ethbr1

Millennials were the last boredom generation -- in that large parts of our formative years were boring.

It feels like big tech has leveraged personal mobile devices to monetize the interstitial moments that we used to be bored in.

And this doesn't seem like it's working out well for the next generations' attention spans.

A lot of tech folks see tech as apolitical, and especially in a hyper-charged political climate (the world, currently) they don't want "politics".

What I think that fails to realize is that so much of our technological world is defined by political decisions.

Failing to be aware of them and engaged in them (to a reasonable degree: it's a slippery slope) cedes those decisions to people who are technically ignorant.

If by "conservatives" you mean hate speech and vaccine conspiracies, then sure.

If by "conservatives" you mean conservative political speech, I'd love to see some examples.

There's a big deterministic gulf between numerical OCR and judging whether a particular piece of free text is breaking TOS.

It's entirely feasible for Meta to hire, train, and continually staff high quality human moderators to make important calls.

This isn't some nebulous 'We're not even sure if it's possible!'

It's just Meta being cheap and preferring to enrich its shareholders at the cost of everyone else.

In the before times, we used government regulation to enforce private company responsibility in accordance with authority.

If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).

If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.

But at their current scale, this is really a resource allocation question about whether their margin is a few points higher or lower.

Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.

It's a lot less interesting to watch someone optimize a spreadsheet and every once in awhile look out at a smoothly running operation.

It feels like we're seeing a bit of a turn in things... we'll see.

I was struck yesterday by reading Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth" proposals from the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth#Proposed_legi...

One characteristic of democracy is that it is ever-rewritten by those who strive to change it and vote. (Also, occasionally assassination, in Long's case)

> So, the new owners needed to retain the employees necessary to continue its operations. To do so, they had to honor employee compensation agreements.

At that point, compensation agreements with a previously solvent employer are... negotiable.

There's no "had to" in that scenario.

The government wanted to retain the people who knew how to run the thing. Those people wanted the most money they could get.

The deal could have been whatever the two of them struck -- and the public anger was/is that historically the government hasn't bargained very hard against the leadership of companies in that scenario.

He's 82.

Even for a megalomaniac, at some point it doesn't really matter.

Where it's going to pinch is any incompletely funded AI datacenter build-outs.

If the market is already crammed with sector-concentrated debt (because of the amount already issued), finding buyers for more is going to get increasingly hard.

At some point everyone big already has enough exposure and isn't interested in the risk of more.

The only thing that keeps the party going is being able to drain that debt off bank sheets, but it's hard to see a ton of interest in fixed rate, capped upside exposure to a high risk industry in an environment of rising central bank rates.

Use a mortgage originator that keeps the servicing themselves. One of the reasons I usually use PenFed in the US, after a nightmare of fly by night servicers.

Passkey-over-Ethernet-over-USB C!

Exactly. I'm disinclined to cut Apple, Google, and MS the benefit of doubt for steering a standards committee to spec + real world usage that privileges themselves.

Indeed. Ergo the best consumer defense is portability and open platforms.

If educated and liberal white people have an out-group preference, why are African Americans and women underrepresented in CEO seats?

Or are you saying corporate boards are uneducated and conservative?

So 2% African American and 11% female? (the current ratios of F500 CEOs for each identifier)

Or presumably ~85% white and male?

Like some sort of shared communication device that's larger, sits on a counter, and is plugged into the wall?

What a novel idea.

The rub with a locked-in, incompatible platform is that a company must not only not be lying now... but into the future.

Anyone who thinks Apple is going to fight for their users if their revenue slips targets and stock tanks is an idiot.

Money talks.

I think the argument that precise language doesn't matter is even harder than that.

It requires that LLMs are equally effective with imprecise language as precise language.

And while I'm sure the frontier labs are continually iterating on 'garbage in, something vaguely useful out', it's a high bar to get that output to be as useful as if it were more precisely prompted.

Using LLMs well with human language requires precision.

There are only a few professions that are intrinsically precise with language.

No surprise we're seeing adoption in software programming and mathematics.

>> no-one is forcing you to use said service in that case

What remotely attested passkeys will really start being adopted for -- blocking consumer AI agent use.

Think about how many billable products are essentially convenience automation on top of a user's existing access in a platform?

What if consumers start using AI agents to interact with platforms in ways that skip those billing toll gates (because their agents are remixing actions / data on the user side)?

Both the intended (I'm skipping a premium charge) and unintended (I used a hacked agent and/or my agent went awry) are going to become major issues for companies in the next 5 years.

And the question will be asked "Can't we just ban user AI from using our app?"

Attested passkeys are going to be an awfully tempting option to reach for as an answer. Especially for banks. (Fuck banks' technology stacks)

They also have to be the only one to make AGI. Maybe 1 of 2.

:D That customer is most customers.

> Mathematics need to redefine their profession and how they work (like us software developers too). There are very good reasons to believe mathematics has an important role to play. If they could just stop talking about OpenAI and get back to work - they are very much needed, in particular now!

The root issue is OpenAI et al.'s thoughtlessness in their engagement with a field.

OpenAI has resources.

That they fail to allocate enough of those to cleaning up pre-print papers (that seem to be a corporate PR priority for them to release) so they can be consumed and engaged with by the field they're targeting is... acting like a jackass?

It's the same "Meta / Alphabet can't vs won't hire more human reviewers" problem.

OpenAI could, at an immaterial salary level to them, pay a ton of PhD students and mathematicians just to clean up their proofs and papers.

Not doing so is a leadership and financial choice.

Addendum to risk: larger companies can throw bodies at escalated issues.

Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.

> we don't need a central planning committee

Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."

Time Warner: "No, I am the pill that poisons."

Part of the problem is that the US has no unified empowered cybersecurity regulator that I'm aware of.

As a result you get a mishmash of DHS + DOJ + SEC + HHS agencies.

If there was one single throat to choke that had remit for cybersecurity + ability to being cases and assess fines, they'd be handing them out left and right.

This is the elephant in the room that OpenAI and Anthropic specifically aren't talking about -- when "good enough" is surpassed.

Because there are a large number of use cases (and large sub-portions of others) where genius-level AI isn't required.

Which means once that threshold is surpassed in people's relevant fields, available margin on that is going to collapse to commodity levels.

It's difficult to see how either pure-play AI company maintains its valuation once that happens. Their TAM is based on capturing a big chunk of all work, not just that which requires the highest intelligence.