It's so blatantly tied to who's likely to lose the most money. The unreal part to me is that the major news outlets are so much more obvious in their framing now.
AI has a lot of rich people riding on its success, and this time's different for, IMO, two major reasons...
- First, the companies most invested in AI are perfusing it everywhere. Many parts of these big businesses, if not the business as a whole, is invested heavily in the success of LLM-based products. Microsoft is probably the poster child for this, where you can't use practically any of their modern products without copilot or some such being shoved in your face. OpenAI and Anthropic are both companies whose existence is predicated only by a viable LLM-based product. Nvidia and (as of their last-week's announcement) Micron are both now also heavily invested in the success of this technology, though they're also surely not the only companies in the hardware sector to be following this path to some degree.
- Second, the actual individuals behind these companies are the world's richest people, and much of their fortune comes from stock in these companies, and loans taken out against that stock.
They stand to *personally* lose a significant-even-to-them sum of money if the bottom falls out of this thing. If this weren't the case, I'm absolutely certain we wouldn't be seeing as much reporting about how an AI crash would hurt the average household. When smaller crashes happen (even those that affect more average households), it's inevitable, or it's good for the economy in the long-term (it's a correction, after all -- how could that possibly be bad?), or it's the consequence of people's personal choice to invest one way or another, but because the uber-rich were spared, it's *not really that bad.*
This is a disgusting turn in the state of journalism. I don't pretend know what comes next, or how this can be remedied. Crowdsourced news is as prone to manipulation as "traditional" centralized news, so that's not it, and I don't think people have the depth of knowledge to use something purely fact-based (like bellingcat) for every domain of day-to-day life (which is less an effect of the US education system being in continuous decline over decades, and more an effect of the cognitive load it takes to be familiar enough with everything to be able to draw reasonable conclusions about it.
This take is almost as condescending as saying that Ruby isn't a serious language.
Ruby arose and became popular because it caters to a niche that was underserved by the competitors of the time (and while I'm no historian, I think Rails had a big role to play in Ruby's popularity).
Ruby is very ergonomic, and so is Rails. Frankly, almost 10 years after moving on from it, ActiveRecord is the yardstick by which I measure the ergonomics of all other ORMs in other languages, but what ergonomic means will vary from domain to domain.
With languages like Ruby and Python, it's very easy to get from nothing to an app that will work generally well enough almost straight away. A lightweight syntax, a lot of implicit functionality, and a flexible type system are all great for that, but in my current niche, I couldn't use it (I currently work with Rust, and the explicit control is a huge selling point, despite the much heavier syntax and more complicated semantics). That doesn't mean Rust was built without the human experience of using it in mind, though, and arguably the opposite's true.
This seems like a very one-dimensional take. It's not invalid per se, but it really overlooks why states emerged in the first place (and I'm talking more about large, geographically-cohesive groups of people more than nations as the concept's come to be known in the last 2-3 hundred years).
The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.
Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.
I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
Odd, I've never seen a theory of state creation that starts with the benefits of scaling "electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing". Those are quite modern benefits, so seem like odd choices to illustrate your point.
I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.
This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.
I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.
Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.
So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.
Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.
Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.
What would it take to make money? Double or triple the pricing. Most of these companies messed on pricing initially. ChatGPT Plus/ Claude Plus (or whatever it is called) are $20/month. These should be $80 to $100/month products. Probably even more, $200.
But then, how do you get the users and growth figures that justify the current boom in infrastructure build-up? A high equilibrium might be profitable to a few companies and useful to a few rich customers, but it’s far from justifying current valuations.
A lot of this is a matter of opinion, so I don't think it's useful to argue at length... but at least two of the people in the honourable mentions are literal convicted criminals and high-profile scammers.
Even if you're willing to discount their motive for advancing the cause of cryptocurrency, as far as I'm concerned, neither should these people be given any kind of honourable acknowledgement, nor is it even settled that cryptocurrencies are a net-positive for society, or that they serve their intended purpose, for the most part.
To elaborate on that last part: Bitcoin, a crypto asset which at this point is substantially not used as a currency, is still proof-of-work, which at that scale is immensely environmentally impactful; in the cases where Bitcoin is still used as a currency, a considerable amount of that exchange volume is in support of scams.
It's specifically been opt-out: `browser.ml.enable` is set to `true` in `about:config` in recent versions, and even disabling that doesn't get rid of the "AI assistant" option in the right-click dropdown menu.
browser.ml.chat.enabled set to false
browser.ml.chat.menu set to false
browser.ml.chat.page set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge set to false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts set to false
browser.ml.chat.sidebar set to false
browser.ml.enable set to false
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled set to false
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled set to false
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable set to false
extensions.ml.enabled set to false
That should do it.
Can also use the user config override if you want to do it without having to do that every time you install FF somewhere new (put user.js in the root folder of your firefox profile).
At this point, it's easier to start with a privacy-focused, AI-free fork, like LibreWolf, and turn some stuff on to stop it breaking sites that have privacy-hostile workings, like disabling that LibreWolf exclusive fingerprinting protection that many sites don't play nice with.
You can remove it directly from the right-click menu, but that's really not my point.
Mozilla has now shoved AI down my throat as a user of Firefox. It's one thing if they want to pursue questionable business directions on a purely opt-in basis -- that's their prerogative -- and while I'll take issue with what was in my opinion one of the last bastions of the open web burning money like that, ultimately, at least they didn't force it on the user.
It's another thing when they impose it on the user base, and a user base, at that, that's probably more sensitive to having the latest trend shoved in our faces than the average browser user (I'm not saying this to sound elitist; on the contrary, I think FF attracts obstinate, almost luddite types when it comes to new technology; I think many of us just want a basic, relatively no-frills browser).
Maybe it's a generational thing -- I haven't had to use a standalone calculator in my professional life -- but what's the benefit of using RPN as opposed to the more common infix notation?
Beyond that... do RPN calculators like these usually include the option to use infix notation?
It eliminates the need for parentheses and operator precedence, which is honestly nearly half of the character count of my usual infix math. You can just keep performing new calculations and then later on decide how you want to combine them. It's pretty great.
The iPhone calculator, for example, only recently added parenthesis. However, with prefix notation you have to plan out your open parenthesis, and if you forgot one you have to back up. With postfix, the parenthesis are implicit. Which is faster? “2 2 + 2 x” or “2 + 2 = x 2 =“ for 2(2+2)
On a basic four-function calculator, you can do "2 + 2 x 2 =" to get 8 without the extra = in the middle. RPN really shines when you use the stack for real. "(2 + 3) x (4 + 5)" is "2 3 + 4 5 + x" in RPN, but on a four-function this requires the stateful memory buttons and gets out of control fast. You may need to spill out to pen-and-paper with a four-function calculator, but you never need that with RPN. I'm less certain that the comparison works out in RPN's favor if you have a calculator with parentheses--where are you getting the complex expression that you're entering? If it's on paper, then it's already in infix notation and you had to mentally convert it to RPN inside-out. Entering the infix notation may be more keystrokes but likely less mental effort because it's more of a direct transcription. I taught a sibling how to use an HP-12C and I don't think they're ever gaining that time back in efficiency.
Way back around ‘84 in the military I was doing the artillery survey calculations for the Lance (potentially nuclear) missile. We had to store first the program into the volatile hp memory, run check calculations before doing the real calculations. I always found the calculations very efficient - they had to be as they had to be done within certain time limits (and independently checked). It was a strange feeling thinking about doing the calculations under high pressure and what the stakes were if you would get the coordinates or directions wrong in case it would be used.
Beyond the fast entry (no parentheses), I like RPN because I find it a more intuitive way of working with numbers.
I do not need to think about my operation before I start inputting numbers. I can type in the numbers I'll need, and while seeing them I run operations on them.
I resent the implication that us being separate countries is a "historical quirk." It's condescending at best and exemplifies why we feel increasingly distant from the US.
It's like saying that Belgium and the Netherlands, or Spain and Portugal, or Germany and Switzerland are one historical quirk away from being the same countries.
You are the one making the assumption that I meant Canada should be controlled by the US when I meant and wrote no such thing.
And Europe _absolutely_ should unite under a single government instead of this pseudo national semi-single-currency/market with a vague poorly representative European government designed mostly just to dance around the fact that these small states are stuck on archaic nationalist ideas and can't get along with a unified purpose. The world needs the strength a unified Europe could provide to counteract Russian aggression, the growth of Chinese power, and the crumbling cornerstone of world order the US is going through.
> It's like saying that Belgium and the Netherlands, or Spain and Portugal, or Germany and Switzerland are one historical quirk away from being the same countries.
I think you could say this about any of those countries, although Switzerland's mountainous location means that it would always resist being part of a larger polity.
I've heard the same rhetoric (we're brothers, all will be fine) from many russians days before 2022 star of proper war in Ukraine. This feeling sadly means nothing in large enough scale.
I mean, it's entirely possible that a historic quirk 300+ years ago leads to an increasingly distant relationship today.
It's definitely possible to intepret this the way Russia speaks about Ukraine - "They shouldn't even be a country *except for a historical quirk", but a charitable interpretation would be more along the lines of "things could have gone slightly differently and we'd be countrymen, but instead we brothers from a different mother (country)".
> I resent the implication that us being separate countries is a "historical quirk." It's condescending at best and exemplifies why we feel increasingly distant from the US.
I mean that's a bit of an exaggeration. Canadians are basically Americans for all practical purpose to the degree you can barely tell them apart. It doesn't help that Canada has lacked any real national identity other then listing the few minor differences between it and the USA for decades.
> Canadians are basically Americans for all practical purpose to the degree you can barely tell them apart. It doesn't help that Canada has lacked any real national identity other then listing the few minor differences between it and the USA for decades.
Why does this even mean? Does national identity even really matter? It's like saying Californians are basically Texans for all practical purpose. Men and women are pretty similar. To suggest that they're so similar they may as well be the same is absolutely condescending.
In the context of this whole article aka getting people to join the military it 100% matters. Do you think people are going to fight and die for a concept they don't care about?
>It's condescending at best and exemplifies why we feel increasingly distant from the US.
As a Canadian, why would it be condescending to suggest that at some point in the distant past, Canada and the U.S. could have been a single country had history played out slightly differently? There is nothing offensive about it, if anything the fact that it's a claim about a historical matter only highlights how the two countries have evolved separately and independently.
Furthermore your other points are kind of bizzare. Spain and Portugal could absolutely have been a single country, and in fact they were under the Iberian Union. There are numerous other instances where the two countries came close to unifying.
The historical possibility of a unified Belgium and the Netherlands is even stronger since those two countries had been unified twice.
Germany and Switzerland however is a long shot, but at any rate I don't think anyone from Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain or Portugal would take offense or find it condescending that some historical event could have gone differently and reshaped all of Europe... taking offense to that suggestion as a Canadian, even during these times seems overly insecure and I don't think it's a sentiment shared by most of us.
Although I don't deny it could've happened, Spain and Portugal were different kingdoms during the Iberian Union (Philip II of Spain was known as Philip I of Portugal.)
It's condescending to describe it as a quirk, in the sense that it's no more a quirk than anything else in history. In the current climate where this sort of rhetoric has been publicly and visibly used by Russia to justify their invasion of Ukraine, and by the PRC to justify their ongoing pressure campaigns against the ROC, I also don't take this kind of wording at face value.
Wars were fought. People died, generations were involved in discourse about national identity and where borders should be drawn.
The US and Canada were both at one point British properties, so by some definitions, we also used to be unified. Then we weren't.
Is it insecure? Maybe. The reality is that in a shooting war, we wouldn't last very long against the US, in all likelihood. Under these conditions, the least I can do is to push back against rhetoric that undermines our legitimacy as our own country.
Create a market segment where everything costs more for everyone, "employ" countless people -- usually on restrictive work visas and with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections -- to be the boots on the ground of the operation, pay those people so little that they drive and ride dangerously in traffic, bike lanes, and on sidewalks to eke out more money out of the system, get people used to paying $40 for a burger, and then just... automate the whole thing away?
This is an ethical no-win scenario for companies like Doordash in my mind, but it's one of their own making. Food delivery as a business catering to the general public needs to go away (with exceptions for meals on wheels-type operations serving the sick and the old who may otherwise not be able to get food on their own).
In house delivery has existed for a lot of business for a long time. For instance, nearly every pizza store would do delivery themselves. Many still do. However those services didn't introduce a middleman between you, the store, and the driver who extracted money from all 3.
When you operate a delivery service for your restaurant, there's A lot of overhead. You have to strike a balance between paying deliverers their wages, and timely service for your customers. If you mismatch your number of deliverers to the business you have for the day, then you're either throwing away money, or making your customers wait a very long time for their food, which also may have knock-on effects in the kitchen, if you don't want the food to be cold, you might need to wait to start preparing it until your delivery guy is on the way back from his route. Outsourcing delivery to a delivery company seems like a win from restaurants, which is probably why so many have signed up for it.
Problems with the current companies aside, asserting that we just shouldn't have general food delivery services at any price is strange. You could make the same argument against take-out too - anyone aside from the sick and the old is capable of cooking their own meals too, restaurant kitchen work is a notoriously poor work environment at low wages, etc...
> with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections
Sweet summer child, they know very well what they're doing. The instances I've interacted with employees at those companies, they know exactly what kind of future they're building towards, and most of them seem very eager to get there, regardless of existing regulations.
> Food delivery as a business catering to the general public needs to go away
Why though? There is clearly demand for it in some way. We've been doing food delivery to the general public for decades, is it the amount of selection that you're against or food delivery as a whole?
I agree that VC-funded startups that aim to basically crash industries because they're flush with cash, so they then can jack up prices should go away, but I don't see that linked with "Food Delivery" as a concept, we should be able to regulate one of them without getting rid of the other.
I personally have never ordered food from any delivery service and only a few times a year from any restaurant at all, because I know how to cook and worse case, make a peanut butter sandwich.
But if people are going to order food to go, is it better to have everyone driving to pick it up or better to have one driver picking up and delivering multiple orders at once?
I mean, in a world of finite resources and pollution, which is better?
People using these services know how to cook, they're usually trying to save time. Especially if they don't want to interrupt their work to ready a meal.
You can pre-order lunch to arrive for your lunchtime meetings in about a minute in the app. Probably less convenient if you have an apartment, compared to a house, though.
lol this is capitalism buddy. food delivery exists because people want it and pay for it, you actually don't get a say at all on if it needs to 'go away'.
Are Ortega and Newton mutually exclusive? Isn't the case much more likely that both:
- Significant advances by individuals or small groups (the Newtons, Einsteins, or Gausses of the world), enable narrowly-specialized, incremental work by "average" scientists, which elaborate upon the Great Advancement...
- ... And then those small achievements form the body of work upon which the next Great Advancement can be built?
Our potential to contribute -- even if you're Gauss or Feynman or whomever -- is limited by our time on Earth. We have tools to cheat death a bit when it comes to knowledge, chief among which are writing systems, libraries of knowledge, and the compounding effects of decades or centuries of study.
A good example here might be Fermat's last theorem. Everyone who's dipped their toes in math even at an undergraduate level will have at least heard about it, and about Fermat. People interested in the problem might well know that it was proven by Andrew Wiles, who -- almost no matter what else he does in life -- will probably be remembered mainly as "that guy who proved Fermat's last theorem." He'll go down in history (though likely not as well-known as Fermat himself).
But who's going to remember all the people along the way who failed to prove Fermat? There have been hundreds of serious attempts over the four-odd centuries that the theorem had been around, and I'm certain Wiles had referred to their work while working on his own proof, if only to figure out what doesn't work.
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There's another part to this, and that's that as our understanding of the world grows, Great Advancements will be ever more specialized, and likely further and further removed from common knowledge.
We've gone from a great advancement being something as fundamental as positing a definition of pi, or the Pythagorean theorem in Classical Greece; to identifying the slightly more abstract, but still intuitive idea that white light is a combination of all other colours on the visible spectrum and that the right piece of glass can refract it back into its "components" during the Renaissance; to the fundamentally less intuitive but no less groundbreaking idea of atomic orbitals in the early 20th century.
The Great Advancements we're making now, I struggle to understand the implications of even as a technical person. What would a memristor really do? What do we do with the knowledge that gravity travels in waves? It's great to have solved n-higher-dimensional sphere packing for some two-digit n... but I'll have to take you at your word that it helps optimize cellular data network topology.
The amount of context it takes to understand these things requires a lifetime of dedicated, focused research, and that's to say nothing of what it takes to find applications for this knowledge. And when those discoveries are made and their applications are found, they're just so abstract, so far removed from the day-to-day life of most people outside of that specialization, that it's difficult to even explain why it matters, no matter what a quantum leap that represents in a given field.
AI has a lot of rich people riding on its success, and this time's different for, IMO, two major reasons...
- First, the companies most invested in AI are perfusing it everywhere. Many parts of these big businesses, if not the business as a whole, is invested heavily in the success of LLM-based products. Microsoft is probably the poster child for this, where you can't use practically any of their modern products without copilot or some such being shoved in your face. OpenAI and Anthropic are both companies whose existence is predicated only by a viable LLM-based product. Nvidia and (as of their last-week's announcement) Micron are both now also heavily invested in the success of this technology, though they're also surely not the only companies in the hardware sector to be following this path to some degree.
- Second, the actual individuals behind these companies are the world's richest people, and much of their fortune comes from stock in these companies, and loans taken out against that stock.
This is a disgusting turn in the state of journalism. I don't pretend know what comes next, or how this can be remedied. Crowdsourced news is as prone to manipulation as "traditional" centralized news, so that's not it, and I don't think people have the depth of knowledge to use something purely fact-based (like bellingcat) for every domain of day-to-day life (which is less an effect of the US education system being in continuous decline over decades, and more an effect of the cognitive load it takes to be familiar enough with everything to be able to draw reasonable conclusions about it.reply