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I was thinking of how cool it would be to build a Twitter-like service where the only posts are GPT-3 outputs.”

This could have been either the output of GPT-3 or someone who doesn’t know what they’re saying.

IMO if you’re interested in AI research or ML engineering, you already know that — in order to avoid getting people killed - you have to understand how it works under-the-hood. You’re doing yourself, your employer and your fellow humans a favour.

Just keep up the good work, and ignore the bullshit. If an AI winter comes, you’ll be well prepared to migrate to another engineering role.

“The instruction set together with the input representations jointly determine the class of algorithms that are learnable by the neural controller, and we see this as a fruitful avenue for future research akin to how current instruction sets shaped microprocessors.”

“The generalization or correctness we aim for is mostly about generalization to instances of arbitrary sizes.”

“[...] computing a = f(s) can be more expensive on current CPUs than executing typical computation employed in the algorithms studied here. We thus hope that this research will motivate future CPUs to have “Neural Logic Units” to implement such functions f fast and efficiently, effectively extending their instruction set, and making such approaches feasible.”

Docker and Compose look pretty straightforward in comparison, at least for local development.

But it just works (most of the times). I can worry about getting shit done, instead of messing around with web servers, interpreters and package managers (it’s fun the first couple of times, but then I want to get to the code).

The problem is that Docker on Mac sucks, because it’s basically a VM running Linux, and it eats up most of my 8 gigs of RAM (yeah I know, 2020).

Maybe, what Apple really needs is something like WSL2.

I think that you should always talk about average users. There is no point in talking about technical users that make up a small slice of the market pie.

I’m an Apple customer. I’ve an iPhone but I’m still horrified from needing to buy a developer account (which is like 99$) to install (my) apps on my iPhone (only). It would be probably possible for Apple to enable checks for personal apps, executing apps that are signed with the same iCloud account or something like that (doing all the checks on the device, no servers involved).

Never mind that macOS is a hot mess for (some) developers, right now. So, yeah, I have some issues with Apple too.

On compensation

I see a certain similarity between Hey, Spotify, Restocks. They all are (paid) apps trying to take advantage of Apple user base, without compensating Apple for it.

Meanwhile, Apple is expected to keep paying for the App Store servers, its curation team and its app approval team.

Obviously smartphones are getting better hence (average) users will buy a new phone less often and Apple is expected to keep supporting old devices for 5/6 years and it has to pay the engineers who work on the OSes and the APIs, and the non-engineers that keep the show running.

You could argue that Android and Google are better.

But Android is not Google’s main business, ads are. Google has built (mostly free) services that generate data about its users, which is then used a bait for advertisers.

No one cares if you’re using F-droid instead of the Play Store, Google is still getting its checks from you and your org using Gmail, Analytics, AdSense, YouTube, etc...

On side loading

Side loading apps (for the average user) is risky and it’s mostly done for three reasons IMO:

- cracking apps - accessing apps that are not allowed on the Play Store - escape Google

I don’t really have much to say about side loading. I’m too biased against it, so maybe someone else could convince me that it’s a good thing.

Conclusion

What would happen if Apple allowed apps to use external payment options (like Stripe)?

Well, the obvious, no one would use IAP because there would be much cheaper services that are not compensating Apple.

Apple is far from perfect:

- the App Store approval process is a mess - the communication process is broken (removing old message exchanges, come on...) - they really don’t seem to care about indie developers

However, although Apple needs developers to keep running the show, without no Apple there is no iOS, no App Store. It’s a tricky problem to solve.

I’m pro BLM, and I’m really outraged by the behaviour of police across the US.

But this has nothing to do with software names, and it is so a US-centric point of view.

Sure, by raising money you’re going to grow your business more easily, but you’ve also compromised your ownership of it.

Obviously, if all you think about is cashing out after the company’s IPO, raising money makes sense. Especially, if you don’t have a sustainable business in the first place, and you’re losing money.

If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.

Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.

I wonder what would happen if we can find a way to build software protection in supervisor mode, ditching user mode and associated context switches.

I think that he agrees on Andreessen about the importance of timing, but he doesn’t consider timing alone a recipe for a successful business.

Also Thiel seems more focused on technology as a whole, rather than the software-centric position adopted by Andreessen.

I think that both views have pros and cons, and that we would benefit from trying to find the greatest common denominator between the two approaches—instead of discarding that or this view.

PS: I read and enjoyed Zero to One, and I’d like to learn more about Andreessen views. If anyone has any suggestion...