Would it be less dystopian for Operating Systems to ship with their own browser that ships with their own models? Or do you find the current situation where Operating Systems ship with browsers dystopian?
I find the very idea of this AI thing making its way through like a virus onto our computer systems (either in centralised form, as it mostly happens now, or installed locally, like this article writes about) quite dystopian. On the other hand I do not find the idea of the Internet browser as dystopian (even though a data and corporate behemoth like Alphabet being the entity behind Chrome is indeed dystopian, I agree on that).
On a second thought you're on to something, maybe if we hadn't let the Internet browser take over our computer-lives as much as it did in the last 20 or so years then Chrome (under its current manifestation, that is) wouldn't have happened. At least we are now aware of the dangers awaiting in front of us when it comes to AI.
Which is why this feels so artificial and why it’s the 3rd most read article on the front page of the FT. Running as a sport has been very sadly and irremediably gentrified, gone are the days of Zatopek and of Abebe Bikila winning an Olympic marathon barefooted. Fuck Ineos and its owner, too, while I’m at it.
It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading (even tens of thousands of pages of) documentation, that is the crust of it.
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It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading
I don't think so: the problem is that there exist lots of parts in the system that are quite complicated but which one very rarely has to touch - except in the rare (but happening) case that something deep in such a part goes wrong a for requirement for this part pops up.
If you "learned by doing" instead of reading, you are suddenly confronted with a very subtle and complicated subsystem.
In other words: there mostly exist two kinds of tasks:
- easy, regular adjustments
- deep changes that require a really good understanding of the system
I tend to document some tricky non-obvious pieces of knowledge directly above the relevant code. "We have to do X below instead of obvious-first-idea-Y because Z".
Any time a refactoring comes up which moves code around, AI (or my coworkers) remove those comments without thinking twice, and I need to tell them "hey this is still valid".
It's kind of a learning JIT. It's no use to go through and memorize something you don't need in the short term. It's hard to memorize well and by the time you need to draw on the knowledge it's already hazy.
This is why you can think of such documentation more as a reference manual and not just plain documentation.
In any case, AI is great for traversing a codebase and producing at least a draft of such documentation.
> Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products?
The OP did mention GE Capital, the motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing. And of massaging the accounting books in order to increase shareholder value in the short term, also.
> motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing
I doubt they are bigger than other national "heavy industry" champions from East Asia and Western/Central Europe. Without checking, I would guess that the global leaders are Boeing and Airbus.
Back in the day GE (including GE Capital) was, on paper at least, the largest company in the world when it comes to market cap, my memory is fuzzy but I’d say that happened just after the Dot Com crash and going into the Great Recession. Greater than a heavy industry company like Samsung, yes. Again, this was in a big part as a result of GE Capital doing very scammy things, but for a good few years Jack Welch was regarded like an actually business guru.
Seeing that type of email coming from a company like Anduril would honestly freak me the frick out, no ifs and no buts about it. Which probably means I'd never be part of their target audience.
> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast
I'm not an American, never set foot in the US for that matter, but I'd say I'm pretty sympathetic to the people actually living there. All this to say that I've recently had the same realisation as you when it comes to West Coast people vs East Coast people, by this point the SV automatons are way, way outside of "normal life", maybe that has always been the case but for sure back in those days SV didn't have the same power as it has now (I'm not talking money, even though that is important, I'm talking actual power to have control over people's lives), not by a long shot.
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
I can confirm that French paperbacks are in a league of their own, my almost weekly purchases at the French bookstore here in Bucharest are a example of that (never visited Japan, but a French friend of mine who’s also a book rat and who staid in Tokyo for about a year told me about the same you’re saying about them). On the other hand I could never understand the Anglos’ infatuation with a book not being serious enough if it’s not hardback, maybe a reflection of their castle-owning days, when one had enough space to store them. I’m kidding, but only by half.
I’d also want to show my appreciation for Italian publishers, for some of them, at least, the quality of their some of their books can be quite high (Laterza and Einaudi from the top of my head, but there are others, too).
About this book: "Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders", and especially about this source of information:
> Shlomo Goitein used the documents that were serendipitously discovered in the geniza of the Cairo synagogue
I'm still waiting for a proper "inclusion" of their contents in the "main" historical discourse, it's a pity that there aren't much many historians going through them and using their contents. From the dedicated wiki page [1]:
> The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled the Cairo Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000[1] Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. (...) comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
Here's to hoping that that dystopia will never happen.
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