GPT3 released four years ago, in terms of iterations beyond that, we are at ~v5, and progress has only been incremental relative to that milestone. The transformer models can only be scaled so far before not even VC money can sustain training. I believe we will get there eventually, but transformer based LLMs have been hitting a roof for a long time, and we need to think differently.
Replacing managers is a walk in the park compared to replacing programmers. The focus is on programming because that is the benchmark, if we can outsource that to AI, then we can replace everyone.
On the contrary, this tantrum by no means works to lessen the growing idea that control of the platform should be put into the hands of a independent third party.
While not European in origin, the platform holds and manages tremendous value for us, to the extent where small changes can cause mayor economic disruption, and Apple has not been managing it fairly.
And for a state actor, which exists to serve the common good, it is not acceptable that a single company holds and abuses this kind of power.
The EU is economically meaningless on the grand scale. They are only 7% of Apple's revenue, and similarly low for other companies. And every day they become a less profitable market to operate in. The EU holds power only as long as the rest of the world is willing to deal with its BS.
Trying to "break up Apple" is simply not within the EU's power as Apple is worth more than the EU's whole tech industry combined. Apple would simply leave and the whole region would be left with shiny bricks.
If the EU pursues this with big tech at large it will find itself in the 80s. It needs US big tech far more than US big tech needs it.
Last time I checked, Apples holdings are all based in Ireland. So from a legal standpoint, it's a Irish company, held accountable by EU law. It can't "simply leave".
Certainly feels great to have your livelyhood kicked to the curb by some rich american megacorporation throwing a tantrum.
The worst part is that probably 40 percent of the development time has been trying to wrangle my way around weird rendering quirks in safari, never again. My next site will have a banner suggesting safari users open the site in firefox..
Norway as an independent actor is too small to carry any weight in this matter.
Our best bet is to hedge our interest as an extended member of the European Union, and even there we have a limited say.
My partner and I are both sick and tired of feeling like our purpose in life is to make rich people richer, and we reached the age where we realized there is no glory in corporate life, only a endless hamster wheel.
So we quit our jobs, sold our house, and bought a sailboat that we are working on making fully independent with solar and a watermaker.
We still need money though.
In the short term we have a cash buffer, in the long term we are hoping to do two things, optimize our cost of living and increase the revenue of the side business. If we are unable to balance the needle within three years, we will start taking on freelance assignments.
^ This is textbook Great Resignation. Wild to imagine the consequences to society if 20-30% embrace this for a prolonged period. Curious what is it about the pandemic that triggered this?
My hypothesis is that a lot of people were willing to work for the system when they believed the system could protect them from bad things. Covid upended this sense of security, since the system was not capable of handling it and/or guaranteeing protection, so people re-evaluated the social contract and whether promises to them were being met.
I also think that it kicked people in the pants and made them realize they had no idea how much time they had left. Confronting their own mortality made them realize what they actually wanted out of life.
It was weird for me to watch, because I was diagnosed with MS in 2016 and went through a personal version of that, just to come out the other side and watch everybody else have the same crisis.
Me and my girlfriend is building something similar, but targeting a different niche, a personal non-collaborative knowledge tree. Would love to connect and share ideas if you are up for it! https://ember.ly
But with users comes problems that we currently don't have the money or time to deal with. After the workday is complete, we have on average 2-3 hours to work on the platform. If we did this under the cape of a "big-brother", we would have more time and resources to deal with issues that we currently can't, such as marketing, legal and economic issues. And would be able to dedicate the entire day to get the system ready to go public.
If we could dedicate the entire day to development of the system, we could release in a matter of weeks.
At the current rate we are lucky if we can get the system online by early-spring, but considering that this is not a traditional social b2c startup, that might be fine.
Find users that understand the limitations and find value in the product. That also means that what you work on will be what the users actually want rather than what they might want or what is fun to work on.
A good filter for what users find valuable is that they will pay for it.
1. What's the business model that uses open source?
2. Yes, I have an opinion. Fooling around with open sourcing the project is easier than shipping something useful and finding users and engaging with them. Until a significant fraction of people care about the project, nobody cares whether it's open source.
3. Open sourcing a project is not a road to free labor. Building a community of users is a potential way to garner useful pull requests. But a community of users comes first.
4. Generally, my impression is that building a community of open source users is harder than finding customers for a business.
Think in steps.
Get 10 users, make em happy.
Ask yourself how to get to 50, if no answer look at possible marketing campaign, open sourcing is one option for a marketing campaign
Thanks for the advice, that is a clever way to think about user-acquisition, breaking it down into smaller parts.
We will try this once the next beta is ready!
