That’s why I said it’s more expensive, but large companies can make it up in volume. The extra expense only makes sense if you can take advantage of the E.G. increased transport capacity provided.

Isn’t this functionally the same thing? What happens to smaller companies in this hypothetical? Are you not assuming that they get pushed out of the market shortly thereafter?

You’re assuming that LLMs can ever be made accurate. I think you might be able to make them somewhat more accurate, but you’ll never be able to trust their output implicitly.

I am assuming this. I am assuming that we’re at the bottom of this technology’s sigmoid curve, there is going to be a ton of growth in a relatively short amount of time. I guess we’ll have to wait to see which one of us has a better prediction.

As a programmer I am absolutely not worried in the slightest that LLMs are coming for my job. I’ve seen LLM produced programs, they’re an absolute trash fire, most of them won’t even compile let alone produce correct output. LLMs might be coming for really really bad programmers jobs, but anyone with even a shred of talent has nothing to worry about.

You have described the state of LLMs right now. Programming languages seem like a perfect fit for a LLM; they’re extremely structured and meticulously (well, mostly) defined. The concepts and algorithms used not overly complex for a LLM. There doesn’t need to be much in the way of novel creativity create solutions for standard use cases. The biggest difficulty I’ve seen is just getting the prompting clear enough. I think a majority of the software engineering field is on the chopping block, just like the “art for hire” crowd. People pushing the limits of the fields will be safe but that’s a catch 22, isn’t it? If low-level entry is impossible, how does one get to be a high-level professional?

And even if we take your [implied] stance that this is the top of the S-curve and LLMs aren’t going to get much better-- it will still be a useful tool for human programmers to increase productivity and reduce available jobs.

if we don’t adopt UBI, universal healthcare, and some amount of subsidized housing

This has been my stance for years. Automation is coming for all of us. The only reason LLMs are so controversial is that everyone in power assumed automation was coming for the blue collar jobs first, and now that it looks like white collar and creative jobs are on the chopping block, suddenly it’s important to protect people’s jobs from automation, put in safety nets, etc, etc.

Forgive my cynicism. haha

This feels like wishful thinking. Any automated system (cars, LLMs, etc) only need to be better than a human doing that job. Your example, for, um, example, ignores that self-driving trucks don’t need to take sleep breaks, or bathroom breaks, or spend time with their families, etc.

Using the assumption that this is the bottom of the curve for this LLM technology and that we still have a lot of expansion in the tech coming in a relatively short amount of time, then I would guess that any job that makes art that is “work for hire” will cease to exist, and I imagine programming is going to take a pretty big hit in available jobs. I don’t think you’ll be able to get rid of human programmers altogether, but you’ll need way fewer of them.

You shouldn’t trust ChatGPT for that, but your company could definitely spin up their own LLM and then we’re back at the problem.

One, it doesn’t seem like they’re comparable products for most uses.

ChatGPT, the user-facing website, is not comparable to google, but the technology itself is directly comparable. I am using Google’s own brand of chatbot-in-search (not bard, but probably is bard in the background) and it really does a good job taking the information from the top couple search results and compiling it together in one place for me to get the answer to my question. It seems (seems) less likely to hallucinate since it seems to be pulling information specifically from the search results; I obviously don’t accept what it outputs without clicking through to the source websites, but I could see that becoming unnecessary in the future, since so far I haven’t seen anything misrepresented or made up.

It’s like Google’s thing where they pull short answers to questions from popular websites (like wikipedia) but dialed to 11.

Trademark infringement, as opposed to copyright infringement, is all about customer confusion. If my vacuum repair shop is called 𝕏, then it’s not likely to cause customer confusion if a sandwich shop opens up and brands themselves as 𝕏.

This may be why there are so many different X trademarks, and why none of them “went after” each other.

If I remember correctly, Meta’s does pertain to social media, but as far as I know they’re not using it, so it might get messy there.

Also, in case it’s not clear. The 𝕏 is just a normal unicode character. Dude couldn’t even be bothered to pay someone to make a logo for him.

It’s mostly true, but not entirely. The data “on the internet” has to live somewhere. For instance, when you DM someone on a social media network-- would you consider that private? I assure you the content of those messages can be read by the website’s admin-users.

If you’re hosting your own non-social web service (like, personal cloud storage or something), then that is arguably private for you, but if you let someone else also use it, then it is not private for them, because you can almost certainly see their file content, having access to the server directly.

Encryption can throw all of this off; a service like Signal is private-- the admin-users of Signal can’t see your messages. Generally speaking any service that warns you that all your data will be lost if you forget your password is probably private. If they can recover your data, they have access to your data.

Edit: Better word choices.

If you spent $1 million a day since 0AD, you would not have spent $886 billion yet.

Nothing says “Hey ladies, we consider you Reproductive Chattel” like making the argument that women should be forced to give birth so that the state government can get more money.

I loved the game, myself, but I don’t often recommend it to people because of all the controversy around the creators of the game being fired and no longer having any control over the game.

However, there was recently an UpIsNotJump video reviewing (I guess?) the game and it goes above and beyond. I’ve used his videos to convince people to try out games before-- maybe it would help you convince your friends to give it another try.

Link here; it skips the cereal ad at the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXqXgGHRNkc&t=85s

A federal government being willing to enforce the law Reconstruction style and send in federal troops to effect the arrest of these traitors and the unconditional surrender of their government. Anything less is just giving the anti-democratic forces time to get stronger and chip away at more of our society.

At first I was writing a comment to say the Posse Comitatus Act wouldn’t allow this, but it seems like the Insurrection Act of 1807 is an exception, and would apply in this instance.

Specifically:

10 U.S. Code § 253 - Interference with State and Federal law

The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—

(1)so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
(2)opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.

Edit: I feel compelled to point out that we’re not here yet, because the SCOTUS order has a review process for the new voting maps, and if a judge rejects them, the judge can authorize a third party to draw the maps for Alabama. If the Alabama government rejects those third-party maps, then shit gets real.

You’re right, there’s not much the federal government can do to force this directly, but indirectly, they can decide where federal funding goes. and Alabama gets 41.2% of it’s state revenue from federal funding.

I think many of us are using reverse proxies, and opening port 443 (https) and maybe port 80 (http).

I have spent thousands of dollars over the years on my Plex setup. I’d caution against the assumption that switching to Plex and hosting your media is going to be cheaper in the short run, or maybe even the long run, than paying for streaming services. Depending on your use case you may even need to pay for Plexpass. (Hardware encoding, iirc, is locked behind their Plexpass subscription.) And factor in the inevitable troubleshooting you’ll have to do when something doesn’t work for your brother’s family.

Do the math for yourself, is all I’m saying. It’s not automatically the better solution.

I am in a similar boat (with Boox) but I set up my old Kindle Paperwhite for my kid just a few weeks ago and that’s when I learned that they finally gave up on mobi.

Probably people who seek out political groups on the Internet and don’t lean far right.

And would you consider your past self to have been well informed?

A demographic notoriously known for being well informed. /s

It is trivial to sign up for a service when you want to watch something, and then cancel it when you don’t, until there’s something else you want to watch on the service. That is the benefit over cable.

Most people still treat it like a cable subscription: always on, even if they’re not watching it.

I don’t know if this is what you meant, but Amazon dropped support for mobi and switched to epub in late 2022, iirc. Not that this means you suddenly should start using Amazon or anything.