gone through both.
If smartphones are to be a requirement for participation in civil society, privacy- and freedom-preserving smartphones are needed at the very least. People shouldn't be required to submit to some company's Terms of Service in order to participate in society.
Meaningful regulation would mean e.g. air-gapped infrastructure so they can't make inadvertent privacy mistakes. And guaranteed service levels, and a service of last resort.
Google have based built a business model without accountability and transparency. Which is fine, as long as we're not forced to use them by the state.
Telcos are licensed. Mobile phone manufacturers and, crucially, OS providers, are not. Although in the EU they are now subject to some Digital Markets Act control.
And telco licensing isn't even really relevant. Afaik, licensing condition only has to do with their use of the airwaves and other such technical stuff. It's got nothing to do with ensuring the rights of the telco users.
> Should everyone be required to use private banks to access e.g. foreign exchange?
Maybe so, I don't know. Though it is worth remarking that "private" banks in the US really are only semi-private. The (admittedly imperfect) regulations that banks are subject to starts to blur the lines between public and private. Not to mention that there are far more banks than smartphone handset-and-OS makers.
> No modern society is going to maintain a parallel government economy to serve the vanishingly small minority who live in fear of private companies.
This is not the only option (though it would potentially be an option for some sufficiently-powerful societies). Other options could include:
1. Multilateral coalitions to do some combination of specify/design/build smartphones and/or their OS
2. Specify a set of user rights and regulate smartphone handset and OS manufacturers accordingly
As a sibling commenter said, this isn't about living in fear of private companies as such. It's about not wanting to be coerced into a system of products that don't preserve liberal rights.
Not everybody wants to carry a smartphone around all the time.
If the ID becomes about more than proving right to work, and becomes a daily carry, it's not hard to see the appeal of a government down the line tapping into an always on-hand microphone, GPS, internet enabled device.
Even putting the tin foil hat aside, I and many people like me enjoy leaving the phone at home, and want as little time spent on the thing as possible.
Yup. Look at train tickets in England. For now it's a convenience but you'll notice the law hasn't kept up with the push to have tickets on phones: the law still says you must produce on demand a ticket when requested. So if your battery runs out or your phone crashes or the app glitches or you've annoyed the "safety" department of Google/Apple... it's entirely your problem
A moody ticket inspector is under no obligation really to give you a few minutes to sort it out
Or, if like I experienced yesterday, the most popular train ticket app stutters during peak rush hour and you cannot display the ticket you have actually bought to the conductor and exit gates at the destination.
Digital is more convenient at the loss of privacy. And no, absolutely not, NOT everyone has a smartphone nor can use one. Go read the thread on teaching iPhones to seniors.
Not everyone has a smartphone. A substantial number of especially older people don't. Plus poor people, and just.. well, offline people whose lives are much more communal than ours. The requirement for a hundreds-of-units-of-currency device to prove who you are is bonkers.
But this isn't a conversation about people being excluded from the latest JS framework, this is a conversation about people not using a smartphone being increasingly excluded from pretty fundamental things. App only tickets for public transportation? Grandma can't do that. E-voting? Grandma can't do that. Online banking? Grandma can't do that, because grandma struggles to send a text message much less to navigate a modern app with five different dickbars that is outright designed to get people to sign up for marketing trash.
Having an option for digital ID is great, and there are many potential benefits to it. Requiring a modern smartphone for it is wildly out of touch.
>Second, you're on the wrong forum complaining that people need a device to do things in life.
I think it's exactly right forum, because we know how unreliable and unmagical are those things and are in a good position to judge the risk of relying on them too much.
I do feel that AI has been overhyped a bit for now, but what happens when we scale our electricity and GPU production 10x, 100x, go nuclear etc and can 100x AI models - lets see. Its too early to tell really.
The amusing thing is that it takes several orders of magnitude less data to bring up a human to reasonably competent adulthood, which means that there is something fundamentally flawed in the brute-force approach to training LLMs, if the goal is to get to human-equivalent competency.
Also the fact that 30B models, while less capable than 300B+ models, are not quite one whole order of magnitude less capable, suggests that all things being equal, capability scales sub-linearly to parameter count. It's even more flagrant with 4B models, honestly. The fact that those are serviceable at all is kind of amazing.
Both factors add up to the hunch that a point of diminishing returns must soon be met, if it hasn't already. But as long as no one asks where all the money went I suppose we can keep going for a while still. Just a few more trillions bro, we're so close.
I suspect there’s a good deal baked into a human brain we’re not fully aware of. So babies aren’t starting from zero, they have billions of years of evolution to bootstrap from.
For example, language might not be baked in, but the software for quickly learning human languages certainly is.
To take a simple example, spiders aren’t taught by their mothers how to spin webs. They do it instinctively. So that means the software for spinning a web is in the spider’s DNA.
I don't think we can even do a "Handbook of LLM techniques" at this point and have something thick enough to raise a monitor. It's all in the Data. First they started with copyrighted material, then public sources (maybe private sources as well), and now they are hammering every server in existence to get moooorre..
> what happens when we scale our electricity and GPU production 10x, 100x
Nothing interesting without some fundamental breakthrough IMO. Model/agent providers add another level of "thinking" that uses 10x the energy for 10% gain on benchmarks.
They also typically dilute human input with self-talk. You can steer them in a direction, but the internal conversation can convince itself otherwise.
It’s not frequent but it’s very frustrating when it happens.
Agree - I wanted to try this and I expect it to work like YouTube or close as possible. I am not watching 5 minute demo or signing up for a random project even if I would love to use YouTube in a more mindful way. Just give me a search bar and allow me to search 10 times for free and then I might sign up.
I don't even know what it is based on the first impression. If you're trying to be the alternative to X, a comparison of "how this works" might be enough to get me to give you an email - though signing in to use it immediately feels like YT, not an alternative. Your "Why Choose FocusStream?" points are all over the place and unlikely to resonate equally with your audience. I'd suggest attacking the competition with the one major differentiator and then showing how that works.Example "See video lengths upfront, track your progress, and make every minute count." is not nearly as compelling as "No ads, no autoplay" IMO.
Finally, I find this contradictory: "no algorithmic rabbit holes... Tell us your interests. We find the highest-quality videos from across the web" - I suspect what you're trying to provide is curation focused on helping me learn about specific topics vs. serving up what will keep me engaged and watching longer. If that's accurate something like "algorithmic recommendations that REDUCE how much time you spend on our site" would be a unique value prop.
“The only way to go fast, is to go well.” Robert C. Martin
Maybe spaghetti code delivers value as quickly as possible in the short term, but there is a risk that it will catch up in the long term - hard to add features, slow iterations - ultimately losing customers, revenue and growth.
Anecdotally I'm already seeing this on a small scale. People who vibe coded a prototype to 1 mil ARR are realizing that the velocity came at the cost of immense technical debt. The code has reached a point where it is essentially unmaintainable and the interest payments on that technical debt are too expensive. I think there's going to be a lot of money to be made over the next few years un-fucking these sort of things so these new companies can continue to scale.
So basically the new version of the 1990's people's projects that grew to high ARR based on their random Visual Basic codebase? That's how software companies have been starting for 30 years.
if i have 1mil ARR, i can hire some devs to remake my product from scratch. and use the Vibecoded Example as a design mockup.
If i manage to vibecode something alone that takes off, even without technical expertise, then you validated the AI usecase...
Before Claude i had to make a paper prototype or a figma, now i can make Slop that looks and somehow functions the way i want.
i can make preliminary tests, and even get to some proof of concept. in some cases even 1million $ annual revenue...
Yes, this is exactly where AI shines: PoCs and validating ideas. The problems come when you're ready to scale. And the "I can hire some devs to remake my product from scratch" part is the exact money making scenario some of my consulting friends are starting to see take shape in the market.
But people say this about technology in software engineering time and time again.
VB? VBA macros in Excel? Delphi? Uhh... Wordpress? Python as a language?
Well you see these are just for prototypes. These are just for making an MVP. They're not the real product.
But they are the real product. I've almost never seen these been successfully used as just for prototyping or MVPs. It always becomes the real codebase and it's a hot fucking mess 99% of the time.
What ends up happening is that humans get "woven" into the architecture/processes, so that people with pagers keep that mess going even though it really should not be running at that scale.
This is where the missmatch is, the future is not in scaled apps, the future is in everyone being able to make their own app.
You don't have to feature pack if you are making a custom app for your custom use case, and LLMs are great with slim narrow purpose apps.
I don't think LLMs will replace developers, but I am almost certain they will radically change how end users use computers, even if the tech plateaus right now.
> the future is in everyone being able to make their own app.
Everyone can do their own plumbing and electrical work in their homes too. For some people it works out, for others it's still better to pay someone else to do it for them.
I guess that depends on how you get that ARR-figure. If more than all of it goes to paying your AI bills, then you can't really afford that much engineering investment.
Or, you can be like many modern CTOs: AI will likely get better and eventually be capable of mostly cleaning up its own mess today. In which case, YOLO - your startup dies, or AI is sufficiently advanced enough by the time it succeeds. The objections about quality only matter if you think it’s going to plateau.
That is, literally, faith-based business management. "We suck, sure - but wait, a miracle will SURELY happen in version 5. Or 6. Or 789. It will happen eventually, have faith and shovel money our way."
I suspect it's going to tank instead of getting better, no matter what they try to do with attention or agents or whatever, especially if it's training on AI-written code of which there will be more and more of as time goes on. I'm not an AI expert by any means, so take that with a grain of salt.
This is true, but what I've come to realize is companies only prioritize the short term, no matter what, no exceptions. They take everything on as debt.
They don't care about losing customers 10 years later because they're optimizing for next quarter. But they do that every quarter.
Does this eventually blow up? Uh, yeah, big time. Look at GE, Intel, Xerox, IBM, you name it.
But you can get shockingly far only thinking about tomorrow over and over again. Sometimes, like, 100 years far. Well by then we're all dead anyway so who cares.
