The United States is different from 95% of countries. We're the place you are supposed to flee to when those other countries oppress you. That's just not the history of a place like Italy or Japan.
My great great grandparents left Quebec in search of a place where they could earn enough money to make it. They immigrated to America. They lived in communities of other Quebec emigrants and spoke French their whole lives. They never pursued American citizenship. Without birthright citizenship, would my great grandma have been American? OK then what about my grandpa? What about me? I'm not sure if any of my immigrant ancestors formally pursued American citizenship.
This is real. If your app breaks because your AWS region crashed, the CEO probably isn't going to blame you. If you have similar uptime but the crashes are due to you picking a cheaper setup, you might be in more trouble.
I wonder if there's a single trainer in Kenya who is responsible for some of the conventions we see so often. Maybe (s)he just really likes full stops and used them in all of the training examples.
I'm not excusing Altman's many many lies, but it is worth noting how many algorithmic advances in the past 20 years were made with relatively little computing power. Think of things like xgboost (2016). A modest computer can run a pretty big dataset on CPU. When Tensorflow was launched in 2015, I played with it on an ancient laptop and it worked just fine. Then I upgraded to a mobile workstation and was still able to keep up with many SOTA models. Turns out LLMs are massively more power hungry than most earlier algorithms, even in NLP.
US law is more murky if they are responding to a perceived emergency. That can give probable cause. Imagine someone calls 911 due to smoke coming out of the neighbor's house. Clearly the drone can legally use IR to look for fire in the house. But it gets complicated fast, which is what worries me. Now imagine a car backfires, a microphone array reports it as a gunshot, and a drone shows up and starts scanning the nearest apartment building.
Nicely done! When I started moving up from being an individual contributor to corporate management years ago, the brass would casually say things like "P&L" or "EDITDA" and I had no idea what they meant. I read textbooks, took online classes, and it was a big deal when I finally could lead a conversation related to our finances.
Well said. There are so many better companies out there. It reminds me of Microstrategy before their Bitcoin madness started... why would anyone use it?
I remember when Salesforce was a true innovator. I attended a Salesforce conference the other day. Sounds like they're all-in on their "agentic" vision. I miss when the Salesforce conferences were tailored to nerds like me and included products that the CEO would never hear about but my team would fight tooth and nail to keep in the budget.
I still had trouble setting up C on my home PC when I was a teenager. I read The C Programming Language and really enjoyed it but couldn't figure out how to get the code to run at home. I went to the local community college and took an intro class that used C++ then I took AP Comp Sci using Java and left the C family behind.
I write a lot of R and I love fonts that convert <- and |> into a single character. It's definitely a preference, but it matches how my brain thinks about the code.
For a business, the second question is what your competition is going to do. If you have a monopoly over something, you can reap the rewards. But if you're in a space with lots of competition, you might not end up with any better profit margins if everyone's in a Red Queen's Race.
I disagree strongly with your broader point. We now have the technology to sort through the minutia of the past and learn deep things. Here's one tiny example. I was able to find out where one of my ancestors lived because someone sent him a letter via General Delivery around 1900 that he didn't pick up. The Post Office listed everyone with letters waiting for them. The smallest detail, but it proved useful for me in tracing my family's origins across the Wild West.
Preserving the past is how we learn, adapt, and grow.
I got into family history fifteen years ago. As a history buff, it was a fun hobby. I even put together family trees for several friends. When I read old newspapers, it's incredible how similar many problems seem to what we face today.
There's also a practical aspect. Last year the Canadian government declared that I can get a Canadian passport if I can prove my links to that country. Now I've reactivated my Ancestry account and would love it if I had a box of personal diaries to sift through for evidence of my heritage.
The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.
I assure you that poor people have always been focused on money. Every time the rent is due, they are very aware. It's the wealthier folks who have historically had the privilege of being Bogleheads and ignore having to think about the financial implications of every decision they make.
Lower-income families have traditionally had community institutions to support them. You could be a church member for free, hang out at the union hall, or participate in any number of IRL activities that let you quit thinking about cashflow for a few blessed hours.
Replacing community engagement with an obsession over cash isn't healthy, either for individuals or communities.
I don't think Nash envisioned politicians and their aides being able to profit from making decisions. Do you launch an attack on Eastasia? Well the market right now says there's a 40% chance, so I guess it's a good idea to grab your crypto keys and make some bets before you call the Joint Chiefs.
Good point. France uses the same postal code layout as the United States. At one job where a data feed only had Zip for userlocation, we would look for suspiciously large numbers of people from Idaho because they have an overlap with the numbers used for Paris.
The government enforces your claim and you pay taxes on anything you earn from it. I bet most IP generates a whole lot more money for the government than enforcing the copyright costs.
You just nailed the difficult balance in copyright law. I agree that life+70 is wayyyyy too long. But you also want to incentivize creators to keep trying to make something of their existing IP. Sapkowski is one example. Another good one is the Dresden Files series, which is 26 books in and still going strong. Each book in the series repeats some of the basics that were covered in the original (often using the exact same phrasing). Then the author extends the story over the course of a few hundred pages. If the original book were already public domain, anybody could write a fairly convincing in-universe book and I have to imagine the author would have moved on to other series.
Personally, I think 50 years strikes the best balance. Everything from the '60s would be fair use, so Spiderman would be public domain but not a wizard named Harry.
This is fascinating! I find it especially interesting to see the solar increase and decrease based on sunshine and what replaces it in the different regions.