baltakatei

I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.

It seems that that joke situation is upon us.

POV: ESL programmers

It’s like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer’s market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).

There’s some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we’re definitely not there yet.

“Create a python script to count the number of r characters are present in the string strawberry.”

The number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry' is: 2

deleted by creator

Banks will use progressively less energy per capita as bulk data processing becomes more energy efficient, assuming they donʼt transition to using proof-of-work.

Ultimately, mining should be banned from the surface of Earth. Let miners build orbital solar panel infrastructure close to the Sun where power is plentiful. See Bitcoin developer Peter Todd’s 2017-09-10 presentation on the subject (transcript).

Edit: Fixed URL. Edit2; Add transcript link.

See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:

• Nest Labs (home automation)
• DropCam (home automation)
• DoubleClick (advertisement)
• FitBit (wearables)
• Waze (GPS navigation)
• Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
• Like.com (shopping)
• Meebo (social network)
• GrandCentral (VOIP)
• Picasa (photographry)
• Tenor (GIF search)
• PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.

In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

Donate to Mozilla Thunderbird. Free software isn’t free.

Nvidia: I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.

Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.

Amazon replacements:

• Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
• eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
• Shopping: basically any major online retailer’s website
• Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
• Groceries: your local grocer, lol.

As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.

Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.

I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.

In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.

Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.

Ultimately, the quality of your work is a function of you and your resources. Corruption and miscommunication plague all management systems. Corrupt management siphons resources away from otherwise good work. Government bureaucracy is another layer of management like any other. Customers are not just consumers but working people like you.

Hang in there.