For someone engaging in a lot of fun, sci fi utopian thinking, he still falls prey to libertarian thought:
"I'll go one step further and say the quiet part out loud: we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. If you've built an empire, the best possible use of it is to burn its capital like a torch and light up a corner of the future. Fund the ugly middle. Pay for the iteration loops. Build the cathedrals. This is how we advance civilization."
That can be done easily (and has been done many times in the past! And in the present, elsewhere in the world outside the US!) by TAXING the billionaires and using that money for government funded research programs such as DARPA, NSF, national space programs that are actually ambitious and risk taking and held to timelines.
Americans need to get over this idea that billionaires are gods that we must pray to and instead see them as just normal citizens who need to be taxed way more.
Considering the Kobo ereaders have bluetooth antennas, it is really too bad that they cant be put on the FindMy network to find a lost ebook. Open source firmware should enable that though since the FindMy protocol has been reverse engineered.
I find myself hoping that my sector is one of the last to be destroyed and that before I personally get laid off, the masses will have fought for and won some kind of UBI or assistance or jobs program or something. Just hope this situation resolves itself before it comes for me.
I also had this feeling during the 2020 crash... and during the 2008-2012 crash...
Engineers (both HW and SW) are often fantastically bad at understanding how business works, including where their salary comes from and how much value they are producing, versus how small the % of the value they produced is which gets returned to them as their salary.
This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
"So, I woke up today. Got my coffee, family went to sleep, and I have a free afternoon." What kind of schedule or different timezone does this author have with their family? I am trying to imagine a family that either goes to bed in the early afternoon or a person who wakes up in the evening to start their day.
> I always use the example of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This game is so well crafted that I know people who don’t even like video games but bought a console just to play it — and once they finished, they sold everything.
I feel like with the part you highlighted and this quote here that we are reading a blog post from an alternate dimension or something.
I sold my Nintendo Switch when I stopped playing with it. Then a year or so later I really wanted to play Breath of the Wild again, because it's just so beautiful, and bought another Switch just for that.
It can be both. You can enjoy family time, and still be happy with alone time. I love getting up at 5 am, when everyone is still asleep and the house is still quiet. But I also love spending time with the family once everyone's day starts. Both are possible.
wanting time away from your loved ones doesn't seem the least bit weird to me.
Like sure you love your wife and kids, but being with them every second of every day is probably too much for most sane people. Especially if you have hobbies that demand a lot of focus time.
This is why I find the business case of putting datacenters in orbit to be so stupid. And yet there are several startups saying they are gonna do just that.
In such scientific environment, There are gentlemen agreements about many things that boils down to "Don't be an asshole" or "Be considerate of the others" with some hard requirements at this or that point for things that are very serious.
Ilya Sutskever out there as a ronin marketing agent, doing things like that commencement address he gave that was all about how dangerously powerful AI is
Very funny at the end when they say that the strong safeguards they've built into Claude make it a good idea to continue developing these technologies. A few paragraphs earlier they talked about how the perpetrators were able to get around all those safeguards and use Claude for 90% of the work hahaha
I'd assume that means the servers are 'air-gapped' somehow. In that, the enterprise servers and the 'free' servers aren't on the same hardware.
Now, there is about a 0% chance that is true, and exactly a 0% chance that it even matters at all. They both use the same internet in the end.
So, then I'd have to imagine that they don't train the 'free' models on enterprise data, and that's what they mean.
But again, there is about a 5% chance that is true and remains so forever. Baring dumb interns and mistakes, eventually one day someone on the team will look at all the enterprise data, filled with all those high utility scores (or whatever they use to say data is good or not), and then they'll say to themselves 'No one will ever know, right? How could they? The obfuscation function works perfectly.' And blammo, all your trade secrets are just a few dozen prompts away.
Either that or they go bankrupt (like 23 and me) and just straight sell all that data to anyone for pennies (RIP).
Our locks are great, except when someone picks them effortlessly and robs the whole neighborhood... but that's why it's important to keep making better locks
Cue the scene from Office Space where Jennifer Anniston's waitress character is required to have a minimum of 7 pieces of flair on her uniform, per corporate franchise policy. And that movie is from the 90s!
"I'll go one step further and say the quiet part out loud: we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. If you've built an empire, the best possible use of it is to burn its capital like a torch and light up a corner of the future. Fund the ugly middle. Pay for the iteration loops. Build the cathedrals. This is how we advance civilization."
That can be done easily (and has been done many times in the past! And in the present, elsewhere in the world outside the US!) by TAXING the billionaires and using that money for government funded research programs such as DARPA, NSF, national space programs that are actually ambitious and risk taking and held to timelines.
Americans need to get over this idea that billionaires are gods that we must pray to and instead see them as just normal citizens who need to be taxed way more.
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